The future of /r/DolphinEmulator

**AnyOldName3** · 06-23-2023, 02:56 AM #1

As I discussed in the Random thread a few days ago, I made the /r/DolphinEmulator subreddit nearly a decade ago after another user here noticed it didn't exist yet. My intention was to hand it over to the Dolphin team, but they weren't keen, so I've remained the most senior moderator. Ten years on, it's grown to eighty thousand subscribers (very few of which actually do anything), and me and the other moderator decided to set it to private mode as part of the Reddit API protest. The outcome of that is that Reddit's shown they're hostile to their volunteer moderators, and we really can't be bothered with it any more. A couple of days ago I ran a poll on whether to continue the protest, and was surprised to find that among the tiny fraction of people who cared enough to vote, reopening as normal was overwhelmingly unpopular. See https://www.reddit.com/r/DolphinEmulator/comments/14fminz/results_of_the_vote/.

So this leaves me with a bunch of users wanting different things. If I can hand the subreddit over to the Dolphin team to do as they see fit, that ignores the three quarters of people who didn't want that. If I put it back into private mode (currently it's in restricted mode, so people can see posts, but not respond or post their own, which means the corpus of resolved support threads are still accessible from Google, but in private mode, that wouldn't be the case), then I expect that within a couple of weeks, Reddit staff will remove me as a moderator, and either leave it unmoderated (and therefore locked so no one can post, just as it is now, or assign some random schmuck. That's likely to end up with the subreddit in a mess that's a lot less attractive for the Dolphin team to commandeer. Currently, there's a no-piracy rule that's been well-enforced, so it should be squeaky clean from a litigious-Nintendo standpoint. There's the option of keeping it restricted, but still posting links to Dolphin blog posts

as and when they appear, but I suspect none will do so until after we're booted.

Anyone here have thoughts?

***MayImilae*** · (This post was last modified: 06-23-2023, 07:02 PM by MayImilae.)

Well, there isn't a clear way forward with reddit in turmoil right now. There's no way to plan or predict what's going to happen at this stage. For example, if you are worried they'll remove you and replace you with random mods, you could give a bunch of Dolphin devs moderator permissions as backup. Which you may still want to do, I don't know. But then reddit could just purge ALL mods and then it wouldn't matter how many mods there are. Anything can happen right now, hell you probably know what's going on better than I do, so I can't really give any good advice or anything. Maybe the subreddit is small enough that they won't bother you, I don't know.

However, in my opinion, the ones that care about the subreddit should be the ones that run it. As with ten years ago, I don't think that "handing it over" to the Dolphin Developers (aka you giving it to the Dolphin Foundation and leaving it in our care exclusively) will have a good result - we're busy, and we're not going to do a very good job taking care of it simply because we don't care about it as much as you do. Plus most of us aren't on reddit very much.

If anyone wants to pitch in and volunteers to help with the subreddit's moderation, by all means they should! But I still think you should remain as the lead of the subreddit for as long as reddit allows, and for as long as you want to remain in that position. That will give the best result going forward, imo, though there's no way to predict what's going to happen at this stage.

If you want to add all the Dolphin developers as backup staff in case you are removed, theoretically we could do that, but there are a lot of concerns. With reddit threatening to yank control at any point, we should not make it official at this stage. Imagine if we branded it the official dolphin emulator subreddit and then suddenly it was unmoderated. No thank you! So IMO, Dolphin emulator should not "assume control" in any capacity. If you want to give a bunch of us mod powers as backup, it must be in an unofficial capacity and only as backup. But honestly I don't think that's a wise move anyway. IMO you should spread it out to those you trust within the subreddit's community itself, and anyone from wider Dolphin communities who volunteers to help out.

Spoiler: (Show Spoiler)

EDIT: Considering how reddit seems to want to do anything to force subreddits to open, moving to just reposting our blog posts may not be a bad idea, honestly. Up to you.

**AnyOldName3** · 06-23-2023, 11:16 PM #3

One problem is that there's never been anyone else volunteering to moderate who was remotely appropriate. We've had a few messages over the years from people who'd never interacted with the subreddit, but moderated a lot of small, unrelated ones, who were clearly looking for an internet power trip. The moderator that isn't me was recruited not because he volunteered, but because I noticed them reporting the majority of rule-violating posts and posting constructive comments, so they were already doing some of the work and clearly had an interest in keeping things running smoothly. I can't use the same strategy again as reports disappear forever once someone's dealt with them, so we can't look at stats, and instead have to remember what we've seen in the past, but I've not really had my finger on the pulse of the community recently, so have nothing to remember.

As for installing backup moderators, it looks like Reddit admins have always removed the entire team so far unless there were particularly vocal scab mods who were opposed to a shutdown in the first place.

notmiguel · 06-26-2023, 11:40 AM #4

I could moderate the sub but i am currently a owner of a discord server myself so i cant really do it