I’ve been the main moderator of the same community since 2016. This evening, i approved my last comment.

I’m leaving for two reasons:

  1. Reddit went public a week ago. I didn’t volunteer to work for a publicly traded company, i volunteered to work for a community. As long as i live under capitalism i accept that my labor will generate value for shareholders, but damned if i ever do it for free. (this is not a Faulkner quote)

  2. April 1st is coming and i’m scared they might do another r/place. Doing in r/place 2022 and 2023 has left me dejected and bitter and i don’t want to feel obligated to participate again.

Leaving felt like ripping myself off of something warm i’ve been comfortably glued to for a long time. Still recommend it for anyone still giving Reddit shareholders free labor

EDIT: there are too many comments to respond to, but i’ve appreciated all of them! Thank you

  • Kribensis
    242·
    3 months ago

    I’d been on Reddit for 13 years and finally managed to detox by doing two things only.

    • Uninstalling the app from my phone (along with LinkedIn, which I have to use, but despise). Since the browser experience is terrible, that was half the problem.
    • Strategically muting subreddits that annoyed me.

    Wall of text about why (but I’ll use paragraphs):

    In recent years, I started noticing that everything discussion-oriented was either a Dunning-Kruger driven echo chamber or a total circlejerk for the default progressive opinion on that subject. And, anything content-oriented was reposts.

    Quick caveat: I’m not saying that every progressive position is bad, only that I enjoy forming my own positions without getting yelled at. Also, I don’t know OP’s sub and I’m sure it was well-moderated. I’d imagine quitting as a mod would be emotionally harder.

    Anyway, for a few weeks, whenever some low-info/naive/didactic opinion or recycled content popped up, I muted that sub.

    The last to go was my professional sub, since I’m in a small field. But once I realized all I’d done there in 13 years was help people starting out, but never once received help myself (since there are virtually no posters with experience), I was good to go. I can mentor elsewhere and probably help way more.

    Once I muted stuff, I had a few content subs left like r/urbanhell or r/catio, or other fun stuff I want to keep. But my feed is suddenly super quiet, so I just open it once a week, like a magazine.

    It’s not quite quitting, but that’s for when Huffman (or whoever replaces him) realizes that to move the revenue needle, they need to block adblockers like YouTube, or go fucking nuts with sponsored posts, or sell personal data, or build their own LLM on everyone’s posts, or whatever they’re gonna do.

    And it probably won’t be Huffman anyway, since he just dumped half a million shares at $50+ and can therefore buy an island, so he is absolutely out of there 😂

    Meanwhile, if I’m Reddit’s Unix admin or whatever and have waited for years to vest my equity, I can’t even sell for another 5.5 months. It ain’t gonna be $50+ then. Brutal.

    And that’s how it goes. Never again. I don’t miss it, since sending Lemmy memes to my Signal chats replaces most of the hijinks and sex/the outdoors replaces the dopamine.