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Sunk cost fallacy is my assumption, but take that with a grain of salt. I'm one of those low tech savvy old farts people talk about. I left because making it harder for moderators to do their jobs means communities that I love will be less safe and welcoming. Maybe the rest have to experience that discomfort for themselves before they too are driven away. Or they think they can ride this out and continue as before when things settle down.
This is good to see, it seems a lot of the people that were for the blackout left, now there is so much vitriol against moderators on reddit, I'm so tired, I just don't want to anymore, deleted my 10+ year old account today after telling my mod team I can't anymore, so now at least the chances are smaller that I will go back.
Just know that I for one appreciate the hell out of you. I don't have the technical skills to do what you do, and to be perfectly honest, I don't have the patience either. It amazes me that people with the skills volunteer their time to do this mostly thankless work which makes communities more enjoyable. From the bottom of my heart, thank you!
The thing is I really enjoyed the community that I modded, and still do, so I wanted to make it the best place it could be, I didn't have the skills either to do it in the beginning, started out just helping out the main moderator of our community, then after a couple of years they just disappeared, and I was driving myself rather insane for a year before I started fighting with the admins for 3-4 weeks to get the rights to get more moderators to join me, since I didn't have the right to before that, only the main mod had those rights.
I invited some people that I trusted from the community, and it at least made the work more tolerateable, having it spread out between 3 people in different timezones, and keep in mind we were a really small niche sub (~8k members) I don't even want to know how much worse it is for people moderating the gigantic ones, more people usually brings a lot more problems.
It became more or less a routine, just checking in, seeing if there was any spats to break up, people who were being dicks or spamming us with their books etc without interacting with the community, you get into this groove where you just get used to it. The most annoying thing was the few times where we gave people temporary bans and they started being aggressive about it in the mod chat, but since we were a really nice small community it was all worth it.
Come this whole thing, they take away the tools I used to deal with my routine, which would force me to be on the PC a lot more to deal with the community, then the blackout, we had a vote, and people were mostly for it, we did it, and people were decently for having done it, but nothing more when we were done. I don't know why mods have a bad rep, might be a bigger sub problem like so often, I don't know, we at least tried to do as much as possible just to keep our little community being friendly, accepting of beginners and not getting spammed with extremely repetetive content.
With this whole thing, I tried being a part after the blackout as well, but I keep seeing people just being really vitriolic, the place doesn't seem the same anymore, the whole keeping the community happy thing gets to tiring when you know the site does it's best to make it harder to deal with. I tried contacting admins again, but got some argueably toxic answers from the german admin, which is the only one I was getting a hold of. And I can't justify doing free work for a company that really doesn't appreciate it at all.
In the end I hope I at least left the community in a better shape that I entered it, I don't know if I did, but I hope so. At least this way I can stay true to myself and not being a spineless person not ready to give up on things, not because I think I would be the only one doing the work, but because I was already doing it and kind of knew what I was doing, and how our community ticked.