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?)
They like the position of power over other users and it’s worth more to them than being treated well by the platform.
A lot of them think that what they’re doing is "important " somehow, like they’ll let the “community” down if they quit. They’re all deluded.
The question was already answered.
Many people don’t have a life, they get addicted to Reddit (or something similar) and it’s importance to them becomes extreme.
Such people managed a protest, but as Spez rightly pointed out - they’ll be back.
Basically, I think the way forward is to get SEARCH engines to dig content from the Fediverse - because that is the area where Reddit wins. You don’t have to go there, you just do a search - and Reddit comes up all over the place.
Lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, Beehaw etc just don’t exist there when you want to get answers to questions that would exist, for example r/Firefox, r/CSSFirefox.
For real. Since the protests started I’ve been a good boy, removed my Boost shortcut, never opened it in a browser, never even accidently started typing it out of habit, etc. But it’s in, like, ALL the Google searches. That’s been my ONLY traffic to Reddit in the last couple weeks is accidentally clicking on Google results without noticing what site it’s on and then feeling bad about it and backing out.
You’re asking the people who quit reddit why they haven’t quit reddit. Maybe ask over there?
