I’ve been the main moderator of the same community since 2016. This evening, i approved my last comment.
I’m leaving for two reasons:
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Reddit went public a week ago. I didn’t volunteer to work for a publicly traded company, i volunteered to work for a community. As long as i live under capitalism i accept that my labor will generate value for shareholders, but damned if i ever do it for free. (this is not a Faulkner quote)
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April 1st is coming and i’m scared they might do another r/place. Doing in r/place 2022 and 2023 has left me dejected and bitter and i don’t want to feel obligated to participate again.
Leaving felt like ripping myself off of something warm i’ve been comfortably glued to for a long time. Still recommend it for anyone still giving Reddit shareholders free labor
EDIT: there are too many comments to respond to, but i’ve appreciated all of them! Thank you
I lost a big part of my habits and communities when Reddit killed 3rd party apps, but I actually left that day. If the mods left their little powertrip aside and actually quit reddit/protested properly, it probably wouldn’t have IPO’d. They were just scared to lose their sub and position. It’s also what allowed reddit to manage replacing the few problematic mods and keep things going.
Anybody who kept going (especially for all these months) deserve to stay on reddit and not benefit from the work Lemmings (not me) have been doing. My experience on lemmy is far inferior to reddit, but I’m doing my part and not going back.
Mods choices were to give up their community immediately to all the chucklefucks lining up to replace them, or to wait and see. It’s naive, not traitorous. Just as naive as anyone believing that anything short of federal intervention could have stopped the IPO.
Despite reddit’s ineptitude, shit like an IPO doesn’t happen overnight, and there’s practically nothing that can stop one if the goal is for the CEO to cash out.
Reddit also was already replacing entire mod teams on default subs, groups of 10+ people. They happily let subs go to complete shit when the new mods were terrible, and closed subs with no mods. Huge subs. They were banning mods for even suggesting moving to other sites, and restoring comments from accounts that had tried to wipe their comment histories. There’s also evidence they were using GPT to run bots in support of staying.
With all the shady shit going down, Reddit would not have hesitated for a moment to replace literally every existing mod on the site. Could have hired people to do it too, at comparatively low cost.
Holding on through that is dumb, but you’re an ass for calling someone a traitor because they had more investment in a space than you. You don’t berate someone for staying in an abusive relationship longer than you happen to think is rational.
Save the vitriol for the corpo shits who did this, actually move the fuck on, and stop shitting on people out of your misplaced ideas of “purity”. These are fucking websites man. Find some more important shit to be an ass about.
What was there to “wait and see” after Spez banned 3rd party aps and Rif/apollo went down? Spez had announce monetization schemes and IPO.
He stayed because it was about him, not reddit. His arguments are pretty weak this late into the gestalt.
To say that he had more investment than me is bonkers. I was on Reddit since the beginning, and plenty of chucklefucks replaced me, but leaving was the right thing to do, because as you said after the ban there was no stopping the IPO, only helping it.
Reddit would not have survived replacing all the mods. But a large percentage of reddit didn’t care about 3rd party integrations, and helped spez keep his momentum. Our man here is one of them…
You are so noble and pure for doing what you did. Surely these actions will comfort you on your deathbed.
Ironic on a post where people are saying he is noble for what he did, and I should respect that. My comments get removed for being (politely) negative while you guys are all here with your little personal attacks on who I may or may not be.