After eight years, i resigned as a moderator of my community

I’m sorry. The corporate assholes don’t deserve to pad their fat wallets based on your free labor, but it’s still absolutely the loss of something you love when you step away and it hurts. I’m still grieving losing Apollo and all of the goofy, weird ass little subs and brilliant human beings who made me laugh and cry every day on Reddit. It’s not been replaced in my life. It took millions of us almost 20 years to make that stupid website something incredible…I can’t deny that it was incredible at points.
It’s gone, it’s just a website now and an app with ads every 3rd pixel just like the rest. There is still some good content and good people, just as there are on TikTok, Bookface, X and insta. The decent shit that is there, on all of the platforms, is overwhelmed by their horrible algorithm trying to sell you shit and increase engagement to monetize your every click.
- I'm tired of being monetized. They have more than enough money.
- I miss Apollo and Reddit too.
- Second time for me. I migrated about ten years ago from Metafilter, which I eventually rage quit. That really fucking hurt, and Reddit filed that niche in my life (but not the meeting IRL or helping IRL part).
  Now I've had to go through the same thing with Reddit. I'm into Lemmy, Mastodon, and Bluesky, but it's not the same. I hope it's just not the same, yet.
  
  I don’t know that anything will be the same because it took so long for everyone to gather there and make 100,000 thriving communities about every random little thing from rare diseases to Pokémon made from toilet paper tubes, sexy John Oliver, kids getting hit on the head. If got interested in some random TV show, you could find a sub where there would be 100 interesting conversations about it. That just doesn’t exist outside of Reddit. Where even could it? Fucking Quora? Facebook groups?
  I don’t know what anyone could have done to preserve it though. If it’s POSSIBLE to slap a million ads on it and make a billion dollars, but definitely ruin it forever…it’s inevitable. Nothing can stop that.
- If there's good shit on any of those sites, I'll surely read about it here. If not, it's not worth it.

If you have it in you, please recreate your previous subreddit here in the fediverse. There's less tools, but also far less users, and plenty of room to make tools.
A ton of niche communities didn't make it over here during the "exodus". Any little bit helps.
- Shameless plug: /c/Sekiro, /c/Bloodborne
  Doing my part :)
  
  !sekiro@lemmy.zip
  !bloodborne@lemmy.zip
  Gotta actually link things if you want people to find them, my friend! 😉
- Yes please

That must've been tough to do. You have the respect of at least one internet stranger 🫡
- Lemmings did the tough thing months (years?) ago when thousands of third party apps and community development went to waste.
  He took the easy way out and helped spez IPO.
  
  Some of us take a longer path than others. All are valid. Sure, maybe some have better outcomes, but no one should be criticized for taking a step on the right direction, however late it may be. You don't know what they've been through or what it meant to them. If you're only going to be negative then you probably just shouldn't comment.

Before June 2023, I was a mod on several Reddit communities for about 13 years and outside of Reddit since the turn of the century. I just kinda stepped back once the Reddit BS happened.
10 months later, my happiness and over all quality of life has improved. Not only am I no longer stressed (bye bye moderation based nightmares!), but I have way more time to dedicate to my passions and goals.
I thought that dedication to holding together a few niche communities and battling the "bad guys" defined me and gave me a sort of immortality.
I was VERY wrong.
Our great grand kids won't be trolling reddit archives, telling everyone how "cool" grandpa was.
The greatest thing I ever did to improve my QOL was step away from moderating and leading communities on the internet as a whole. Doubly so if they involve political talk.

I participated and organized the Lemmy banner on the last r/place and it went pretty well. If they ever decide to do another r/place, I don't know if I'll do it. If people haven't left already then they might be stuck there but idk.
I was pretty happy with doing lots of alliances last time with the Fuck Spez Coalition, Germany, and a few others. I just don't want to visit that awful site, it already hurt me a lot last time participating it at all hours of the day and fueling traffic so I probably won't do it again.
Edit: I believe this was the final result
https://lemm.ee/post/2028359
https://lemm.ee/post/2033816
- oh hey, I was there too! Worked at the save3rdpartyapps logo, was really nice seeing everyone collaborate but it got really stressful at points. People were greedy for canvas space. Was a bit disappointing that we could only do so much, the banner was really small after all. But at least the protest didn't go unnoticed with the giant "FUCK SPEZ" across the whole canvas.
  
  Well, our banner is at the center of the canvas so for our small group size I think we did fairly well and I'm pretty sure we got a few people to visit the link
- I never knew there was a fediverse design, that's neat
  
  I tried to get the word out but received lots of downvotes because people didn't want to give Reddit the traffic. A couple of my posts got taken out.

. I didn’t volunteer to work for a publicly traded company, i volunteered to work for a community. As long as i live under capitalism i accept that my labor will generate value for shareholders, but damned if i ever do it for free.
I sincerely hope you said this in multiple places on Reddit
There will be a lot of people who don't realise that that's precisely what the IPO means
- Anyone who comments on Reddit is now giving free information to the capitalists. I don’t care if people don’t go anywhere, so long as they abandon Reddit.

I left my community of 12 years with >4M subs a year ago, when they killed the API. Without third party tools, my time modding had more than doubled. I spent almost as much time on reddit as I did on my full time job at some point.
- I wonder if they don’t even want mods. Just AI/algorithms and ads. What is 100 well moderated, mindful discussions worth compared to a single, well targeted ad?
- Honest question: what did you feel you got out of modding? I feel like it would be a thankless endeavor and would bring absolutely no satisfaction at any point.
  
  It started as a very niche community when I joined, so being a mod actually felt like being a "recognized" member of the community without doing a whole lot. And when the sub started growing, keeping the trolls out was more of a necessary chore to preserve the peace, that I did without really thinking about it.
  Only once I left I started realizing how much time it consumed. I've signed up for a phd program since I left and I still have more free time despite the research and a full time job. That's how much time it consumed in the end.

I deleted my account and left the spez wasteland months ago. You should consider it too.
- I left my communities as a moderator last summer already, but kept my account because of a few communities I wanted to keep interacting with. However, after this IPO thing I decided to completely cut it and used a tool to mass delete my comments before deleting my account altogether. Felt relieving!
  
  I tried that with my account and got it permabanned. Locked my 600k karma with a fake ass “you violated Reddit prime directive”.

- It's possible to craft a public company that has bylaws strict enough to make it like a good nonprofit, but why would you do that and still pay taxes?

Yo, I was mired in modding for several years. It felt good to maintain that space, and I helped create the best community for one of the most popular mobile games. It wasn't the general community, it was the analysis/strategy focused sub, so we had very tight moderation policies. That made a lot of people mad, both those that wanted to post more general content, and those that wanted to rage about the game/developer. The work is constant and nearly thankless, not to mention unpaid.
Your point of not doing volunteer work for a publicly traded company is an excellent one. I definitely felt pride in doing that kind of community service for a public space. Now that Reddit is profit-driven and answering to shareholders, it's asinine to do that work for free.

Why do people like r/place, and why do others hate it? I never understood the phenomena.
- It's like an MMO for pixel art. The best part of MMOs is all the other players. The worst part of MMOs is... all the other players.
  
  So accurate.
  
  How do you gear/level up? What are the currencies?
- The first time /r/place was offered was markedly different from the others. The first was a free-for-all hellfest for a long while where organization wasn’t even secondary or tertiary to the experience. Then came the age of “reason” and brands and flags sprouted up, obliterating any semblance of originality with an uninteresting mob of paint rollers. The second go around, there was nothing new, everything was pre-planned and strategically plotted, and genitals were a big no-no. To answer your question, novelty and the spontaneous lack thereof. Freedom and the spontaneous lack thereof.
  
  Then came the age of “reason” and brands and flags sprouted up
  Ugh. The domination of the space by advertisements and just straight-up nationalism is so lame and nauseating. I don't know if it's mainly bots or just peoples' general lack of creativity, but it sucks.
- The first r/place was one of those unique events in history. The later ones didn't work because people now knew what it was, techniques to use, and of course bots. I think the most enjoyable was how it not only sparked comradery within various subreddits to support their design and keep it alive, it also brought together some "opponents" to do the same (thinking my experience with the Star Citizen/Elite Dangerous agreement to help each other).
  
  Also streamers were a lot more influential on place 22 and 23 than they were in 17. Streamers are external to the website, don't particularly have a dog in the race other than themselves, are encouraged to create spectacle, and the kind of personality that makes you a big streamer is not conducive to being a good neighbor in a competitive pixel art game. So while i hesitate to say that there was anything about Reddit in particular that made Place 2017 a good event, i do think the presence of streamers made 22 and 23 much worse.

Congratulations! You’re doing the right thing. Reddit is trash now.

Bring it here. We need good moderators. Welcome back to the original corporate free Internet. It's great

I did the same thing last July, left to switch full-time to Lemmy (I registered my first Lemmy account @mp3@lemmy.ml a long time ago EDIT: jeez 5 years ago already?!) and somewhat abandoned my account.
I was then approached by the lemmy.ca admins, asking if I would be interested to help administer the website, which I gladly accepted. I do not regret one minute giving my time to the fediverse.
I went back to Reddit last month to remove my account from being a moderator on all the communities I was part of. I didn't even tell anyone, I just left. Reddit is way past its prime.
- I still remember your name from the early days, it's great that you stuck around! How much Lemmy changed in these few years...
  
  I could recognize that name anywhere, hello sir :)

r/place has had the soul sucked out of it past the first iteration. I'm not even going to bother checking it this year because I can see the future and I know what the canvas will end up being - bots maintaining flags. I'd be nice if they restricted it to accounts that are at least a year old, but at this point all the accounts people were botting with the last two years are qualified under that definition.
Cool idea, consistently horrible implementation.

The only thing I remember about r/place was that they dropped it anytime they did something stupid, like kill the free API, and that they would mod the content which made it a bot spam war fest.
Also the Pakistani flag getting defaced by r/Chodi because insert rent free joke here.
- They did that once actually, when they killed third-party apps they decided to do a surprise r/place hoping it would calm people down. In July. Not even a year after the last one. It came as a horrible surprise

Fuck em, welcome to the fediverse!

@thawedcaveman sorry that happened to you, it sounds difficult. But I think you've made the right decision.
Hope you find a silver lining. For me, moving to the fediverse has been an overwhelmingly positive experience. It's fun being part of something cool that can never be sold out by people like Spez.

Possible Spin: you get paid the same and have more free time?
- Plus it won't look bad on the resume

Shit, man, I know how it feels.
I wasn't any kind of big mod, but it was something I did out of love for a set of related hobbies/interest and the folks that took part in them. I had only really started being a relatively busy mod maybe six months before the shit hit the fan last year. I was having fun, expanding wikis, shooting the bull with everyone. Managed to streamline some automod stuff to filter out bots and trolls. Didn't even mind most of the crap that goes with modding like having to throw a ban or whatever because idgaf, so it was done and over and forgotten once it was necessary.
It was fulfilling in a way I hadn't thought I would have after my back gave out and I couldn't work. I do some volunteer stuff that got started during the height of covid, but that was weekly even then, and had dropped off a lot. So having that "work" to keep my mind busy was nice.
So, yeah man, sorry you had to bow out, it sucks.

Had a 12 year old account. Just got permad. Honestly feels like a weight off my shoulders. That place was making me so toxic.
- May be an unpopular opinion but I always had an issue with the toxicity of Reddit going all the way back to 2014. I don't know what it is about that site but the people act like absolute pieces of shit more often than should be expected.
  
  It's because of the anonymity and lack of consequences. If it were in person they'd actually be confronted about it. Online however you can spout the most horrific shit all day ,every week and nothing could happen.
- Lost a 14 year old account for an anti-Nazi comment. No more free content for them from me.

I’d been on Reddit for 13 years and finally managed to detox by doing two things only.
Uninstalling the app from my phone (along with LinkedIn, which I have to use, but despise). Since the browser experience is terrible, that was half the problem.
Strategically muting subreddits that annoyed me.
Wall of text about why (but I’ll use paragraphs):
In recent years, I started noticing that everything discussion-oriented was either a Dunning-Kruger driven echo chamber or a total circlejerk for the default progressive opinion on that subject. And, anything content-oriented was reposts.
Quick caveat: I’m not saying that every progressive position is bad, only that I enjoy forming my own positions without getting yelled at. Also, I don’t know OP’s sub and I’m sure it was well-moderated. I’d imagine quitting as a mod would be emotionally harder.
Anyway, for a few weeks, whenever some low-info/naive/didactic opinion or recycled content popped up, I muted that sub.
The last to go was my professional sub, since I’m in a small field. But once I realized all I’d done there in 13 years was help people starting out, but never once received help myself (since there are virtually no posters with experience), I was good to go. I can mentor elsewhere and probably help way more.
Once I muted stuff, I had a few content subs left like r/urbanhell or r/catio, or other fun stuff I want to keep. But my feed is suddenly super quiet, so I just open it once a week, like a magazine.
It’s not quite quitting, but that’s for when Huffman (or whoever replaces him) realizes that to move the revenue needle, they need to block adblockers like YouTube, or go fucking nuts with sponsored posts, or sell personal data, or build their own LLM on everyone’s posts, or whatever they’re gonna do.
And it probably won’t be Huffman anyway, since he just dumped half a million shares at $50+ and can therefore buy an island, so he is absolutely out of there 😂
Meanwhile, if I’m Reddit’s Unix admin or whatever and have waited for years to vest my equity, I can’t even sell for another 5.5 months. It ain’t gonna be $50+ then. Brutal.
And that’s how it goes. Never again. I don’t miss it, since sending Lemmy memes to my Signal chats replaces most of the hijinks and sex/the outdoors replaces the dopamine.

How was place a bitch for mods? I honestly never heard anybody talking about it and im genuinely curious
- I felt a duty to not only place pixels but also coordinate efforts. Picking the design, updating the design, spreading information so the people placing pixels know what's going on, advertising, talking to other communities...
  I don't remember them very well but i'm pretty sure i've had 4 hour nights for the entire duration. For place 2023 i spent most of my waking time in Discord calls.
  And all this for a game that can be emotionally devastating. Getting overrun by a streamer feels shockingly similar to having big kids trample your sand castle, it's this little thing that you built together getting destroyed by stronger people and they're mocking you relentlessly.
  
  Gah. Ok yeah that sounds like ass.

Welcome to life!

Before I left I edited all of my comments to say "fuck u/spez". Very relieving to get the fuck out of there. I fucking despise the idea of working to make money for the rich, never will. If they ever create an economy that forces me to work, the only labor I will do is to make sure they never feel comfortable again.
- I know at the end spez made people to hate reddit but idt people should do this. Reddit still has lots of posts asking niche questions (which got answered) that aren't even in stack overflow. Imagine looking up some question, you could find that only in reddit but the answer got edited to "HATE SPEZ, EAT BALLS".
  We might think Reddit is shit but if it's shit let's just leave it as it is.
  
  Good, fuck em. They don't deserve to be the go-to place for troubleshooting.
  
  You're getting downvoted, and I don't 100% agree with you, but I agree with your principal: at least a decade's, maybe 15 years' worth of the best answers to niche questions on the internet are going to die with Reddit, either because people delete/replace their comments or, more likely, Reddit just fucks them up some how in trying to monetize the answers.

r/place wasn't nearly as good as the time 4chan gave us all Nazi my little pony.

Good on you.
I walked away from my sole moderatorship as well, but I think my contribution was considerably less significant than yours... I moderated a tiny all-but-dead niche interest sub where I was also basically the only poster.
That's, like, no difference whatsoever from what I do here. So I just upped sticks and moved to Lemmy, with no noticeable change in my life or workflow.

Glad to hear you stepped away, it is not worth letting them exploit your labor for their personal profits. Reddit changed a lot since 2016 and not for the better. They should be forced to cut checks for community leaders or hire an internal mod team at this point, but too many rubes are willing to mod for free. Of course reddit is more then happy to let them warm the seats and increase their value.

Offering you a bucket of moral support. Congratulations on your latest big step to fully joining the Fediverse! Every little bit of time and energy you can provide is appreciated.

Congrats!

Still recommend it for anyone still giving Reddit shareholders free labor
EDIT: This confused me a lot at first, but now I get it, the "it" is you recommend others to quit too. First I read "it" as "reddit", meaning you still recommend reddit.
Anyways, I hope you find value in moving on, and will be happy with your decision in the long run.

I never understood the point of place and why it made people become so evil.
- Place was loved by people because it was interesting and showed lots of human ingenuity. People were so angry that reddit abused it in an attempt to take attention away from the criticism and protests. Especially because it was assumed to only happen every 5 or so years, and having two close together felt very abusive by reddit.

Oh you meant subreddit, not community. Yeah fuck that shit hole, not worth your time

It's heavy to give up on something after 8 years but power to you for sticking to your guns, your energy will be far better spent elsewhere.

deleting my my account solidarity and just something i keep meaning to get around to

Sorry to hear about your experience, hope you I'll have a better time here

and if you leave and abandoned that sub by delete your account. admin just need to find a new mod on that sub

Someone should put Reddit's stock price graph on r/place.

reddit claims to be the face of the internet. so obviously there are going to be good and bad people...only it seems like there are more bad than good.
you'll also notice,cancel culture is pervasive in social media,to the point it became toxic. any time any facts that doesn't fit the narratives of the idiots,you get downvoted and/or called/branded derogatory names.
an anecdotal observation,i have my fair share of run ins with right wing crazies spouting nonsense on social media such as reddit but honestly, it's mostly the left where i saw true craziness and experienced fascist behaviours.
- it’s mostly the left where i saw true craziness and experienced fascist behaviours
  That really depends which part of the internet you're in, which politics you're more sensitive to, and which point of view you're observing them from. If you're in leftist communities they tend to be a lot nicer on the inside.

This is silly to me. So you're happy working for free at a private company, but not a public one? The fact that them going public was known for a while was fine? The lack of care they showed you as a private company while taking the shitty concrete steps to go public were all fine?
If yu want to take a hard look at your role, when the last revolt during the API changes happened, the revolt failed because mods like you wouldn't stand up. So it's funny to me to see what the "final straw" is for you, because in the grand scheme of things, it seems like nothing.
I certainly don't understand why you would move to another place in the Internet and announce this silly view.
- No need to be an asshole about it, the important thing is that he moved on, the path he took is not relevant.
  
  I didn't think I was being an asshole. The questions I asked were genuine, and I think I was pretty neutral with pointing out how OP shares blame in the situation they are in.
  And, through all that, i summed it up with how silly this whole situation is - especially when you look at how OP is responding in the thread. This comes across as a "look at me, I did something good, tell me how nice I am" post. Given the rest of the situations context, just ugh.
- I can agree with your point, the API changes should have been the breaking point. Keep in mind there's going to be a lot of different final straws for people though, it is inevitable as traditional social media collapses into itself. The best time was yesterday, the next best is now.
  
  I totally get that - but coming to another platform to announce it is just funny to me, and I think the questions I asked at the start were valid and I'm genuinely curious about the answers.

- Why do you feel the need to call this person a traitor? Jeez.
  
  I lost a big part of my habits and communities when Reddit killed 3rd party apps, but I actually left that day. If the mods left their little powertrip aside and actually quit reddit/protested properly, it probably wouldn't have IPO'd. They were just scared to lose their sub and position. It's also what allowed reddit to manage replacing the few problematic mods and keep things going.
  Anybody who kept going (especially for all these months) deserve to stay on reddit and not benefit from the work Lemmings (not me) have been doing. My experience on lemmy is far inferior to reddit, but I'm doing my part and not going back.
- I'm not the one with 'Reddit' in my username.
  
  Yeah, Lemmy is shit, enjoy.
  
  What does that have to do with anything? At least I'm not on reddit, or on lemmy whining about reddit.
  Literally made that name the day I wandered away from Reddit, the day they killed 3rd party apps. And I didn't go back! Youre like gamers who whine but just keep preordering, youre ruining it for the rest of us.