Steve Huffman went on a media offensive where he attempted to cast aggrieved users and moderators, many of whom give countless hours of their free time to make Reddit the vibrant platform it is today, as unreasonable. “These people who are mad, they’re mad because they used to get something for free, and now it’s going to be not free,”
Oh the fucking irony of the guy whose site can't survive without millions of free hours from dedicated mod teams, who spend their entire duration criticised (sometimes tightly, sometimes wrongly,) shit on, harassed, and often doxxed and threatened by the user base
My time as a Reddit mod left me with no desire to do it elsewhere and I'd modded other forums prior to Reddit. I stepped down about 5 years ago and while I won't say I'll never do it again, I'm exhausted just recalling my experience and that's enough to put me off.
There are communities I'd love to have and see here on kbin but the mere thought of the time and effort has me taking a hard pass.
I modded 2 niche communities, and it was a relief to leave and resign. I haven't felt so free to express a real opinion in a long time. Even alts aren't safe because you have an chair linguists.
Mods of bigger subs, good and bad do a job I wouldn't ever want
I'm not sure where it ranked at the time but I remember when one of the subs hit 100k (this was circa 2014) and by the time I left we were close to 500k. When I checked before the blackout they were sitting at 1.9m.
You're absolutely right about an alt not doing much, if you ever had time for that. Modding definitely affected my Reddit experience, even after stepping down, and combined with how it changed over the last several years, my participation went way down, maybe a handful of comments a month at best, and I lurked and upvoted/downvoted for the most part. I'm slowly shaking off those cobwebs in this exciting new space!