I’m doing this. It  it sucks because there’s a wealth of knowledge there, but I’d rather get it someplace else and I feel guilty every time I go there,  and I was a digg refugee when they fuck their old site so I’ve been through this before… Forces change so at least there’s that.

Good for you! I was mod of a tiny gaming sub, and 99% of its members did not care the least tiny bit about Reddit. They will when it comes for old-Reddit, but the “first they came for…” argument did not manage to penetrate their shells, especially as they were involved in multiple subs and those all stayed behind intact as well. So like 4 of us started a new community here… where we have maybe 1 post a week instead of 1 per hour. Even that much is inordinately complicated by all the bugs on Kbin/Lemmy, where ~80% of the time when you want to upvote or boost it asks you to re-login (actually it’s ~100% after a certain threshold of time is reached, or 0% if you instantly do it without taking time to read or write anything first, but that is not normal behavior!), and my notifications have been permanently busted for weeks now due to a bug where if you comment on a post that a mod later removes, the notification of someone responding to you has no way to ever be removed or even seen, ever again. So what I am saying is… I really cannot even so much recommend that they come here, just yet? I am a techie person and can patiently deal with these things, but most of them are not, and won’t.

But you cannot control them. You can only control yourself. Which you did? Thus, good for you! YOU at least did the right thing. Maybe others will follow your lead, especially as the software gets better (Kbin in particular is more in its infancy than Lemmy - like iirc it even has zero moderation tools right now!?), or maybe they will not, but that again is on them. You at least showed them the way.

Fair enough. Although, I remember seeing stats on how much their traffic was down in those 48 hours, and it wasn’t much, I don’t think they even broke 10%.

At this point, the only way to truly hurt Reddit is to move the community to another platform.

Just wanted to chime in as another mod mentioned in the article who has been communicating back and forth with Ms. Harding over the last few weeks. I’m also burnt out on the idea of being a mod again. It’s just not worth it, especially when I have so many other things to occupy my time with.

As someone with no interest in canning whatsoever, I just want to thank you and your fellow mod below for contributing your niche expertise and no doubt enormous amounts of time and passion to the internet.

People call modding a thankless task, and at times like this it must surely feel that way, but countless people will have silently thanked you as they benefitted from your expertise and willingness to share it freely. You represent what humanity and science and education should really be about, for that I deeply appreciate your efforts.

Thank you so much for your service. I was a mod of a tiny gaming sub and so got only the barely taste of what you must have experienced daily. In my case we argued endlessly (& unfortunately sometimes toxically) which game mechanics are “better” to take advantage of, while you are over there dealing with literally potential life-and-death situations! (edit: oh, well it at least is true for some mods, even if not you, but I still thank you for all your efforts nonetheless!:-P) (I hoped that during a pandemic I was at least helping people deal emotionally with being indoors all the time, plus just in general trying to encourage good behavior within society, but it is nowhere near the same I am sure:-P) I can only imagine the stress you had to go through here during the fall of Reddit, but I do not have to imagine that feeling of burn-out: most mods actually who really truly care about their communities only last a handful of years if that (I think I read somewhere that the average was like 1-2 years).

You deserve peace, and maybe you’ll find some other way to contribute to your community - in fact you definitely will, though it may not be on the internet next time:-). Also, I noticed that a lot of the stressful situations I encountered were due to Reddit changing its nature YEARS before Huffman did this recent fiasco - it encouraged people to speak rather than listen, e.g. to perhaps ask for recipes rather than do a search for pre-existing ones. An additional post = an additional metric to count and potentially an additional advertisement to display, while a search showing “canned” results (hehehe pun intended:-P) did not gather them as much profit, but then the former added to your workload whereas the latter would not, so a great deal of the problems that mods faced were issues of Reddit’s own devising, I think. At least in quantity if not in quality.

But also in quality too b/c it changed the very focus away from finding facts and towards encouraging the lonely to speak with others, in a manner in which “facts” can take a backseat to that human connection… which can get some people killed in the process.:-(

So I definitely understand why you would want to distance yourself from all of that. Me too. The need will be met in some other way - maybe via books, magazines, or websites with only vetted authors allowed, or perhaps with disclaimers added to every submission, and maybe a paid curation staff, or even AI tools scanning for common misinformation specific to that genre, I don’t know. But in any case, I did want to thank you for your own efforts. I have no interest in any of those communities so never once went to any of those, but I do like to see people volunteering their time to help other human beings:-).

Thanks for contributing to the article by agreeing to be interviewed for it. How did they track you down, if you don’t mind me asking?

I was the sole mod of /r/skin until I got warned about the subreddit being private in protest.

I originally took it over because it was 100% spam and scams and the previous mod hadn’t been on Reddit for years. It took a year before the spammers gave up. When I left I turned off the automod and the spammers will return. So much for trying to build a helpful space.

Burggit.moe is where a lot of the anime porn subs left for

Thanks for taking the time to respond, even though I was critical! Sure, I have no disagreement with anything you said in your reply. I’m also involved in hobbies where bad information can hurt people (including canning and foraging for mushrooms), and I’m obviously against knowledgeable people being removed from positions of authority in these communities. This post bolds the text about being worried that new mods may miss something that the old mods wouldn’t, which could lead to someone getting hurt. I saw that, and that a couple of early comments latched onto it as a focus. I had broccoli in a wok that I needed to get back to and just fired off a quick comment as a bit of infernal advocacy that the replacement of mod powers probably isn’t as dire as the quote makes it sound.

Mod of /r/homeautomation here (mentioned in the article as “Dan”) and yeah, you pretty much nailed it. In our case the biggest concern was amateurs working with electricity. The “which wire is which” posts were often greeted with a “black hot, white neutral” response which on the surface is generally correct. However, there are lots of cases (especially in houses older than say 20 years) where that can be wrong and dangerous. It’s further complicated by the fact that multiple live circuits can exist in the same box so even if you killed power to the light you are working on the box may still have live wires.

As with canning, homeowners dying from electrocution is rare, but it doesn’t negate the danger. I’ll wire shit hot all the time (much to my wife’s annoyance) but I’ve been doing this for years and with lots of guidance and supervision. I will also very much KNOW what’s hot and what’s not both through a no-contact probe and a voltmeter. Electricity isn’t something people should be messing around with if they don’t have at least a basic understanding.

I’ve rambled long enough, lol. Funny enough, I also live in the state where the train derailment happened in February (though I was nowhere near it).