There is a social contract and moderator effort to make that happen. When that contract is broken and moderators are stretched thin, how long is that subreddit still going to be just cute animals?
I'm betting all subreddits soon turn into /r/eyeblech (gore/death/dismemberment gifs). Not necessarily illegal, but definitely not what you're looking for when you go to /r/awww
But I think there's enough active, and willing mods who already manage several large subreddits (10m+) capable of managing the half a dozen or so subs that I mentioned.
And I'm only talking about 6 subs, not even 10's of subs.
I just don't think theres enough ambiguity/complexity with moderating those in regards to choosing what content is or isn't appropriate for that sub.
But either way I truly hope we can get old reddit back, api, third party clients, and all :(
If one of Reddits big goals in all this is to sell actually useful information on a broad variety of topics for training LLMs (I think they’ve basically said as much), then I’m not sure that only being able to prop up a few meme and cute animal subreddits is that much of a win.
It’s the long tail of niche subreddits where almost all the content that keeps Reddit at the top of SEO rankings and makes them interesting for training AI lives.
can you name a single from r/aww ? Could you even tell if they reopened it with new mods? People are not that passionate about mods from a sub about cute animals.
Even in subs where people are very passionate about moderation, they just give up and forget about it very quickly because it's not worth it. r/Animemes/ still has orders of magnitude more visitors than the alternative people moved to after their big mod drama.
Extremely few people interacts with mods and care about them
There is a social contract and moderator effort to make that happen. When that contract is broken and moderators are stretched thin, how long is that subreddit still going to be just cute animals?