That's not really fair. I mean, it is for some, but for most of us, we're just caught in a shitty situation.

I mod (or modded, I suppose) for a medium-sized city subreddit, and it's used for things like news about missing persons, job openings, safety hazards, special events, and so on. Things that are of interest to the actual, physical community. It's an online mirror of our city that took years to develop.

That's really hard to just abandon. At the same time, most of the mods were using RIF or Apollo to stay on top of spammers, trolls, scams, and other objectionable content, and now we're stuck with either the half-baked, laggy, crash-prone nonsense of the official app, or the desktop website.

Neither is any good for properly moderating a busy, active subreddit from a phone. It can't be done.

So mods who care about their communities are trying their best to hold them together while finding a way to protest these changes, and it sucks for everyone involved.

And a lot are working on leaving Reddit and trying to build communities here on Lemmy instead.

Reddit is dying now. It's going to be slow, and it's going to involve mods trying to save their communities for a while, but I don't think anything is really going to save it from this mortal, self-inflicted wound. Give it time... Lemmy is getting better daily, while Reddit is getting worse. And cut the mods who care more about their communities than they do about the specific platform those communities reside on some slack. It's a shitty situation all around.

Are they really? They dedicate their free time to give reddit their power. Reddit is now yelling at them to give power back to themselves despiteb years of saying the opposite.

The minor power trip seems to be the only reason a large number became mods to begin with.

It is rather short-sighted. There is no way Reddit could easily replace all of the moderators, and it would be chaos if they removed all of them at once, but Reddit threatening them works because they know they're scared of losing control of their communities.

Hopefully it lands next diaper or detergent...

God how bad would that be... Big company paying spez and he places their product next to thicc young lady with big titties... The horror!

As I understand it, the sub being flagged NSFW as a whole means Reddit can't sell ads on it, whereas general subs with NSFW content are considered fine (like AskReddit, where "what's the sexiest sex you've ever sexed?" comes up about twice a week). The subs would need to be flooded with NSFW content that is upvoted above anything SFW for several days and a campaign to highlight this to advertisers to effect change in this way, and I'm sure the admins would yell at them before it got that far and the moderators would crumble again.

Mods are like game devs, the powers that be know they can treat them like absolute shit because there is an endless supply of replacements who are willing to be treated like shit for the opportunity to do the work.

Reddit is afraid of its users. They know that being heavy handed on one will cause a way bigger backlash. Doing it to a few subs already caused the protest to swell.

As if they give a crap about app developers.

Or maybe a new (monetized) platform for NSFW content? They're just eliminating competition.

That's what makes this so difficult

Most mods of large subs are addicted to power, even if it's just a facade

They have done so already for a few subs where a few of the mods were willing to budge. In others, all mods were removed and the subs were made restricted.