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
I know at the end spez made people to hate reddit but idt people should do this. Reddit still has lots of posts asking niche questions (which got answered) that aren't even in stack overflow. Imagine looking up some question, you could find that only in reddit but the answer got edited to "HATE SPEZ, EAT BALLS".
We might think Reddit is shit but if it's shit let's just leave it as it is.
Good, fuck em. They don't deserve to be the go-to place for troubleshooting.
The problem there is that the rise of reddit, specifically the fact that it has a much higher concentration of people discussing niche subjects due to its sheer size, ultimately led to the FALL of the forum.
Most of the places that USED to turn up in search results are GONE because there was no point in paying for hosting when a seemingly superior outside solution with greater reach and greater response times existed.
When helpful, contributing individuals remove their content from somewhere, it never hurts the big wigs that made the bad choice and it never teaches anyone any lessons because it never happens at a large enough scale to send a message. Hell, the giant reddit protest that led the lion's share of people to Lemmy is barely a historical footnote and accomplished almost nothing particularly lasting or meaningful on Reddit itself despite being massive.
I'm not saying protesting is a waste of time, it's not, it just needs to be better coordinated than even the aforementioned one was to be effective and stopping along the way to punitively shoot the largely innocent community itself in the foot does not produce any positive end results.
Don't throw a temper tantrum and delete content, MIGRATE IT.
That's something I wish a lot of subs had the foresight to do before the API-block launched. I imagine it's much more thankless and labor intensive to crawl the useful information from communities now. (But don't worry, tons of Ais already did! /s)
I miss forums, too.
Also the story with Discord. Hey, you wanna try and shout your question like you're in the middle of the New York Stock Exchange in the 90's and hope you get a response? It's instant tho! Even if the solution will be completely ephemeral and your question will be asked a million more times.
Sigh.
No, it's all good. Yours was the millionth time the question was asked, so instead of an answer you'll get everyone jumping down you throat to "just do a search."
Your search results will return the previous 999,999,999 times the question was asked, and also the same chorus of "just search," but not the answer. And it's no good just scrolling to the oldest result, because that time the question was not answered. You need to land somewhere near the hundredth repetition, which was the one where somebody answered the question, but after when nobody answered the question, and also before everyone got tired of the question.
"But we have THREADS in Discord now! It's so much better! Especially because no one reads or posts to them!"
I hate when it also feels like you're butting into a conversation with some "locals" by asking a question. Lol
Like with a forum you could just open up with "Hey guys, so I tried to do this and... thanks for any help!"
But in Discord you feel so awkward just hopping into "#general" because it's the project's only support board and going "HEY I TRIED THIS AND IT'S NOT WORKING ANY IDEAS?" as their chat about local weather scrolls your request away. Lmao
Again, okay, good, fuck reddit. The helpful content will move. They won't get clicks and advertising money from my comments.
Yes, it only removes a piece of knowledge which could be helpful and save their time fixing bugs or trying out new things for thousands.
Yeah, the proper way is to become a place that can solve your niche questions so that reddit will eventually die. You don't have to "kill" it by changing your informative comments, help etc.
Nah buddy. The propper way is to abandon reddit with all of your data and go somewhere else. Maybe that somewhere else is Lemmy, although it probably won't be. By leaving your shit in, you generate clicks for their website, nothing more.
where exactly you will pass those answers for niche questions? unless someone creates a similar community in lemmy, it gains traction enough and someone asks same question? if that's the case, good luck for you, bad luck for that person who didn't make any mistake but wanted to find a fix, spez isnt the one who's going to be annoyed when you edit your comments, that stranger is going to be. let me know if any guys who edit their comments on reddit make and moderate similar communities here, i will be glad to be a member.
Okay then, why should I care about this niche information being on reddit? I want them gone. The comments that were made are made by me. I can do whatever I want with them.
i hope no one will be affected by your "niche and informative" comments being edited with "eat shit spez". have a nice day, and make lemmy or other forums that you find useful grow in an organic way.
Yeah, people will be affected. That's the point of deleting your comments from reddit.
but it's not gonna be spez or other reddit execs, the ones who are responsible for api changes but your average joe who just uses reddit to find answers to niche questions? anyways, idt you are gonna understand so it's useless to continue anyways. do what you want brotha. i doubt anyone will be affected by your informative comments being edited anyways.
And we are back to square one, and the protest that doesn't inconvenience anyone. It's you who doesn't understand. Reddit doesn't deserve being the site to go to for "niche info" and "troubleshooting". You know jack shit about me, yet you say "nobody is going to need them" without knowing what I do. Newsflash, robotics, CNCs, programming and a lot of shit you probably couldn't grasp.
then you prolly know how hard is to find some niche fixes that's not on stack overflow, their own forums, not even on some random chinese forums where you need to translate everything to understand it but unfortunately in some random archived post on reddit.
listen i am not pro reddit, if i was I won't be here. i could bring out other valid arguments but considering you are so adamant on things without trying to see on another perspective I can't continue this. It would have been even better if you did understand and tried to counter argument but even after multiple comments, you didn't. can't waste anymore energy.
if it doesn't try creating another place, not destroying the current one. create and moderate communities on lemmy that you are good at. make it grow, grow it big so people end up asking questions here instead of reddit so lemmy will slowly but surely become a place where people will find their answers for niche shit. that's the ideal way.
because all we wanted was to send message instead of trying to just destroy what people built?
we think alike but one is extremist and another one is pacifist.
Yeah they don't but that doesn't mean that you have to destroy the existing discussions. This mob mentality is not going to harm reddit execs anyway or help lemmy gather crowd, but only the people who are searching answers for niche questions and people who still try to make reddit a better place despite the shit that's going on.
That means that exactly. It was content created by me, I can do whatever I want with it. I don't want reddit to profit off of it. So I get rid of it. Simple.
This is like saying "protests in the street don't do anything other than piss off regular people, don't do it pls :(((("
Nobody objected when subreddits shut down for protest.
The correct terminology here is "I will burn down my shop, because I hate the mayor of this town, why should anyone care because it's my shop". No offense to you bro, I wouldn't be here too if I was content with Reddit.
I built a shop in a community for the benefit and betterment of the community. Then, a decade plus later, this respected co-founder of the community decides he isn't rich and important enough, so he starts imposing his will over this community, making whatever changes he sees fit regardless of the backlash and how the community reacts to it. When finally driven out, why would I leave anything standing behind that he could profit or benefit from. So damn straight, I burned down my shop, even ripped out the foundation by destroying decades' worth of content before moving to the next town over where I heard whispers about a community run community.
All you could have done is vacate the community and not burn your building in that community. He's greedy but you are arson.
You're getting downvoted, and I don't 100% agree with you, but I agree with your principal: at least a decade's, maybe 15 years' worth of the best answers to niche questions on the internet are going to die with Reddit, either because people delete/replace their comments or, more likely, Reddit just fucks them up some how in trying to monetize the answers.
Well I don't care about internet points. Even if one person reads everything, understands what I am trying to say and stop doing that or realises it's wrong, it's good for me. Even yesterday I had a problem with postgres and guess where I found a fix for that? not stackoverflow, not their forums, not on "lemmy" but reddit. I don't use reddit often these days but I gotta give credit where it's due and I wish lemmy becomes a replacement for reddit when it comes to finding answers for niche questions and not for getting mass downvoted to trying to have a proper argument against mob mentality.