I deleted all my reddit stuff when the mods of /r/games mas deleted comments on TB's twitlonger back a year ago. Went through roughly 20,000 comments and deleted them all. /u/spez has already stated that he is not going to reverse the changes. And not a single person was shocked. I stand by my prediction: Reddit will be sold to someone by the end of the year. These actions are to sterilize the site for the future owner.
The thing most people don't get is that a guy like me is not an audience you want to cater to. In fact, having 100's or thousands of guys like me on your web site is a bad thing. Sure we know stuff, and talk and add to the community, but we are bad for a business. I don't watch TV, I don't really read fiction, I don't go to the movies, I don't buy useless clutter, I have a set diet, I use ad-blocking software, I save more than I spend, and I don't use services that benefit from traditional advertising. A guy like me is the exact person you want OFF your website.... IF YOU INTEND TO MONETIZE IT. That Victoria lady was canned for not going along with the monetizing scheme for IAMA. I never went to that subreddit, which reading about it now, looks to be a major draw for page views. I blocked all adds on Reddit for months which means that the 20-30 hours a week I spent on Reddit were a net negative to reddit the company. When I bailed on reddit I went in and scrubbed all my comments, all 20,000+ of them (And now that there are scripts to do that for you, I'm a bit pissed I did not think about that last year). Reddit the company will not miss me. Yet, if enough of the people like me that hung out there bail on the site, reddit the community will weaken and scatter to follow the people having the interesting conversations. They want young people who buy stuff to use the web site. They want celebrities who draw in people who pay attention to ads. They want safe, clean communities that won't scare away mom and grandma. The whole fatpeoplehate thing? Don't care. People in those subreddits are not nice people. Some of that was, IMO, 4chan leaking, and if they were harassing people off site (The cause of the ban) then they deserved it. FPH was banned, in my opinion, because it grew big enough that it was on the front page of /r/all as early as March. Can't have disgusting stuff like that on the front page when junior shows this new cool website to mom and dad, now, can we? Everything Reddit is trying to do right now, and for the last year or so, is to do one thing and one thing only. Prep it for a sale to someone. Whatsapp sold for 16 freaking billion dollars. Snapchat is being valued at 19 BILLION dollars! Uber, a company that honestly has no real product other than the people who use its phone app is worth $40 BILLION dollars. What do those all have in common? An active advertising-friendly demographic of a userbase. There has to be people at Reddit, Inc seeing this go down and getting pissed that when they are in the news, it is about fatpeoplehate, /r/coontown, /r/cutefemalecorpses, /r/pictsofdeadkids etc and not valuation numbers in the billions of dollars. The thing is, though, that the "interesting people" and I include most of the people here on Hubski in that category, make the community. You guys are why I am here. Everything else is just a website, right? Digg did not figure this out in time, and now we will watch and see if Reddit goes the same way. Thursday there is going to be a big AMA of some sort with the admins, and Hubski will hopefully be able to grab some of the cool people who bail when that goes bad.