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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Who would?
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
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
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.
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.
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 think the reality isn’t that they’re hoping for a corporate turnaround, but rather that they don’t want to lose the power and control they have. I mean Reddit is a huge community and having control of that, I’m sure, can get to ones head. Enough to do it for free
Ive never felt sorry for them. My experience with them, the few times Ive needed to interact with them, is that they’re so absorbed into their power that they see themselves as infallible. They judged you as a wrong doer and there’s no way it was a mistake or inflexible interpretation of their own made up rules.
I was also a mod on Reddit, for about six years.
There are people as you describe. The rest of us hated them, too, because not only did we have the same grievances as normal users but, on top of that, they made all mods look bad by association and started (or perpetuated) a lot of the stereotypes users across the internet still have about internet mods.
Those people weren’t all mods, though. Even among those left at Reddit that won’t leave, I think a lot of mods just don’t care one way or the other and think they can keep moderating as they always have as the place starts to fracture. I think they’re wrong, which is why I left. Certainly all the worst powermods and terminally online folk won’t leave, for the reasons you do outline, but even now I don’t think it’s right to paint everyone with that broad a brush.
I think attacking the mods like this is similar to attacking a person in an abusive relationship. It’s more complicated than that when they feel so attached to the product of what is in some cases thousands of hours of work put into their communities that they’ve built for over a decade.
Don’t attack the victims. Attack the abuser. I’m glad that it was easy for you to leave the abusive relationship but it’s not easy for everyone. The same psychology is at play.
Totally agree and what’s worse here is that the abuser has impacted others as well, so they do want to keep making the point. Let’s just move on and in the end it won’t matter
Breaking through this and getting moderators to migrate is key to killing reddit and booming lemmy. The act of having the mods create communities on lemmy then sticky comment/post their new lemmy communities for the userbase will bring over tens of thousands of new users. Far more than currently exist here.
Hostility to them won’t help, it’s more likely to make them reluctant to move over. I mod several communities, some for 12 years, and I’ve had a bad time trying to engage with the instance admins here and came up against complete pigheadedness from one instance we reached out to, we’ve had other modteams give us similar stories in the mod backrooms too. These experiences risk alienating the people with the highest amount of power to make migrating off reddit a success, having the userbase here doing it too on top of that will just guarantee that the hesitant steps some are making will end up stopping entirely.
FUCK REDDIT. ✊🏽
FUCK REDDIT. ✊🏽
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.
I already had a very low opinion of unpaid internet janitors, but this made me think even less of them lol.
Enough sense to be angry but not enough to leave
Really. The linked thread has so much, “If you don’t do these x things, we’re going to be really upset.”
Come on. Cut the fucking cord.
Not the point. Some mods bad, some mods good, and without mods entirely online spaces would be full of crap.
You’ll be amazed how good regular people are at opening their asses.
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?
Of course. It’s better being a lonely loser than a loser with a cunt.
I moderated a top-15 subreddit for over 5 years. reddit got so corporate so long ago that the 80% of the mods left are just on some kind of power trip. So no, I won’t ever feel bad for them.
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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.
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.
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.
