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?
What’s the community called if we may ask?
Let us help you move it over to Lemmy, and take over mod responsibilities
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
Self post obfuscated links and references to Lemmy.
Make it enough of a challenge that only the curious users are sufficiently motivated.
???
Profit.
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
Just walk away, let it crumble, and accept the time and effort you put in are a sunk cost.
Perhaps make a pinned post saying what’s happening and why, a plug for the Fediverse, and leave.
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.
Can you change the name? Changing it to something radically different would get the job done. Especially if it’s weird and gross
Start banning the top poster every day.
The simple answer is I don’t think you shoul. if there is a community that is so big, even if you’re a moderator that doesn’t give you the right to kill the community.
If in your opinion this community is harmful and violates the rules of reddit you can report it. But for anything else if you don’t want to be a part of it, Just don’t be a part of it.
If you would like this community to also exist in Lemmy, open a community in Lemmy, moderate it and pin it in the subreddit. But at the end of the day, it is not your place to decide if a community should exist or not, even if you personally invested a lot of time moderating it.
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.
‘Flaired users only’ Require mod review for flairs.
And just choke it to death
this seems like a pretty simple, effective, and believable solution
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.
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!
Don’t forget to somehow sprinkle info about the existence of lemmy somehow, if you think that type of average person would be good for lemmy
Eh… do we want people to associate lemmy with an abusive mod?
Nah you do it as an alias. Create an alt which takes up the fight with the abusive mod.
