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Comment by gaoshan | Hacker News Reader

I'm a mod (of an insignificant subreddit), have been active for 15+ years, 6 figure karma, even had the single most upvoted comment on all of reddit one day...they notify you and give you an award when that happens in case you wonder.

My feelings about the site have evolved so much over the years but in the past couple of years the vibe has been turning consistently negative. I'm getting fed up and I imagine a lot of others are as well and I can't imagine this will end up benefiting Reddit in general.

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Congratulations for working for free for a for-profit company?

Might I recommend you to turn towards places like Lemmy or other less-commercial and less exploitive websites?

Reddit relies on free work, but doesn't value or help the mods. And now, they're doubling down on screwing everyone and manufacturing fake content for what appears their IPO.

I think it's time to skedaddle.

I think I'm out of the loop... what is this about manufacturing fake content?

Probably referring to this: https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/13p889x/red...

Can't fault them for following a tried and true strategy from the same platform: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/06/reddi...

You mean "volunteering to keep a community forum polite and productive".

I wish people would quit shitting on mods like they're idiots for taking out the trash.

Yes, though, the larger subreddits are political and repost astroturf. Anti-american garbage. But not every sub is like that. I'll look into Lemmy though.

> You mean "volunteering to keep a community forum polite and productive".

Both of those things can be true.

The reality is those communities--which only thrive on Reddit because of effective moderation--are built on a private platform whose primary method of generating profits is to monetize the attention of those community members.

So, yes, those mods are absolutely contributing free labour that Reddit is turning into private profits, and that labour comes in the form of volunteering to keep those forums polite and productive. Whether or not that's a reasonable tradeoff is up to each individual, though I have to confess I don't personally understand it (despite, in the past, benefiting from it). At least my day job pays me for the labour that they monetize.

And now Reddit is taking a dump all over those free labourers by taking away critical tools that they use to make those forums polite and productive in the first place.

Thank you.

That's why I recommended putting "volunteering time" with actual non-profit orgs and groups, so that 100% of the labor goes to all. I didn't advocate "quit volunteering for a community", cause that's the wrong thing to advocate.

There's mastodon, Lemmy for 2. Discord isn't great, given earlier in the curve of monetization. Same for other for-profit areas. But again, I'd recommend finding communities in a not-profit-driven area and work there.

The for-profit side of things has the same death spirals. I'm just sick of this "web2" crap profiteering and killing useful community stuff.

I mod a technical sub focused on a FOSS project because it's a good place for people to seek advice and share cool tech. I'm doing it for the people, and I'm doing it because I care about the project. It's small though, only just hit 10K subs, and the moderation load is light, basically just ensuring any vendors who turn up actually contribute to the community, not just a drive-by sales blurb.

No one said you're doing it for Reddit. Most mods are doing it to support their community.

The point is Reddit is pocketing profits from you donating your free labour to the benefit of their private platform.

Dress it up however you like, that core fact remains true.

Yep. But then, I'm paying $0 to host a 10,000 strong community, so you know, swings and roundabouts.

This sounds like a bad way of saying things. If everyone agrees Reddit isn’t a great company then the optics of saying you pay nothing to host on a platform/company that isn’t that good doesn’t seem user focused etc.

The other persons rationale make perfect sense. Any one can justify anything they want as much as they want, profits still went to Reddit.

I stopped modding Reddit by 2019. My politics evolved. I didn’t think it made sense to provide Reddit with free labor.

I'm not providing my labour to Reddit, I'm providing it to the community of users.

Stop kidding yourself: You're providing it to both.

That's fine. You do you.

But it is what it is.

Life is not zero sum. You can structure an exchange so that both sides benefit. Many (most?) Reddit mods believe that was the setup, but it’s being lost now.

As is also the case with Twitter, for example.

Maybe the lesson, here, is that private platforms cannot and should not be seen as the "town square" or a place for "community", and that if you make that choice, you need to be ready to move if the platform turns in an unfavourable direction.

Of course, what we're seeing with things like Bluesky is that, unfortunately, for many, that lesson continues to remain unlearned.

I was a moderator for a fairly large subreddit (6 figures subscribers).

I was a moron doing free work for a for-profit company.

I deserved to be shat on.

That's fair, but that isn't how I felt.

I was the mod for a city subreddit for a while and while it was tiring, it was easy to do (especially with a medium sized group, each pitching in a little bit). Keep the spam and trolling down, and community engagement up. (Then I got banned for calling a spammer on a large message board a spammer).

Name an online community space that isn't a for-profit company, that more than a few hundred people could name.

Facebook Instagram Nextdoor Meetup Reddit

Whoops.

> Name an online community space that isn't a for-profit company, that more than a few hundred people could name.

I have nothing against for profit companies.

I am vehemently against of donating labor to for-profit companies. Especially when they will betray those that provided free labor when it becomes convenient.

Reddit proved me right.

Those are all pretty general platforms. A city community is a specific niche that could work anywhere including on its own.

Community building doesn’t have to be only picking one general social media mega platform to live off of.

Lemmy is too slow to take off. And federation is too inconvenient for the average user.

It's not easy to move a group to a new platform, and there's very little people using Lemmy currently. The thing about Reddit despite its flaws is that it allows access to many large communities with a single account.

> Congratulations for working for free for a for-profit company?

They work for themselves, and use reddit resources free. If anything, this relationship is beneficial for the community, but reddit.

Reddit massively benefits from the existence of the community. They are sacrificing goodwill in the hope that the higher revenue per user is worth the backlash.

> in the past couple of years the vibe has been turning consistently negative

As a regular user, I gave up on reddit a couple of years ago because of exactly this problem.

I deleted my 15 year old account this week and don't miss it. My hn account is next but isn't that old. Why make it easy for the world to track you?

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