For those who don’t want to give Reddit the traffic:

We’re back - and here’s what’s happening

(Please don’t give any awards for this post - although it’s a kind gesture, that’s money that goes to Reddit!)

Hello r/LegalAdviceUK.

As you may have noticed, the mods have taken part in the Reddit blackout for the last week.

For those not in the loop of the drama, there are a lot of concerns about Reddit’s recent changes and their response to user concerns.

LAUK took part in these protests, not only in solidarity with other subs and their issues, but we feel that these Reddit changes make moderating more difficult, and therefore present an increased risk of our users being exposed to harmful and dangerous advice, or influenced by idiots or directed by people looking to make financial gain.

The mod team of LAUK are mostly employed professionals either directly working in law (e.g., Solicitors, Police Officers,) or in related professional fields (HR, finance, etc); who rely on well developed mobile apps to moderate, which the official Reddit app has never, ever been good at.

Last month, the moderators manually removed over 5,500 unique comments that broke the subreddit rules - this is a very different subreddit to more casual subreddits and the mods take delicate care to balance the regulatory environment of giving legal advice in the UK, the Reddit platform, and trying our best to help people in need. This task would be impossible without 3rd party tool and applications.

Like many other subreddits, LAUK was recently sent a vaguely sinister and threatening message from the Reddit admins, attempting to divide and conquer mod teams, re-interpreting their long standing rules in order to desperately leverage them against the moderators who curate and manage their website in their own time for free.

Reddit is both stating the protests are having no or minimal effect, whilst at the same time giving away free ad-space to try and keep advertisers, and doing everything it can to force subreddits to re-open. The protestors are both weak, and strong, depending on which argument makes Reddit look less-terrible at any given time.

In response to these threats from Reddit, the LAUK mods have opened the subreddit under protest.

The mods are in discussion about the following changes:

Encouraging users to look at safer and more regulated advice options than Reddit

Supporting users to minimise supporting Reddit financially (e.g., use adblocks)

Moving our FAQ and wiki off-site out of a Reddit controlled location

No longer constructively working with Reddit admins - e.g., no AMAs, betas, surveys, mod council, etc.

Additionally:

We may decide to operate from whatever Reddit alternative turns out to be the most popular, or move platform entirely e.g. to Discord. This would be over the coming months

Some moderators may stop moderating Reddit to give their free time to the alternatives above

Our initial reaction was - as we suspect it would have been for many of our users if threatened in that way - to refer the admins to the reply famously given in Arkell and Pressdram. However, the primary motivator for moderators (as well as being power hungry neckbeards) was to help people using our professional skills and knowledge. Reddit is actively harming this community but the majority of moderators believe morally we should continue to use the community we have built to help people as best we can.

We encourage any admins reading this to look for other jobs at organisations who are not going to make you actively harm the community you are supposed to support, whilst excitedly looking to treat you like Elon treated 6,500 twitter employees.

For and on behalf of the LAUK mod team,

Fuck u/Spez and long live John Oliver.