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?
Just walk away, let it crumble, and accept the time and effort you put in are a sunk cost.
Perhaps make a pinned post saying what’s happening and why, a plug for the Fediverse, and leave.
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.
Start banning the top poster every day.
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.
Add a link to a lemmy community in every automod comment, make every user manually approved.
‘Flaired users only’ Require mod review for flairs.
And just choke it to death
this seems like a pretty simple, effective, and believable solution
You can’t really. It’s that moment when you realize you never “owned” the subreddit in the first place, all your work belonged to reddit.
And frankly he’s being incredibly selfish to try this. 200,000 people apparently enjoy his sub, but now that he’s bored with it he’d rather see it destroyed than let someone else handle it.
Might not necessarily be as narcissistic as you imply. If this person created the sub, and is still the only mod, then it wouldn’t really exist without them.
I’m not saying they own it, but if you’ve built something from the beginning, even if the work isn’t 100% your own it’s extremely difficult to abandon it. It’s similar to open source software. How would you like it if some corpo, lobbyist, PsyOps operation, or straight dumbass, took the thing you built and co-opted it for personal gain? Just like software, they may feel an obligation to ensure it won’t fall into the wrong hands or be bastardized.
The Reddit corporation doesn’t give a fuck. They are the enemy of the entire user base.
Might not necessarily be as narcissistic as you imply. If this person created the sub, and is still the only mod, then it wouldn’t really exist without them.
No, but maybe it can exist without him. Out of 200,000 subscribers someone could want to step up and take over.
The Reddit corporation doesn’t give a fuck.
200,000 people might give a fuck.
Then 1 of those 200,000 can make a new sub and use their own leg work that OP did.
Then they can make a new sub and pointlessly use their own leg work.
The existing sub is right there. OP wants to walk away from it. There’s absolutely no point to burning it to the ground and forcing someone else to do a bunch of work to recreate it, it’s just petty.
I’ve had to deal with this sort of “if I can’t have it nobody can” mentality in online communities before, helping rebuild the ruins of something that someone pointlessly destroyed on their way out the door, and it massively sucks. OP’s just going to make everyone hate him.
Eh, I believe the creator of something can do whatever they want with their creation.
So if Linus Torvalds were to announce one day “I’m tired of Linux, time to burn it all down” that’d be fine? Someone else can just create a new operating system, after all.
The point here is that OP may have “created” the subreddit in the sense of clicking a few buttons and filling out some text fields, but at this point it’s a community with 200,000 participants. Those participants also share in its ownership. Forcing them to jump through hoops recreating the whole thing just because OP’s decided he wants a Viking funeral is selfish.
I haven’t delved into the other posts, so sorry if this is a duplication.
What if you make a post saying posts to the sub will now require manual review and as the only mod, you log in occasionally and approve posts.
Probably add some automod restrictions for comments too.
Who knows when you’ll get a chance to approve posts.
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.
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.
Instead of killing it, what about creating an official sister community here, and encouraging people to use it. Being under the same moderation and having the same rules can go a long way towards establishing that trust. While reddit still won’t like it, it would look terrible on them if they tried to stop it.
It’s already here :)
well, can we get a plug? i dont see any moderated subs from your user info
well, they said they had no interest in moderating anymore.
You can do “temporary events” without approval where you just claim there are too many new people and can shut down most posting/commenting for a week. Not sure if there’s an explicit limit, but if you do it too many times they’ll probably take the sub from you.
You can disable video and images, go text-only, and turn off media in comments. You can set the wrong language so it gets surfaced to the wrong people. Max out all “safety filters”. Arbitrarily mute and ban people, and don’t respond or explain why. Become extremely hardline about something stupid, add it to the rules and be as insufferable as possible about it. There will be a lot less oversight if you pretend the changes are you taking some strong moral position on something.
A good one to go for is spam. Basically consider any mention of any brand/product/show/site/etc advertising and pretend everyone is an astroturf bot and be ban happy. Since a large chunk of reddit is actually this it will be hard for admin to figure out when you aren’t acting in good faith. Other good things to go after are kids or adult content, or things that it would look bad for a public company to be defending.
Set up automoderators that remove really broad sets of keywords that could arguably be related to what you’re going after, but are going to have tons of false positives. If the keywords overlap with what the sub is about, even better.
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
Make onerous rules and restrictions. Hold posts for moderation and make them answer questions. Don’t accept the answers. Shadowban regular contributors.
That’s Reddit, so you should solve the problem in a Reddit way: start banning everyone and delete threads. It’ll become empty in no time.
until they restore the threads, remove the OP from the mod position, and appoint a new one.
