I signed up because I was curious, I’m still a mod, and they promised swag. (My subreddit voted against moving over to lemmy and it’s fine, I guess. They’re the only reason I’m still over there at all.)
It was interesting–I’ve not watched all of it, but it was very high energy.
My biggest takeaway was that OMG they don’t care about hearing-impaired mods. The subtitles were auto-generated and, even a few hours later, still had very obvious errors. For example, “a mod” was consistently transcribed as “Ahmad”. “I love r/stupiddovenests and r/gardening” became “I love our stupid dove nests and our gardening”. Very distracting.
Anyways, after the event you get to pick your swag–either a plushie or ‘digital swag’. I’m going with the snoo plushie because it looks about the right size for my dog to hump, and he likes to take out his aggression against white plushies (the color of my other dog, who passed away a few years ago. He still growls at videos of her because he’s a butthead).
Not to get all cynical, but If there’s one thing I learned in Summer of '23, it’s that sometimes you can nakedly use, monetise and exploit your userbase, dismantling many of the helpful tools they’d built for themselves along the way, then wrap it up by completely dismissing their reactions as “noise,” and the vast majority of them will STILL stay put, because moving services in response is ‘just too much of a hassle.’ (methinks there’s even a kind of national voting parallel there)
As a matter of fact I personally retain my acct at Reddit to access the type of content that doesn’t exist here… yet. But at the same time, I’m one of many who started up a semi-niche hobby community on the Fediverse to parallel the one I most liked at Reddit. At least it’s there for folks who might trickle in, over time. And who knows? Maybe one day there’ll be another Rexxit.
Anyway, I guess if Rexxit '23 had never happened, I’d have considered attending "Mod World ‘25.’ At this point, however, I think I’d lean moreso towards the classic Lewis Black response of grabbing a pencil, sharpening it, and sticking it in my eye. :-)
(your pardon, OP, for that random-ish bit of rantishness)
No worries! I didn’t expect Mod World to get a warm response on Lemmy, ranting is reasonable and expected.