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A few larger moderators I know personally are saying they aren’t enjoying the new Reddit experience and at least one says they plan to leave within a few months.
What really isn’t being talked about is the fractured trust. None of them feel they are maintaining their own community anymore. They feel like they are maintaining a subreddit for Reddit’s profit ambitions. That’s a huge distinction.
The other side is just being forced to moderate via the website or their trash app. They hate the experience now. If you were a mobile-only moderator, you hate it now, almost guaranteed.
Then the bot detection network and everything else shutting down is making the free service they provide feel more and more like a job vs “for the good feeling of building a community.”
Reddit won’t die overnight but it will continue to decay with users slowly making their exit to other platforms.
I think the most outstanding issue is how Reddit is trying to turn mods into employees that work for free. Nobody does that job to benefit Reddit, they do it to build and support a community. You take that away and there’s no incentive. Without mods you have no community.
They don’t care, they think a trash community without proper moderation will still generate enough traffic for them and it’s probably going to be true.
Glad to see this being acknowledged/making the rounds. I highlighted some of this in my own mod resignation post (not to pat myself too hard on the back here), as have other members of the mod team I was a part of. The changes are bad, but the complete disregard for (and dismissal of) this relationship mods and Reddit crafted for over 15 years just came crumbling down. No matter what the future holds for the site, that relationship is dead. And many of us don’t want to mod under the new circumstances.
Just wanted to say, I really enjoyed Reddit prior to the API-apocalypse. I appreciated all of you guys and gals over there keeping things structured and orderly. I came from Slashdot to Digg to Reddit and now Lemmy. Really enjoying it here but there’s always that thought in the back of my mind of hoping it doesn’t grow to the scope of Reddit.
Right now, we seem to have a lot of technical folks who contribute. Far less fighting and drama. It’s been nice. lol
Someone on another thread linked in this comment about the “trust thermocline”. That thread is in regard to Twitter, but it’s also very relevant to what’s going on with reddit.
This is a great point, and a great link. Reddit doesn’t understand the extent to which “user goodwill” in general and “moderator goodwill” in particular were crucial to its business model. Without them, it’s not going to make any difference what they do, profits will not, as Huffman put it, “arrive.”
(Relatedly, what a revealing way to put it. Huffman obviously thought he was sitting on a heap of static assets he could tap into for quick profits instead of a dynamic system he could have cultivated for a rich harvest. Too late now for either, I expect, though he may catch the dregs if he’s lucky).
The thing that bothered me about that statement was the way he phrased it, that “[reddit will] continue to be profit-driven until profits arrive” - as if the arrival of profits is inevitable and no one needs to do anything to ensure their safe journey.
So he thought he could just kinda coast along, spending massive amounts of resources on various combinations of reddit community points and reddit NFTs and personalizable snoovatars and RPAN and glitchy video players and cryptocurrency and April Fool’s programs and a shitty app and suddenly deciding to have reddit natively host images and videos that massively increase both storage and transfer requirements and footing the bill for multiple very rich AI companies to suck up all of reddit’s data, and no one would notice or care, because the arrival of profits is inevitable, they’re just a little late …
That’s possible, but I feel like if they did understand, they would use that understanding to suck a little less hard. It’s not just the bad policies, or the bad implementation, or even the bad timing, it’s that they’re not even taking PR seriously as part of the process. It would not be difficult or even particularly expensive for them to hire one (1) person who is good at PR, and take their advice. They don’t seem to have bothered, which really suggests they don’t know it’s important.
Yes, they might think investors won’t understand why users are upset, and they might be right. But most people seriously considering putting money into a social media platform are at least vaguely aware of the fact that it’s not going to make money if the users leave, and they will notice bad PR. The API protests have shown up repeatedly in at least three publications that serious investors follow. If anyone at Reddit was really paying attention to the interpersonal parts of the scenario, it would have occurred to them that some problems are easier to avoid than they are to hide to investors, and interpersonal conflict is one of them.
(Edited to add: “how and when to avoid pissing people off” is taught in business school, I think. Point being, it’s possible Huffman thinks investors are too stupid to evaluate his decisions, but I think investors are, on average, likely to understand that Reddit needs some way to hold users other than just “we have lots of content,” since people who have careers in business and finance deal with human factors a lot).
Upvotes being financially incentivized with real money
Readily-accessible large language models
Can lead to anything other than Reddit becoming increasingly flooded with botted content. Like you mentioned, it won’t happen overnight, but it does seem inevitable.
The decay is already very noticable in some subs. The one I frequented most for example…wow, what a shitshow that turned into. It was once a place where moderators nuked bot accounts and karma farmers within an hour or so, content was interesting / helpful with only a random meme here and there, guides that were actually based on proper sources instead of “dude trust me”, art that was properly credited … of course there were also occasionally some low-grade posts, but those were seldom upvoted. Last time I checked you couldn’t find a single actually worthwile thing buried under the sheer amount of shitposts, Karma Farming reposts, obvious bot accounts and T-shirt scammers, almost all of them upvoted by the thousands. I couldn’t stand to look at it for more than a minute and haven’t opened reddit ever since.
NGL, it does hurt a bit to see that sub I once loved turn into a dumpster fire, but on the flip side I’m glad that I jumped ship before it happened. I honestly like it better here.
I’m modding nearly 50 subs right now, down from about 80 as I slowly unwind my presence there. The site isn’t the same since so many subs are private still or restricted.
Well not as many as you might think. I always recruited a lot of other mods to share the load because burn out is a huge problem. I’m still modding r/news but I’m winding down my Reddit presence. I also used a ton of automated tools like browser extensions and bots that I wrote myself to make the work easier.
Yeah, I just deleted my last accounts over there today. They’ve been wiped for a while now and kept checking to make sure restored subreddits content were removed. Decided today that I didn’t care anymore and deleted.
Apparently I had a few thousand in Reddit gold there. Guess that doesn’t matter now either.
Now I have 5 fediverse accounts. 2 serving as backups.
I occasionally view Reddit using content blockers and annoyance removers so I don’t see all the popup stuff to sign in with Google, or to use the app, etc. I’m now useless traffic on their site that can’t be monetized.
That’s not really my place to say something like that. When you spend literal YEARS building something on someone else’s platform, it takes a bit of time to let go.
I personally had a hard time adjusting to the idea of losing Apollo, an app I spent thousands of hours using. I can’t imagine having to let go of a massive community you’ve worked so hard to build.
I think they are trying to come up with an exit strategy to another platform. They like Lemmy World but don’t like the fractured idea of each instance having the same name for a community.
In reality, it’s just an excuse to put off the inevitable. They really don’t want to rebuild, so it’s all or nothing and a tough thing to let go.
I think they are trying to come up with an exit strategy to another platform.
The more they put this off and delay and delay the less likely they are to gain any traction of users to move, if anything I think it’s just an excuse to not move as you said later.
In reality, it’s just an excuse to put off the inevitable. They really don’t want to rebuild, so it’s all or nothing and a tough thing to let go.
Truth is they don’t want to leave reddit and most moderators had their bluff called about the situation. I’m not saying they’re power hungry or spez was right but they don’t want to leave because it’s too difficult for them to start over and build communities or they don’t have the skills to do it. Some might dislike the lack of prestige as well who knows. However, they’re sticking around clearly because they don’t want to leave and deep down inside they have hope that something will change and they will go back to the old normal, some will come to accept the new normal and change their minds.
I’ve personally been down this route before where I invested thousands of man hours into communities but sometimes you just need to know it’s time to move on close up shop and do something else, I just don’t think most of the people who moderate on Reddit have the stomach for it.
I mean that may or may not be the case, I can’t speak for all of them but it’s definitely a challenge to build a new community from scratch and it’s a lot of work.
It’s not for everyone and 99% of people who say they can or could do it are full of shit.
They like Lemmy World but don’t like the fractured idea of each instance having the same name for a community.
I like that idea. On reddit, if someone made the subreddit r/nonbinary and they were a transphobe, there was nothing you could do except create r/truenonbinary or r/nonbinarytransaccepting or whatever else. r/nonbinary belonged to a bigot forever. On the fediverse, you have to compete with platforms that have the same name as you, but might be more tolerant or have a better user experience. You don’t have ownership over a name which you can leverage against others
That’s a really great point. I’m hoping that in the future there will be something like community federation on top of server federation, so that friendly communities that are very similar (not just in name) can be joined together to share content and users and blacklist unfriendly communities. Even if this was something that was done on the user/app side, rather than a real Lemmy feature it would make it easier to follow multiple similar communities, and it would be less of an issue to have the same community existing on multiple servers.
They like Lemmy World but don’t like the fractured idea of each instance having the same name for a community.
Ahh, steer your mod friends away from lemmy.world. They’re having problems right now because of their high visibility (biggest instance). They’re having issues like server overload, DDOS attacks, bot attacks. Recommend an instance that’s not heavily loaded and regionally close.
People that don’t understand the Fediverse architecture can have trouble with it. Explain it’s not the instance that matters other than how well it performs locally. The content is all there for everyone to interact with regardless of the instance.
Also explain that communities may share the same prefix name but people commonly make the mistake of thinking they are two communities with the same name. They are not. The full name for a community includes the instance that hosts it. For example !fediverse@lemmy.ml is not the same community as !fediverse@lemmy.world even though they share the same prefix name.
I will not be taking your advice. You should have seen Reddit when they had to deal with a huge influx of Digg users at the beginning. It was just as bad.
I think they have done a really good job dealing with all of this. It’s growing pains. They need time to get things nailed down.
In the meantime, there’s benefits of creating your communities on the largest instance. That’s why I created mine here on Lemmy World.
There was a social contract, an informal agreement, between moderators and Reddit - “We’ll moderate for you on this site, for free, as long as you provide a good enough place for the community to exist and enough support to help us out”.
This has been mostly worth it for a long time; even during shittier times, mods could be confident that their own space was under their stewardship and so could be protected from the worst that would come.
But now Reddit is being openly hostile toward its moderators, when in the past the most that has ever been expressed is indifference or ignorance. The website is getting worse, and so is the vibe - and so the deal is no longer worth it, so to speak.
That’s my thoughts on it, as a moderator there for 6 years who left a few weeks ago.
It did take me 6 weeks and I’m not a moderator on Reddit. I told everyone there that I’d be leaving after Apollo shut down and last Saturday, I finally nuked the rest of my accounts on Reddit.
So a few months is quite possible to take action on. I think they are winding down operations slowly.
A few larger moderators I know personally are saying they aren’t enjoying the new Reddit experience and at least one says they plan to leave within a few months.
What really isn’t being talked about is the fractured trust. None of them feel they are maintaining their own community anymore. They feel like they are maintaining a subreddit for Reddit’s profit ambitions. That’s a huge distinction.
The other side is just being forced to moderate via the website or their trash app. They hate the experience now. If you were a mobile-only moderator, you hate it now, almost guaranteed.
Then the bot detection network and everything else shutting down is making the free service they provide feel more and more like a job vs “for the good feeling of building a community.”
Reddit won’t die overnight but it will continue to decay with users slowly making their exit to other platforms.
I think the most outstanding issue is how Reddit is trying to turn mods into employees that work for free. Nobody does that job to benefit Reddit, they do it to build and support a community. You take that away and there’s no incentive. Without mods you have no community.
They don’t care, they think a trash community without proper moderation will still generate enough traffic for them and it’s probably going to be true.
Glad to see this being acknowledged/making the rounds. I highlighted some of this in my own mod resignation post (not to pat myself too hard on the back here), as have other members of the mod team I was a part of. The changes are bad, but the complete disregard for (and dismissal of) this relationship mods and Reddit crafted for over 15 years just came crumbling down. No matter what the future holds for the site, that relationship is dead. And many of us don’t want to mod under the new circumstances.
Just wanted to say, I really enjoyed Reddit prior to the API-apocalypse. I appreciated all of you guys and gals over there keeping things structured and orderly. I came from Slashdot to Digg to Reddit and now Lemmy. Really enjoying it here but there’s always that thought in the back of my mind of hoping it doesn’t grow to the scope of Reddit.
Right now, we seem to have a lot of technical folks who contribute. Far less fighting and drama. It’s been nice. lol
Appreciate that. It’s a bummer but on to greener pastures!
Hey hello. I made my first “resignation” post last night. I haven’t had time to properly untangle everything yet but im here now.
Have I seen you around modcoord server? Your profile pic is familiar haha
Uh yeah you could say that.
Oddly cryptic but ok lol
Sorry about that. Yes I’m a mod of the sub and discord.
Ahh that’d make sense haha. I’m terrible with usernames.
Someone on another thread linked in this comment about the “trust thermocline”. That thread is in regard to Twitter, but it’s also very relevant to what’s going on with reddit.
Edit: *headdesk* forgot to provide the link.
This is a great point, and a great link. Reddit doesn’t understand the extent to which “user goodwill” in general and “moderator goodwill” in particular were crucial to its business model. Without them, it’s not going to make any difference what they do, profits will not, as Huffman put it, “arrive.”
(Relatedly, what a revealing way to put it. Huffman obviously thought he was sitting on a heap of static assets he could tap into for quick profits instead of a dynamic system he could have cultivated for a rich harvest. Too late now for either, I expect, though he may catch the dregs if he’s lucky).
The thing that bothered me about that statement was the way he phrased it, that “[reddit will] continue to be profit-driven until profits arrive” - as if the arrival of profits is inevitable and no one needs to do anything to ensure their safe journey.
So he thought he could just kinda coast along, spending massive amounts of resources on various combinations of reddit community points and reddit NFTs and personalizable snoovatars and RPAN and glitchy video players and cryptocurrency and April Fool’s programs and a shitty app and suddenly deciding to have reddit natively host images and videos that massively increase both storage and transfer requirements and footing the bill for multiple very rich AI companies to suck up all of reddit’s data, and no one would notice or care, because the arrival of profits is inevitable, they’re just a little late …
That’s a good point. There’s a big scoop of entitlement there. Douchebags all the way down.
I suspect that they do understand it, but are hoping to scam investors who do not.
That’s possible, but I feel like if they did understand, they would use that understanding to suck a little less hard. It’s not just the bad policies, or the bad implementation, or even the bad timing, it’s that they’re not even taking PR seriously as part of the process. It would not be difficult or even particularly expensive for them to hire one (1) person who is good at PR, and take their advice. They don’t seem to have bothered, which really suggests they don’t know it’s important.
Yes, they might think investors won’t understand why users are upset, and they might be right. But most people seriously considering putting money into a social media platform are at least vaguely aware of the fact that it’s not going to make money if the users leave, and they will notice bad PR. The API protests have shown up repeatedly in at least three publications that serious investors follow. If anyone at Reddit was really paying attention to the interpersonal parts of the scenario, it would have occurred to them that some problems are easier to avoid than they are to hide to investors, and interpersonal conflict is one of them.
(Edited to add: “how and when to avoid pissing people off” is taught in business school, I think. Point being, it’s possible Huffman thinks investors are too stupid to evaluate his decisions, but I think investors are, on average, likely to understand that Reddit needs some way to hold users other than just “we have lots of content,” since people who have careers in business and finance deal with human factors a lot).
I can’t see how the combination of:
Can lead to anything other than Reddit becoming increasingly flooded with botted content. Like you mentioned, it won’t happen overnight, but it does seem inevitable.
The decay is already very noticable in some subs. The one I frequented most for example…wow, what a shitshow that turned into. It was once a place where moderators nuked bot accounts and karma farmers within an hour or so, content was interesting / helpful with only a random meme here and there, guides that were actually based on proper sources instead of “dude trust me”, art that was properly credited … of course there were also occasionally some low-grade posts, but those were seldom upvoted. Last time I checked you couldn’t find a single actually worthwile thing buried under the sheer amount of shitposts, Karma Farming reposts, obvious bot accounts and T-shirt scammers, almost all of them upvoted by the thousands. I couldn’t stand to look at it for more than a minute and haven’t opened reddit ever since.
NGL, it does hurt a bit to see that sub I once loved turn into a dumpster fire, but on the flip side I’m glad that I jumped ship before it happened. I honestly like it better here.
I’m modding nearly 50 subs right now, down from about 80 as I slowly unwind my presence there. The site isn’t the same since so many subs are private still or restricted.
Damn! How many hours did you volunteer per week when you moderated 80?
Well not as many as you might think. I always recruited a lot of other mods to share the load because burn out is a huge problem. I’m still modding r/news but I’m winding down my Reddit presence. I also used a ton of automated tools like browser extensions and bots that I wrote myself to make the work easier.
Yeah, I just deleted my last accounts over there today. They’ve been wiped for a while now and kept checking to make sure restored subreddits content were removed. Decided today that I didn’t care anymore and deleted.
Apparently I had a few thousand in Reddit gold there. Guess that doesn’t matter now either.
Now I have 5 fediverse accounts. 2 serving as backups.
I occasionally view Reddit using content blockers and annoyance removers so I don’t see all the popup stuff to sign in with Google, or to use the app, etc. I’m now useless traffic on their site that can’t be monetized.
I’m not going to use their app for any reason. I use Narwhal and I used to really like it.
For current reddit’s owner, it only needs to last until the IPO. They better hurry before it deteriorates into nothing but a site of bots.
Why dont you tell that mod to just leave now? I dont see a reason to continueing to work for free on something hes going to leave
That’s not really my place to say something like that. When you spend literal YEARS building something on someone else’s platform, it takes a bit of time to let go.
I personally had a hard time adjusting to the idea of losing Apollo, an app I spent thousands of hours using. I can’t imagine having to let go of a massive community you’ve worked so hard to build.
I think they are trying to come up with an exit strategy to another platform. They like Lemmy World but don’t like the fractured idea of each instance having the same name for a community.
In reality, it’s just an excuse to put off the inevitable. They really don’t want to rebuild, so it’s all or nothing and a tough thing to let go.
Truth is they don’t want to leave reddit and most moderators had their bluff called about the situation. I’m not saying they’re power hungry or spez was right but they don’t want to leave because it’s too difficult for them to start over and build communities or they don’t have the skills to do it. Some might dislike the lack of prestige as well who knows. However, they’re sticking around clearly because they don’t want to leave and deep down inside they have hope that something will change and they will go back to the old normal, some will come to accept the new normal and change their minds.
I’ve personally been down this route before where I invested thousands of man hours into communities but sometimes you just need to know it’s time to move on close up shop and do something else, I just don’t think most of the people who moderate on Reddit have the stomach for it.
Most mods on Reddit are not community builders. They’re queue slaves.
I mean that may or may not be the case, I can’t speak for all of them but it’s definitely a challenge to build a new community from scratch and it’s a lot of work.
It’s not for everyone and 99% of people who say they can or could do it are full of shit.
I like that idea. On reddit, if someone made the subreddit r/nonbinary and they were a transphobe, there was nothing you could do except create r/truenonbinary or r/nonbinarytransaccepting or whatever else. r/nonbinary belonged to a bigot forever. On the fediverse, you have to compete with platforms that have the same name as you, but might be more tolerant or have a better user experience. You don’t have ownership over a name which you can leverage against others
That’s a really great point. I’m hoping that in the future there will be something like community federation on top of server federation, so that friendly communities that are very similar (not just in name) can be joined together to share content and users and blacklist unfriendly communities. Even if this was something that was done on the user/app side, rather than a real Lemmy feature it would make it easier to follow multiple similar communities, and it would be less of an issue to have the same community existing on multiple servers.
Ahh, steer your mod friends away from lemmy.world. They’re having problems right now because of their high visibility (biggest instance). They’re having issues like server overload, DDOS attacks, bot attacks. Recommend an instance that’s not heavily loaded and regionally close.
People that don’t understand the Fediverse architecture can have trouble with it. Explain it’s not the instance that matters other than how well it performs locally. The content is all there for everyone to interact with regardless of the instance.
Also explain that communities may share the same prefix name but people commonly make the mistake of thinking they are two communities with the same name. They are not. The full name for a community includes the instance that hosts it. For example !fediverse@lemmy.ml is not the same community as !fediverse@lemmy.world even though they share the same prefix name.
I will not be taking your advice. You should have seen Reddit when they had to deal with a huge influx of Digg users at the beginning. It was just as bad.
I think they have done a really good job dealing with all of this. It’s growing pains. They need time to get things nailed down.
In the meantime, there’s benefits of creating your communities on the largest instance. That’s why I created mine here on Lemmy World.
Always have been 👩🏽🚀🔫👩🏽🚀
Always have been 👩🏽🚀🔫👩🏽🚀
This is true, but think of it like this:
There was a social contract, an informal agreement, between moderators and Reddit - “We’ll moderate for you on this site, for free, as long as you provide a good enough place for the community to exist and enough support to help us out”.
This has been mostly worth it for a long time; even during shittier times, mods could be confident that their own space was under their stewardship and so could be protected from the worst that would come.
But now Reddit is being openly hostile toward its moderators, when in the past the most that has ever been expressed is indifference or ignorance. The website is getting worse, and so is the vibe - and so the deal is no longer worth it, so to speak.
That’s my thoughts on it, as a moderator there for 6 years who left a few weeks ago.
lol, in a few months? they are not leaving
It did take me 6 weeks and I’m not a moderator on Reddit. I told everyone there that I’d be leaving after Apollo shut down and last Saturday, I finally nuked the rest of my accounts on Reddit.
So a few months is quite possible to take action on. I think they are winding down operations slowly.