This screams “Please stop this and go back to doing work for free.” They keep threatening but know they need the free labor.
Exactly. And it’s driving me crazy how many mods are caving. Like, I get that you care about the community and want it to continue on, but will it even be the same now that you know how little control you actually have? Will it survive the next insane, profit driven decision Reddit makes and refuses to negotiate on? Just rip the band-aid off now like /r/interestingasfuck and others did and let them remove you. We’ve seen that they can’t actually replace what was lost, so let them try.
“But if I lose my fragile grip on this iota of power, I’ll have nothing, and I’ll BE nothing. I can’t start over again from nothing!”
I strongly believe that that is exactly what is subconsciously going on there. The human mind is addicted to power, no matter which form.
but will it even be the same now that you know how little control you actually have?
Some communities weren’t even the same anymore after those 48h protests. And you can basically feel which parts of the community instantly left the moment they realized all that talk about protesting was bullshit and it was purely symbolic.
Them replacing mods is what scares me the most. My subreddit is for advice for stretching piercings. If I continued to protest or even outright deleted my subreddit, and they restored it and replaced the mod team, what quality of moderating should I expect? Like I get it on meme subs, not hard to moderate that sort of content. But I know damn well they aren’t going to get people with experience relative to the more specific subs.
You can never delete a subreddit once created. Ever. That’s why many are editing, then deleting, their comments.
The best you can do is to create a community on Lemmy and invite your redditors to the new community.
I get that, and respect it very much. You care about others and the community you’ve helped create. But Reddit is now actively exploiting that care for their own profit. Reddit draws value from your community and the advice it offers others. If that advice is poor then yes, people will suffer, but that’s on Reddit for allowing this all to happen how it has, not you.