What baffles me: why do moderators still subject themselves to this?
It can't be Stockholm Syndrome: Reddit is not forcing them to be around. They are free to go and take their communities with them.
It can't be financial gain: Reddit is not paying these moderators.
It can't be the tech: their client is to this day unusable.
It can't be a lack of alternative: creating a Lemmy/Discourse/Flarum/NodeBB alterantive site is not trivial, but well within the reach of any sufficiently motivated user. Or people can set up a site with a managed provider for less than $20/month.
The more this type of crap happens, the harder it becomes to sympathize with the moderators and the more I am inclined to believe that the ones who are still there are truly just a bunch of people who are power tripping.
My own subs (/r/dredmorbius, /r/MKaTS, r/MKATH, /r/RenewableEnergy, and others) have been private for well over a year. I've stripped my subreddit from email sigs and account descriptions (here, the Fediverse, Diaspora*) as well.
Reddit's dead to me, and today's news only confirms my past decisions.
(The site had been increasingly untenable for years before the great Reddit Blackout.)
they can't do that. You do any sort of migratio and you accepting losing the large majority of your quietly passive userbase. It's the network effect.
Some will dismiss that as mods "clout chasing" or "power tripping", but I can understand even a good moderator not wanting to spend another X years attempting to foster another community. It's hard in general these days to build a genuine community.
> you accepting losing the large majority of your quietly passive userbase.
Sure, but they are a sunk cost and not the group that we should be worrying to convert. If you want to migrate your community, you should not be focusing on 90% of lurkers, but the 9% of participants and 1% of prolific posters.
> It's hard in general these days to build a genuine community.
Reddit is a ghost town, and the only reason that it doesn't feel this way is because of the bots and astroturfers. There is nothing "genuine" about it. The sooner mods realize this, rip of the bandaids and move on, the better for everyone.
>but they are a sunk cost and not the group that we should be worrying to convert
It's tough. You don't need them but you do. If you go by the 90-9-1 rule, you'll want to aim for a number about at least 10x your real goal if you an actively discussing user base (and you yourself is the "1" for a while), and 100x minimum if you are hoping for a self-sustaining community (unless you're willing to pay for power users. At which point we question if it's a truly "organic" community).
These days I wouldn't be surprised if it's more like 900-99-1 either. Posters don't want to post to an audience of zero, commenter's can't comment on nothing. So we want lurkers if only so we beat the statistics.
The issue with 99.9% of competing communities always seems to come down to a literally "dead community", a community lucky to get one genuine new post a week. I wish for a slower community myself, but going at a post a week feels more like a blog than a hub. And I haven't seen any consistently high quality aggregators hit that quality bar.
>Reddit is a ghost town, and the only reason that it doesn't feel this way is because of the bots and astroturfers.
The biggest parts of Reddit is probably bots and other paid actors. But if you stick to smaller communities you can still find some genuine community (for better or worse. Remember that Reddit and civility don't really go hand-in-hand). As long as it can do that, moderators will choose Reddit. Though given the real time enshittification, who knows for how long?
"Moderators will now have to submit a request if they want to switch their subreddit from public to private. Thousands of subreddits went private as part of last year’s protests."
Reddit hates all the people that make all the value their platform has
In the original saying about Oracle, it was specifically Larry Ellison being compared to the lawnmower, so it would apply even to the executives as individuals rather than the corporation.
What baffles me: why do moderators still subject themselves to this?
It can't be Stockholm Syndrome: Reddit is not forcing them to be around. They are free to go and take their communities with them.
It can't be financial gain: Reddit is not paying these moderators.
It can't be the tech: their client is to this day unusable.
It can't be a lack of alternative: creating a Lemmy/Discourse/Flarum/NodeBB alterantive site is not trivial, but well within the reach of any sufficiently motivated user. Or people can set up a site with a managed provider for less than $20/month.
The more this type of crap happens, the harder it becomes to sympathize with the moderators and the more I am inclined to believe that the ones who are still there are truly just a bunch of people who are power tripping.
Trust me, I've bailed entirely.
My own subs (/r/dredmorbius, /r/MKaTS, r/MKATH, /r/RenewableEnergy, and others) have been private for well over a year. I've stripped my subreddit from email sigs and account descriptions (here, the Fediverse, Diaspora*) as well.
Reddit's dead to me, and today's news only confirms my past decisions.
(The site had been increasingly untenable for years before the great Reddit Blackout.)
> and take their communities with them.
they can't do that. You do any sort of migratio and you accepting losing the large majority of your quietly passive userbase. It's the network effect.
Some will dismiss that as mods "clout chasing" or "power tripping", but I can understand even a good moderator not wanting to spend another X years attempting to foster another community. It's hard in general these days to build a genuine community.
> you accepting losing the large majority of your quietly passive userbase.
Sure, but they are a sunk cost and not the group that we should be worrying to convert. If you want to migrate your community, you should not be focusing on 90% of lurkers, but the 9% of participants and 1% of prolific posters.
> It's hard in general these days to build a genuine community.
Reddit is a ghost town, and the only reason that it doesn't feel this way is because of the bots and astroturfers. There is nothing "genuine" about it. The sooner mods realize this, rip of the bandaids and move on, the better for everyone.
>but they are a sunk cost and not the group that we should be worrying to convert
It's tough. You don't need them but you do. If you go by the 90-9-1 rule, you'll want to aim for a number about at least 10x your real goal if you an actively discussing user base (and you yourself is the "1" for a while), and 100x minimum if you are hoping for a self-sustaining community (unless you're willing to pay for power users. At which point we question if it's a truly "organic" community).
These days I wouldn't be surprised if it's more like 900-99-1 either. Posters don't want to post to an audience of zero, commenter's can't comment on nothing. So we want lurkers if only so we beat the statistics.
The issue with 99.9% of competing communities always seems to come down to a literally "dead community", a community lucky to get one genuine new post a week. I wish for a slower community myself, but going at a post a week feels more like a blog than a hub. And I haven't seen any consistently high quality aggregators hit that quality bar.
>Reddit is a ghost town, and the only reason that it doesn't feel this way is because of the bots and astroturfers.
The biggest parts of Reddit is probably bots and other paid actors. But if you stick to smaller communities you can still find some genuine community (for better or worse. Remember that Reddit and civility don't really go hand-in-hand). As long as it can do that, moderators will choose Reddit. Though given the real time enshittification, who knows for how long?
For many of the "supermods", they are powered by ideology.
"Moderators will now have to submit a request if they want to switch their subreddit from public to private. Thousands of subreddits went private as part of last year’s protests."
Reddit hates all the people that make all the value their platform has
IMO, saying Reddit "hates" anyone/anything is anthropomorphizing the lawnmower.
Obviously OP is using Reddit as shorthand for Reddit Executives.
In the original saying about Oracle, it was specifically Larry Ellison being compared to the lawnmower, so it would apply even to the executives as individuals rather than the corporation.
I'm sure there's at least a bit of disdain among executives. A lawnmower doesn't directly edit raw data on a server of some controversial subreddit.
[dupe]
Some more discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41698762