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comment by syncretic
syncretic  ·  4094 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: So I deleted my reddit account...

    What particularly made you quit?

I liked moderating when we had admin support. We no longer have admin support, so I really didn't feel like moderating anymore. My "syncretic" account was pretty much just for creating subreddits, submitting content to those subreddits, and moderating those subreddits. I felt a responsibility to those subreddits because I had created them or at the very least I was a senior mod. I'll still use reddit, I just don't care about it anymore, I'm not emotionally invested in it anymore, and I don't trust a single word that comes out of any admin's mouth.

Several events in the last several months have made me realize that I am an unpaid volunteer for a corporation that really doesn't care about quality over quantity. They want pageviews, they want internet power. Look what they did when SOPA and PIPA threaten their existence. Shut down the entire website in protest and start the ball rolling for dozens of other sites to do so as well. What do they do when Gawker publicly outs one of the most prolific moderators and community builders on the site? They banned the article site-wide for doxing (as they should have), then unbanned a few hours later, then they said absolutely nothing for several days while the mods scrambled to figure out what to do (do we remove it, do we approve it, do we boycott Gawker Media?), and then instead of a public statement in /r/announcements (like, oh, I don't know, a condemnation of Gawker), they make some stupid post in the mod back room about how this is a "complicated issue" etc etc.

What would they have done if some Mens Rights blog outed the identity of someone from the LGBT community? Oh wait, that happened, and they manually went into the subreddit to remove the post, against the wishes of a moderator. Yes, that was the right thing to do, but it just shows you how they enforce the rules however they please, and only when they aren't going to get bad press as a result.

Fuck them.

    Are you reading your "omg syncretic quit" threads?

Hmm....

<goes to investigate>





Laurelai  ·  4094 days ago  ·  link  ·  

>What would they have done if some Mens Rights blog outed the identity of someone from the LGBT community?

They didnt do a damn thing when agentorange doxed all those feminists until a year later. And /r/mensrights still links to a voice for men.

Ethan  ·  4094 days ago  ·  link  ·  

>Look what they did when SOPA and PIPA threaten their existence.

Uh, I'm pretty sure any business would protest a law threatening their existence.

starberry697  ·  4094 days ago  ·  link  ·  

Were you friends with VA? I think it is pretty hard for an average person to understand "jailbait" and his other less distasteful subreddits, so dropping him rather then supporting him was pretty much the best option they had. i don't know much aside from that he modded /r/wtf and NSFW subreddits, as well as glomming onto creepshots when it became controversial. I also asked him a few questions after jailbait was banned and he said he removed content that could be considered pornographic (the lose defininition where even if they are clothed but in a pornographic pose), but then I saw him defending the 14 year old girls ass because "he couldn't see her date of birth tattoeed on her ass". I've being doxxed and every time I mention people blame me for it being doable. When does personal responsibilty come into it?

syncretic  ·  4085 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    Were you friends with VA?

I wouldn't call him a friend, you could even say we disliked each other, we certainly clashed enough as moderators and there was a large amount of drama when I banned him from /r/TheoryOfReddit. However, I respected him as a moderator and I certainly didn't think he deserved to have his life ruined like that over his online activities. He was very helpful in the mod community, he was a moderator of /r/modhelp I believe, and he also created a new moderator guide that was very educational. He personally inspired me to become a moderator. Even though I wasn't really into the NSFW side of reddit (although I once created a few successful ones just to see if I could), studying his posting history showed me that it really wasn't that hard to just dive into creating new subreddits. All you had to do was seed them with content and start talking about them & linking to them in other subreddits.