I feel like another critical change happened, and that is that Reddit’s users views of themselves changed. The idea that we are giving Reddit free content and labor so they can profit from it is spreading around.

An ugly underlayer has been laid bare and many are finding they don’t really like it.

Community idea: we develop a fake company that we all “work” at so that we can vouch for each other and use our “experience” on our resumes.

I was a mod on a big sub for awhile many years ago and it was a literal horrowshow every day. It was an endless torrent that never stopped, the mod team basically ran 24/7. It was guaranteed you would see at least some fucked up bigotry every time you looked in the queue because the sub was a regular target for those people. It was really just a nonstop firehose of all the worst the internet has to offer, one reported Reddit comment at a time, forever. The tools I had access to were janky browser plugins and things like that, stuff previous mods had built themselves years before because the actual Reddit tools were inadequate. The sub involved so much moderation the team was very organized and you had to put in a certain amount of work every month, it really was like a part time job where you get to set your own hours but can be “fired” for slacking. You often feel emotionally drained afterwards just like a real job, and you start feeling anxious when you “clock in” because fuck not this same miserable bullshit yet again, just like a real job. I have so much respect for quality moderation, it is not at all easy in any way.

I think what will happen is that a lot of the subs are eventually going to end up in the hands of the few mods who love sucking up to the admins and the mods who are in it for the dopamine they gain power-tripping instead of the mods who are in it to make the subreddit the best version of itself.

This will only further the “5 Mods Control 92 Of The Top 500 Subs” issue and lead to overall less happy, less engaged users.

And on top of that when those “tools” don’t materialize and they’re more overworked than previous mods having to manually squash bots and alt right trolls, even more will bail.

And I bet spammers will target the subreddits where mods have been removed.

or the people who now see an opportunity to take over a sub and power-trip

there is no good outcome for reddit with this situation

but if you sell your account you can get hundred of dollars! That’s upwards of $9 a year of pure profit.

I’m deleting all my free content off reddit. It’s not particularly exciting content, but I have answered a few questions people probably ask on Google (recipes, cleaning tips, etc) that will now be gone. Just gotta back up my most important stuff first

I literally forgot what it was like to browse content without sponsored ads strangling my feed.

It feels a lot like Reddit wants to be Facebook, especially with the recent changes it made to the official app to remove control over what Redditors read.

However, I don’t think Reddit can afford the moderation required to be Facebook.

Don’t forget there are literally Nazis being employed as Mods

I can already hear the CPA/affiliate marketing bots spinning up lol.

Man, I was mod for a tiny subreddit for a TV show that was niche. We still got slammed with bots, nsfw, spam, etc. I can’t imagine what the big subs are like, and I laugh at Reddit trying to insert their people into that situation.

It’s important to remember it’s early days. Things aren’t as smooth as reddit now, especially with Federation, but they’re going to improve.

can’t pump the community with ads if the community gets overrun with content offensive to those advertising companies

Yes, they can and they have done so occasionally.

It hasn’t been addressed because so far it has been used relatively sparingly, and because the subreddits in question are often shut down by Reddit rather than handed over to a new head moderator.

Often it happens because the mod(s) refuse to enforce sitewide rules on their subreddit. The removals are usually preceded by encouragement from admin to sharpen up, followed by warnings and milder measures.

Historically, Reddit has been slow to act on that stuff of its own accord, only doing so when users organise to alert advertisers to the content their ads are appearing alongside.

You will see users of these subreddits complain that their communities are being targeted, especially if Reddit has acted against a cluster of related behaviours, but that latter bit does mean that those users tend to seek out other places. I don’t want to compare those fleeing to Lemmy/kbin/mastodon to proponents of political violence or those running foreign disinformation campaigns, but the principle of Reddit pushing a given class of users away from the site remains the same.

I suspect that Reddit has miscalculated here, or is just gunning to manipulate the apparent user metrics ahead of the IPO, but it seems to me that they actively want to shed everyone who is privacy-conscious, tech-literate, etc. They don’t want conversations about old.reddit or 3rd party apps or the fediverse influencing those who are unaware of these things, and they don’t want users or moderators who will organise against Reddit They already have power mods who have been running large numbers of the most popular subreddits for years and some of these may be paid admin; they’d find it easy to get people to replace the head mods of smaller communities, and they probably don’t care about the niche subreddits and will either let those die or trial the use of bot moderators on them.