Exit, voice and the fork#
SLOP6531 · Week 10
June 2023#
Reddit announced API pricing that would end third-party clients.
Several thousand subreddits went private, including most of the largest.
The people who closed them were unpaid.
Within a fortnight#
the company had replaced the moderators of several protesting communities
What that settled#
An old question, badly:
- the volunteers had built the communities
- the company held the keys
- nobody had ever written down which of those mattered
Hirschman, 1970#
Three responses to an organisation you are unhappy with.
| Response | In practice |
|---|---|
| Exit | you leave |
| Voice | you complain, and stay |
| Loyalty | what makes voice worth trying |
Unpaid changes the arithmetic#
Exit costs an employee their income.
It costs a volunteer nothing — which is why it is weak.
The leverage is not the leaving. It is the work that stops.
A strike withholds labour from an employer.
This withholds it from the queue.
The third option#
Leave, and take the work with you.
| Fork | What it needed |
|---|---|
| Enciclopedia Libre, 2002 | the text, and it had it |
| MariaDB, 2009 | the code, and the maintainers |
| LibreOffice, 2010 | both, plus a foundation |
Enciclopedia Libre won and lost#
Spanish Wikipedia’s contributors forked in 2002, over a proposal to run advertising.
The proposal was dropped. Wikipedia has never carried ads.
The fork outlived the argument by twenty years, and went offline in 2024.
What a fork actually needs#
- the data — licensed so you can take it
- the tooling — or the will to rebuild it
- the people — the hard one
Two out of three is a mirror, not a community.
Who bears the cost#
You are bargaining with a platform.
For a fortnight, the queue is unattended.
The people who lose are the ones you closed the community to protect.
Ninety minutes#
and the cohort has to do something#
The scenario lands at the start of the Shift