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?
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.
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.
what they said is true for probably 95% of mods
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
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
Yeah, that’s an issue. It’s hard to say no sometimes.
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?)
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)
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.
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.
^ exactly this. Every time I manually deledted 2-3 pages worth of comments in quick succession, reddit somehow failed to display any more comments, regardless of which mode I used or how I tried to sort them. I always got the “this user hasn’t posted anything” or “there seems to be nothing here” messages.
A couple hours later it always worked again and I could delete more, but it still feels hella fishy. Imagine a bot/program would delete stuff only until reddit pretends there is nothing more to delete and then shuts off, and if the user checks their account immediatly afterwards, it looks as if the content IS gone, only to suddenly reappear a couple of hours later without warning …
Manually deleting everything took way more time and effort than just running a program once, but at least I’m now positive that my content is truly gone. I even double-checked today to make absolutely sure, and everything google spits out ends in a broken link / missing content. (and it feels strangely satisfying, lol)
Removed by mod
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.
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.
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.
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.
Popularity is one hell of a drug – they can’t “just quit” unless their “dopamine fix” starts to become irrelevant. In other words – make others quit, and the “mods” will follow along.
My guess. Many of the mods who have been doing it for years have a sense of ownership and personal investment in the role/sub. Modding is a thankless task most of the time, so if they are still doing it, for free, they must be getting some emotional benefit.
It may also be the only aspect of their lives where they can exert any control or agency.
Ahem… not anymore apparently
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
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.
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.
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.
Yup, that’s what the s cond part of my post was meant to say
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.
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.
Eh, I quit.
15 year user of Reddit. I helped mod a very small sub, but didn’t do a whole lot mod-wise besides delete a few spam posts now and then when they popped up.
I don’t have any current plans to go back and be a part of those communities for the time being, which sucks because there were a few great (obscure) ones that I’m not sure will migrate or be replaced in the short term.
But the thing about Reddit is that it’s not a homogenous group of people. Sure, it fosters a lot of group think by amplifying the most popular opinion, but if a large chunk of people with one attitude leave, then loudest voices will be the next most popular opinion. Plus, there’s so many casual users now too. Most of my friends were like, “Huh? Something’s going on with Reddit?”
The whole thing feels similar to the whole Digg -> Reddit fiasco. Guess we’ll see how things shake out though.
If I were you I’d create the obscure ones and just post “looking for mods” at the top. Either the community remains dead and you delete it after a few months or another mod rolls up and you can pass it off to them.
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
the releases of underground/unsigned/indie music acts in a certain Asian country
I’ve been looking for exactly that. And you say that there are other sites for such a thing? It would be cool if you had a site that was basically automated to make redundant the posts on your subreddits, and hopefully federated communities, so that you’ll retain the data in the case a website/instance ever dies.
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.
For me, just to fuck with reddit as a whole.
It’s a fine line though. Spez is too much of a wimp do the dirty work, so we’re dealing with whoever is running the modcodeofconduct account.
That means we can’t go too far, not without risking someone that’s just trying to get through their day unnecessary stress via abusive language.
It takes a bit of dancing to walk the line between calling them on the shit they copy/paste in, and not going after the flunky that’s on duty.
There’s still some mods that have given up and keep working for free because they don’t realize that reddit as we knew it is dead. They think (and this is from talking to some of them) that the communities will just keep going like they were, and that the community itself is worth bending the knee.
They genuinely can’t conceive that the community could exist anywhere else. And they’re partly right because there’s always going to be the bulk numbers that are too damn lazy to leave. They’ve signed up there, they’re used to things, and fear change.
What the mods that are clinging to the idea of the community don’t seem to get is that the real community that provided good conversation, good posts, and were doing more than scrolling and waiting for a chance to drop a one liner they don’t realize has already been made five times, have left.
They think that the ones still there, whining about just wanting to scroll and fuck around, were actually part of the community. That thinking is wrong. I’ve seen it. The ones that are left behind, that are now attacking the mods that opened back fully, were never useful. The guys that mattered are here, or on discord, or have just fucked off entirely. I say guys, but it’s meant as a general term, not a gendered one.
So, my ass is going to keep throwing up pictures of pigs and calling them spez until every alt I have is burned. If they haven’t banned my mod account by then, I’ll burn that fucker up too.
It’s pure, stubborn, spiteful resistance just for the sake of saying fuck off to spez and any shitty capitalist drek like him that think they bring value.
This right here. The only thing that’s remotely useful on Reddit anymore is the large archive of old content; the community is already fractured, and it won’t be long before the only people left on Reddit are the dregs who just want to scroll through the mind-numbing garbage that appeals to the lowest common denominator.
Reddit might already be dead at this point, and I’m not sure that even the hardest backpedals will ever restore the faith they’ve destroyed over the past few weeks.
deleted by creator
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.
