Additional additional context: The absentee head mod (legweed) returned a week before the protests and made a thread for all the mods of the sub to discuss whether to do a blackout. Basically nobody else meaningfully interacted except for the a single mod who was vehemently against it (CedarWolf), the same mod that was promoted by the admins.
The users of the sub overwhelmingly supported the blackout, but CedarWolf was involved in mass comment/post removals and bannings of pro-blackout content in the leadup. This included mod convo posts literally saying the community can’t make the decision for themselves and that they (CedarWolf) know what’s best for the community. At the same time legweed was trying to get other mods opinions but nobody actually responded until legweed make a stickied post to engage the community. This upset CedarWolf as he’d been spending most of his time suppressing those same conversations from happening.
I’m not saying an absentee mod should be able to show up an unilaterally private a sub, but in this case they were showing up to engage the community and the community was the one who asked to have it privated. None of the other mods really cared enough to argue, the one anti-blackout person was basically alone in their opinion and is equally responsible for a unilateral decision, except that one went against the community wishes.
Sure legweed was an absentee head mod, but CedarWolf wasn’t just active, he’s terminally online and has a really nasty superiority complex. I don’t think either is really head mod material but one sided with the admins and now they have the unilateral control they had already tried to exercise prior.
Source/Context:
Oh they for sure care, just yesterday I was listening to a podcast and one of the ads was for Orlando. The theme of the ad? “Orlando is still great for gay people” They cited all kinds of statistics in an attempt to prove gay people should still visit and that it was a safe and fun place for them. They understand how critical those DINK tourists are, especially when you already have a lot of infrastructure and investment in attracting and serving them.
DeSantis doesn’t care, but I promise you that lots of conservatives on the ground will start caring when their business traffic starts to choke off. Conservatives retire to Florida, but I’d imagine liberals make up at least half of the tourists between spring break, nightlife/LGBTQ hotspots, and how “woke” Disney has become.
Florida’s current economic landscape is only possible due to tourism money, and once that reality becomes clear people are suddenly going to become far less concerned with non economic issues. Even the promise of tax cuts won’t work when entire industries see their revenues drop by meaningful %'s.
I’m from Kansas, I know what it looks like and feels like to live in a conservative economic death spiral. The reality is you have to let it start getting worse before people take it seriously and put a stop to it. Even the conservatives here voted out Brownback after he started gutting every maintenance, service, and school budget in a failed attempt to balance his tax cuts. All those people who treat politics as a game get real serious once it hurts them directly, but until then I’m not sure there’s an effective way to reach them.