20h ago

How to "kill" a subreddit?

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?

53 comments

Rebuild it on Lemmy, and once enough people have migrated, ditch reddit

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

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?

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 change the name? Changing it to something radically different would get the job done. Especially if it's weird and gross

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.

Start banning the top poster every day.

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.

Add a link to a lemmy community in every automod comment, make every user manually approved.

'Flaired users only' Require mod review for flairs.
- And just choke it to death
  
  this seems like a pretty simple, effective, and believable solution

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.

I haven't delved into the other posts, so sorry if this is a duplication.
What if you make a post saying posts to the sub will now require manual review and as the only mod, you log in occasionally and approve posts.
Probably add some automod restrictions for comments too.
Who knows when you'll get a chance to approve posts.

Probably best thing to do would be to plug lemmy a couple times, do it in a couple pinned posts, in the wiki, in the welcome bot message, and create the alternative you’ve always wanted here.

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?

Instead of killing it, what about creating an official sister community here, and encouraging people to use it. Being under the same moderation and having the same rules can go a long way towards establishing that trust. While reddit still won't like it, it would look terrible on them if they tried to stop it.
- It's already here :)
  
  well, can we get a plug? i dont see any moderated subs from your user info
- well, they said they had no interest in moderating anymore.

You can do “temporary events” without approval where you just claim there are too many new people and can shut down most posting/commenting for a week. Not sure if there’s an explicit limit, but if you do it too many times they’ll probably take the sub from you.
You can disable video and images, go text-only, and turn off media in comments. You can set the wrong language so it gets surfaced to the wrong people. Max out all “safety filters”. Arbitrarily mute and ban people, and don’t respond or explain why. Become extremely hardline about something stupid, add it to the rules and be as insufferable as possible about it. There will be a lot less oversight if you pretend the changes are you taking some strong moral position on something.
A good one to go for is spam. Basically consider any mention of any brand/product/show/site/etc advertising and pretend everyone is an astroturf bot and be ban happy. Since a large chunk of reddit is actually this it will be hard for admin to figure out when you aren’t acting in good faith. Other good things to go after are kids or adult content, or things that it would look bad for a public company to be defending.
Set up automoderators that remove really broad sets of keywords that could arguably be related to what you’re going after, but are going to have tons of false positives. If the keywords overlap with what the sub is about, even better.

All subreddits have power posters. The same 6 names show up far more than any other names. You need allies to poison this well, and these are your potential allies. See if you can get some of them in a private non-reddit forum (I dont advocate discord but it is likely easier). Step 2 is adding rules that enable enshittification. Cutting out rumour and requiring reputable sites. Recent news only. Text only posts must contain a question in the title only. No top level replies to own threads. Off topic chat not allowed. AI hating not allowed. I'm sure there are some more. Step 3: inconsistent modding. Apply these rules only to the non-six. Step 4: your allies then start declaring this subreddit dead and that other communities exist. Whilst they move to Lemmy too

Make onerous rules and restrictions. Hold posts for moderation and make them answer questions. Don’t accept the answers. Shadowban regular contributors.

I dislike Reddit too, but why would you want to ruin a subreddit just because you want to stop? What's the problem with finding new mods? This logic seems similar to Reddit's by thinking it's your property, when it should be the community's
- They're a reddit mod, seems par for the course

That's Reddit, so you should solve the problem in a Reddit way: start banning everyone and delete threads. It'll become empty in no time.
- until they restore the threads, remove the OP from the mod position, and appoint a new one.

I would not advise destroying a community like that. I think that would be a waste. So many people are destroying data, knowledge and human alliances, just because they lives on a website that went shitty.
I live in a shitty country. I left the country where I was born because it was shitty, and now I live in a different shitty country. Every computer I have access to has shitty software on it. The internet infrastructure is provided by shitty companies. My food is grown out of shit, and my shit is recycled by shitheads. The universe is a toilet. So what now?
Maybe give your community to someone who cares about it, while promoting an alternative that you care about.

Largely, you'd already gotten good advice on how to sabotage a sub.
The key is automod, but don't forget that the goal is to keep reddit from just undoing it all and replacing you before things get so bad nobody comes back if they do.
So you gotta put some time into it, and implement changes over a few weeks. Start by bumping up the account age setting to something high enough to weed out a lot of casual users but not everyone. Add in some automod filters to remove common things. Let that rest for a day or two, then add in some more filters so that posting becomes harder, but not impossible.
At some point in there, people will complain, so you'll have to tweak automod to remove references to mods as well.
That's the process. By the time things get bad enough that reports would get crazy, enough people should have just left in a huff that the reports don't get so high that reddit pays attention.
By the end of it, any new posts will have to jump though major hoops, so you'll effectively keep out bots. Place a final automod rule requiring some specific words and walk away. That's the best you can do. Maybe reddit undoes it, maybe not, but by the time they get around to it, it won't matter.

Doesn’t this seem morally flawed? You moderate a sub, but don’t want to do it anymore and you can’t stand the thought of someone else doing it so you want to just ruin and destroy it? That sounds awful. No, the sub doesn’t belong to you and it doesn’t belong to Reddit either. It belongs to the members because they’re the community. I can’t even comprehend why you feel like it’s something that belongs to you. You moderate as a service to that community, not because you own it. When a pastor retires, they don’t burn down the church they preached in. That church belongs to the people and the pastor was its servant, not its owner.
- I think it's kinda like the reason we not only stopped contributing to Reddit, but also deleted all our posts: we don't want to use and contribute to a platform for capitalists-fascists, even retroactively.
- Agreed it seems rather selfish
- Yes and no. First of all, there is nobody who wants to take over. So the option is "abandon it" vs. "kill it". Reddits actions in regard of their mods do have consequences. And it also doesn't belong to the community as Reddit is actively claiming ownership. So to take your church analogy: The pastor wants to quit. The bishop claims ownership and control of everything, is actively harming the community, but can't provide a replacement priest.
  And in my opinion it is better to stop projects like this instead of abandoning them as abandoned places & subreddits will get taken over by spammers, crazy people and full on nazis.
  
  How do you know there is nobody who wants to take over? Have you posted on the community about it? Or on one of the moderator communities?

Sell it. There are websites for it

I've never moderated anything on reddit but...
Can you just change the topic and start deleting posts which do not align with the new topic ?
... or impose complicated rules about what types of posts are allowed on what days of the week / month.
"post titles can only include the letter B on the second Tuesday of each month!"
These types of shenanigans would surely make it a wasteland for new content. I do wonder how long it would take to actually die though. Would people unsub? The user count might just stagnate for ever.

Like others already said: make it suck. Go into your Joker arc and become the edgelord. You build it and you can destroy it. But you can’t just go full psycho over night. Make it look like you are becoming a power hungry mod with a napoleon complex over the course of a couple of weeks. As soon as some users start their own subreddit start linking there (preferably by making fun of them to stay in character) so the migration keeps going. While this is happening, ban the few contributing users that are still there.
When everything is burned down, post a dick pic on r/mentalhealth, log off and never look back.
PS: Bonus points if you document everything and release it on YouTube.

Get new mods but pick the worst people for the job, at least a half dozen or so. If you get one person and that person abandons their account you're vulnerable to a reddit request, half a dozen and you get more breathing room.
get rid of your automod config (Replace with bans for the words "meta" and "subreddit") and any customizations you've done like icons or whatev.
if its a discussion subreddit, make it links and self posts and allow image uploads.

See if you can find an advertiser to promote their content on your sub. As the mod you control if it stays or not.
Get paid for your power until everyone leaves or you get canned lol

Wasn't there some pop culture subreddit that closed down recently? What was the story/process there?
- The only active mod got permabanned due to Reddit's rule changes.
  I don't expect the sub will stay closed forever, though. Reddit almost certainly will install a new mod to lead the subreddit. No, if you want to truly kill a subreddit, you'll have to destroy the subreddit's reputation beyond what can be salvaged with a mod change

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