A fellow mod informed me that about it as I was laying in bed. Reddit sent a message to the mod team and after 1 hour demoded me. I didn’t even had time to see it, never-mind respond to it.
Looks like we rattled reddit enough to start shooting. There goes all that fancy talk about our protest not affecting them much.
Just FYI for now. It’s late here so I’ll see how we proceed tomorrow.
That’s their TOS. Their actions recently — namely undeleting user posts and comments — run directly counter to their TOS. They’re essentially claiming ownership of the user submitted content by doing that.
Reddit reserves all the rights to everything you post ("When Your Content is created with or submitted to the Services, you grant us a worldwide, royalty-free, perpetual, irrevocable, non-exclusive, transferable, etc., etc.), but you alone are responsible for it (“Because you alone are responsible for Your Content, you may expose yourself to liability if you post or share Content without all necessary rights.”).
@Lorez “Yes your honor, user ******* gave me all this content and I’m making money out of it, but I have nothing to do with it. I swear”
Terms of service are pretty much the legal equivalent of graffiti, they are there to look impressive not mean anything. You’ll struggle to find any legal rulings based on business to consumer TOS because companies know they are very like to get rejected as unenforceable due to discrepancy between the parties and inability to negotiate.
If reddit are asserting control of content by forcibly publishing it (opening private subs and undeleting comments) then there is a very good chance a judge would see them as being responsible for it.