I run a moderatly successful Subreddit (~200.000 subscribers), but I want to stop. I have no interest in moderating it anymore, but Reddit as a company has totally made it clear that it is viewing subreddits as its own property:
- As far as I know I can’t take a subreddit of this size private anymore
- If I just stop moderating, people still can post and will post problematic content that I don’t want to see online
- If i stop moderating, somebody else can “claim” the sub and will be the new moderator, which I also don’t want
Does anybody here have experience in stopping a subreddit that doesn’t lead to Reddit just placing new people in control? I’ve already removed the option for the sub to be recommended to users and for it to be shown in “high traffic feeds” (which always led to nazi showing up btw), but I also was thinking about a way to restrict who can post or to set extreme high karma requirements for posts. Or are there any other options?
Like others already said: make it suck. Go into your Joker arc and become the edgelord. You build it and you can destroy it. But you can’t just go full psycho over night. Make it look like you are becoming a power hungry mod with a napoleon complex over the course of a couple of weeks. As soon as some users start their own subreddit start linking there (preferably by making fun of them to stay in character) so the migration keeps going. While this is happening, ban the few contributing users that are still there.
When everything is burned down, post a dick pic on r/mentalhealth, log off and never look back.
PS: Bonus points if you document everything and release it on YouTube.