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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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.
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.
Same here.
After the infamous AMA, I made a post in my subreddit basically saying “peace out, I’m off to Lemmy. Good luck, everyone.” Lucky for them, I’d set up a pretty robust automoderator over the years so that’s still taking care of the majority of the moderating tasks I’d imagine.
I visited that post today and saw over 500 comments, each one by a mod and each one of them angry. Why they’re still there, I have no idea.
This is just the start. Once Reddit IPOs and we hear how many tens of millions spez made off the backs of mods and power users, more will start to question why they are doing unpaid labor just to make spez rich. There is a fundamental problem with trying to make bank on volunteer labor, and we’re just starting to see it begin.
Spez will have his millions then and not care one jot about those who, post his big payday, “question why they are doing unpaid labor just to make spez rich”.
For him there will literally not have been any “fundamental problem with trying to make bank on volunteer labor” as he will have pulled it of and come out of it filthy rich. For any sucker that buys Reddit stock at the public IPO price, that will be different, but Spez himself wil have won.
So the only way to actually punish him for his actions and deter other sociopaths from doing the same thing in the future is to damage the brand well before any IPO.
He’ll still have plenty of stock and CEOs get paid in stock options. But anyway, spez doesn’t have to care, my point was that Reddit mods will question and many will.
This is precisely why I quit. I’m still on reddit because the conversation volume on Lemmy is not yet high enough to keep me on top of a few select subjects I follow.
I only moderated one (significant) community - about 30k. All I really do is maintain the bot to control spam. But, I quit. I’m still there, I just refuse to do anything to make the experience any better than it is, and it will slowly degrade over time from my inaction.
Capitalism is great in that it creates great things. Capitalism sucks because it ultimately, inevitably destroys every great thing it creates.
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.
Reddits surrender to capital reminds Matrix with agent Smith becoming everything and everyone despite Neo.
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.
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 😂
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.
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.
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.
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.
I haven’t felt sorry for mods since the mods of a sub I’ll not mention decided to stop the protest after some of them got banned, because “we don’t want the sub to fall into the hands of randoms”.
Spineless behavior. Just move and rebuild the community elsewhere. It has been more than a month and the ship has sailed. Even if Reddit decides to backpedal for now, they’ll try again in the future.
Totally they could just say “we are moving to X” and continue the work there. How hard is it? It’s time consuming but as a team it’s doable
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Im so glad I left as soon as I recognised how much they don’t care about mods. I was a mod at several subs and fuck that. I’m happier here. Remember. Spez made it clear that so long it doesn’t hurt their revenue, he will do whatever he cares to do without listening to the clients.
Jumped ship when Spez wasn’t caving to the protests. I was mostly a lurker on Reddit and posted a little but now with the state of our social media it’s better to get out and have a voice. And this place is nice
I’ve never modded but have been on Reddit 15yrs 11mo as of the Apollo shutdown. At this point I’m in the 16yr club. It’s wild how badly they are acting toward mods.
Frankly I’m not a mod lover or hater, with the exception of AskHistory. It was so clear how the mods there truly made the community. Haters will say they had a heavy hand, but it kept the quality remarkably high.
I’m middle age so I’ve seen a full decade of forum shitposting and flamwars before Reddit even existed. The fact that Reddit can’t see the value of the community that build “their platform” is beyond tonedeaf, it’s just straight up arrogant.
I’m sure Reddit will stay far bigger than lemmy for a long time, but that’s fine. Maybe better. The old forums were microscopic by modern social media standards but in hindsight the conversations with active users were more real and not just some random username that might as well have been anon.
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.
Y’know, I read that entire thread, and it really doesn’t come across as you’re representing it.
The mods are spitting rage over there. They’re outright insulting every aspect of reddit. I feel like focusing on the idea that because they made a post there they must still be active users is a stretch and unfair.
Of course, we know too many people still use the site. But it’s hard for me to get on board with a blanket “fuck the mods” based on that thread alone.
Yeah, mods don’t like Reddit either.
Every other day, I get over how mad I was about the whole spez thing, and just focus on bettering our community and Lemmy in general.
But then they do something again that immediately remind me how much of an asshole he is. Last week, it was them taking out the coins and awards. Now this week, it’s introducing r/Places like nothing happened and we’re all friends again. Fuck him.
I’ve been on Reddit quite some years, but don’t understand what the fuss about r/places is about. Would you mind explaining it to me?
It’s just a way to get a whole subreddit involved in an activity and compete against other subreddits in a goodhearted way that doesn’t involve brigading or anything. In theory, it’s fine. Doing it right now is absolutely tone-deaf.
Doing it right now is absolutely tone-deaf.
Its mandated fun. “Users, you have been agitated in the last weeks. We hereby strongly suggest you participate in this thing we have chosen in order for you to have fun again.”
Reddit becomes stale as it goes through the motions when trying to hand out the member berries.
The beatings will continue until morale improves vibes
Precisely. I just saw that you have to be on .new or the official app to participate. Oh well…
Imo it is also a way to offset some of the losses of engagement they’ve been experiencing and show potential shareholders that they can still drive traffic instead of being driven by it.
Oh I have no doubt of that. They want to look better for their IPO and they look terrible right now.
I see, thanks!
Your argument is strange, since I definitely feel bad for people in abusive relationships and have understanding for how difficult it might be to leave one.
Come on, we are stretching the analogy here. Reddit isn’t beating them. Reddit isn’t isolating them. Reddit isn’t going to explode in anger if they find out you’re flirting with another social media website.
It’s a website. I was on there for 15 years and I left with a snap of a finger. It’s not that serious.
It’s a website. I was on there for 15 years and I left with a snap of a finger. It’s not that serious.
That’s why it’s a bad analogy.
Some people are sentimental, and that’s okay.
And everyone is exactly like you? Some people feel attached to it for any kind of reasons and when someone sunk countless hours in something, I have no troubles understanding why it might be difficult to leave. Especially since for some communities there are no alternatives. Why not be a bit more emphatic?
Ok I admit there may be some emotion there and might be difficult to leave. I was there for 15 years, I get it.
But really I’m pushing back at the analogy to an abusive relationship.
The mechanism seems similar, sunken cost, ignoring bad treatment, lack of self respect - while the abuse part is definitely not comparable.
I do think there is some element of abuse, (i.e. “landed gentry”) but definitely not on par with an intimate relationship. Comparable, but not anywhere near equivalent.
I think the sunk cost can be compared to a gambling addiction. You lose money, you know the casinos are designed to make you lose money on average, yet people chase after losses all the same.
Casinos are an investment of money, and moderation is an investment of time. A gambler could just leave the casino after suffering a loss, and a Reddit mod could leave Reddit after suffering from this blatant abuse from the admins. But with addicts, you’ll always have that itch, that voice in the back of your head telling you to stay or go back.
Some people are more prone to these urges and can’t resist. Gambling addicts exist. It’s a serious problem, and I have a close friend who suffered from this very addiction. I’d consider many of these mods to suffer from a similar, albeit lesser form of this brand of addiction.
Either way, I agree that it’s something that should be pitied, and disagree with the idea that “it’s not that serious.”
