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.

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.

That must've been tough to do. You have the respect of at least one internet stranger 🫡

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

. 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

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 deleted my account and left the spez wasteland months ago. You should consider it too.

I’m a capitalist and I would never do free work for a public company. Now I don’t mind a hobby but a public company isn’t a hobby.

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.

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.

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.

Fuck em, welcome to the fediverse!

@thawed_caveman 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.

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.

Possible Spin: you get paid the same and have more free time?

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.

Had a 12 year old account. Just got permad. Honestly feels like a weight off my shoulders. That place was making me so toxic.

How was place a bitch for mods? I honestly never heard anybody talking about it and im genuinely curious

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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.

Lmao. Oh no! Leopards ate your face? Nobody could have seen this coming!! Anyways...

This has always been the goal of reddit and we've known this since the exodus of 3rd party apps. You're basically a traitor who kept going and helped Reddit IPO, and youre the only one who is surprised.