I should begin by mentioning that I am (was) a moderator of three subreddits: one large subreddit, one NSFW subreddit and a medical-related subreddit. After u/spez’s calamitous AMA, I joined Lemmy and haven’t looked back. I am really enjoying the Lemmy/KBin vibe. It is very much an alpha (almost beta) product and the ad free, corporate free, decentralized nature of the fediverse has a thrill of its own.
Over the past couple of months, Reddit has done everything it can to show its moderators that they are low-value and easily replaceable. They’ve done this by removing technical tools, killing off third party applications, crippling API changes and jaw-droppingly bad public relations. Heavily used products like /r/toolbox are no longer being actively developed. When Reddit API implements a breaking, non-backwards compatible change, that tool will also die.
Yet the moderators of Reddit continue to moderate. They stay and help Reddit build Reddit. They continue to work for free; to allow Reddit to make money off of their work despite being abused. When I see things like the comment section on this post, I no longer feel sorry for the Reddit moderators still on the site. I see them as a sad, sorry group who cling to the false hope of a corporate turnaround. They could leave Reddit. They should leave Reddit.
These moderators are in an abusive relationship with Reddit, Inc. I might understand the argument, “we built this community, we can’t just abandon it”. But would you give the same advice to someone else in an abusive relationship? I get that the analogy between the mods and the corp is an imperfect one, yet it is similar enough to be valid, in my opinion.
Moderating is really hard. It is hard and thankless and never-ending. Finding good moderators who can handle the marathon nature of the gig is incredibly difficult. If Reddit moderators were to delete their moderating bots, downgrade their automod “code” and dial back their modding efforts to 5 min/week or less, it would materially hurt Reddit as a product.
The sunk-cost fallacy is a real thing. If the Reddit mods understood this, they’d take their talents elsewhere. But as long as they continue to help Reddit build Reddit, one shouldn’t feel sorry for them.
They could leave. I did and I’ve never been happier.
This does raise an interesting point - subreddits that were not so popular in the old world could take advantage of the communities goldrush - ie, many users looking for communities they’re interested in, on lemmy instances.
When there are a lot fewer communities, with a lot less content, even niche communities have a pretty good chance of people subbing to them, if not for anything else, just to populate currently sparse selection of content.
Might also have something to do with Lemmy’s early adopters being a lot of Millennial and late Gen X folks. People seemed to enjoy the nostalgia.
But yeah, it’s a lot easier to gain traction with a new community on Lemmy. All you need is a silly idea, content, and the motivation to let people know it exists.
On your first point - I suppose you’re right. I don’t think it’s just the nostalgia though - I feel like newer generations are getting more and more computer illiterate, as corporate built software is architected to have the least learning curve, and the least amount of user debugging or customisation. The older generations in contrast grew up having to fix or Jerry rig computer stuff, simply because it wasn’t as polished back then as now.
I read an essay exploring this many years ago. If you’re interested, I’ll go dig up the source for you.