🙄
I would love to know how many mods are no longer moderating, have reduced their moderating, or have left Reddit altogether after this whole situation.
I haven’t been on Reddit since the third party apps shut down, so I have no idea what’s going on over there now.
I personally resigned from a subreddit I founded and moderated for 11 years. Had nearly 300k subscribers but enough is enough.
Reddit isn’t like it was when I started using it 17 years ago and it’s not going back.
Fuck Spez.
@TheColonel @TimTheEnchanter 17 years ago is pretty much exactly when reddit became accessible. You were there from the very beginning.
I’ve been there for 14 years, and this kerfuffle has killed all enthusiasm I had for staying. I’ve switched to using reddit’s RSS feeds for the few subs I can’t give up yet (mainly those related to the Ukraine war) but I expect I’ll stop using it altogether in short order.
On the plus side, it’s furthered my deep distrust of big tech companies.
I felt like a Reddit old-timer and I have (had?) been on there 12 years, ha ha! Seventeen years is wild! I don’t have much enthusiasm for staying/going back, either.
I’d like to thank you for what you did.
I had been on Reddit for a similar amount of time, but I had cycled through a number of usernames during that period. So it wasn’t nearly as big of a loss for me as it was for you—I appreciate the lengths you went for supporting the cause. Thank you. 
I moderated two subreddits over 1m users, one over 250k users, and a handful over 10k users.
Every. single. one. of my team members has left, except for one on one of the tiny subreddits.
Some of our most active mods on /r/android left once their apps stopped working. We still keep it up with barebones modding, with a prominent link to !android@lemdro.id. Something I’m noticing is that people who were banned from communities on Reddit for inflammatory remarks, trolling, and spam are carrying over their vitriol to the Fediverse.
At this rate there won’t be any mods left to respond to the admins’ feedback request!
I and another dude modded a 30k+ sub. There were 5 mods, but the other 3 are basically gone at that point, and I was brought on because I was active in the community. We both left, and within a week users are complaining about the slacking mods and wondering why spam is getting through, why discussion threads aren’t posted, etc.
We didn’t do anything with the shutdown, as it wasn’t “our” community to shut down. We were just brought on for workload reasons. But we’re both gone now, and the cracks were showing immediately.
Sadly, I’m fairly certain it’s literally just me in the equivalent fed community. Haven’t seen any other subs, at least.
I used to moderate a lot of huge subreddits. Eventually got into the top 50 moderators by subscriber count. It was never a power trip, I just really enjoyed cleaning up garbage from the mod queue.
Obviously reddit is still running without me, but I used to do a shitload of unpaid labor to help keep that site clean. It was worth doing at the time, but everything I used to like about Reddit is gone. I don’t regret doing the work, and I don’t regret leaving.
I stopped moderating all of the niche subs (that I created) except for two and have, basically, let the mod team run things. I only dip in to check modmail in case a mod needs me. Otherwise, I don’t use Reddit at all. Beehaw!
The niche subs are the ones I’ve missed the most, honestly. There were some really great little communities on there!
Yeah, niche ones provide the most value since the popular ones are the easiest to replace with the larger user base that seeks them out. Too many niche subs sold themselves short on their importance when it being niche was what kept people coming back over leaving due to lack of alternatives for that interest.
Oh absolutely! I’ll remain the ‘head mod’ of /r/AskBibleScholars but the mod team there can handle the day-to-day. I’m still considering (and working on) the Q&A section of askbiblescholars.com and hope to provide the same service to the wider Internet.
I still visit using the website in a desktop browser because I can’t help myself, but it’s noticeably different, even on subs like r/games where there was never a shutdown at all. The weekly “What have you been playing?” topic isn’t getting nearly the number of responses as it normally does, and those responses aren’t as well moderated. They used to be very good at keeping people on topic and formatting their posts with game title/system/etc. but all of that is getting a little sideways now, too.
I started noticing a drop in the quality of some subs after the blackout, before the third party apps shut down, too. I suspect a lot more subs are that way now.
I also still browse the desktop site when I’m at work and I feel like the vibe has nosedived. Shit post subs like AITAH are front paging more than ever, the subs I frequent have less activity and that activity is lower quality. I am getting way more rude, unhelpful, ignorant comments.
I was a mod for a 500k+ sub, and I left. I wrote the post about us going dark in protest, and that was the last thing I did. I left myself in the list of mods for a few weeks, just lurking in modmail, seeing the threats from the admins come in. I officially removed myself from the mod team about a week ago. We had 6 active mods, and there are now just two remaining.
Prior to the API fiasco, Reddit Inc had demonstrated a pattern of promising changes to the mods which they failed to deliver timely if at all. They’ve acknowledged this pattern, promised to do better, then failed to deliver time and again. That part isn’t new.
Then the API changes were announced and the Reddit community gave Reddit Inc the loudest and most decisive rebuke they ever have. That was the feedback conversation. And Reddit Inc went forward with their plan unchanged. No concessions were made. No concerns were addressed or alleviated. Reddit Inc was informed of what this decision would break and they went ahead and broke it anyway.
As a former mod, there is nothing left to discuss. There is no reason to believe Reddit Inc will act on anything that doesn’t agree with what they’ve already decided to do. I’m not going back to that kind of abusive relationship. They had their chance to listen to feedback and made it clear that they won’t.
That’s a great point. The entire last 2 months have been continuous feedback sessions. The Ama with spez is full of well upvoted feedback. There was a simple 5(?) item list with direct feedback and requests during the blackout with steps on how to accomplish it.
Reddit inc proved in the last to months what they do with feedback
I modded a 10M+ sub for years and years and it is laughable how inept reddit’s engineering team must be when it comes to developing mod tools. They literally have open source teams hacking mod tools into browser extensions and they still couldn’t figure it out.
After a while it became abundantly clear that this kind of boring, iterative feature engineering was just not well funded compared to other parts of the company.
I made a poc https://modder.lemmyverse.net tool that I’m hoping to expand on for Lemmy tooling 😄
Very well said! Reddit’s lack of any response to feedback is one thing. However, to actively act like there has not been provided feedback already is disingenuous and well just more of what Reddit has proven they want to be. If they would come out and actually address the already provided feedback, I still wouldn’t trust them as far as I could metaphorically throw them.
The July metrics must have shown them engagement is plummeting, especially content submissions, which have been garbage since the blackout. One look at r/all shows most posts being up for hours and sometimes days at a time - it used to be a matter of minutes. Doubtless this is also reflecting in their traffic metrics as well.
As someone who contributed there since the pre-Digg days, after discovering the Fediverse, I’m never going back. Reddit arrogantly assumed that there was no other platform mods and contributors could go to that would provide what they do. But when it comes down to it, the Fediverse does what Reddit did, with more features, flexibility, and without the threat of centralized mismanagement. The only thing Reddit had that the Fediverse doesn’t was an audience of millions, but the audience follows the content, and the best place to create content online is right here, right now, right here, right now, right here, right now….
Welcome to the next evolution of the web, Reddit, and to the realization that you pushed your audience to evolve past their need for you.
Don’t forget they deleted premium and awards completely. They seem to be making the worst possible decisions at every turn. It’s absolutely breathtaking.
It’s like… I keep imagining what if I were a Manchurian Candidate CEO and tried to destroy the entire value of my company as surely as possible before being found out, what decisions would I make? And I must say, what spez and musk are doing keeps surprising me at every turn, because even in my imagination I have not come up with schemes as effective as theirs.
while reading you post, I visited reddit. the latest i’ seein on HOT All and HOT Popular is 6hours old post and the oldest is 15 hours. It truly has slowed down over there. and I did not see much interesting original content, most are reposts.
Yep - I watched the same thing happen at Digg after they went down the path Reddit is now. Within 3 months of their infamous redesign, it was a ghost town.
Reddit will likely limp on longer, but I think they severely underestimated how badly they’ve harmed their own business.
Agree with everything you said but was secretly hoping you linked to Right Here Right Now by Jesus Jones… The hottest song of 1991.
Damn that brings back high school memories - thanks! I totally agree it fits as well.
I went with the Fat Boy Slim vid for the evolution theme and the fact that the guy on the bench at the end was the best analogy that came to mind for Reddit in its current state. Jesus Jones seems to be speaking to how I feel after discovering the Fediverse.
Reddit admins: “Surely nobody will actually like Lemmy. It’s like if you took reddit back in time 10 years. Smaller, more niche, less brand activity, pretty much just die-hard nerds. Who could possibly prefer something like that?”
It’s like early reddit, except they replaced the conservatives with tankies.
Always gotta have the “we don’t go there, tis a silly place” area of a new social media
So, we’ve all had a… time on Reddit lately. And I’m here to recognize it, acknowledge that our relationship has been tested, and begin the “now what?” conversation.
acknowledge that our relationship has been tested
This is so emotionally manipulative / abusive, and says everything anyone needs to know about reddit/spez. It’s like if someone burns down your house and says “look i’m here to acknowledge that your house has been burned down, but we can still work things out bestie <3”
Yeah.
"I’m done bullying you now! It’s time to move on and be friends again. :)
…
What? You want an apology? Why are you so pigheaded and angry and clinging to the past and unwilling to work things out? We’re all adults here, so let’s be level headed and reasonable about this. Stop yelling. You could at least be civil. You’re the problem, and you pushed me into this. Don’t make me the villain."
And of course that passive tense “has been tested” so they can avoid claiming responsibility and try to frame it as “both sides” at best. But really more like “me right, you wrong, I have big stick.”
Barf.
