Captain's Report, June 2023

[u/kpcnsk]

As you may be aware, there's a lot of drama going on in Reddit these days. Corporate Reddit wants to make some changes that will help generate profits. These changes will directly affect volunteer moderators, and will make it difficult (or even impossible) to maintain the quality of content you view here. As a result, many subreddits (including r/PirateKitties) went dark in protest.

We're back, and a poll shows our members are pretty evenly divided as to whether or not to continue the protest. In light of the fact that corporate Reddit has been forcing the blacked-out subreddits open, I have decided that we will remain open for now.

I'm not happy with the situation. I'm not optimistic that the protest will change Reddit's mind, as they have pretty much doubled down on their position. I think in the long run this foreshadows the decline of communities and content on Reddit. We've seen it before on Facebook and Twitter.

It's a complicated situation. Reddit has made this place, and they can do with it as they please. At the same time, the openness of the platform has allowed it grow fantastic communities with rich content. Unfortunately, corporate Reddit does not value those communities as much as it values the profits its sees from ad revenue. I suspect that as Reddit moves down this path, we'll see both more ads and more spam to the detriment of the communities existing here.

Any changes to r/PirateKitties will be posted here, with full transparency. Feel free to share your thoughts on the matter below.