Reddit is reaching out to moderators after tensions rose over recent policy changes and API pricing. A Reddit admin acknowledged the strained relationship and outlined new weekly feedback sessions and other outreach efforts to repair ties. However, moderators remain skeptical of Reddit’s efforts given mixed results from past initiatives. Many mods feel Reddit has been unwilling to make meaningful changes to address their concerns like more accessible API pricing or exemption for accessibility apps. After a tumultuous few months, moderators have very low expectations that Reddit’s latest efforts will result in real changes.
It’s a lot of abuse to take, I’m kind of surprised more redditors haven’t jumped ship. It’s so much cozier here on lemmy, I just think maybe redditors have no idea what the water is like over here and so they haven’t even dipped a toe into any alternatives.
Tbh, Lemmy is much more difficult to get into. I wouldn’t be here if I wasn’t somewhat dogmatically against reddit’s shenanigans. My buddy who uses the official app doesn’t really care about any of this stuff. Even I feel a bit alienated by Lemmy because it feels so dominated by tech workers. Your average meme-enjoyer is going to see multiple instances, buggy apps, none of their favorite communities and they’re going to bounce off it. I like Lemmy but we need to be realistic about how palatable it is.
You’re not wrong, but it is definitely getting better. I think the organization of Lemmy takes some getting used to, and as well, I think finding new places to look on Lemmy isn’t quite as easy as Reddit is, which might be an area that the software could improve a bit.
Is Reddit easy to explore for new places? Maybe it got better in the new UI, but search was historically bad and discovering relevant subs was pretty difficult. I sort of think people dipping their toes in fediverse waters forget how rough around the edges Reddit was/is. I agree that lemmy and its ilk have a lot of room to improve on usability, but the bar doesn’t seem exceptionally high.
It’s an early adopter problem, and it could be much worse (looking at you, Tildes, where I swear I was one of less than 10 users who were not either well compensated professionals (tech or otherwise), or in school at the time to become one, at least before the latest Reddit exodus. At least most of the Lemmy instances, while tech heavy, don’t have the same smugness that a lot of nearly-exclusively highly compensated white collar worker spaces do. (Not that Tildes is unique in that space in the least, Hacker News is utterly insufferable, and the personalfinance and povertyfinance subreddit split arose for the same reasons)
Luckily I think Lemmy has more potential to get more early adopters who don’t work with tech professionally, especially on an instance like Beehaw. I haven’t felt like some kind of lower class interloper (as someone who is in lower level retail management for work) here, unlike many other super techy spaces.
I’m a tech worker and sometimes shitposter.
I’ll tell you why I haven’t deleted reddit – aside from tech-heavy discussion here (Linux, Reddit, tech generally, that sort of thing), there isn’t a fediverse equivalent to things like the sports or food subreddits I follow.
I agree iscussions on lemmy are higher-quality and friendlier, for sure. But for a lot of the things I use reddit for they just don’t really exist here yet.
Same, I’m mostly part of specific communities based around Europe/language/hydroponics which simply don’t exist here and am here mainly out of spite and solidarity.
I really like the fediverse, I’m on kbin and it feels like old reddit did, before it experienced its own Eternal September. The hardest part of switching over was deciding which instance to sign up for an account on, had to try some different servers before I settled on this one.
I don’t even think that’s too much of an issue, I had no problem just getting an account on all the instances! Lol 😆
I’m kind of surprised more redditors haven’t jumped ship.
I had a bunch of alt accounts, for different purposes that I didn’t want cross referenced (no need for my career-oriented alts to be associated with my political views or details about my family life or personal relationships), and then I just kept enforcing that principle of least privilege to segmenting my different hobbies and interests into different accounts. Third party apps made it easy, so I just kept doing that.
So now that I no longer use a third party app, it was a natural time to delete a bunch of old accounts. Lemmy provides enough of an alternate for any technology-related discussion, and I have confidence that the discussions about food, sports, entertainment, parenting, etc., will eventually reach near parity with reddit. For now, though, I keep my career-focused account to browse lawyer-related subreddits (including the private /r/lawyers), and my city-focused account to participate in discussions about my city, because I don’t think lemmy will be there for quite some time. Of course, now that I no longer look at reddit from a mobile device, I basically only use RES+old.reddit whenever I happen to be on my personal laptop (which is relatively rare these days).
I’ll be honest, that matches my own patterns myself. I use Reddit for some of the niche communities that don’t exist here yet, but eventually they will exist here I hope. I still have two separate accounts here for maintaining the least privilege principle you are doing too.
Forum management 101
Lesson One:
1% of your readers produce 99% of your content.
Only about 1% of the population producing content is interested in enduring the shitshow of toxicity that comes with moderation.
Don’t piss them off.
End of Lesson
Then why are they even still there? It’s like they’re so addicted to the small amount of irrelevant “power” they get from the position and they just can’t give it up.
I get that the tin pot dictator narrative is popular wrt subreddit mods, but it really isn’t a useful model for understanding people’s behaviour.
Fear of change, denial of loss, and sunk cost are all much more powerful tools for understanding.
Plus there are plenty of subs that strongly benefit from the population size or promence of reddit - very niche interests, smaller city or town subs, etc.
And there are some subs where the archive of past material is a huge drawcard - for example AskHistorians which is almost certainly the best single reason for reddit existing and the best modded sub I know of.
Absolutely. When I was on Reddit, all the subreddits I joined were very niche: cities, fandoms, parody subs, and the like. The main reason I found them was because I could think of something and go “it’s Reddit, there’s a subreddit for anything”.
That’s pretty powerful when you’re trying to build a community, since you can skip the “we exist” and “look here to find us” parts of the pitch and spend time and effort on the community itself instead.
Lemmy/KBin just doesn’t have that appeal yet. Pretty much all the subs here, while by no means bad, are very “general-interest”, and the interface to find them is clunky, especially if they aren’t on your home server.
you can skip the “we exist” and “look here to find us” parts of the pitch and spend time and effort on the community itself instead.
Thank you for stating that so clearly!
This is also why many communities have failed to launch on migrating off of Twitter. They don’t have a ready-made, prepped, and universally agreed upon landing site, and intersectionality of communities prevents them from actually finding one, so they’re all individually faced with the prospect of leaving their online communities and starting over, or staying put.
I sit on the periphery of most of my interest groups. I’m a loosely bound valence member, and many of my interests are also just well represented here in the Fediverse, so setting up shop here just wasn’t an issue. But for people who are more tightly bound, it’s going to feel like there are overwhelming barriers to leaving.
Right, so you were a mod and you don’t like people calling out your behavior. Got it.
This ain’t a “narrative,” it’s my (and many many others’) personal experience with every mod that I’d encountered on that site.
I have never been a moderator, and your anecdote is not data. Your personal experience with a few people with toxic attitudes cannot be generalized, and the context of those experiences is vastly different from what’s currently being observed and discussed.
I get that you’re bitter that some stranger on the internet told you to stop doing something they didn’t like, and had the power to make you, but that doesn’t mean anything to anybody else.
If you think this is some unique point of view by someone who was spurned by a mod, or something, you know very little about reddit.
This is such a cynical take. Contrary to popular belief, the vast majority of moderators do care about their subreddits or else they wouldn’t be volunteering their free time. The allure of the power to remove some random person’s post on the Internet, or to ban them just so they return with another account, pales in comparison to the thrill of watching your community grow and people having fun because of it. And it’s not this weird selfish, hey-look-at-me-I’m-so-successful kind of thrill, it’s like you joined this thing because you are interested it and now all these other people who are also interested in it are there talking about it. That’s what’s cool, you set off to make this place where people can talk about this thing that you think is cool and you get to watch it grow and be successful over time. Some of these communities have been around for over a decade, so, people have invested time and effort into them for over a decade.
Moving to elsewhere isn’t really as easy as people make it out to be. At the moment “moving communities” means fracturing your community as there is no unified approach to doing this.
The operative word being “unified” which is next to impossible to achieve. If you get all mods to agree you will have a hard time reaching all your users. This in itself presents the biggest roadblock, ideally you’d close up shop and redirect users to the new platform. Reddit will most certainly not allow this, their approach to protesting subreddits that were not even aiming to migrate made that abundantly clear.
So this means that, at the very least, you are looking at splitting your community over platforms. This is far from a unified approach.
This isn’t even touching on the lack of viable long term platforms out there. I’d love for people to move to Lemmy. But realistically speaking Lemmy is very immature, instance owners are confronted with new bugs every day, not to mention the costs of hosting an instance. That also ignores the piss poor state the moderation tooling is in on Lemmy. The same is true for many of the possible other “alternatives”.
All the new attention these platforms have gotten also means they are getting much more attention from developers. So things might change in the future for the better, in fact I am counting on it. But that isn’t the current state of the fediverse. Currently most of the fediverse, specifically Lemmy is still very much in a late Alpha maybe early Beta state as far as software stability and feature completeness goes.And, yes, the situation on reddit is degrading and this latest round of things has accelerated something that has been going on for a while. But at the same time Reddit is the platform that has been around for a decade and where the currenty community is. Picking that up and moving elsewhere is difficult and sometimes next to impossible. I mean we haven’t even talked about discoverability of communities for regular users.
Lemmy (or any fediverse platform) isn’t exactly straightforward to figure out and start participating in. If you can even find the community you are looking for. Reddit also hosts a lot of support communities, who benefit from reddit generally speaking having a low barrier of entry. Many of those wouldn’t be able to be as accessible for the groups they are targeting on other platforms.
As a mod of a 200k subreddit, yeah it’s not a power thing. I saw some fun thing people liked doing and made a place specifically for that kind of content. It was fun to see all the goffy stuff people made. Yeah every now and then someone was being a dick and needed to be removed but it was an overall fun place.
Then why are they even still there?
Sunk cost fallacy or misplaced hope are other options outside of Napoleon complex.
It’s easy to look at this from the lens of people just wanting power, but maybe it’s something akin to the grief, honest grief, I felt about leaving Reddit because I had been there so long as just a user. I can’t imagine how it would feel to give up control over something that I had created and curated for many years knowing that it was going to be destroyed. 
If you want to push back against the rising right-wing bigotry modding a decently sized subreddit might be one of the most effective places for regular people to do so. Arguably that power is not irrelevant in today’s social media landscape.
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Yeah, I don’t get it either. I rather easily went through and deleted all of my posts and comments. It was quite freeing, really.
I also went through each sub that I moderated (solo, since I didn’t want to cause conflict with any co-mods or others) and both privated them and set them to NSFW. I did set the co-run ones to NSFW though and they haven’t been changed back yet, so I guess the others are okay with that.
And I have yet to receive any messages from admins telling me to change them back. I go and check my account every week or so. Nothing’s changed.
Have you seen their attempt for 3rd r/place? Lol what a shame!
If Reddit had just released a statement that was even just neutral like “Sorry, but we are monetizing our content now” instead of Spez’s ridiculously insulting bullshit, none of this would be happening now.
“Sorry, but we are monetizing
ouryour content now”Fixed that for you.
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Spez is a shit expert. Of course he knows when things will pass.
Well, tensions were building, then there was an Incident, now they are trying a reconciliation so there will be a moment of calm. See here for more info: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycle_of_abuse
Thems some bitter olives.
Just f quit, let it all burn. The problem is moderators often enjoy that little power & importance they have & are perhaps addicted to that a little. Am I wrong?
You might be right for some of them, but I don’t think there’s anything wrong with them enjoying a little power and importance, especially if it’s in relation to a community that they are connected with. But I agree with you that it might be a good idea to at least consider quitting, since it’s likely that Reddit is just going to get worse as it becomes increasingly controlled by dead-eyed shareholders.
If they’re still sticking with Reddit they might as well put on a gimp suit, because that’s exactly how Reddit means to use them.
but moderatora are still there
