Technology

How is no one mentioning the abuse on r/conservative where spewing all kinds of falsehoods, and xenophobias and you are gold, but trying to provide factual information gets banned?

I think there are more things to worry about than the number of groups someone helps moderate.

And alsothere is no recourse against improper bans. I was banned from my corresponding country sub because a moderator misinterpreted something I said.

Hey, they chose to offer free labor for a company that has proven time and time again to not give a crap about the mods or the users. I get why they are complaining but I at least hope that they aren’t surprised or expect that their complaints will do anything.

I have negative respect for mods at this point.

I've seen too much unchecked mod abuse to ever take their decisions seriously again.

Fuck Reddit basement dwelling mods and fuck Reddit in general, so glad I'm done with that shit app, I say something a little mean and I get perm banned, fucking losers

It limits mods to 5 subs with over 100,000 monthly visits it seems reasonable to limit the mods reach they all have back deals going on to push agendas and ads it's pretty fucked.

MRW someone posts about Reddit still being a shit community tolerating abuse on a downward arc from Advance Publications, to Mods (fuck Spez), to users.

"Hey guys, I heard about a poppin' new club! The cover is only $10, but bouncers get to backhand anyone anytime they feel like it, and kick you out anytime that you advocate support for anything even slightly left of center." /s ᕕ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)ᕗ

I kibd of agree.with this one, on the other hand reddit is not my circus and those mods are not my monkeys.

Hell, I never understood why anyone worked for free to make the owners richer ? Here I get (and thank you), like an old school BBS but reddit makes zero sense as a mod.

Site is already broken

Allowing volunteer mods was dangerous enough. Allowing those mods to have unlimited subreddits was a magnet for agenda-driven operatives. The changes don't really do enough to get rid of mods with an agenda.

BTW, once a Reddit mod permabans you, there's no way to appeal their ban. The mods can simply ignore your request for a review. Also, after you are banned, Reddit doesn't automatically decrement the membership count. You must unjoin on your own. So its membership numbers are inflated for each subreddit.

Caught a permaban for calling someone a coward. No big loss, honestly. Reddit wasn't doing anything for me except raising my blood pressure.

average of over 60,000 daily active moderators” that month, which, at the time, would mean that 0.1 percent of all mods equals 600 people.

No, it equals 60 people.

Break it hahaha! Fuck that place!

Can't kill a reanimated corpse, reddit is already dead.

One the one hand I can understand the issue that one person wielding mod power in many subs is a problem, especially if that mod is prone to abuse of the mod position.

On the other hand, some subs, especially smaller ones, might go modless.

What I would have done differently is that I would not align this rule on the number of subs alone. The size of a sub should also be a factor, as well as overall number of mods in those groups. A good solution would be not as easy as what they propose.

Limiting the number of large subs a user can moderate is a good way to a) limit their power b) reduce misinformation campaigns.

I've been off Reddit totally since 2023, so part of my understanding may be out of date, but before that I was on for many years and watched how powermods became powermods.

Thus this situation is very unusual. Reddit never did anything about the powermod situation before, but now, suddenly, it's a big deal. For years (over a decade, at least) users have been screaming about the worst abuses on the site being from powermods, and time after time Reddit bent over backwards to not only avoid doing anything about it, but seemed to grasp every opportunity to enhance the problem any way they could, shutting down complaints rather than the power trippin' bastards that were regularly creating the problems.

Note that powermods very frequently mod the largest subs, which is how they became powermods to start with: modding a sub that got big and then being invited to help mod new subs that then also grew in popularity.

For myself, I don't think anyone would give two shits if "powermods" only had an aggregate total of 500 users each, but very frequently they have millions, even tens of millions. Looking at the largest subs on the site and the powermods on those subs, and how many of those powemods are crossovers on equally dominant subs, you see the same core group of powermods across all the top sites, give or take a few individually here and there.

Strangely, this is the group Reddit is now disbanding.

Another thing to consider is how many powermods went on to become admins over the years. At least a handful: I don't know the exact number anymore but it's non-zero. Powermods who are admins are especially useful to Reddit, because they ensure that the c-suite has direct control over some of the largest subs without ever appearing to do so.

All this is to say that the powermod situation has been mutually beneficial to Reddit admin for ages, which is why they never changed it or even really acknowledged it.

But now, for the first time since 2005, Reddit powermods are suddenly a problem. So what's changed? Cui bono?

My guess is that Reddit admin is about to a) yank the entire site to the hard right by removing pretty much all effective human moderation and thus preventing powermods from being able to stand in their way across the largest subs (some of which we've already seen and the article addresses), and/or b) introduce some other vile change or policy that is certain to piss off EVERYONE, including every non-bot mod on the site, to the point that admin expects a general revolt even among the powermods and need to dilute the individual power of mods in advance.

One very hypothetical change that could do the trick is Reddit forcing mods, including powermods, to quietly engage in collecting evidence of and reporting users and content that admin would like to sell to the current US admin, for example: intel which Reddit is well situated to provide and for which the current administration has already been calling in the wake of a certain recent death. What if Reddit decides to go all in with the present political trajectory, looking for political power as well as the payout they're usually in it for, and in so doing force mods to comply or lose their subs? It's not like Reddit hasn't already done it for less.

Again, these are just my own musings. But whatever the reason, Reddit admin calling it quits with the powermods suggests something much larger than just another light rehabbing of Reddit power structures.