The abusive relationship is with Reddit, not the community they moderate. A more accurate analogy is tolerating the abusive person because you don't want to completely lost contact with many other people you care about just because of that one guy who they're still friend with. The answer then become less clear cut than just cut off the toxic person. It becomes a question of when the abusive person becomes toxic enough that even the prospect of keeping in touch with other people you care about isn't worth it any more. That is going to be different for everyone and there's no right answer as it completely depends on the person. It is still possible that someone misjudge and they'd be better off leaving earlier, but what that earlier point is still has to be decided first according to their own circumstances.

To illustrate my point. Some people believe it's the right thing to do to leave Reddit much earlier than this year, such as when they let /r/the_donald operated freely. In this case here because you decided to stay until 1-2 months ago, you are also part of the problem that "stayed and helped Reddit build Reddit".

I think this post simplified the situation in a way that misrepresented the motivation of some moderators.

You want to hear something fucked up? After nearly 10 years in Reddit, one day I suddenly started receiving daily death threats and HEAVY bot spamming on this tiny little sub I was moderating. So naturally I reached out to the mod support sub for help. Then this bot/spammer started flooding my post on their sub which actually felt great—they were getting a taste of what I had been dealing with. The post ended up with well over 500 comments from this piece of shit. So instead of help me out, you know what they did? They banned me from the mod support subreddit.

I had a conversation with one of the admins who basically told me they don't care about death threats. Furthermore, this spammer had also admitted to murdering people. Again the admin didn't care. Till the day I left they were unable to stop this one person from creating hundreds, maybe even thousands of accounts and spamming tons of people including myself. A billion dollar company can't even control their own product. The bots literally own Reddit. Lol. Fuck them, all of them who stayed.

Here some proof: https://imgur.com/Hofqdh8 https://imgur.com/gallery/vJhZlwX

I shut down the my subreddit for old memes on Reddit and moved it to Lemmy. Then it blew up on Lemmy and the old ass memes spread to the other meme subreddits. (Sorry)

This is home now.

!antiquememesroadshow@lemmy.world is better than ever over here. Although it’s still full of stale ass memes.

Same here.

After the infamous AMA, I made a post in my subreddit basically saying "peace out, I'm off to Lemmy. Good luck, everyone." Lucky for them, I'd set up a pretty robust automoderator over the years so that's still taking care of the majority of the moderating tasks I'd imagine.

I visited that post today and saw over 500 comments, each one by a mod and each one of them angry. Why they're still there, I have no idea.

This is just the start. Once Reddit IPOs and we hear how many tens of millions spez made off the backs of mods and power users, more will start to question why they are doing unpaid labor just to make spez rich. There is a fundamental problem with trying to make bank on volunteer labor, and we're just starting to see it begin.

Except for the veteran sub where I got perma banned for literally saying I don't like fascism, I never had many paths cross with mods.

Where I lost respect for them is when Reddit started telling them to open up or get replaced and most of them complied. I'd have some more empathy if it was at work where getting canned meant scrambling to pay bills - but we're talking about Reddit. They claim to stand for something but the second they're asked to give up anything for that belief they cave.

Psuedo interwebs powers just trump morals and values these days.

This maybe a controversial opinion here but many of those moderators also suffer from a big problem of powertripping. They just don't want to leave that position.

Honestly I stopped feeling bad for mods as soon as I saw a majority of them fold like a soggy napkin upon the first threat from the admins saying they'd remove mods who keep their subs private.

If I were a mod I would have kept it private until Reddit removed me. If all mods actually did that, Reddit would have been in big trouble since they'd effectively have to find new mods all at once for the entire site. Instead, most mods basically did Reddit a favor and lessened the impact substantially. Thanks mods!

I also don't feel bad for most Reddit users. Way too many of them were too ignorant to even understand what the protests were about. And a majority of them were yelling at mods to reopen and saying the protest was stupid just because they were okay with using the official mobile app

Unbelievable all around honestly. The entire thing was fucking embarrassing. We had one actual chance to win and everyone blew it.

Communities can be rebuilt, as we've seen. There really is no excuse at this point for those mods to not leave and start rebuilding somewhere like Lemmy.

Reddit will never reverse course. Maybe their goal used to be aligned with ours, but now they're just a massive corporation chasing an ever growing profit.

I haven't felt sorry for mods since the mods of a sub I'll not mention decided to stop the protest after some of them got banned, because "we don't want the sub to fall into the hands of randoms".

Spineless behavior. Just move and rebuild the community elsewhere. It has been more than a month and the ship has sailed. Even if Reddit decides to backpedal for now, they'll try again in the future.

For me it was mostly about accessibility, because reddit essentially told disabled people they aren't welcome. So ... bye

But also the attempt at monetizing FUCKING EVERYTHING is pissing me off. I miss the internet where most things were free. I am not going to pay a subscription to read an aggregation of links. If I have to pay I am going to choose something more fun over social media.

Y'know, I read that entire thread, and it really doesn't come across as you're representing it.

The mods are spitting rage over there. They're outright insulting every aspect of reddit. I feel like focusing on the idea that because they made a post there they must still be active users is a stretch and unfair.

Of course, we know too many people still use the site. But it's hard for me to get on board with a blanket "fuck the mods" based on that thread alone.

Im so glad I left as soon as I recognised how much they don’t care about mods. I was a mod at several subs and fuck that. I’m happier here. Remember. Spez made it clear that so long it doesn’t hurt their revenue, he will do whatever he cares to do without listening to the clients.

Jumped ship when Spez wasn't caving to the protests. I was mostly a lurker on Reddit and posted a little but now with the state of our social media it's better to get out and have a voice. And this place is nice

Your argument is strange, since I definitely feel bad for people in abusive relationships and have understanding for how difficult it might be to leave one.

I’ve never modded but have been on Reddit 15yrs 11mo as of the Apollo shutdown. At this point I’m in the 16yr club. It’s wild how badly they are acting toward mods.

Frankly I’m not a mod lover or hater, with the exception of AskHistory. It was so clear how the mods there truly made the community. Haters will say they had a heavy hand, but it kept the quality remarkably high.

I’m middle age so I’ve seen a full decade of forum shitposting and flamwars before Reddit even existed. The fact that Reddit can’t see the value of the community that build “their platform” is beyond tonedeaf, it’s just straight up arrogant.

I’m sure Reddit will stay far bigger than lemmy for a long time, but that’s fine. Maybe better. The old forums were microscopic by modern social media standards but in hindsight the conversations with active users were more real and not just some random username that might as well have been anon.

I was moderating, this whole thing started, and I moved over to lemmy, I don't get why people are still continuing to do loads of work on a site that hates them with an even more toxic environment than before, not really for me.

I really, really wanted all the mods to quit in protest. I think the site would go up in flames within a day of people finding out it was open season. Like, not able to recover, up in flames.

Every other day, I get over how mad I was about the whole spez thing, and just focus on bettering our community and Lemmy in general.

But then they do something again that immediately remind me how much of an asshole he is. Last week, it was them taking out the coins and awards. Now this week, it's introducing r/Places like nothing happened and we're all friends again. Fuck him.

Moderating for free is a mental illness.

Mods on Reddit are power hungry basement dwellers. I'm glad you got out. They do nothing but stifle conversations and turn the cesspool that is reddit into more and more of an echo chamber. I've had so many accounts banned for simply trying to have a conversation that didn't fit the "narrative". It's shocking how much so little power goes to people's heads.

The thing that is different is that they really CAN leave. Reddit has nothing over them. Reddit doesn't have their important documents, control of their finances. Reddit isn't physically present, so they aren't physically endangered. And yet they are STILL reacting exactly how an abuse victim.

This ought to be a lesson for all of us that ANY of us can fall into that pattern and not judge people who are.

So many reddit mods were angry power-hungry assholes. I don't feel sorry for them just as much as I don't feel sorry for reddit's hopeventual collapse. I can't count how many times I had BS moderation enacted, then when I was perfectly civil, usually just asking for basic clarification as to why something was removed, was instantly silenced from further communication with the mods with threats of potential removal from participation in the sub or reddit entirely. I am not alone in this experience.

I run a discord server and freely explain to user that they are welcome to disagree with me, openly and freely, as while I run this unofficial community server about an event I don't own/operate,

The same is for a reddit mod, especially for broad topics and localities.

Unfortunately I do see the potential for similar behavior here in the fediverse. I can't say I know how to address it entirely, but I know I can act the way that's fair to the community of which I am only an administrator, not a ruler nor creator.

The majority of the "good" mods like yourself have already bailed, I'd wager. Only the bad ones, who use moderation to feel a sense of power and control over others to replace their own lack of power and control, will remain after a couple more months, at which point you'll see Reddit truely begin to falter. Those are the ones clinging to hope and power, even though they lose more of it by the second.

Welcome to Lemmy. It's fun here.

Very true

I moderated a top-15 subreddit for over 5 years. reddit got so corporate so long ago that the 80% of the mods left are just on some kind of power trip. So no, I won't ever feel bad for them.

what i dont get are those members that demand opening of subreddit and claimed that some of the moderators are power hungry, forgetting that they are moderating for free, and failed to understand that it will become harder without the APIs.

Truthfully i wish bots will demolish their favorite subreddit

I sort of understand that they are a necessary evil but I really get tired of seeing stuff like this

Moderators should just stop working for free on platform that doesn't value them.

comment removed by moderator

Spez's comment on moderators showed the world he's not a tiny bit better than Marck "They trust me, dumbfucks!" Zuckerberg.

Yet so many people willingfully trust him with their most personal sensitive information until it's too late.

https://www.insider.com/nebraska-teen-sentenced-jail-abortion-police-facebook-2023-7

Even with that, you still don't see FB users running away from the private data collection and resell platform.

It will be very hard for some moderators to leave because they put so much work in reddit, and leaving would force them to admit they were used by someone who despised them the whole time, and there is no hope he would ever change.

It's similar to women who can't leave their violent companion: they want to believe in something that does not exist, and will stretch their perception of reality to avoid admitting they're wrong.

I do not despise the moderators who won't leave. I pity them.

With all that said, this remind me I wanted to permanently delete my reddit's account. I won't contribute to a BS "users" numbers...

Im a moderator of subreddits, and i can say i agree.

the moderator of r/onlyfans is a good example, it was repurposed to be about fans, but in order to "protest" he decided to allow porn back in, and despite the users constantly being extreamly angry about this for over a month, he had refused to dissalow porn, while he did tighten the rules on it slightly recently, they appear to go totally uninforced with porn bots slowly taking over the community.

I think attacking the mods like this is similar to attacking a person in an abusive relationship. It's more complicated than that when they feel so attached to the product of what is in some cases thousands of hours of work put into their communities that they've built for over a decade.

Don't attack the victims. Attack the abuser. I'm glad that it was easy for you to leave the abusive relationship but it's not easy for everyone. The same psychology is at play.

Oh I don't, don't you worry.

The admin are trash over on reddit. The CEO is trash. Lots of the mods in the big subs are trash too though.

Any of the mods that complained and protested but are still on the site are gutless and just don't want to lose their mod power.

I agree, well said. Shame on Reddit for what it did, but shame on them for putting up with it.

I loved Reddit but it was slowly getting worse, then suddenly way worse. My time with Reddit died with Apollo.

Lemmy isn’t Reddit, but it definitely itches that scratch for me. Like fuck if I ever give Reddit any traffic myself anymore. Bridge burned, I have no problem walking away.