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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).
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.
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.
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.
After Reddit crushed Apollo I was super pissed, because Apollo in my opinion was the best. I scrambled for alternatives (before I learned about Lemmy) I noticed my Alien Blue and Narwhal still functions, minus porn. Eventually I stumbled on Lemmy and I see so much potential with this place. I could still (for now) comfortably consume Reddit content and be happy but spez is such a fuck he’ll eventually block access to those two, so I decided I’m out.
I’m very glad I found this place, Lemmy and the Voyager app. I think I’m pretty good about finding places before they get big. I joined MySpace in 2004, Facebook in 2006, Twitter in 2008, Reddit in 2010. Now 13 years later I’m on Lemmy, and I truly think this (the federation) is the next big thing. Fingers crossed.
Sorry about the old man yelling at the clouds rant.
If you liked Apollo, like me, it’s highly possible that you will also enjoy voyager. It’s basically a web UI for Lemmy, heavenly inspirier by Apollo. Here is the link to the GitHub: https://github.com/aeharding/voyager
And here to see the WebUI instance live in action: https://vger.app/
Edit: nevermind, i didn’t read your comment detailed enough, because you already mentioned it