People do it for free on Lemmy, too. Reddit used to be much more moderator-friendly. I think a lot of remaining mods are just going on muscle memory at this point.
Yes, they do. And while I don’t get it on here either, at least they don’t line the pockets of some shitty company. Some moderation is necessary, and I guess I should be happy about other people doing it for free here.
People do it because they care. I ran /r/StarTrek for over a decade because I wanted a specific type of community to exist that didn’t elsewhere, and reddit made it easy.
Of course, reddit eventually screwed me (and all of us) with their greed and there was no way to move what we’d built. If a nonprofit reddit-like site existed back then I would hopefully have had the foresight to use it instead.
Oh hey, I recognize you. Genuinely and truly, thank you for your years of service. I run a mastodon community these days for the same reasons, and I can only imagine how frustrating and eventually heartbreaking it must have been for long-time reddit mods to slowly get screwed out of the homes they’d built for themselves and others.
