Reddit

You're asking the people who quit reddit why they haven't quit reddit. Maybe ask over there?

As a (soon to be) former reddit mod, reddit moderators are all power hungry. Modding and feeling like they're important is a coping mechanism for many of their lives.

Of course I can't speak for everyone else, but: I've been asked to become a mod for a sub with 2.3 million users, and I have contributed to that site for almost a decade. It took me 3 days to save and then manually delete all of my posts, and I'm still working through the comments a week later. It absolutely HAD to be done, because I'm not going to let a certain someone earn cash with my literal years of unpaid volunteer work any longer, but I would be lying if I said that it was an easy decision.

Why? Because that action punishes the users. A whole lot of what I posted were in-depth game guides, and reddit users now no longer have access to those. I regularily called out scammers, provided sources for artworks, answered dozens of questions daily - I felt responsible for that sub and its users. And if you feel responsible for something, then you can not easily toss it away without feeling a certain degree of guilt, whether that feeling is justified or not.

But just for the record: I do not regret the decision. Yes I feel a bit bad for the community, but it had to be done. I can still understand why others might be more reluctant tho.

(and of course there are also power mods who just don't like losing their status / influence, but that's a different story)

At this point, I think some of 'em are just sticking around to push spez as far as possible. Look at all the shit some of 'em are doing, does it look like they care whether or not they're still mods at the end of it all?

I sabotaged my subreddit and I'm not deleting my account so that I can check on it and try to make sure it stays sabotaged.

Some places, for example AskHistorians have a lot of amazing content to protect. Other communities would suffer greatly if "insensitive" (read Nazi) mods took over.

It's so frustrating. For years they refused to touch moderators of truly cruel and dangerous subs. But let them suffer a little pushback, and suddenly they are more than willing to remove people from positions of power.

Popularity is one hell of a drug -- they can't "just quit" unless their "dopamine fix" starts to become irrelevant. In other words -- make others quit, and the "mods" will follow along.

As long as there is someone that will ignore what the CEO os doing in exchange for being able to be mod, it will not matter how many real mods leave, there will always be someone next in line to be mod.

That said, it probably will make the quality of the subs degrade over time

Eh, I quit.

15 year user of Reddit. I helped mod a very small sub, but didn't do a whole lot mod-wise besides delete a few spam posts now and then when they popped up.

I don't have any current plans to go back and be a part of those communities for the time being, which sucks because there were a few great (obscure) ones that I'm not sure will migrate or be replaced in the short term.

But the thing about Reddit is that it's not a homogenous group of people. Sure, it fosters a lot of group think by amplifying the most popular opinion, but if a large chunk of people with one attitude leave, then loudest voices will be the next most popular opinion. Plus, there's so many casual users now too. Most of my friends were like, "Huh? Something's going on with Reddit?"

The whole thing feels similar to the whole Digg -> Reddit fiasco. Guess we'll see how things shake out though.

My guess. Many of the mods who have been doing it for years have a sense of ownership and personal investment in the role/sub. Modding is a thankless task most of the time, so if they are still doing it, for free, they must be getting some emotional benefit.

It may also be the only aspect of their lives where they can exert any control or agency.

I am the moderator of a small (~1.9k subscribers) subreddit and I haven't made the switch yet. I will eventually, but at the moment I feel like I have not gathered enough information in order to completely migrate my community off-site for a) archival purposes and b) functional parity purposes and I feel like taking the subreddit offline without having a solid migration plan will just result in the community dissolving entirely.

it's a subreddit that's pretty unique,but niche at the same time - it follows the releases of underground/unsigned/indie music acts in a certain Asian country (it's not hard to discern what I'm talking about if you look hard enough) and whilst there are other sites on the internet that do the same thing, I feel like what I've built on Reddit is unique enough in the as a link aggregating format with search functionality.

sure, I could work at manually posting everything that was ever posted to the subreddit to a new lemmy server, but I'm just one guy, and alas, the chronological documentation will be messed up, which I'd like to preserve as best as possible.

so at the moment, I am thinking about moving my subreddit off the site, but I'm waiting for some utility tools to help me do that.

For me, just to fuck with reddit as a whole.

It's a fine line though. Spez is too much of a wimp do the dirty work, so we're dealing with whoever is running the modcodeofconduct account.

That means we can't go too far, not without risking someone that's just trying to get through their day unnecessary stress via abusive language.

It takes a bit of dancing to walk the line between calling them on the shit they copy/paste in, and not going after the flunky that's on duty.

There's still some mods that have given up and keep working for free because they don't realize that reddit as we knew it is dead. They think (and this is from talking to some of them) that the communities will just keep going like they were, and that the community itself is worth bending the knee.

They genuinely can't conceive that the community could exist anywhere else. And they're partly right because there's always going to be the bulk numbers that are too damn lazy to leave. They've signed up there, they're used to things, and fear change.

What the mods that are clinging to the idea of the community don't seem to get is that the real community that provided good conversation, good posts, and were doing more than scrolling and waiting for a chance to drop a one liner they don't realize has already been made five times, have left.

They think that the ones still there, whining about just wanting to scroll and fuck around, were actually part of the community. That thinking is wrong. I've seen it. The ones that are left behind, that are now attacking the mods that opened back fully, were never useful. The guys that mattered are here, or on discord, or have just fucked off entirely. I say guys, but it's meant as a general term, not a gendered one.

So, my ass is going to keep throwing up pictures of pigs and calling them spez until every alt I have is burned. If they haven't banned my mod account by then, I'll burn that fucker up too.

It's pure, stubborn, spiteful resistance just for the sake of saying fuck off to spez and any shitty capitalist drek like him that think they bring value.

I quit, I stayed on for the protests because it felt nice to work together on it, and then when the sub I was moderating decided they didn't want to take part in the protest anymore I deleted all my posts and my account.

The question was already answered.

Many people don't have a life, they get addicted to Reddit (or something similar) and it's importance to them becomes extreme.

Such people managed a protest, but as Spez rightly pointed out - they'll be back.

Basically, I think the way forward is to get SEARCH engines to dig content from the Fediverse - because that is the area where Reddit wins. You don't have to go there, you just do a search - and Reddit comes up all over the place.

Lemmy.world, lemmy.ml, Beehaw etc just don't exist there when you want to get answers to questions that would exist, for example r/Firefox, r/CSSFirefox.

Probably some form of addiction. I mean, if I didn‘t have this convenient substitute, staying away from Reddit would be more of a struggle for me too.

They’re gonna save her, fight the admins and marry Reddit. She don’t wanna be saved.

Realistically, a good portion of them could be influence peddlers, paid by states , advertising agencies or others to shape online discussion.

That makes more sense to me than both idealistic community builders or no-life narcissists, which are the two most common ways I've seen mods characterized.

They don’t want to give up their powertrips

I've modded a few communities I created and a few others. I dropped many of them over the years but two, and will be leaving these soon. The reason was admin abuse and user toxicity.

Sunk Cost Fallacy - A lot of mods just can't bear to give up all the time and effort they have put into Reddit.

Of course, there are better and worse reasons than that too. Just like in any group of people there are the good, the bad, and the other.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Escalation_of_commitment

Some are paid by the company's the sub represents, they might be community managers.

But most should definitely just quit. It's a thankless abused neglected, and soon to be much more difficult, position.

mods for one duckduckjeep group encouraged people to leave cute ducks on jeeps in parking lots. turned out they were just selling plastic ducks https://www.amazon.com/s?k=plastic+ducks

I rarely used reddit but people generally should spend more time unplugged

Probably because it's hard to quit all of the sudden. They put a lot of effort in mantaining a community and to let it go is hard...

A lot of them think that what they're doing is "important " somehow, like they'll let the "community" down if they quit. They're all deluded.

Some people are dedicated and like working for their community, the work being its own reward. They may be worried what would happen to their community if they leave (and new mods are appointed by the overlords) which is a real concern for many, especially the more niche ones, I think. Recreating those communities elsewhere can be tough (and no, Lemmy / the Fediverse isn't an alternative for everyone yet, not least because of the relatively higher initial investment into understanding the structure). They may feel like there is still is hope, they don't want to abandon ship until the bitter absolute end and I can respect that. Some people may also simply like the attention (we are talking about mods here after all ololol mods ghey).

The cynical answer would be that moderator privileges on reddit are likely to attract power seeking users and it's unlikely that they're going to want to give up their influence for the sake of an improved user experience or sticking it to the man