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.
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.
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. 
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.
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.
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.
This just feels like a cop out - welcome to the Internet, you need to search to find stuff? Maybe I’m terminally techie, or got online way “to early”, but my god, how did people get on reddit to begin with? It wasn’t a default homepage in a browser. How did they get an e-mail account? How did they find an ISP? Did they need counseling to pick a cell phone provider?
This feels just like the “Linux isn’t straightforward to …” - Ok? Neither is Android or Windows or MacOS. You just went through that at some point in the past and don’t remember the confusion.
And it’s not like Reddit started out with those communities. I mean, either you don’t care, or you care and hoping reddit changes is basically like being in an abusive relationship. Maybe try asking a techie friend if you really can’t handle a search engine and reading a small amount.
I mean, we’re not talking about setting up I2P to access an internal IRC network here, we’re talking about picking a website and getting an account. This should not be hard. And if you’re a mod fleeing reddit, maybe be the change you want to see and start a community on the fediverse.
I might be not getting something here but it just sounds like “All these people are trapped in a bad situation and I don’t believe they have any agency or ability to learn anything new to get out of it”. These people have agency. Instead of telling everyone “oh Lemmy is too confusing” - point them to the hundreds of posts and websites now explaining how to do it.
ok… breath… rant over.
Frankly, you are taking a too binary approach to the subject of your rant. There are tons of Lemmy instances, so figuring out the right one isn’t as straightforward as stumbling upon a single central platform.
No, I am just outlining several factors that come into play that do weigh in for people. I am not just saying it is difficult to find Lemmy instances. I am saying it is difficult to move entire communities over. I am also saying several other things than just “moving difficult”. To be honest, I highly suggest you go back and ready my comment again with the intent of seeing the nuance.
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.
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.