This is a fantastic comment, but I think it’s a little bit too focused on the platform and not enough on the community. I’m the mod of a couple of subreddits in the 6-digit subscriber range as well as a couple of much smaller ones. The reason I do it is entirely because of the community. Reddit as a platform has been going downhill for a long time, but it has excellent communities. I really enjoyed interacting with the people in my community, or sharing and discussing content I cared about. And while moderating provides value to Reddit as a company, it also provides value to the community.
The company, of course, knows this, and that’s why it thinks it’s able to strongarm us into doing its bidding. It thinks our love of the community is greater than our hate for their actions. I hope they’re wrong, but the response I’ve seen in comments on Reddit so far tells me that at least some users not just don’t mind what Reddit’s doing, but are actively supportive of it. That is…disheartening, to say the least.
My community is wherever I happen to be. Obviously I don’t know what you mod, but yesterday I probably wasn’t part of your community. Today it seems I am. Tomorrow is feeling pretty far away to know for certain. I can say I feel zero attachment to Reddit the URL or my account, which I recycle every few years anyway for privacy.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had a lot of good conversations there, but I couldn’t name a single /u I’ve ever interacted with. The anonymous interactions are the point for me. Lemmy doesn’t have to be Reddit, it just has to be big enough that it gives me enough to think about and talk about in my downtime. I won’t miss Reddit at all.
My experience of Reddit was obviously very different from yours then. I know a number of people directly by their usernames who I would say I’m quite fond of, and who I considered—not quite friends exactly, but pretty close to it. A few users I have met in-person and had drinks with.
I’ve had the same account for 11 years, and in that time have interacted with a lot of people and had what I considered very valuable discussion. It’s sentimental, but I value that. I’m saddened to see it go away.
There are more pragmatic reasons to be sad about Reddit’s demise too. The fact that you could just append “reddit” to nearly any Google Search and get results that were usually far better than the often-clickbait-ridden results that would turn up otherwise was made possible by Reddit’s scale. That’s a very valuable aspect that will be gone.
This is a fantastic comment, but I think it’s a little bit too focused on the platform and not enough on the community. I’m the mod of a couple of subreddits in the 6-digit subscriber range as well as a couple of much smaller ones. The reason I do it is entirely because of the community. Reddit as a platform has been going downhill for a long time, but it has excellent communities. I really enjoyed interacting with the people in my community, or sharing and discussing content I cared about. And while moderating provides value to Reddit as a company, it also provides value to the community.
The company, of course, knows this, and that’s why it thinks it’s able to strongarm us into doing its bidding. It thinks our love of the community is greater than our hate for their actions. I hope they’re wrong, but the response I’ve seen in comments on Reddit so far tells me that at least some users not just don’t mind what Reddit’s doing, but are actively supportive of it. That is…disheartening, to say the least.
My community is wherever I happen to be. Obviously I don’t know what you mod, but yesterday I probably wasn’t part of your community. Today it seems I am. Tomorrow is feeling pretty far away to know for certain. I can say I feel zero attachment to Reddit the URL or my account, which I recycle every few years anyway for privacy.
Don’t get me wrong, I’ve had a lot of good conversations there, but I couldn’t name a single /u I’ve ever interacted with. The anonymous interactions are the point for me. Lemmy doesn’t have to be Reddit, it just has to be big enough that it gives me enough to think about and talk about in my downtime. I won’t miss Reddit at all.
My experience of Reddit was obviously very different from yours then. I know a number of people directly by their usernames who I would say I’m quite fond of, and who I considered—not quite friends exactly, but pretty close to it. A few users I have met in-person and had drinks with.
I’ve had the same account for 11 years, and in that time have interacted with a lot of people and had what I considered very valuable discussion. It’s sentimental, but I value that. I’m saddened to see it go away.
There are more pragmatic reasons to be sad about Reddit’s demise too. The fact that you could just append “reddit” to nearly any Google Search and get results that were usually far better than the often-clickbait-ridden results that would turn up otherwise was made possible by Reddit’s scale. That’s a very valuable aspect that will be gone.