I was thinking that this could be the way to truly kill a sub. Let it descend to the noise, the chaos, the spam, and the hatred. Maybe do the least bit to stem claims that it’s unmoderated.
If people are interested in devaluing Reddit, it seems like a good place to start
The average user won’t know what’s happening, they’ll just think “Wow, what’s with all this spam, mods need to do their jobs.”
What needs to happen is people migrate from Reddit to alternatives like Lemmy, or at the very least, the Reddit admins think enough people are going to leave Reddit. Filling your sub with spam won’t make people switch to Lemmy, they’ll just go to one of the remaining subs that’s still being moderated.
By stepping down in moderating and letting it get crappy, it will induce more people to leave, thinking “this sub has gone to shit”
It’ll get people to leave certain subreddits, but the average Redditor still doesn’t know enough about other sites like Lemmy to even really think about making a switch.
If r/gaming, for example, stops moderating and goes to shit, people will go “Wow this sub sucks now, I’m gonna browse r/games or r/gaming2 or whatever.” But if r/gaming blacks out, and most importantly posts a message with a link to [email protected] that says “The community is going here, please join us,” that will at least get some people to move.