It’s obvious that Reddit as a company has no respect for its users and less than that for the mods. It’s a thankless, difficult job that isn’t 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 don’t value your work or your opinions? Why not just pull out en masse and let the place burn to the ground?
As a (soon to be) former reddit mod, reddit moderators are all power hungry. Modding and feeling like they’re important is a coping mechanism for many of their lives.
Speak for yourself.
I got stuck with the job because it needing doing and no one else stepped up.
I personally never had an interaction with any mods, but I can imagine it being much like any other position of power within any type of human interaction. But, Tbf, the job is prob a pain in the ass, and I wouldn’t want it.
It’s also just addictive. I don’t think all mods are “power hungry” in a bad sense - certainly many of them mod communities well and responsibly, but most of the ones that put in a lot of time are hooked to that community for one reason or another - either it gives them a sense of accomplishment or it’s comfortable and familiar or they just feel valued there. It’s easy to slip into that trap.
I got shadowbanned from the entire site once from pissing a mod off. I wasn’t even being combative or anything I posted a link to dispute misinformation and just said “That’s wrong though. Here is a link from the Mayo clinic explaining it” and got banned. No warning, no message, nothing. I had to make a new reddit account conpletely i couldnt upvote or comment on ANY subreddit after that. All for pissing off a mod. I hated how much power they have (had?)
You’re asking the people who quit reddit why they haven’t quit reddit. Maybe ask over there?
I am the moderator of a small (~1.9k subscribers) subreddit and I haven’t made the switch yet. I will eventually, but at the moment I feel like I have not gathered enough information in order to completely migrate my community off-site for a) archival purposes and b) functional parity purposes and I feel like taking the subreddit offline without having a solid migration plan will just result in the community dissolving entirely.
it’s a subreddit that’s pretty unique,but niche at the same time - it follows the releases of underground/unsigned/indie music acts in a certain Asian country (it’s not hard to discern what I’m talking about if you look hard enough) and whilst there are other sites on the internet that do the same thing, I feel like what I’ve built on Reddit is unique enough in the as a link aggregating format with search functionality.
sure, I could work at manually posting everything that was ever posted to the subreddit to a new lemmy server, but I’m just one guy, and alas, the chronological documentation will be messed up, which I’d like to preserve as best as possible.
so at the moment, I am thinking about moving my subreddit off the site, but I’m waiting for some utility tools to help me do that.
Some places, for example AskHistorians have a lot of amazing content to protect. Other communities would suffer greatly if “insensitive” (read Nazi) mods took over.
It’s so frustrating. For years they refused to touch moderators of truly cruel and dangerous subs. But let them suffer a little pushback, and suddenly they are more than willing to remove people from positions of power.
You know this is another big aspect to all this that people keep forgetting. They DID act like they had no control getting rid of problematic mods in the past but it sure wasn’t an issue getting rid of actually good mods when it hurt reddits bottom line. Also I know it was a bigots comment but Spez fucked around and edited peoples comments and shit too. It’s just WAY too power trippy over there.
Of course I can’t speak for everyone else, but: I’ve 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 I’m still working through the comments a week later. It absolutely HAD to be done, because I’m 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 don’t like losing their status / influence, but that’s a different story)
Instead of manually saving + deleting content, you should use scripts to download and delete all posts + comments you’ve 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.
