After eight years, i resigned as a moderator of my community
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
The first time /r/place was offered was markedly different from the others. The first was a free-for-all hellfest for a long while where organization wasn’t even secondary or tertiary to the experience. Then came the age of “reason” and brands and flags sprouted up, obliterating any semblance of originality with an uninteresting mob of paint rollers. The second go around, there was nothing new, everything was pre-planned and strategically plotted, and genitals were a big no-no. To answer your question, novelty and the spontaneous lack thereof. Freedom and the spontaneous lack thereof.
Ugh. The domination of the space by advertisements and just straight-up nationalism is so lame and nauseating. I don't know if it's mainly bots or just peoples' general lack of creativity, but it sucks.
It's like that Woodstock concert in the 2000s. You can't just recapture magic like that by repetition.
Spontaneity is spontaneous.
My understanding is it's mostly bots. Not bot accounts so much, but people running scripts using their main accounts. I'm not totally sure on this, but I'm pretty confident I read about scripts communities used for their drawings.