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As the Reddit war rages on, community trust is the casualty
(arstechnica.com)
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this post was submitted on 16 Jun 2023
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Technology
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I don't understand why people work as moderators for free for a for profit company. Maybe someone can explain why they are interested in cleaning up subreddits just so reddit can become rich?
Back in the day (pre-2015 or so) Reddit used to feel a lot different. Odds are, a lot of the big-name mods came into power back then. It's been a real slow "boil the frog" type approach for many years as they slowly made the logged out user experience worse, then the "new reddit" experience worse... and now the mobile apps.
If you weren't paying attention, it was really easy to fall into a routine where you believed the site's operators still had the users' best interests at heart. Especially if your subscriptions only brought you posts from older subreddits that managed to retain that old feeling. I could see someone wanting to moderate that for free, even if it was out of a naïve belief that it was possible to return to the old days of Reddit.
That being said, they've really gone full mask off as of late. Hard to imagine anyone could return to moderating that for free. The glory days of Reddit are definitely behind us. Here's hoping Lemmy manages to keep the momentum going. So far, it really does feel like the old days on Reddit.
This is a fantastic comment, but I think it's a little bit too focused on the platform and not enough on the community. I'm the mod of a couple of subreddits in the 6-digit subscriber range as well as a couple of much smaller ones. The reason I do it is entirely because of the community. Reddit as a platform has been going downhill for a long time, but it has excellent communities. I really enjoyed interacting with the people in my community, or sharing and discussing content I cared about. And while moderating provides value to Reddit as a company, it also provides value to the community.
The company, of course, knows this, and that's why it thinks it's able to strongarm us into doing its bidding. It thinks our love of the community is greater than our hate for their actions. I hope they're wrong, but the response I've seen in comments on Reddit so far tells me that at least some users not just don't mind what Reddit's doing, but are actively supportive of it. That is...disheartening, to say the least.
My community is wherever I happen to be. Obviously I don't know what you mod, but yesterday I probably wasn't part of your community. Today it seems I am. Tomorrow is feeling pretty far away to know for certain. I can say I feel zero attachment to Reddit the URL or my account, which I recycle every few years anyway for privacy.
Don't get me wrong, I've had a lot of good conversations there, but I couldn't name a single /u I've ever interacted with. The anonymous interactions are the point for me. Lemmy doesn't have to be Reddit, it just has to be big enough that it gives me enough to think about and talk about in my downtime. I won't miss Reddit at all.
My experience of Reddit was obviously very different from yours then. I know a number of people directly by their usernames who I would say I'm quite fond of, and who I considered—not quite friends exactly, but pretty close to it. A few users I have met in-person and had drinks with.
I've had the same account for 11 years, and in that time have interacted with a lot of people and had what I considered very valuable discussion. It's sentimental, but I value that. I'm saddened to see it go away.
There are more pragmatic reasons to be sad about Reddit's demise too. The fact that you could just append "reddit" to nearly any Google Search and get results that were usually far better than the often-clickbait-ridden results that would turn up otherwise was made possible by Reddit's scale. That's a very valuable aspect that will be gone.
Wasn't it Yishan that was calling reddit an "internet city". I'm sure a lot of people bought into the idea that reddit was different. Maybe back then it was, or at least pretending it was.
I feel like the admins and their actions were just not that visible back in the day too. Aside from the occasional drama around banning a high-profile sub, the fact that Reddit was run by a company with its own interests didn't come into play very often. With the admin layer hidden, Reddit the website felt like a sandbox run by the community.
Most, I would wager, weren’t motivated to do it for Reddit. They were motivated to do it for their communities that happened to be on the site.
Moderation— particularly volunteer based moderation— tends to be about the bonds moderators have and develop with the users they interact with every day. Admins are a mixed bag: some of them may have sympathy towards the mods, but ultimately their livelihood is tied to the company line.
A lot of the internet is built on free labor. A lot of that we have been willing to let slide. That willingness ends when the quantum of respect doesn’t get paid for that labor. I don’t know how someone continues moderating on Reddit at this point; barring a big turnaround(and possibly the ouster of current management), it feels like the move should be to migrate their communities elsewhere.