Itās obvious that Reddit as a company has no respect for its users and less than that for the mods. Itās a thankless, difficult job that isnāt 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 donāt value your work or your opinions? Why not just pull out en masse and let the place burn to the ground?
Of course I canāt speak for everyone else, but: Iāve 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 Iām still working through the comments a week later. It absolutely HAD to be done, because Iām 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 donāt like losing their status / influence, but thatās a different story)
Instead of manually saving + deleting content, you should use scripts to download and delete all posts + comments youāve 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.
