Real question: Why don't the mods just all quit?
Real question: Why don't the mods just all quit?
It's obvious that Reddit as a company has no respect for its users and less than that for the mods. It's a thankless, difficult job that isn't even a paid position. I think a lot of us have probably quit real jobs for less bs than Reddit has pulled.
So why stay? Why bother with protests and such when the company has made it clear they don't value your work or your opinions? Why not just pull out en masse and let the place burn to the ground?
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Of course I can't speak for everyone else, but: I've been asked to become a mod for a sub with 2.3 million users, and I have contributed to that site for almost a decade. It took me 3 days to save and then manually delete all of my posts, and I'm still working through the comments a week later. It absolutely HAD to be done, because I'm not going to let a certain someone earn cash with my literal years of unpaid volunteer work any longer, but I would be lying if I said that it was an easy decision.
Why? Because that action punishes the users. A whole lot of what I posted were in-depth game guides, and reddit users now no longer have access to those. I regularily called out scammers, provided sources for artworks, answered dozens of questions daily - I felt responsible for that sub and its users. And if you feel responsible for something, then you can not easily toss it away without feeling a certain degree of guilt, whether that feeling is justified or not.
But just for the record: I do not regret the decision. Yes I feel a bit bad for the community, but it had to be done. I can still understand why others might be more reluctant tho.
(and of course there are also power mods who just don't like losing their status / influence, but that's a different story)
It sucks for the users that they lost all the content you made, but spez fucking deserves it. Besides, maybe when the community decides on a place to settle, the content could just go there instead.
Instead of manually saving + deleting content, you should use scripts to download and delete all posts + comments you've made, or even replace their content with something else. I saw that a mod of one of the Pokemon subs replaced all his comments with the Vaporeon copypasta.
Using a script that edits/deletes a whole bunch of comments in quick succession is detectable and seems more likely to trigger the admins to restore them. In contrast, a slow series of manual edits might be more likely to go unnoticed and make the information stay gone.
Good point. A script that only archives posts might be a better idea. It could even simultaneously remake those posts here.
Just copy-pasting everything to lemmy wouldn't be a good idea in my case. Nearly all of my guides have sources linked that redirect back to reddit posts/guides, and I have to change those links to lemmy content or other sites so reddit doesn't get any traffic.
If the majority of content of an user is made without extra links, then a program that automatically nukes everything on reddit and simultaneously uploads it here would be a super convenient thing tho.
^ exactly this. Every time I manually deledted 2-3 pages worth of comments in quick succession, reddit somehow failed to display any more comments, regardless of which mode I used or how I tried to sort them. I always got the "this user hasn't posted anything" or "there seems to be nothing here" messages.
A couple hours later it always worked again and I could delete more, but it still feels hella fishy. Imagine a bot/program would delete stuff only until reddit pretends there is nothing more to delete and then shuts off, and if the user checks their account immediatly afterwards, it looks as if the content IS gone, only to suddenly reappear a couple of hours later without warning ...
Manually deleting everything took way more time and effort than just running a program once, but at least I'm now positive that my content is truly gone. I even double-checked today to make absolutely sure, and everything google spits out ends in a broken link / missing content. (and it feels strangely satisfying, lol)
I also wiped my history as a 5y mod, which wasn't as hard because I know it will organically rebuild itself, but I do think it makes you realize how many hours you've poured into making a community what it is, and it makes you reconsider whether you really want to do that again in the future. I think one or two niche communities is a nice side gig that you can learn from, especially if it's related to what you do irl, but as soon as you get over five or so that you're personally invested in I think it's worth stepping back to see if there isn't a better, more productive outlet for those passions.