How to "kill" a subreddit?

Close the sub for the day when you “don’t have enough mods operating today.” Then open mod applications. Accept no one. Just continue until the subreddit bleeds to nothing in a few weeks, as you’ve broken no rules and redditors are impatient

Edit: and read nothing that you’re sent. Just mark all as read. They will complain loudly. It will spur a reaction that will hinder your plan. Remember your mental health!

Rebuild it on Lemmy, and once enough people have migrated, ditch reddit

Create a bunch of fake reddit accounts (or pay for some botting) that brigade the sub with pro-trump/musk rhetoric. If your users have brains, they'll get pissed and start shit talking the two, saying that trump & musk are existential threats to america and the world, and it's basically guaranteed that someone will say something like "can't wait for those dumb tubs of lard to expire". This is apparently now against Reddit ToS and can get a sub shut down (see r/WhitePeopleTwitter) so just let it get temp banned by admins, then do it again and get permabanned, or use the temp ban (or just warnings) as justification to close commenting and/or posting

Be as toxic of a mod as you can be lol.

Delete posts and comments at random

Ban users

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.

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.

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!

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.

I dislike Reddit too, but why would you want to ruin a subreddit just because you want to stop? What's the problem with finding new mods? This logic seems similar to Reddit's by thinking it's your property, when it should be the community's

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

Doesn’t this seem morally flawed? You moderate a sub, but don’t want to do it anymore and you can’t stand the thought of someone else doing it so you want to just ruin and destroy it? That sounds awful. No, the sub doesn’t belong to you and it doesn’t belong to Reddit either. It belongs to the members because they’re the community. I can’t even comprehend why you feel like it’s something that belongs to you. You moderate as a service to that community, not because you own it. When a pastor retires, they don’t burn down the church they preached in. That church belongs to the people and the pastor was its servant, not its owner.

I would not advise destroying a community like that. I think that would be a waste. So many people are destroying data, knowledge and human alliances, just because they lives on a website that went shitty.

I live in a shitty country. I left the country where I was born because it was shitty, and now I live in a different shitty country. Every computer I have access to has shitty software on it. The internet infrastructure is provided by shitty companies. My food is grown out of shit, and my shit is recycled by shitheads. The universe is a toilet. So what now?

Maybe give your community to someone who cares about it, while promoting an alternative that you care about.

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.

Largely, you'd already gotten good advice on how to sabotage a sub.

The key is automod, but don't forget that the goal is to keep reddit from just undoing it all and replacing you before things get so bad nobody comes back if they do.

So you gotta put some time into it, and implement changes over a few weeks. Start by bumping up the account age setting to something high enough to weed out a lot of casual users but not everyone. Add in some automod filters to remove common things. Let that rest for a day or two, then add in some more filters so that posting becomes harder, but not impossible.

At some point in there, people will complain, so you'll have to tweak automod to remove references to mods as well.

That's the process. By the time things get bad enough that reports would get crazy, enough people should have just left in a huff that the reports don't get so high that reddit pays attention.

By the end of it, any new posts will have to jump though major hoops, so you'll effectively keep out bots. Place a final automod rule requiring some specific words and walk away. That's the best you can do. Maybe reddit undoes it, maybe not, but by the time they get around to it, it won't matter.

I've never moderated anything on reddit but...

Can you just change the topic and start deleting posts which do not align with the new topic ?

... or impose complicated rules about what types of posts are allowed on what days of the week / month.

"post titles can only include the letter B on the second Tuesday of each month!"

These types of shenanigans would surely make it a wasteland for new content. I do wonder how long it would take to actually die though. Would people unsub? The user count might just stagnate for ever.

Sell it. There are websites for it

Like others already said: make it suck. Go into your Joker arc and become the edgelord. You build it and you can destroy it. But you can’t just go full psycho over night. Make it look like you are becoming a power hungry mod with a napoleon complex over the course of a couple of weeks. As soon as some users start their own subreddit start linking there (preferably by making fun of them to stay in character) so the migration keeps going. While this is happening, ban the few contributing users that are still there.

When everything is burned down, post a dick pic on r/mentalhealth, log off and never look back.

PS: Bonus points if you document everything and release it on YouTube.

Get new mods but pick the worst people for the job, at least a half dozen or so. If you get one person and that person abandons their account you're vulnerable to a reddit request, half a dozen and you get more breathing room.

get rid of your automod config (Replace with bans for the words "meta" and "subreddit") and any customizations you've done like icons or whatev.

if its a discussion subreddit, make it links and self posts and allow image uploads.

See if you can find an advertiser to promote their content on your sub. As the mod you control if it stays or not.

Get paid for your power until everyone leaves or you get canned lol

Wasn't there some pop culture subreddit that closed down recently? What was the story/process there?