For those who don't know, retrogaming on Reddit was a labour of love, there is a multireddit, m/retrogamingnetwork that networks over 60 subreddits under one banner giving the audience, banner, and reach of a big subreddit to some very small and niche spaces.
I bopped onto the main subreddit to grab their discord link for https://sub.rehab/ and was amazed to see the sub open. There's a stickied post from "your new head mod" - they've made some changes already, ones that would stir debate if the userbase was still there to know about it: Reveddit Link
To quote the post opener:
First of all, you all know me probably at this point, but I’m Chalupacabra. We’re in the process of readjusting the mod team, so it’s not fully set up yet, but I’m your new head mod. It’s a process that’s been in the works for a bit now, I’m sure you’ve probably noticed some of the changes the team and I have put together to try to mix things up a bit based on what y’all told us you were interested in seeing.
And if there's any doubts as to what the community "were interested in seeing" we had voted 88% in favour of a total blackout.
On the one hand I'm glad I don't have anything to miss on reddit anymore, I'm not interested in being part of communities run by people more interested in themselves than anyone else, but it's sad to see something that should have died peacefully be zombified instead.
That's happening on many subs unfortunately, mods can't do anything about it but users can.
The best option is to just quit reddit, that's what many of us are doing, leave the subs empty and see how well they fare without decent content.
When not possible (it's not a joke to move communities of millions) spam them with irrelevant content, that's what some are already doing with videos full of noise for example, r/pics r/gifs r/art with memes of John Oliver, r/Steam (Valve) with stuff about literal steam, etc.
It's sad indeed, on some communities there are truly amazing people, but I guess it's time to move on, "no king lasts forever".
Oh for sure, I've already purged my accounts and I've no interest in going back, it's disappointing though, the same happened to r/emulation but I'm less mad about that, that's an open source community that dodgy people try to make money off, I'd prefer it be anti community than an outright scam which could reasonably happen if one of the more nefarious app devs had a chance to request it as an inactive forum.