As we’ve been covering, things are not going well over on Reddit at the moment, with the site’s ownership currently engaged in a running battle with readers and moderators. Users are so annoyed at attempts to monetise the site that they’re working through a variety of protests, but one of the larger gaming subreddits—r/steam, with 1.9 million subscribers—is now my favourite.
We’ve seen blackouts, we’ve seen sites toggle their settings to NSFW (thus cutting off ad revenue), but r/steam—whose mods were threatened with removal if they didn’t reopen the subreddit after an initial blackout—has decided as a community that if they had to reopen, they were going to reopen with a purpose.
And that purpose, as PC Gamer point out, was to become the internet’s top destination for all things steam-related. And by that I don’t mean the PC’s preferred shopfront and launcher, but steam engines. Steam clouds. Steam tractors, steam-driven cars and academic books about steam.
Here, for example, is a classic “rate my setup” post, emphasis on classic:
In this post, a user has an important technical question they’re hoping the community can answer:
Just because there’s a protest going on doesn’t mean there isn’t anything to celebrate:
Like most gaming subreddits, users are sometimes overcome with nostalgia, and like to reminisce about the good old days:
Here’s a reminder that Reddit only exists as it does today because it’s a place where users can teach, learn and hang out with other human beings for free:
While this maybe isn’t the most effective form of protest—with users still generating content, anyone viewing r/steam on the company’s official mobile app will still be served ads, which is the whole reason they’re trying to squeeze third-party applications out in the first place—if you’re going to settle into a protest for the long-run, you may as well have some fun with it.