U/darkdemon42 Architect of r/evilgenius vents when admins coerce him into reopening the sub.
“Imagine a billionaire asked you to build the new swimming pool in his summer house. He promised that you if you did a really good job, he’d let you swim in it for free. That’s sounds like a great deal, only you have no idea how to build a swimming pool. So you spend years figuring it out. You learn what you can, and get tradies in to fill in the gaps. Then, after nine long years of work the homeowner comes to you and says that he’s actually going to sell the summer house, and that deal where you can use the pool? Yeah not any more. But the new owners might let you look at it! Through the fence. Oh and also he doesn’t like the tradies, so they’re going to need to go. But it’s alright, because his trust fund nepo kid is going to help instead.
You can either take it with a shit eating grin and get it finished, or you can say “fuck you”, and punch a hole in the wall of the pool, preventing the arsehole from profting off all your work. Which would you choose?”
But there isn’t really an option for that. You basically choose between either running a sub yourself or simply not having the sub. There’s no actual choice to get paid to run a sub.
At closest, you can create a community on a site you own, but then you don’t get the advantage of all those Reddit users, the easy hosting that works even if your sub scales to millions of people, or the tools that are provided or created by others specifically for Reddit.
Even here on the Fediverse, there isn’t really an option to get paid and there’s still no guarantee that your hard work won’t get destroyed (unless you put in a bunch of extra work and the expense to use your own instance, too). Ads are basically impossible unless you control the instance that people register in (it doesn’t matter if the community is hosted on a different instance). Donations are basically the only option.
I think though that the trade off to not getting paid is that you run your sub however you want. The mod teams set community standards, but rarely are expected you do so democratically. Not all mod teams ruled with an iron fist, but some did. That’s the perk when your labor is free.
In my 11+ years of experience, the few times mods made things democratic in subs (prior to reddit going dark this month) were when a new feature of the community cropped up that was divisive but popular, the mod team actually agreed or liked that be feature of the community but didn’t want to be viewed as embracing something that was drawing ire from a vocal portion of the community, so the mods opened it to a vote to avoid the controversy of overtly picking sides and let the trolls and brigades overrun a voting system to codify the new feature into the community. This gave mods enough cover and plausible deniability about their hands being tied and the people have spoken, so who are we to ban all neo-Nazi memes? or whatever the divisive topic was.
what! any founder started their sub from 0, and the reason it went big is their love and dedication, not the dumb software. you did it once you can it do it again and you’re gonna be better at it the second time around! there’s never going to be a better moment than now, with the backlash and the mass migrations. not one reason to stay and every reason in the world to do it, with how spez is acting and the bleak corporate future on reddit. now is the time