I run a moderatly successful Subreddit (~200.000 subscribers), but I want to stop. I have no interest in moderating it anymore, but Reddit as a company has totally made it clear that it is viewing subreddits as its own property:
- As far as I know I can’t take a subreddit of this size private anymore
- If I just stop moderating, people still can post and will post problematic content that I don’t want to see online
- If i stop moderating, somebody else can “claim” the sub and will be the new moderator, which I also don’t want
Does anybody here have experience in stopping a subreddit that doesn’t lead to Reddit just placing new people in control? I’ve already removed the option for the sub to be recommended to users and for it to be shown in “high traffic feeds” (which always led to nazi showing up btw), but I also was thinking about a way to restrict who can post or to set extreme high karma requirements for posts. Or are there any other options?
Be as toxic of a mod as you can be lol.
Delete posts and comments at random
Ban users
That would could simply get them replaced, and the subreddit might continue under new management.
Can you change the name? Changing it to something radically different would get the job done. Especially if it’s weird and gross
You can do “temporary events” without approval where you just claim there are too many new people and can shut down most posting/commenting for a week. Not sure if there’s an explicit limit, but if you do it too many times they’ll probably take the sub from you.
You can disable video and images, go text-only, and turn off media in comments. You can set the wrong language so it gets surfaced to the wrong people. Max out all “safety filters”. Arbitrarily mute and ban people, and don’t respond or explain why. Become extremely hardline about something stupid, add it to the rules and be as insufferable as possible about it. There will be a lot less oversight if you pretend the changes are you taking some strong moral position on something.
A good one to go for is spam. Basically consider any mention of any brand/product/show/site/etc advertising and pretend everyone is an astroturf bot and be ban happy. Since a large chunk of reddit is actually this it will be hard for admin to figure out when you aren’t acting in good faith. Other good things to go after are kids or adult content, or things that it would look bad for a public company to be defending.
Set up automoderators that remove really broad sets of keywords that could arguably be related to what you’re going after, but are going to have tons of false positives. If the keywords overlap with what the sub is about, even better.
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.
Start banning the top poster every day.
I would love to read the ban message. "You violated rule #15, don’t be the top poster of the day "
Add a link to a lemmy community in every automod comment, make every user manually approved.
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.
And frankly he’s being incredibly selfish to try this. 200,000 people apparently enjoy his sub, but now that he’s bored with it he’d rather see it destroyed than let someone else handle it.
Might not necessarily be as narcissistic as you imply. If this person created the sub, and is still the only mod, then it wouldn’t really exist without them.
I’m not saying they own it, but if you’ve built something from the beginning, even if the work isn’t 100% your own it’s extremely difficult to abandon it. It’s similar to open source software. How would you like it if some corpo, lobbyist, PsyOps operation, or straight dumbass, took the thing you built and co-opted it for personal gain? Just like software, they may feel an obligation to ensure it won’t fall into the wrong hands or be bastardized.
The Reddit corporation doesn’t give a fuck. They are the enemy of the entire user base.
Might not necessarily be as narcissistic as you imply. If this person created the sub, and is still the only mod, then it wouldn’t really exist without them.
No, but maybe it can exist without him. Out of 200,000 subscribers someone could want to step up and take over.
The Reddit corporation doesn’t give a fuck.
200,000 people might give a fuck.
Then 1 of those 200,000 can make a new sub and use their own leg work that OP did.
Then they can make a new sub and pointlessly use their own leg work.
The existing sub is right there. OP wants to walk away from it. There’s absolutely no point to burning it to the ground and forcing someone else to do a bunch of work to recreate it, it’s just petty.
I’ve had to deal with this sort of “if I can’t have it nobody can” mentality in online communities before, helping rebuild the ruins of something that someone pointlessly destroyed on their way out the door, and it massively sucks. OP’s just going to make everyone hate him.
Eh, I believe the creator of something can do whatever they want with their creation.
So if Linus Torvalds were to announce one day “I’m tired of Linux, time to burn it all down” that’d be fine? Someone else can just create a new operating system, after all.
The point here is that OP may have “created” the subreddit in the sense of clicking a few buttons and filling out some text fields, but at this point it’s a community with 200,000 participants. Those participants also share in its ownership. Forcing them to jump through hoops recreating the whole thing just because OP’s decided he wants a Viking funeral is selfish.
Sell it. There are websites for it
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.
Start mass posting suppressed news. Seems to do it fast enough.
What’s the community called if we may ask?
Let us help you move it over to Lemmy, and take over mod responsibilities
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
They’re a reddit mod, seems par for the course
Can you make the sub private and for a couple months maintain it as “active” with low-effort posts vaguely on topic by a select few users?
Only answer so far that might maybe work.
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.
Yes and no. First of all, there is nobody who wants to take over. So the option is “abandon it” vs. “kill it”. Reddits actions in regard of their mods do have consequences. And it also doesn’t belong to the community as Reddit is actively claiming ownership. So to take your church analogy: The pastor wants to quit. The bishop claims ownership and control of everything, is actively harming the community, but can’t provide a replacement priest.
And in my opinion it is better to stop projects like this instead of abandoning them as abandoned places & subreddits will get taken over by spammers, crazy people and full on nazis.
How do you know there is nobody who wants to take over? Have you posted on the community about it? Or on one of the moderator communities?
I think it’s kinda like the reason we not only stopped contributing to Reddit, but also deleted all our posts: we don’t want to use and contribute to a platform for capitalists-fascists, even retroactively.
Agreed it seems rather selfish
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.
