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
How was place a bitch for mods? I honestly never heard anybody talking about it and im genuinely curious
I felt a duty to not only place pixels but also coordinate efforts. Picking the design, updating the design, spreading information so the people placing pixels know what’s going on, advertising, talking to other communities…
I don’t remember them very well but i’m pretty sure i’ve had 4 hour nights for the entire duration. For place 2023 i spent most of my waking time in Discord calls.
And all this for a game that can be emotionally devastating. Getting overrun by a streamer feels shockingly similar to having big kids trample your sand castle, it’s this little thing that you built together getting destroyed by stronger people and they’re mocking you relentlessly.
Gah. Ok yeah that sounds like ass.
Oh you meant subreddit, not community. Yeah fuck that shit hole, not worth your time
reddit claims to be the face of the internet. so obviously there are going to be good and bad people…only it seems like there are more bad than good.
you’ll also notice,cancel culture is pervasive in social media,to the point it became toxic. any time any facts that doesn’t fit the narratives of the idiots,you get downvoted and/or called/branded derogatory names.
an anecdotal observation,i have my fair share of run ins with right wing crazies spouting nonsense on social media such as reddit but honestly, it’s mostly the left where i saw true craziness and experienced fascist behaviours.
it’s mostly the left where i saw true craziness and experienced fascist behaviours
That really depends which part of the internet you’re in, which politics you’re more sensitive to, and which point of view you’re observing them from. If you’re in leftist communities they tend to be a lot nicer on the inside.
r/place has had the soul sucked out of it past the first iteration. I’m not even going to bother checking it this year because I can see the future and I know what the canvas will end up being - bots maintaining flags. I’d be nice if they restricted it to accounts that are at least a year old, but at this point all the accounts people were botting with the last two years are qualified under that definition.
Cool idea, consistently horrible implementation.
I’d been on Reddit for 13 years and finally managed to detox by doing two things only.
- Uninstalling the app from my phone (along with LinkedIn, which I have to use, but despise). Since the browser experience is terrible, that was half the problem.
- Strategically muting subreddits that annoyed me.
Wall of text about why (but I’ll use paragraphs):
In recent years, I started noticing that everything discussion-oriented was either a Dunning-Kruger driven echo chamber or a total circlejerk for the default progressive opinion on that subject. And, anything content-oriented was reposts.
Quick caveat: I’m not saying that every progressive position is bad, only that I enjoy forming my own positions without getting yelled at. Also, I don’t know OP’s sub and I’m sure it was well-moderated. I’d imagine quitting as a mod would be emotionally harder.
Anyway, for a few weeks, whenever some low-info/naive/didactic opinion or recycled content popped up, I muted that sub.
The last to go was my professional sub, since I’m in a small field. But once I realized all I’d done there in 13 years was help people starting out, but never once received help myself (since there are virtually no posters with experience), I was good to go. I can mentor elsewhere and probably help way more.
Once I muted stuff, I had a few content subs left like r/urbanhell or r/catio, or other fun stuff I want to keep. But my feed is suddenly super quiet, so I just open it once a week, like a magazine.
It’s not quite quitting, but that’s for when Huffman (or whoever replaces him) realizes that to move the revenue needle, they need to block adblockers like YouTube, or go fucking nuts with sponsored posts, or sell personal data, or build their own LLM on everyone’s posts, or whatever they’re gonna do.
And it probably won’t be Huffman anyway, since he just dumped half a million shares at $50+ and can therefore buy an island, so he is absolutely out of there 😂
Meanwhile, if I’m Reddit’s Unix admin or whatever and have waited for years to vest my equity, I can’t even sell for another 5.5 months. It ain’t gonna be $50+ then. Brutal.
And that’s how it goes. Never again. I don’t miss it, since sending Lemmy memes to my Signal chats replaces most of the hijinks and sex/the outdoors replaces the dopamine.
@thawed_caveman sorry that happened to you, it sounds difficult. But I think you’ve made the right decision.
Hope you find a silver lining. For me, moving to the fediverse has been an overwhelmingly positive experience. It’s fun being part of something cool that can never be sold out by people like Spez.
. 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.
I sincerely hope you said this in multiple places on Reddit
There will be a lot of people who don’t realise that that’s precisely what the IPO means
Anyone who comments on Reddit is now giving free information to the capitalists. I don’t care if people don’t go anywhere, so long as they abandon Reddit.
If you have it in you, please recreate your previous subreddit here in the fediverse. There’s less tools, but also far less users, and plenty of room to make tools.
A ton of niche communities didn’t make it over here during the “exodus”. Any little bit helps.
Shameless plug: /c/Sekiro, /c/Bloodborne
Doing my part :)
Gotta actually link things if you want people to find them, my friend! 😉
I’m always too lazy to link properly. Thanks for helping out :D
We need auto conversion ao that c/communityname actually links to the community if it exists on the home sub of the user (for example as a suggestion)
Yes please
Congrats!
I left my community of 12 years with >4M subs a year ago, when they killed the API. Without third party tools, my time modding had more than doubled. I spent almost as much time on reddit as I did on my full time job at some point.
Honest question: what did you feel you got out of modding? I feel like it would be a thankless endeavor and would bring absolutely no satisfaction at any point.
It started as a very niche community when I joined, so being a mod actually felt like being a “recognized” member of the community without doing a whole lot. And when the sub started growing, keeping the trolls out was more of a necessary chore to preserve the peace, that I did without really thinking about it.
Only once I left I started realizing how much time it consumed. I’ve signed up for a phd program since I left and I still have more free time despite the research and a full time job. That’s how much time it consumed in the end.
I wonder if they don’t even want mods. Just AI/algorithms and ads. What is 100 well moderated, mindful discussions worth compared to a single, well targeted ad?
Bring it here. We need good moderators. Welcome back to the original corporate free Internet. It’s great
Sorry to hear about your experience, hope you I’ll have a better time here
Why do people like r/place, and why do others hate it? I never understood the phenomena.
It’s like an MMO for pixel art. The best part of MMOs is all the other players. The worst part of MMOs is… all the other players.
How do you gear/level up? What are the currencies?
So accurate.
The first time /r/place was offered was markedly different from the others. The first was a free-for-all hellfest for a long while where organization wasn’t even secondary or tertiary to the experience. Then came the age of “reason” and brands and flags sprouted up, obliterating any semblance of originality with an uninteresting mob of paint rollers. The second go around, there was nothing new, everything was pre-planned and strategically plotted, and genitals were a big no-no. To answer your question, novelty and the spontaneous lack thereof. Freedom and the spontaneous lack thereof.
Then came the age of “reason” and brands and flags sprouted up
Ugh. The domination of the space by advertisements and just straight-up nationalism is so lame and nauseating. I don’t know if it’s mainly bots or just peoples’ general lack of creativity, but it sucks.
My understanding is it’s mostly bots. Not bot accounts so much, but people running scripts using their main accounts. I’m not totally sure on this, but I’m pretty confident I read about scripts communities used for their drawings.
It’s like that Woodstock concert in the 2000s. You can’t just recapture magic like that by repetition.
Spontaneity is spontaneous.
The first r/place was one of those unique events in history. The later ones didn’t work because people now knew what it was, techniques to use, and of course bots. I think the most enjoyable was how it not only sparked comradery within various subreddits to support their design and keep it alive, it also brought together some “opponents” to do the same (thinking my experience with the Star Citizen/Elite Dangerous agreement to help each other).
Also streamers were a lot more influential on place 22 and 23 than they were in 17. Streamers are external to the website, don’t particularly have a dog in the race other than themselves, are encouraged to create spectacle, and the kind of personality that makes you a big streamer is not conducive to being a good neighbor in a competitive pixel art game. So while i hesitate to say that there was anything about Reddit in particular that made Place 2017 a good event, i do think the presence of streamers made 22 and 23 much worse.
This is silly to me. So you’re happy working for free at a private company, but not a public one? The fact that them going public was known for a while was fine? The lack of care they showed you as a private company while taking the shitty concrete steps to go public were all fine?
If yu want to take a hard look at your role, when the last revolt during the API changes happened, the revolt failed because mods like you wouldn’t stand up. So it’s funny to me to see what the “final straw” is for you, because in the grand scheme of things, it seems like nothing.
I certainly don’t understand why you would move to another place in the Internet and announce this silly view.
No need to be an asshole about it, the important thing is that he moved on, the path he took is not relevant.
I didn’t think I was being an asshole. The questions I asked were genuine, and I think I was pretty neutral with pointing out how OP shares blame in the situation they are in.
And, through all that, i summed it up with how silly this whole situation is - especially when you look at how OP is responding in the thread. This comes across as a “look at me, I did something good, tell me how nice I am” post. Given the rest of the situations context, just ugh.
“This is silly to me”. Followed by a bunch of snide questions.
“the revolt failed because mods like you wouldn’t stand up”. Throwing blame on someone that did nothing that harmed you directly, and that even assumes a niche mod would have had any impact in the results at all.
“I certainly don’t understand why you would move to another place in the Internet and announce this silly view.” Then you go on to call them silly again, and criticize them for making a post in the proper C/ for that kind of venting.
Then your entire comment here is repeating that, doubling down on the same thighs, and then accuse them of begging for attention.
I get it. You didn’t think you were being an asshole. You were. To avoid that in the future, try not using language that denigrates, belittles, or dismisses someone, and you are much less likely to end up being an asshole. And you 100% were being an asshole. If there were a textbook in being an asshole online, your two comments could serve as perfect examples of how to do it without resorting to cursing. That’s pretty much the only thing you could have done to make it worse without going entirely off topic.
One asshole to another? You gotta either learn not to be an asshole, or own that shit and not pretend you aren’t.
I can agree with your point, the API changes should have been the breaking point. Keep in mind there’s going to be a lot of different final straws for people though, it is inevitable as traditional social media collapses into itself. The best time was yesterday, the next best is now.
I totally get that - but coming to another platform to announce it is just funny to me, and I think the questions I asked at the start were valid and I’m genuinely curious about the answers.
Glad to hear you stepped away, it is not worth letting them exploit your labor for their personal profits. Reddit changed a lot since 2016 and not for the better. They should be forced to cut checks for community leaders or hire an internal mod team at this point, but too many rubes are willing to mod for free. Of course reddit is more then happy to let them warm the seats and increase their value.
