I remember when Reddit announced it would begin charging commercial developers for access to its API, and in response, thousands of subreddits went dark in protest. I think it lasted for a couple of weeks. The CEO threatened the Reddit mods that he would replace them if they didn’t reopen the subs, so nearly every mod reopened and everything went back to normal. The CEO won easily without offering anything, and he was right when he said that ‘this too shall pass.’ Those third-party apps offered accessibility features for disabled people that Reddit still hasn’t implemented today. Now Reddit is getting even worse. How come there wasn’t a protest like that when they made even worse decisions?
Some subs went dark and never came back. Some went dark, came back only because Reddit appointed new mods and removed the old ones. There was a big shift in the top 25 or so most popular subs around that time. Total number of upvotes on the top posts also started trending downward around that time, not that I have any evidence that is a result of lowered traffic.
It was an important detail at the time: mods were fired, and new management made spez happy.
So what if you replace the mods if the user don’t interact? I think the majority of users didn’t care that much about it.
The reverse happened: users were complaining about powerful mods who banned stuff all the time.
When you replace the mod that cared about the subject and knew the subject well with a corporate stooge the quality goes down. They allow posts that are off topic, they ban prolific on topic commenters.
The sub gets fewer votes as the quality goes down
News subs lose their political flavour and so the members all find it unsuitable and leave, and they have to rebuild the sub with members that match the politics of the new guy