2y ago

Real question: Why don't the mods just all quit?

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?

89 comments

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.
  
  Yeah, that's an issue. It's hard to say no sometimes.
  
  what they said is true for probably 95% of mods
- 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?)
- 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.

You're asking the people who quit reddit why they haven't quit reddit. Maybe ask over there?
- Because I deleted my account and I don't want to give them any more of my time or thoughts :D
  I got some good answers here though.

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)
- It sucks for the users that they lost all the content you made, but spez fucking deserves it. Besides, maybe when the community decides on a place to settle, the content could just go there instead.
- 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.
- I also wiped my history as a 5y mod, which wasn't as hard because I know it will organically rebuild itself, but I do think it makes you realize how many hours you've poured into making a community what it is, and it makes you reconsider whether you really want to do that again in the future. I think one or two niche communities is a nice side gig that you can learn from, especially if it's related to what you do irl, but as soon as you get over five or so that you're personally invested in I think it's worth stepping back to see if there isn't a better, more productive outlet for those passions.

At this point, I think some of 'em are just sticking around to push spez as far as possible. Look at all the shit some of 'em are doing, does it look like they care whether or not they're still mods at the end of it all?
- Tbf, when the mods turn to the community and the community understands the ship is going down no matter what, the fun can actually begin for every party involved except for spez.
  
  Yeah, aside from the bootlickers who’re desperate to polish spez’s soles with their tongues.

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.

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.
- You should think about making your own site with all the historic reddit data. Something like a static site generator so you can host it for almost free

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.

I sabotaged my subreddit and I'm not deleting my account so that I can check on it and try to make sure it stays sabotaged.

Power hungry. Having power over others is as important as blood in their veins, and oxygen to their lungs.
Last year, u/carrotcypher, a power mod of multiple privacy subreddits, spoke the quiet bits out loud. I archived it. (Just Ctrl+F his name on webpage if needed.) http://web.archive.org/web/20220501175544/https://old.reddit.com/r/privacy/comments/thikeo/lets_use_lemmy_instead_of_reddit_centralization/i18h6ai/
This month, carrotcypher and fellow r/opensource moderators refused to protest and sided with Reddit admins. You can look at their comments. https://web.archive.org/web/20230608164944/old.reddit.com/r/opensource/comments/1425luc/reddits_thirdparty_app_api_changes_and_ropensource/
carrotcypher opened his trashcan mouth again few days ago, calling the protestors "too collectivist and noisy atm". https://old.reddit.com/r/gdpr/comments/14763xl/rgdpr_will_be_unavailable_starting_june_12th_due/jnu4rno?context=3
These are the crabs of the society. Whackamole and leave them behind, if they try to pull you down.

I quit, I stayed on for the protests because it felt nice to work together on it, and then when the sub I was moderating decided they didn't want to take part in the protest anymore I deleted all my posts and my account.

mods for one duckduckjeep group encouraged people to leave cute ducks on jeeps in parking lots. turned out they were just selling plastic ducks https://www.amazon.com/s?k=plastic+ducks
I rarely used reddit but people generally should spend more time unplugged

Popularity is one hell of a drug -- they can't "just quit" unless their "dopamine fix" starts to become irrelevant. In other words -- make others quit, and the "mods" will follow along.

As long as there is someone that will ignore what the CEO os doing in exchange for being able to be mod, it will not matter how many real mods leave, there will always be someone next in line to be mod.
That said, it probably will make the quality of the subs degrade over time
- Yes, but mods accepting this kind of behavior from Reddit are much more likely to be shitty themselves. Led them take the lead, and let reddit turn to shit as the mods actually doing moderation are gone and there are only power-tripping mods left.
  
  As u/YaztromoX (mod of r/canning) pointed out yesterday, there are subreddits where actually dangerous misinfo gets posted, and the mod team, who are subject matter experts in the subreddit's topic, have to remove that, or people could get seriously hurt.
  There are going to be serious consequences in some communities for letting the scab mods take over.
  
  Yup, that's what the s cond part of my post was meant to say
- Also like, most of the subs I frequented had pinned posts about looking for mods for months, sometimes years. To some it could be tempting, but its still hard unpaid work, and this time with less people to front it than when the mod searches were being held.
- You'd be surprised at how hard it is to find mods sometimes. I've moderated 100k subs where we asked for mods and... crickets.
  It's kind of disappointing because people get SO fucking pissed when mods don't keep up, and a lot of mods don't want to mod forever, and yet nobody wants to pitch in to keep the community going. You can't have it both ways, but people feel entitled to that free labor.

For me, just to fuck with reddit as a whole.
It's a fine line though. Spez is too much of a wimp do the dirty work, so we're dealing with whoever is running the modcodeofconduct account.
That means we can't go too far, not without risking someone that's just trying to get through their day unnecessary stress via abusive language.
It takes a bit of dancing to walk the line between calling them on the shit they copy/paste in, and not going after the flunky that's on duty.
There's still some mods that have given up and keep working for free because they don't realize that reddit as we knew it is dead. They think (and this is from talking to some of them) that the communities will just keep going like they were, and that the community itself is worth bending the knee.
They genuinely can't conceive that the community could exist anywhere else. And they're partly right because there's always going to be the bulk numbers that are too damn lazy to leave. They've signed up there, they're used to things, and fear change.
What the mods that are clinging to the idea of the community don't seem to get is that the real community that provided good conversation, good posts, and were doing more than scrolling and waiting for a chance to drop a one liner they don't realize has already been made five times, have left.
They think that the ones still there, whining about just wanting to scroll and fuck around, were actually part of the community. That thinking is wrong. I've seen it. The ones that are left behind, that are now attacking the mods that opened back fully, were never useful. The guys that mattered are here, or on discord, or have just fucked off entirely. I say guys, but it's meant as a general term, not a gendered one.
So, my ass is going to keep throwing up pictures of pigs and calling them spez until every alt I have is burned. If they haven't banned my mod account by then, I'll burn that fucker up too.
It's pure, stubborn, spiteful resistance just for the sake of saying fuck off to spez and any shitty capitalist drek like him that think they bring value.
- This right here. The only thing that's remotely useful on Reddit anymore is the large archive of old content; the community is already fractured, and it won't be long before the only people left on Reddit are the dregs who just want to scroll through the mind-numbing garbage that appeals to the lowest common denominator.
  Reddit might already be dead at this point, and I'm not sure that even the hardest backpedals will ever restore the faith they've destroyed over the past few weeks.

Eh, I quit.
15 year user of Reddit. I helped mod a very small sub, but didn't do a whole lot mod-wise besides delete a few spam posts now and then when they popped up.
I don't have any current plans to go back and be a part of those communities for the time being, which sucks because there were a few great (obscure) ones that I'm not sure will migrate or be replaced in the short term.
But the thing about Reddit is that it's not a homogenous group of people. Sure, it fosters a lot of group think by amplifying the most popular opinion, but if a large chunk of people with one attitude leave, then loudest voices will be the next most popular opinion. Plus, there's so many casual users now too. Most of my friends were like, "Huh? Something's going on with Reddit?"
The whole thing feels similar to the whole Digg -> Reddit fiasco. Guess we'll see how things shake out though.
- If I were you I'd create the obscure ones and just post "looking for mods" at the top. Either the community remains dead and you delete it after a few months or another mod rolls up and you can pass it off to them.

They don’t want to give up their powertrips

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escalationofcommitment

Probably some form of addiction. I mean, if I didn‘t have this convenient substitute, staying away from Reddit would be more of a struggle for me too.
- Before i discovered kbin, I was trying to use mastodon.social, but it's not the same. I've never really liked twitter and didn't see the point of it, and I kind of feel the same way about mastodon. But I was trying to come to like it anyway. That didn't happen. Now I have kbin, and it's everything i want it to be.
  
  Same, tweeting has never been my thing, but I loooooove threaded conversations. Did you see Lemmy has a phpbb skin?

They’re gonna save her, fight the admins and marry Reddit. She don’t wanna be saved.
- don't save her
  
  she don't wanna be saved

Some are paid by the company's the sub represents, they might be community managers.
But most should definitely just quit. It's a thankless abused neglected, and soon to be much more difficult, position.
- I havent thought of that but yes the minecraft sub has sm mojang employees as mods i think.
  Ive still to read an explanation on why the admins forced their sub to open after an overwhelming vote not too and a direct promise from reddit to respect that vote. Like.. there is going downhill behavior and then there is taking a blatant public dumb on your own credibility. Reddit will survive, digg still exists. But thats the line where i feel its guaranteed to fade out at sm point in the future.

Realistically, a good portion of them could be influence peddlers, paid by states , advertising agencies or others to shape online discussion.
That makes more sense to me than both idealistic community builders or no-life narcissists, which are the two most common ways I've seen mods characterized.
- ... to shape online discussion
  most of the time by squashing alternative points of view
  
  Precisely, they are sharing it by preventing opposition to their ideas and goals
- considering how many of the subs are.... controlled by a relative handful of mods... lets call them 'super mods'... chances are very solid they spend a great deal of their time modding. Which means... they probably earn money from it.
  or... they walk dogs.
  (edit to be clear, I'm only talking about the ones where you see 'moderator of' listing dozens of communities.)
- Or people like Ghislaine Maxwell, aka /u/maxwellhill. People forgot. I didn't.

My guess. Many of the mods who have been doing it for years have a sense of ownership and personal investment in the role/sub. Modding is a thankless task most of the time, so if they are still doing it, for free, they must be getting some emotional benefit.
It may also be the only aspect of their lives where they can exert any control or agency.
- Ahem.. not anymore apparently

Some reddit moderators are genuinely selfless and interested only in helping and serving the community of users who rally around the subject matter they are passionate about...and so as long as the majority of the community are on reddit, that is where the moderators will devote their efforts even if it means a more difficult job starting July 1.
This top level post comes across as a passive insult to reddit moderators, and I'm sure some reddit moderators deserve it, but a lot don't.

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.

Some people are dedicated and like working for their community, the work being its own reward. They may be worried what would happen to their community if they leave (and new mods are appointed by the overlords) which is a real concern for many, especially the more niche ones, I think. Recreating those communities elsewhere can be tough (and no, Lemmy / the Fediverse isn't an alternative for everyone yet, not least because of the relatively higher initial investment into understanding the structure). They may feel like there is still is hope, they don't want to abandon ship until the bitter absolute end and I can respect that. Some people may also simply like the attention (we are talking about mods here after all ololol mods ghey).

Sunk Cost Fallacy - A lot of mods just can't bear to give up all the time and effort they have put into Reddit.
Of course, there are better and worse reasons than that too. Just like in any group of people there are the good, the bad, and the other.

Some because of the power, others because they love the community so much. In my opinion, if a company doesn't respect or like you don't work for free for them because of some misguided sense of community or duty. Only do it for the powertripping then.

I've modded a few communities I created and a few others. I dropped many of them over the years but two, and will be leaving these soon. The reason was admin abuse and user toxicity.

Probably because it's hard to quit all of the sudden. They put a lot of effort in mantaining a community and to let it go is hard...

Power. If they move here, not everyone is gonna move here. Eventually spaz will replace them with new mods if they keep telling people to migrate. They don't feel powerful if only a small number of people migrated with them. Additionally, Lemmy instances are much smaller than the entirety of reddit, Lemmy instances are also not run by a corporation. What this means is that instance owners are less likely to tolerate abusive mods. They stay on reddit for the power.

Wouldn't it be more effective to simply delete whole subreddits en masse? Not only would that spit in spez's face, but it would drive many to other sites like here. Or am I missing something on account of being a low tech old fart?
- It would be safe to assume reddit has backups they can load up in that case.
  
  Crap, I hadn't considered that. Thanks for the info
- I’m pretty sure you can’t just “delete” a subreddit

They like the position of power over other users and it's worth more to them than being treated well by the platform.

Some people, believe it or not, think that being a mod on a subreddit makes them cool and interesting. In reality, it makes them look like a bozo.
- That's a little harsh. And overly broad. It's hard, essential, and generally unappreciated work. They are community volunteers and hold communities together. Some are less pleasant that others, but we need mods, and I'm glad some are willing to step up and do the work the rest of us won't.

89 comments