I should begin by mentioning that I am (was) a moderator of three subreddits: one large subreddit, one NSFW subreddit and a medical-related subreddit. After u/spez’s calamitous AMA, I joined Lemmy and haven’t looked back. I am really enjoying the Lemmy/KBin vibe. It is very much an alpha (almost beta) product and the ad free, corporate free, decentralized nature of the fediverse has a thrill of its own.
Over the past couple of months, Reddit has done everything it can to show its moderators that they are low-value and easily replaceable. They’ve done this by removing technical tools, killing off third party applications, crippling API changes and jaw-droppingly bad public relations. Heavily used products like /r/toolbox are no longer being actively developed. When Reddit API implements a breaking, non-backwards compatible change, that tool will also die.
Yet the moderators of Reddit continue to moderate. They stay and help Reddit build Reddit. They continue to work for free; to allow Reddit to make money off of their work despite being abused. When I see things like the comment section on this post, I no longer feel sorry for the Reddit moderators still on the site. I see them as a sad, sorry group who cling to the false hope of a corporate turnaround. They could leave Reddit. They should leave Reddit.
These moderators are in an abusive relationship with Reddit, Inc. I might understand the argument, “we built this community, we can’t just abandon it”. But would you give the same advice to someone else in an abusive relationship? I get that the analogy between the mods and the corp is an imperfect one, yet it is similar enough to be valid, in my opinion.
Moderating is really hard. It is hard and thankless and never-ending. Finding good moderators who can handle the marathon nature of the gig is incredibly difficult. If Reddit moderators were to delete their moderating bots, downgrade their automod “code” and dial back their modding efforts to 5 min/week or less, it would materially hurt Reddit as a product.
The sunk-cost fallacy is a real thing. If the Reddit mods understood this, they’d take their talents elsewhere. But as long as they continue to help Reddit build Reddit, one shouldn’t feel sorry for them.
They could leave. I did and I’ve never been happier.
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I shut down the my subreddit for old memes on Reddit and moved it to Lemmy. Then it blew up on Lemmy and the old ass memes spread to the other meme subreddits. (Sorry)
This is home now.
!antiquememesroadshow@lemmy.world is better than ever over here. Although it’s still full of stale ass memes.
YOU. You’re the reason I had to endure that unending two day borefest! /jk
If it makes you feel any better, my wife also moved over to Lemmy and she was chewing me out for several days because of it.
She was so annoyed that her feed was full of advice animals and dancing babies.
Thank god for Karma.
Real karma is much more meaningful than Reddit karma. ;)
This does raise an interesting point - subreddits that were not so popular in the old world could take advantage of the communities goldrush - ie, many users looking for communities they’re interested in, on lemmy instances.
When there are a lot fewer communities, with a lot less content, even niche communities have a pretty good chance of people subbing to them, if not for anything else, just to populate currently sparse selection of content.
Might also have something to do with Lemmy’s early adopters being a lot of Millennial and late Gen X folks. People seemed to enjoy the nostalgia.
But yeah, it’s a lot easier to gain traction with a new community on Lemmy. All you need is a silly idea, content, and the motivation to let people know it exists.
On your first point - I suppose you’re right. I don’t think it’s just the nostalgia though - I feel like newer generations are getting more and more computer illiterate, as corporate built software is architected to have the least learning curve, and the least amount of user debugging or customisation. The older generations in contrast grew up having to fix or Jerry rig computer stuff, simply because it wasn’t as polished back then as now.
I read an essay exploring this many years ago. If you’re interested, I’ll go dig up the source for you.
Honestly I stopped feeling bad for mods as soon as I saw a majority of them fold like a soggy napkin upon the first threat from the admins saying they’d remove mods who keep their subs private.
If I were a mod I would have kept it private until Reddit removed me. If all mods actually did that, Reddit would have been in big trouble since they’d effectively have to find new mods all at once for the entire site. Instead, most mods basically did Reddit a favor and lessened the impact substantially. Thanks mods!
I also don’t feel bad for most Reddit users. Way too many of them were too ignorant to even understand what the protests were about. And a majority of them were yelling at mods to reopen and saying the protest was stupid just because they were okay with using the official mobile app
Unbelievable all around honestly. The entire thing was fucking embarrassing. We had one actual chance to win and everyone blew it.
One of the things that clinched it for me to leave reddit for good was when one of my favorite subs’ (r/entwives) mods caved after “protesting” (going private) for the standard 48 hours, then laid down like pathetic losers after said “protest” and stating they’d remain open like normal instead of permanently staying “private.” It was fucking deplorable, and these sad sack mods’ reasoning for it was “well if we stay private, someone will create a duplicate of this sub and it won’t be the same welcoming environment as this one 🥺🥺🥺🥺” man, that made me see red…it was blatant that they were desperate to hold onto the pathetically small amount of power they had, ultimately terrified of losing their user base.
it was blatant that they were desperate to hold onto the pathetically small amount of power they had, ultimately terrified of losing their user base.
This is unfortunately the majority of mods on there, especially the shitty ones that are ban happy and censorship happy. They love being able to silence whoever they want and hold power over people. Losing that “power” is not an option for them.
As soon as I saw that the so called “protest” was only supposed to last a pathetic 48 fucking hours, I knew it was going to fail. The goal should have been to go dark for as long as it took. The entire thing was set up to fail. Absolutely fucking useless.
I know it sounds pretentious as hell, but the majority of people are just idiots that can’t be bothered to learn and educate themselves on anything…
Again, sounding pretentious and the ones smart enough to see the reddit bullshit and figure out lemmy are here now!
I sound like a prick, but it do!
You’re not a prick or pretentious or doing anything wrong. Part of the propaganda matrix is to shame people into not checking or calling each other out for not having basic knowledge they should have. It’s how they keep people uneducated
Top mods of subs can delete them iirc, they should have just done that upon being threatened with replacement- delete all the css, unban anyone banned or alternatively ban as many people as possible and all the known admins, remove all the rules and spam filters, then delete it- so if they do resurrect it from the bin it’ll be as messed up as possible as the biggest F u to the admins you possibly can.
That would do nothing, they can just restore from a backup that is likely happening daily.
People don’t have courage, integrity or principles anymore and it shows.
Im a moderator of subreddits, and i can say i agree.
the moderator of r/onlyfans is a good example, it was repurposed to be about fans, but in order to “protest” he decided to allow porn back in, and despite the users constantly being extreamly angry about this for over a month, he had refused to dissalow porn, while he did tighten the rules on it slightly recently, they appear to go totally uninforced with porn bots slowly taking over the community.
Oh I don’t, don’t you worry.
The admin are trash over on reddit. The CEO is trash. Lots of the mods in the big subs are trash too though.
Any of the mods that complained and protested but are still on the site are gutless and just don’t want to lose their mod power.
Right? As somebody else said, the protest was supposed to be a warning shot. Any subreddit that went dark, but then stayed compliant when the API changes went through is chock-full-o spineless mods.
Communities can be rebuilt, as we’ve seen. There really is no excuse at this point for those mods to not leave and start rebuilding somewhere like Lemmy.
Reddit will never reverse course. Maybe their goal used to be aligned with ours, but now they’re just a massive corporation chasing an ever growing profit.
Reddit will never reverse course.
Not only that, but now they know that they can do basically whatever they want with absolutely no consequences no matter how bad it is for the users, because 99% of the users just won’t care. They’ll continue using the official app and the horrible new website like they always have.
There really is no excuse at this point for those mods to not leave and start rebuilding somewhere like Lemmy.
Oh they are. And they are just as toxic and controlling.
Start your own instance, with hookers and blackjack.
Reddits surrender to capital reminds Matrix with agent Smith becoming everything and everyone despite Neo.
This whole ordeal reminds me of Thor Ragnarok.
Except for the veteran sub where I got perma banned for literally saying I don’t like fascism, I never had many paths cross with mods.
Where I lost respect for them is when Reddit started telling them to open up or get replaced and most of them complied. I’d have some more empathy if it was at work where getting canned meant scrambling to pay bills - but we’re talking about Reddit. They claim to stand for something but the second they’re asked to give up anything for that belief they cave.
Psuedo interwebs powers just trump morals and values these days.
I was a mod that walked away. The fact that so few mods had the balls to call Reddit on their bluff is disappointing but totally expected to me.
I’m not terribly surprised but I was excited at the potential of everyone going “fuck it replace me then” and Reddit trying to limp through an IPO with a whole army of noob mods with zero moderation tools 😂
Part of it is the sunk cost fallacy. They are/were heavily invested in the community and it’s hard to walk away from something that has been important to you. I don’t necessarily disagree with you as I walked away from Reddit and only recently logged in to give away all my coins but I do empathize some with those who haven’t yet.
Well, for what it’s worth I was a mod there – admittedly, of an extremely tiny sub that to the nearest decimal point, no one cares about. I walked away due to all the BS happening at reddit. Not just the API scandal, or throwing the Apollo dev under the bus, but also the general enshittification of the entire experience as well. For instance, I do enjoy a good internet argument now and again, but some of the stuff users in specific subs insisted on arguing with me about just tooth and nail devolved into being absolutely ridiculous. The place is a cesspit of its own making, and not just the administration but also the mods and some cross section of its user base. (I’m not going to speculate on how broad of said cross section. I don’t know; I don’t care.)
At the end of the day, you are correct. It’s just an internet forum that ultimately doesn’t matter. If someone’s only validation in life is wielding a small amount of petty authority over anonymous internet people, well. I don’t know what to tell you. I have no need for such a thing. I was only a mod of my sub because I enjoyed the topic, but I’m not turning it into a job and frankly, I don’t care to be A) lumped in by association with the “power mods” and capitulators/collaborators involved with this whole clusterfuck, and B) if reddit is also implicitly handing me a “fuck you” along with all the rest of the mods, then fuck 'em right back. I’m on the internet to look at cat pictures and talk about motorcycles. On that front, reddit is nowhere special.
Things come and things go. I guess it was nice while it lasted. (And if you want to talk about things going, I used to be a moderator on the Temple of the Screaming Electron forums. Now there’s some nostalgia for you. I’m not even sure that place qualified as The Web 1.0. That turned into a shitshow eventually, too, although for different reasons. It’s almost like history repeats, or something.)
I was only a mod of my sub because I enjoyed the topic,
These were the mods that I generally respected.
I think I recall hearing about TOTSE. Wasn’t it BBS?
It was, originally. It then mutated into a site on this newfangled World Wide Web thingamabob, which ultimately became a UBB driven forum. In what is now considered quite an oldschool style. Originally it was an archive of text files of questionable legality (and accuracy). Think along the lines of the old “Anarchist’s Cookbook” that circulated the early internet, and that sort of thing. A large portion of the text file archive was still available even well after the forum was the only reason anyone went there.
It had a facelift circa I want to say 2008? My recollection is a bit hazy. Which tried to make it look more “professional” and “Web 2.0,” but ultimately was the same old thing in a different skin that was less “l33t hack3r” but not much easier on the eyes. (Someone really, really liked the color blue.) That was kind of the beginning of the end, since after that the creator/admin “Jeff Hunter,” had apparently lost interest after presumably pupating into a productive member of society, and now the whole thing is gone.
Towards the end, Totse also had an inner circle of moderators of dubious sanity for its major forums, who pretty much just used their power to squash dissent and turn their subforums into their own private echo chambers. Sounds kind of familiar, once you think back on it. I, uh, won’t reveal which forums I was a moderator of. Such a thing might impact a person’s reputation.
The thing that is different is that they really CAN leave. Reddit has nothing over them. Reddit doesn’t have their important documents, control of their finances. Reddit isn’t physically present, so they aren’t physically endangered. And yet they are STILL reacting exactly how an abuse victim.
This ought to be a lesson for all of us that ANY of us can fall into that pattern and not judge people who are.
Spez’s comment on moderators showed the world he’s not a tiny bit better than Marck “They trust me, dumbfucks!” Zuckerberg.
Yet so many people willingfully trust him with their most personal sensitive information until it’s too late.
https://www.insider.com/nebraska-teen-sentenced-jail-abortion-police-facebook-2023-7
Even with that, you still don’t see FB users running away from the private data collection and resell platform.
It will be very hard for some moderators to leave because they put so much work in reddit, and leaving would force them to admit they were used by someone who despised them the whole time, and there is no hope he would ever change.
It’s similar to women who can’t leave their violent companion: they want to believe in something that does not exist, and will stretch their perception of reality to avoid admitting they’re wrong.
I do not despise the moderators who won’t leave. I pity them.
With all that said, this remind me I wanted to permanently delete my reddit’s account. I won’t contribute to a BS “users” numbers…
With all that said, this remind me I wanted to permanently delete my reddit’s account. I won’t contribute to a BS “users” numbers…
If you are ok with going scorched earth, download one of those programs that lets you replace the content of all of your comments with either gibberish or a pre-defined message saying why you did it and left first. I only deleted mine and I wish I did that but too late now.
Ah, too late! I deleted it right after writing my comment. I missed that opportunity.
Part of me hopes the raw number of users will drop at least a bit, that would be terrible for the valuation of the company…
But the other part of me has already moved on. Lemmy is fine, I don’t really need to look back.
It’s similar to women who can’t leave their violent companion: they want to believe in something that does not exist, and will stretch their perception of reality to avoid admitting they’re wrong.
This analysis really fucking sucks lmao. Abuse also includes controlling access to structures of dependency (housing, food, money, social webs, children), so a lot of time in the immediate term and often long term it is a MUCH better value proposition to stay with abusers in the hope that they change.
Idk this is so victim blamey and misunderstanding.
Well, we’re talking about 2 different things here:
1.Does the victim in an abusive reationship ackowledge it is abusive. You’d be surprised how many victims don’t. And that does not make them a tiny bit “less” victims.
2.Once the victim acknowledges the abusive situation, how much support is offered to help the victim, and yes, very often, the answer is close to peanuts, and that’s quite a shame. But that’s a whole different issue.
The abusive relationship is with Reddit, not the community they moderate. A more accurate analogy is tolerating the abusive person because you don’t want to completely lost contact with many other people you care about just because of that one guy who they’re still friend with. The answer then become less clear cut than just cut off the toxic person. It becomes a question of when the abusive person becomes toxic enough that even the prospect of keeping in touch with other people you care about isn’t worth it any more. That is going to be different for everyone and there’s no right answer as it completely depends on the person. It is still possible that someone misjudge and they’d be better off leaving earlier, but what that earlier point is still has to be decided first according to their own circumstances.
To illustrate my point. Some people believe it’s the right thing to do to leave Reddit much earlier than this year, such as when they let /r/the_donald operated freely. In this case here because you decided to stay until 1-2 months ago, you are also part of the problem that “stayed and helped Reddit build Reddit”.
I think this post simplified the situation in a way that misrepresented the motivation of some moderators.
It’s like the mods are divorcing parents who has to deal with the toxic ex to take care of their children.
A more accurate analogy is tolerating the abusive person because you don’t want to completely lost contact with many other people you care about
Thing is: Communities also can leave. If the community cares about its mods in the same way the mods care about the community, a move toward an alterantive medium is not a problem.
Of course that’s not how it is. The communities at large to a good part don’t give a shit about the people who moderate. The relationship is often entirely one sided. A community which cares, leaves with the mods. A community which doesn’t give a fuck, stays.
I was just waiting for an alternative. Lemmys sudden boom provided that.
Moderators are not a vital part of Reddit, mods are Reddit.
You want to hear something fucked up? After nearly 10 years in Reddit, one day I suddenly started receiving daily death threats and HEAVY bot spamming on this tiny little sub I was moderating. So naturally I reached out to the mod support sub for help. Then this bot/spammer started flooding my post on their sub which actually felt great—they were getting a taste of what I had been dealing with. The post ended up with well over 500 comments from this piece of shit. So instead of help me out, you know what they did? They banned me from the mod support subreddit.
I had a conversation with one of the admins who basically told me they don’t care about death threats. Furthermore, this spammer had also admitted to murdering people. Again the admin didn’t care. Till the day I left they were unable to stop this one person from creating hundreds, maybe even thousands of accounts and spamming tons of people including myself. A billion dollar company can’t even control their own product. The bots literally own Reddit. Lol. Fuck them, all of them who stayed.
Here some proof: https://imgur.com/Hofqdh8 https://imgur.com/gallery/vJhZlwX
They don’t even require email validation. I made dozens of burner accounts with the same email over the years. It’s wild. They are like actively against controlling the bots. It’s like Twitter, the bots inflate the numbers so they don’t want to go after them.
I want revenge.
I suggest you make a bot for that.
It crossed my mind. I know I could write some insidious code. Ultimately I don’t have time for that nonsense.
There was this guy, I think he called himself “killallwomen” with changing numbers. I received a death threat followed up by pictures of animal porn and gore. I actually didn’t care that much. I understand your concerns and nobody should have to deal with this kind of shit. But I got so many death threats on Reddit over the years. Death threats from nazis, death threats from conspiracy theorists, death threats from CCP slaves, death threats from russian bots, death threats from trumpian cultists, death threats from a guy who thought I want to punch him for some reason, death threats from incels, OH THE INCELS! There are so many of them on Reddit.
I couldn’t care even if I wanted. But not everyone feels the same and things I might find almost funny, could disturb others. So this killallwomen guy kept doing what he was doing and the counter got higher and higher. To the point he almost became a meme in some communities.
Did the admins care? Did they do anything to stop this behavior on their site? Of course they didn’t.
I wonder how many of the people on lemmy that bitched about getting banned on reddit, how its an an echo-chamber and how you’re not allowed to have a different opinion there, are believers in “alternate facts,” or spread misinformation, or are otherwise culpable for bad behavior. I once got banned from /r/TwoXChromosomes because I got insultingly personal in criticizing someone for their rabid misandry. But you know what? Even if that other redditor was in the wrong, so was I for a lack of civility. I messaged the mods, explained specifically what happened, what rule I broke, my intention to refrain from doing that in the future, etc. And I was unbanned. One person’s “echo chamber” is 10,000 people’s enjoyable space.
In the last month or two before the Great Migration, I started noticing a hard right shift all over reddit that seemed extremely suspicious. Comments expressing anti-LGBTQ+ sentiments and other so-called “social conservative”/regressive comments getting tons of upvotes. On a scale I had never seen before with brigading etc. They’d eventually get downvoted into oblivion but what the hell was going on, I have no idea.
Elections are coming up. I remember the time around 2016. Nothing new under the sun.
This maybe a controversial opinion here but many of those moderators also suffer from a big problem of powertripping. They just don’t want to leave that position.
Well, some of those mods are here already, so good for them - they can powertrip here as much as they want! Though I prefer they stay there.
i’m on the Board of Directors of a nonprofit in a realm that has a lot of drama. I fucking hate it. The reason I stay is because leaving means the drama fucks won, to the detriment of all. Not saying my situation is identical to mods on reddit, just that people often have reasons for staying in leadership other than power.
Why not start your own competing non-profit, leave the terrible one and take the good people with you?
IDK why you’re being downvoted. It might not be feasible for op to do that but doesn’t mean its not worth doing or thinking about.
A lot of non-profits have truly dysfunctional leadership. They leech off the hard work of people who do genuinely care about the cause. My friend worked for one of them that was supposed to help underprivileged children. They ended up getting burnt out and leaving, though her former boss who did jackshit was fired shortly after.
Can’t really comment for certain on OP’s behalf, but they did say “in a realm that has a lot of drama”
“In a realm” makes it sound like it’s not just their non-profit that’s at fault, but is a common issue across all non-profits working in that same field/realm
This.
May they stay where they are then, so the rest of us can move on from them and be happy.
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This is absurd. Consider the idea that not every moderator is power tripping, and that there are many who manage communities because they want to see them grow, and want people to have a place to talk about a given topic.
When I used Reddit, I was on some smaller communities, maybe a few thousand people tops, with moderators who interacted with their community, were well known among the regulars, and were great to talk to. They don’t deserve disrespect just because you want to generalize all moderators under one giant blanket stereotype.
I have to agree with you. It’s like people who consider their career to be “management”.
One of the gaming subs mods were acting like they couldn’t even be part of the strike because they were “providing an important service” and another one pcgaming I think offered what was basically token resistance.
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I was the sole mod of of a decent sized sub (12k users) until spez made it clear how unappreciated my work to combat spam & scams actually is.
I deleted my 12 year old main account, the other coming soon.
