Some of the smaller communities only exist because someone created and promoted them, set ground rules, etc.

In the olden days the subreddit would be their personal PHPBB forum.

Now they are just sharecroppers for Reddit, and guess what, Reddit isn't a better admin.

Most of the smaller communities only exist because someone was first to take the subreddit name, period. That doesn't say anything about the quality of their mods. And as I said most mods are power tripping and/or want to control the conversation. I am glad that they are getting removed for the good of the community.

Yeah, it's not nearly as clear cut as someone running their own forum. It's almost irrelevant that someone happened to register /r/politics or r/worldnews first - those are categories of discussion, and so their size is directly proportional to Reddit's size. The moderators don't own that community (even if they think they do). If the moderators declare that they're moving to Lemmy, let them. I think they'll quickly realise that people aren't on those subreddits because of them.

There's a real frustration when you join a new subreddit, and you think you're joining a category of discussion and quickly discover (by having a post removed) that this particular category has someone who enforces a huge list of arcane rules.

Obviously there are exceptions. Some subreddits have non-obvious names, and were built into focused communities by the efforts of the moderators. But not all subreddits are equal, and I think this situation has revealed the gulf between them.

>this particular category has someone who enforces a huge list of arcane rules.

and I think a few months with new eyes will show why those arcane rules exist. Losing that tribal knowledge just means the sub will re-experience the same growing pains until we come full circle back to the rules we deemed arcane.

Tech moves fast. Human nature, not so much. social media is a lot more about the latter.

>> this particular category has someone who enforces a huge list of arcane rules.

> [...] I think a few months with new eyes will show why those arcane rules exist. Losing that tribal knowledge just means the sub will re-experience the same growing pains [...]

I also predict that most people will not even recognize that what they are witnessing is a repetition of what happened before. I think the math of growing a community means most users have joined after the rules (that make the community a decent place to be) were established.

I'm curious, what is your experience modding subreddits?

Where is this conversation going? "You don't know how hard mods have it ;( ?"

I think subreddits are better off without mods. Therefore, I have never modded one.

> I think subreddits are better off without mods. Therefore, I have never modded one.

You might enjoy /r/interesting as fuck. They removed all rules except the sitewide rules. It seems to be mostly porn and OF spam now.

I modded a small programming sub for a while (at least several years). Maybe a post per day type of sub.

It was basically no effort. Occasionally, someone would post spam, users would report it, and I’d go “yep, that sure is spam. Remove”. It was just another “mindless action” to take during Reddit time.

I’m sure larger subs are exponential harder to mod.

> small program lying sub

I'm struggling to parse this, maybe partly because of the other small sub that's in the news atm.

Sorry, I’m running iOS 17 Beta. Autocorrect is very good, but slightly different and I don’t notice some of my typos.

Meant to type “programming sub”

>I am glad that they are getting removed for the good of the community.

And you trust the replacements, that in your words are "mostly power tripping and/or want to control the conversation?". Unless you yourself are taking over and trust yourself to not grow to be what you hate?

This sounds more like a revolving door in your eyes than cleaning out the trash. why bother if you haven't addressed the core problem?

Just the fact that the new mods don't think they have the right to keep the entire community hostage makes them better than the replaced ones, yes. Although it would be better not to have any mods at all.

It is incredibly naive and foolish to suggest that no mods is a good idea. That's how you get 4chan,or worse, 8chan, and if places like that are your goal, then you have no business making suggestions for anything.

4chan has lots of mods, called "janitors". You may not agree with the list of rules of every board, but saying 4chan is unmoderated is wrong.

8chan doesn't even exist anymore.

So you have no idea of what you're talking about, which means you have no business making suggestions for anything.

> So you have no idea of what you're talking about, which means you have no business making suggestions for anything.

That's unnecessarily aggressive. I agree with the poster's point, which is that no (or very minimal) moderation gives you results that are very undesirable for most communities.

I copypasted what he said to me.

I liked the old /. system where everyone could be a moderator occasionally, but you couldn't go haywire because you were limited in how many mod actions you could take within a given time window. It wasn't perfect, but it was a nice take on the moderation problem.