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

I’ve been the main moderator of the same community since 2016. This evening, i approved my last comment.

I’m leaving for two reasons:

  1. Reddit went public a week ago. 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. (this is not a Faulkner quote)
  2. April 1st is coming and i’m scared they might do another r/place. Doing in r/place 2022 and 2023 has left me dejected and bitter and i don’t want to feel obligated to participate again.

Leaving felt like ripping myself off of something warm i’ve been comfortably glued to for a long time. Still recommend it for anyone still giving Reddit shareholders free labor

EDIT: there are too many comments to respond to, but i’ve appreciated all of them! Thank you

confluence,

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

RedditWanderer,

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.

Cethin,

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.

RedditWanderer,

You call it “a longer path”, I call it having your cake and eating it, and whining about it

wintermute_oregon,

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.

roguetrick,

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?

Splatterphace,

Why do people like r/place, and why do others hate it? I never understood the phenomena.

Rhaedas,

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).

thawed_caveman,

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.

janNatan,

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.

iAmTheTot,
iAmTheTot avatar

So accurate.

Splatterphace,

How do you gear/level up? What are the currencies?

Gullible,

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.

ech, (edited )

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.

SineSwiper,
@SineSwiper@discuss.tchncs.de avatar

It’s like that Woodstock concert in the 2000s. You can’t just recapture magic like that by repetition.

Spontaneity is spontaneous.

Cethin,

My understanding is it’s mostly bots. Not bot accounts so much, but people running scripts using their main accounts. I’m not totally sure on this, but I’m pretty confident I read about scripts communities used for their drawings.

EdibleFriend,
@EdibleFriend@lemmy.world avatar

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

thawed_caveman,

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.

EdibleFriend,
@EdibleFriend@lemmy.world avatar

Gah. Ok yeah that sounds like ass.

mysoulishome,
@mysoulishome@lemmy.world avatar

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.

Reverendender,

I’m tired of being monetized. They have more than enough money.

SoylentBlake,

When you have that much money the only thing left to buy is power.

That’s why they don’t stop. If you’re too exhausted just trying to pay for survival, but you can still survive, you are most likely just going to smoke a bowl, or drink a beer, or eat Taco Bell or any combination within and then go to sleep and do it all again.

You’re entirely predictable, your voice is contained, your information feed is curated, you’ve been outmaneuvered before you knew moves were being made.

Stop spending money. It’s literally the only way to take control back sans revolution and guillotines. Grow what foods you can, barter with those that can grow more. It might be impossible to fully divest - I haven’t been able to but I’m super close, but I think all of us can think of ways we can lessen our need for the dollar. It won’t be easy but you want to know a secret? Life isn’t supposed to be easy. It’s probably best to extricate that notion from your goals…I’m 43. Every year I’ve been alive the working class (99% of us) has seen their living conditions decline and our money be able to purchase less and less. That, is the only trend, the only metric by which I can look out at society with and 100% know will continue. 2020 was the easiest year of this decade.

If we all stop believing in the value of the dollar, guess what? Then it’s worthless and that lazy entitled delusional class of sycophants, socio and psychopaths that hoard all the wealth will regress to the mean.

I think the fountain of youth is made of tears from depossessed aristocracy. That’s my theory anyways, I’m looking forward to testing it.

ArbitraryMary,
@ArbitraryMary@lemmy.world avatar

I miss Apollo and Reddit too.

RecursiveParadox,
@RecursiveParadox@lemmy.world avatar

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.

mysoulishome,
@mysoulishome@lemmy.world avatar

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.

porksoda,

Thank you for putting into words some of the emotions I’ve felt over the last 9 months.

abbadon420,

If there’s good shit on any of those sites, I’ll surely read about it here. If not, it’s not worth it.

venusaur,
@venusaur@lemmy.world avatar

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

dumples,
dumples avatar

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

Rentlar,

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.

Buffalox,

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.

some_guy,

Congrats!

CaptDust, (edited )

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.

Revan343,

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

Kribensis,

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.

Blaze,
@Blaze@dormi.zone avatar

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

terry_tibbs,

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.

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