I run a moderatly successful Subreddit (~200.000 subscribers), but I want to stop. I have no interest in moderating it anymore, but Reddit as a company has totally made it clear that it is viewing subreddits as its own property:
- As far as I know I can’t take a subreddit of this size private anymore
- If I just stop moderating, people still can post and will post problematic content that I don’t want to see online
- If i stop moderating, somebody else can “claim” the sub and will be the new moderator, which I also don’t want
Does anybody here have experience in stopping a subreddit that doesn’t lead to Reddit just placing new people in control? I’ve already removed the option for the sub to be recommended to users and for it to be shown in “high traffic feeds” (which always led to nazi showing up btw), but I also was thinking about a way to restrict who can post or to set extreme high karma requirements for posts. Or are there any other options?
I would not advise destroying a community like that. I think that would be a waste. So many people are destroying data, knowledge and human alliances, just because they lives on a website that went shitty.
I live in a shitty country. I left the country where I was born because it was shitty, and now I live in a different shitty country. Every computer I have access to has shitty software on it. The internet infrastructure is provided by shitty companies. My food is grown out of shit, and my shit is recycled by shitheads. The universe is a toilet. So what now?
Maybe give your community to someone who cares about it, while promoting an alternative that you care about.
All subreddits have power posters. The same 6 names show up far more than any other names. You need allies to poison this well, and these are your potential allies. See if you can get some of them in a private non-reddit forum (I dont advocate discord but it is likely easier). Step 2 is adding rules that enable enshittification. Cutting out rumour and requiring reputable sites. Recent news only. Text only posts must contain a question in the title only. No top level replies to own threads. Off topic chat not allowed. AI hating not allowed. I’m sure there are some more. Step 3: inconsistent modding. Apply these rules only to the non-six. Step 4: your allies then start declaring this subreddit dead and that other communities exist. Whilst they move to Lemmy too
Kill it by making it suck. Apply rules unfairly and inconsistently, but in a way that affords plausible deniability (ex: over-apply them to controversial posts/comments and let mostly harmless stuff slide if it gets enough upvotes). Slowly trickle in new rules that narrow the focus of the community to exclude content. Lock posts as soon as any arguments start to kill overall discussion. Be a petty tyrant, bait arguments and ban people for arguing back.
Not every strategy may necessarily be applicable to your sub, but I bet a lot could be!
Don’t forget to somehow sprinkle info about the existence of lemmy somehow, if you think that type of average person would be good for lemmy
Eh… do we want people to associate lemmy with an abusive mod?
Nah you do it as an alias. Create an alt which takes up the fight with the abusive mod.
Like others already said: make it suck. Go into your Joker arc and become the edgelord. You build it and you can destroy it. But you can’t just go full psycho over night. Make it look like you are becoming a power hungry mod with a napoleon complex over the course of a couple of weeks. As soon as some users start their own subreddit start linking there (preferably by making fun of them to stay in character) so the migration keeps going. While this is happening, ban the few contributing users that are still there.
When everything is burned down, post a dick pic on r/mentalhealth, log off and never look back.
PS: Bonus points if you document everything and release it on YouTube.
Sell it. There are websites for it
‘Flaired users only’ Require mod review for flairs.
And just choke it to death
this seems like a pretty simple, effective, and believable solution
The simple answer is I don’t think you shoul. if there is a community that is so big, even if you’re a moderator that doesn’t give you the right to kill the community.
If in your opinion this community is harmful and violates the rules of reddit you can report it. But for anything else if you don’t want to be a part of it, Just don’t be a part of it.
If you would like this community to also exist in Lemmy, open a community in Lemmy, moderate it and pin it in the subreddit. But at the end of the day, it is not your place to decide if a community should exist or not, even if you personally invested a lot of time moderating it.
Get new mods but pick the worst people for the job, at least a half dozen or so. If you get one person and that person abandons their account you’re vulnerable to a reddit request, half a dozen and you get more breathing room.
get rid of your automod config (Replace with bans for the words “meta” and “subreddit”) and any customizations you’ve done like icons or whatev.
if its a discussion subreddit, make it links and self posts and allow image uploads.
Wasn’t there some pop culture subreddit that closed down recently? What was the story/process there?
The only active mod got permabanned due to Reddit’s rule changes.
I don’t expect the sub will stay closed forever, though. Reddit almost certainly will install a new mod to lead the subreddit. No, if you want to truly kill a subreddit, you’ll have to destroy the subreddit’s reputation beyond what can be salvaged with a mod change
Can you change the name? Changing it to something radically different would get the job done. Especially if it’s weird and gross
Doesn’t this seem morally flawed? You moderate a sub, but don’t want to do it anymore and you can’t stand the thought of someone else doing it so you want to just ruin and destroy it? That sounds awful. No, the sub doesn’t belong to you and it doesn’t belong to Reddit either. It belongs to the members because they’re the community. I can’t even comprehend why you feel like it’s something that belongs to you. You moderate as a service to that community, not because you own it. When a pastor retires, they don’t burn down the church they preached in. That church belongs to the people and the pastor was its servant, not its owner.
I think it’s kinda like the reason we not only stopped contributing to Reddit, but also deleted all our posts: we don’t want to use and contribute to a platform for capitalists-fascists, even retroactively.
Agreed it seems rather selfish
Yes and no. First of all, there is nobody who wants to take over. So the option is “abandon it” vs. “kill it”. Reddits actions in regard of their mods do have consequences. And it also doesn’t belong to the community as Reddit is actively claiming ownership. So to take your church analogy: The pastor wants to quit. The bishop claims ownership and control of everything, is actively harming the community, but can’t provide a replacement priest.
And in my opinion it is better to stop projects like this instead of abandoning them as abandoned places & subreddits will get taken over by spammers, crazy people and full on nazis.
How do you know there is nobody who wants to take over? Have you posted on the community about it? Or on one of the moderator communities?
Add a link to a lemmy community in every automod comment, make every user manually approved.
Probably best thing to do would be to plug lemmy a couple times, do it in a couple pinned posts, in the wiki, in the welcome bot message, and create the alternative you’ve always wanted here.
I’ve never moderated anything on reddit but…
Can you just change the topic and start deleting posts which do not align with the new topic ?
… or impose complicated rules about what types of posts are allowed on what days of the week / month.
“post titles can only include the letter B on the second Tuesday of each month!”
These types of shenanigans would surely make it a wasteland for new content. I do wonder how long it would take to actually die though. Would people unsub? The user count might just stagnate for ever.
Your requirements appear to be contradictory. You want to kill it, i.e. not see it any more, and you want to stop moderating it, but you don’t want anyone else to moderate it.
So stop moderating it, and block it. It’s not up to you to tell 200,000 people that they can’t continue to have a community; doing so makes you appear to be acting as some kind of landed gentry. Just walk away and don’t look back.
