Wow - thank you for sharing that. There are aspects of this instance I don’t love, but banning over shadow rules is enough for me to consider just going elsewhere.

Censorship of CCP criticism would be in the modlog if it were true. I’ve only been here a couple weeks but the only things I see the admins refuse to tolerate are racism, homophobia, and hate speech in general. They don’t allow porn but that has more to do with practical challenges than any (expressed) problem with other people wanting it.

What do we need to do to move forward?

Accept that much or most of reddit will look normal tomorrow. Reddit will proceed by projecting that everything is normal, whether true or not. Lemmy will continue to be an alternative with FOSS benefits and much smaller communities. Your own habits have to reflect what you want and there’s no wrong answer.

I’m personally elated to find the smaller communities with higher-quality content. Thoughtful comments aren’t buried under piles of karma-seeking horse-beating jokes.

At the same time, reddit continues to offer historical reference that won’t be matched elsewhere anytime soon. I’m not going to rant as if the place has no value, or as if it can be replaced in a few weeks.

Lots to consider.

There are sorts by hot and top, yes. I don’t know the details of voting and/or replies that score comment order.

There’s no accumulated karma score though. People should be less sensitive about downvotes and I’m hoping it will mitigate low effort karma-seeking content, at least somewhat.

That’s fair to point out, but it implies the only utility users provide to the site is ad impressions. I see a couple of reasons this is not the case.

Mods make up a tiny portion of users but are disproportionately 3rd party app users and rely on 3rd party tools. But if any meaningful portion of the mod community leaves? The remainder were going to have a much bigger job without the tools. To attempt the bigger job with a smaller workforce is a double-whammy. Their only option will be to focus on their favorite subs and elevate more members to mods. The inevitable result will be experienced mods being far outnumbered by new mods, all of whom will have to stick to tedious tasks for subs to not be overrun by spam and hate speech. It’s hard not to predict the same result as what’s happened to Twitter’s content.

Now consider nsfw content, which has always made up a huge chunk of reddit’s traffic. Moderation is even more difficult there to begin with and could easily melt down for the same reasons, even setting aside reddit’s growing distaste for it. Reddit is largely young and male and while many users may have no interest in it, the combination of nsfw imgur links going dead, moderation challenges, and the likelihood of reddit cracking down on nsfw is a combination that may cause reddit to be less attractive for many of the young, male userbase to visit.

I think your point still has merit - reddit won’t miss many of the users seeking alternatives. I would say reddit’s casual “I didn’t even know there were 3rd party apps / old.reddit.com” users are also likely to be turned off by the ultimate results of their changes.

Reddit trying to go the slow route, removing one thing at a time, will make it easier for lemmy to scale and grow to accept all the users.

If they did API, old.reddit, and nsfw all at the same time it would be absolutely impossible to accommodate.

I have enough faith in the moderators and the structure of the platform itself that there shouldn’t be too much of a toxicity problem.

My concern: Are there enough moderators for the deluge coming?