It’s obvious that Reddit as a company has no respect for its users and less than that for the mods. It’s a thankless, difficult job that isn’t even a paid position. I think a lot of us have probably quit real jobs for less bs than Reddit has pulled.
So why stay? Why bother with protests and such when the company has made it clear they don’t value your work or your opinions? Why not just pull out en masse and let the place burn to the ground?
Of course I can’t speak for everyone else, but: I’ve been asked to become a mod for a sub with 2.3 million users, and I have contributed to that site for almost a decade. It took me 3 days to save and then manually delete all of my posts, and I’m still working through the comments a week later. It absolutely HAD to be done, because I’m not going to let a certain someone earn cash with my literal years of unpaid volunteer work any longer, but I would be lying if I said that it was an easy decision.
Why? Because that action punishes the users. A whole lot of what I posted were in-depth game guides, and reddit users now no longer have access to those. I regularily called out scammers, provided sources for artworks, answered dozens of questions daily - I felt responsible for that sub and its users. And if you feel responsible for something, then you can not easily toss it away without feeling a certain degree of guilt, whether that feeling is justified or not.
But just for the record: I do not regret the decision. Yes I feel a bit bad for the community, but it had to be done. I can still understand why others might be more reluctant tho.
(and of course there are also power mods who just don’t like losing their status / influence, but that’s a different story)
Instead of manually saving + deleting content, you should use scripts to download and delete all posts + comments you’ve made, or even replace their content with something else. I saw that a mod of one of the Pokemon subs replaced all his comments with the Vaporeon copypasta.
Using a script that edits/deletes a whole bunch of comments in quick succession is detectable and seems more likely to trigger the admins to restore them. In contrast, a slow series of manual edits might be more likely to go unnoticed and make the information stay gone.
Good point. A script that only archives posts might be a better idea. It could even simultaneously remake those posts here.
Just copy-pasting everything to lemmy wouldn’t be a good idea in my case. Nearly all of my guides have sources linked that redirect back to reddit posts/guides, and I have to change those links to lemmy content or other sites so reddit doesn’t get any traffic.
If the majority of content of an user is made without extra links, then a program that automatically nukes everything on reddit and simultaneously uploads it here would be a super convenient thing tho.
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It sucks for the users that they lost all the content you made, but spez fucking deserves it. Besides, maybe when the community decides on a place to settle, the content could just go there instead.
I also wiped my history as a 5y mod, which wasn’t as hard because I know it will organically rebuild itself, but I do think it makes you realize how many hours you’ve poured into making a community what it is, and it makes you reconsider whether you really want to do that again in the future. I think one or two niche communities is a nice side gig that you can learn from, especially if it’s related to what you do irl, but as soon as you get over five or so that you’re personally invested in I think it’s worth stepping back to see if there isn’t a better, more productive outlet for those passions.
As a (soon to be) former reddit mod, reddit moderators are all power hungry. Modding and feeling like they’re important is a coping mechanism for many of their lives.
Speak for yourself.
I got stuck with the job because it needing doing and no one else stepped up.
Yeah, that’s an issue. It’s hard to say no sometimes.
what they said is true for probably 95% of mods
Maybe a big chunk of traffic is modded by that sort of person, but not 95% of mods as individuals. So many “smaller” subreddits are modded by people that give a damn
I personally never had an interaction with any mods, but I can imagine it being much like any other position of power within any type of human interaction. But, Tbf, the job is prob a pain in the ass, and I wouldn’t want it.
yeah it’s a pain in the ass with no reward except for that slight amount of power which attracts only the mega losers to do the job
It’s also just addictive. I don’t think all mods are “power hungry” in a bad sense - certainly many of them mod communities well and responsibly, but most of the ones that put in a lot of time are hooked to that community for one reason or another - either it gives them a sense of accomplishment or it’s comfortable and familiar or they just feel valued there. It’s easy to slip into that trap.
I got shadowbanned from the entire site once from pissing a mod off. I wasn’t even being combative or anything I posted a link to dispute misinformation and just said “That’s wrong though. Here is a link from the Mayo clinic explaining it” and got banned. No warning, no message, nothing. I had to make a new reddit account conpletely i couldnt upvote or comment on ANY subreddit after that. All for pissing off a mod. I hated how much power they have (had?)
The question was already answered.
Many people don’t have a life, they get addicted to Reddit (or something similar) and it’s importance to them becomes extreme.
Such people managed a protest, but as Spez rightly pointed out - they’ll be back.
Basically, I think the way forward is to get SEARCH engines to dig content from the Fediverse - because that is the area where Reddit wins. You don’t have to go there, you just do a search - and Reddit comes up all over the place.
Lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, Beehaw etc just don’t exist there when you want to get answers to questions that would exist, for example r/Firefox, r/CSSFirefox.
For real. Since the protests started I’ve been a good boy, removed my Boost shortcut, never opened it in a browser, never even accidently started typing it out of habit, etc. But it’s in, like, ALL the Google searches. That’s been my ONLY traffic to Reddit in the last couple weeks is accidentally clicking on Google results without noticing what site it’s on and then feeling bad about it and backing out.
I am the moderator of a small (~1.9k subscribers) subreddit and I haven’t made the switch yet. I will eventually, but at the moment I feel like I have not gathered enough information in order to completely migrate my community off-site for a) archival purposes and b) functional parity purposes and I feel like taking the subreddit offline without having a solid migration plan will just result in the community dissolving entirely.
it’s a subreddit that’s pretty unique,but niche at the same time - it follows the releases of underground/unsigned/indie music acts in a certain Asian country (it’s not hard to discern what I’m talking about if you look hard enough) and whilst there are other sites on the internet that do the same thing, I feel like what I’ve built on Reddit is unique enough in the as a link aggregating format with search functionality.
sure, I could work at manually posting everything that was ever posted to the subreddit to a new lemmy server, but I’m just one guy, and alas, the chronological documentation will be messed up, which I’d like to preserve as best as possible.
so at the moment, I am thinking about moving my subreddit off the site, but I’m waiting for some utility tools to help me do that.
You should think about making your own site with all the historic reddit data. Something like a static site generator so you can host it for almost free
I sabotaged my subreddit and I’m not deleting my account so that I can check on it and try to make sure it stays sabotaged.
At this point, I think some of 'em are just sticking around to push spez as far as possible. Look at all the shit some of 'em are doing, does it look like they care whether or not they’re still mods at the end of it all?
Tbf, when the mods turn to the community and the community understands the ship is going down no matter what, the fun can actually begin for every party involved except for spez.
Yeah, aside from the bootlickers who’re desperate to polish spez’s soles with their tongues.
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You’re asking the people who quit reddit why they haven’t quit reddit. Maybe ask over there?
Because I deleted my account and I don’t want to give them any more of my time or thoughts :D
I got some good answers here though.
Some places, for example AskHistorians have a lot of amazing content to protect. Other communities would suffer greatly if “insensitive” (read Nazi) mods took over.
It’s so frustrating. For years they refused to touch moderators of truly cruel and dangerous subs. But let them suffer a little pushback, and suddenly they are more than willing to remove people from positions of power.
You know this is another big aspect to all this that people keep forgetting. They DID act like they had no control getting rid of problematic mods in the past but it sure wasn’t an issue getting rid of actually good mods when it hurt reddits bottom line. Also I know it was a bigots comment but Spez fucked around and edited peoples comments and shit too. It’s just WAY too power trippy over there.
Sunk Cost Fallacy - A lot of mods just can’t bear to give up all the time and effort they have put into Reddit.
Of course, there are better and worse reasons than that too. Just like in any group of people there are the good, the bad, and the other.
mods for one duckduckjeep group encouraged people to leave cute ducks on jeeps in parking lots. turned out they were just selling plastic ducks https://www.amazon.com/s?k=plastic+ducks
I rarely used reddit but people generally should spend more time unpluggedSome reddit moderators are genuinely selfless and interested only in helping and serving the community of users who rally around the subject matter they are passionate about…and so as long as the majority of the community are on reddit, that is where the moderators will devote their efforts even if it means a more difficult job starting July 1.
This top level post comes across as a passive insult to reddit moderators, and I’m sure some reddit moderators deserve it, but a lot don’t.
I quit, I stayed on for the protests because it felt nice to work together on it, and then when the sub I was moderating decided they didn’t want to take part in the protest anymore I deleted all my posts and my account.
As long as there is someone that will ignore what the CEO os doing in exchange for being able to be mod, it will not matter how many real mods leave, there will always be someone next in line to be mod.
That said, it probably will make the quality of the subs degrade over time
Also like, most of the subs I frequented had pinned posts about looking for mods for months, sometimes years. To some it could be tempting, but its still hard unpaid work, and this time with less people to front it than when the mod searches were being held.
Yes, but mods accepting this kind of behavior from Reddit are much more likely to be shitty themselves. Led them take the lead, and let reddit turn to shit as the mods actually doing moderation are gone and there are only power-tripping mods left.
As u/YaztromoX (mod of r/canning) pointed out yesterday, there are subreddits where actually dangerous misinfo gets posted, and the mod team, who are subject matter experts in the subreddit’s topic, have to remove that, or people could get seriously hurt.
There are going to be serious consequences in some communities for letting the scab mods take over.
The thoughtless buffoon in-charge of the website clearly hasn’t thought that far; he thinks everyone on the website is replaceable, modding every sub is as easy as removing some porn, and he’ll find equally qualified mods literally everywhere.
Spez likely doesn’t actually care about anyone who could end up dead because of something they found on Reddit, but he’d certainly give a shit about the legal implications.
Sounds like a reddit problem, not a volunteer problem
You’re right, the problem is that mods for these subs actually have a conscience and morals, unlike Spez.
You’d be surprised at how hard it is to find mods sometimes. I’ve moderated 100k subs where we asked for mods and… crickets.
It’s kind of disappointing because people get SO fucking pissed when mods don’t keep up, and a lot of mods don’t want to mod forever, and yet nobody wants to pitch in to keep the community going. You can’t have it both ways, but people feel entitled to that free labor.
Realistically, a good portion of them could be influence peddlers, paid by states , advertising agencies or others to shape online discussion.
That makes more sense to me than both idealistic community builders or no-life narcissists, which are the two most common ways I’ve seen mods characterized.
considering how many of the subs are… controlled by a relative handful of mods… lets call them ‘super mods’… chances are very solid they spend a great deal of their time modding. Which means… they probably earn money from it.
or… they walk dogs.
(edit to be clear, I’m only talking about the ones where you see ‘moderator of’ listing dozens of communities.)
