Original post:
So Long, and Thanks for All the Fish
Hi everyone,
Well, it has been a wild ride. I joined reddit over a decade ago, when it was still much smaller and different from today. I quickly stumbled upon r/theoryofreddit and was fascinated by all the discussion and theories about how communities work. So when after a while mod applications opened up I applied, which was my first experience modding on reddit. My experiences there also prompted me to start experimenting with ways to make moderation easier through various user scripts and CSS hacks. This eventually resulted in a very early version of toolbox, although some earlier experiments never made it to the general public.
In the decade that followed I was involved in various communities and Toolbox developed into a project that used by over 20.000 (twenty thousand) mods all over reddit. But over the past few years reddit has been moving slowly in a direction that I believe is not good for the health of many communities. So even before this whole API debacle properly started I was already burned out and tired with reddit.
What I said in this post holds true even more today. I am just tired with the platform's now accelerated decline, see also this comment.
So, over the past two weeks I have decided that I am not going to use reddit anymore.
As a mod, I already did quit my last actual subreddit last year (r/history). Yesterday I cleaned up a few of the smaller subreddits I was still involved as well. As a user I went through all my subscriptions and unsubscribed from all of them with the exception of r/modnews and r/modcoord. The last two because I'll stick around a bit for the meta stuff, certainly to see how things end up. But I think I have invested more than enough time in this platform, probably more than has been healthy at times.
I want to use this post to thank everyone who has been involved with me in a mod team, involved with toolbox and all users of toolbox. "Wait, why is this posted on r/creesch and not r/toolbox?"
Fair question, with a simple answer. This is me saying my goodbyes for now, not strictly a toolbox announcement. While a lot of people see me and toolbox as one and the same thing, many different people contributed over the years and the project itself is not going away. I am also not going nuclear by disabling it as that would make me no better than certain admin actions in the past couple of weeks. As I said here two weeks ago. I will speak my mind, but toolbox itself has since it's inception be there for all mods to help them out. I am not going to abuse that trust we build over the years by forcing my opinion. "Why not quit reddit entirely, delete your account, be done with it?"
I thought about it. But I am not really the nuclear type. And to be completely honest, over a decade of work and effort is difficult to entirely let go. I really do dislike the direction reddit has chosen to go but I'd like to be able to check in to see if there is a shift in course. And yes, while reddit profits from the information on reddit it also is information regular people might benefit from. If I deleted my account, including scrubbing all comments my voice, over what has happened in the past two weeks (years, honestly) will also no longer be there.