I’ve been the main moderator of the same community since 2016. This evening, i approved my last comment.
I’m leaving for two reasons:
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Reddit went public a week ago. I didn’t volunteer to work for a publicly traded company, i volunteered to work for a community. As long as i live under capitalism i accept that my labor will generate value for shareholders, but damned if i ever do it for free. (this is not a Faulkner quote)
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April 1st is coming and i’m scared they might do another r/place. Doing in r/place 2022 and 2023 has left me dejected and bitter and i don’t want to feel obligated to participate again.
Leaving felt like ripping myself off of something warm i’ve been comfortably glued to for a long time. Still recommend it for anyone still giving Reddit shareholders free labor
EDIT: there are too many comments to respond to, but i’ve appreciated all of them! Thank you
I’m sorry. The corporate assholes don’t deserve to pad their fat wallets based on your free labor, but it’s still absolutely the loss of something you love when you step away and it hurts. I’m still grieving losing Apollo and all of the goofy, weird ass little subs and brilliant human beings who made me laugh and cry every day on Reddit. It’s not been replaced in my life. It took millions of us almost 20 years to make that stupid website something incredible…I can’t deny that it was incredible at points.
It’s gone, it’s just a website now and an app with ads every 3rd pixel just like the rest. There is still some good content and good people, just as there are on TikTok, Bookface, X and insta. The decent shit that is there, on all of the platforms, is overwhelmed by their horrible algorithm trying to sell you shit and increase engagement to monetize your every click.
I miss Apollo and Reddit too.
Second time for me. I migrated about ten years ago from Metafilter, which I eventually rage quit. That really fucking hurt, and Reddit filed that niche in my life (but not the meeting IRL or helping IRL part).
Now I’ve had to go through the same thing with Reddit. I’m into Lemmy, Mastodon, and Bluesky, but it’s not the same. I hope it’s just not the same, yet.
I don’t know that anything will be the same because it took so long for everyone to gather there and make 100,000 thriving communities about every random little thing from rare diseases to Pokémon made from toilet paper tubes, sexy John Oliver, kids getting hit on the head. If got interested in some random TV show, you could find a sub where there would be 100 interesting conversations about it. That just doesn’t exist outside of Reddit. Where even could it? Fucking Quora? Facebook groups?
I don’t know what anyone could have done to preserve it though. If it’s POSSIBLE to slap a million ads on it and make a billion dollars, but definitely ruin it forever…it’s inevitable. Nothing can stop that.
Thank you for putting into words some of the emotions I’ve felt over the last 9 months.
If there’s good shit on any of those sites, I’ll surely read about it here. If not, it’s not worth it.
deleted by creator
That must’ve been tough to do. You have the respect of at least one internet stranger 🫡
Lemmings did the tough thing months (years?) ago when thousands of third party apps and community development went to waste.
He took the easy way out and helped spez IPO.
Some of us take a longer path than others. All are valid. Sure, maybe some have better outcomes, but no one should be criticized for taking a step on the right direction, however late it may be. You don’t know what they’ve been through or what it meant to them. If you’re only going to be negative then you probably just shouldn’t comment.
You call it “a longer path”, I call it having your cake and eating it, and whining about it
Before June 2023, I was a mod on several Reddit communities for about 13 years and outside of Reddit since the turn of the century. I just kinda stepped back once the Reddit BS happened.
10 months later, my happiness and over all quality of life has improved. Not only am I no longer stressed (bye bye moderation based nightmares!), but I have way more time to dedicate to my passions and goals.
I thought that dedication to holding together a few niche communities and battling the “bad guys” defined me and gave me a sort of immortality.
I was VERY wrong.
Our great grand kids won’t be trolling reddit archives, telling everyone how “cool” grandpa was.
The greatest thing I ever did to improve my QOL was step away from moderating and leading communities on the internet as a whole. Doubly so if they involve political talk.
. I didn’t volunteer to work for a publicly traded company, i volunteered to work for a community. As long as i live under capitalism i accept that my labor will generate value for shareholders, but damned if i ever do it for free.
I sincerely hope you said this in multiple places on Reddit
There will be a lot of people who don’t realise that that’s precisely what the IPO means
Anyone who comments on Reddit is now giving free information to the capitalists. I don’t care if people don’t go anywhere, so long as they abandon Reddit.
I participated and organized the Lemmy banner on the last r/place and it went pretty well. If they ever decide to do another r/place, I don’t know if I’ll do it. If people haven’t left already then they might be stuck there but idk.
I was pretty happy with doing lots of alliances last time with the Fuck Spez Coalition, Germany, and a few others. I just don’t want to visit that awful site, it already hurt me a lot last time participating it at all hours of the day and fueling traffic so I probably won’t do it again.
Edit: I believe this was the final result
I never knew there was a fediverse design, that’s neat
I tried to get the word out but received lots of downvotes because people didn’t want to give Reddit the traffic. A couple of my posts got taken out.
Yo, I was mired in modding for several years. It felt good to maintain that space, and I helped create the best community for one of the most popular mobile games. It wasn’t the general community, it was the analysis/strategy focused sub, so we had very tight moderation policies. That made a lot of people mad, both those that wanted to post more general content, and those that wanted to rage about the game/developer. The work is constant and nearly thankless, not to mention unpaid.
Your point of not doing volunteer work for a publicly traded company is an excellent one. I definitely felt pride in doing that kind of community service for a public space. Now that Reddit is profit-driven and answering to shareholders, it’s asinine to do that work for free.
I’m a capitalist and I would never do free work for a public company. Now I don’t mind a hobby but a public company isn’t a hobby.
Congratulations! You’re doing the right thing. Reddit is trash now.
Why do people like r/place, and why do others hate it? I never understood the phenomena.
r/place has had the soul sucked out of it past the first iteration. I’m not even going to bother checking it this year because I can see the future and I know what the canvas will end up being - bots maintaining flags. I’d be nice if they restricted it to accounts that are at least a year old, but at this point all the accounts people were botting with the last two years are qualified under that definition.
Cool idea, consistently horrible implementation.
Possible Spin: you get paid the same and have more free time?
Plus it won’t look bad on the resume
The only thing I remember about r/place was that they dropped it anytime they did something stupid, like kill the free API, and that they would mod the content which made it a bot spam war fest.
Also the Pakistani flag getting defaced by r/Chodi because insert rent free joke here.
They did that once actually, when they killed third-party apps they decided to do a surprise r/place hoping it would calm people down. In July. Not even a year after the last one. It came as a horrible surprise
Had a 12 year old account. Just got permad. Honestly feels like a weight off my shoulders. That place was making me so toxic.
May be an unpopular opinion but I always had an issue with the toxicity of Reddit going all the way back to 2014. I don’t know what it is about that site but the people act like absolute pieces of shit more often than should be expected.
It’s because of the anonymity and lack of consequences. If it were in person they’d actually be confronted about it. Online however you can spout the most horrific shit all day ,every week and nothing could happen.
I think it’s more than that, a lot of ganging up on people for really stupid reasons. I personally blame the karma system, it’s like a dystopian social system that prevents people from being genuine and it’s used to hurt people they don’t like or agree with
I give this comment 5 Meow Meow Beanz.
Welcome to life!
How was place a bitch for mods? I honestly never heard anybody talking about it and im genuinely curious
I felt a duty to not only place pixels but also coordinate efforts. Picking the design, updating the design, spreading information so the people placing pixels know what’s going on, advertising, talking to other communities…
I don’t remember them very well but i’m pretty sure i’ve had 4 hour nights for the entire duration. For place 2023 i spent most of my waking time in Discord calls.
And all this for a game that can be emotionally devastating. Getting overrun by a streamer feels shockingly similar to having big kids trample your sand castle, it’s this little thing that you built together getting destroyed by stronger people and they’re mocking you relentlessly.
Gah. Ok yeah that sounds like ass.
