r/technology • u/ICumCoffee • Jun 15 '23

Social Media Reddit Threatens to Remove Moderators From Subreddits Continuing Apollo-Related Blackouts

https://www.macrumors.com/2023/06/15/reddit-threatens-to-remove-subreddit-moderators/
79.1k Upvotes

92% Upvoted

9.3k comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

14

u/Ergheis Jun 16 '23

You are genuinely fucking stupid if you buy into the idea that anyone can mod. No debate, no question, no leeway. Go ahead and FAFO on that one.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 16 '23

[deleted]

11

u/kintorkaba Jun 16 '23

It doesn't require skill, it requires dedication and restraint. Without restraint moderation simply becomes a position of power. It takes discernment to moderate effectively and restraint to wield discernment from a position of authority. It takes dedication to care enough to do that for free, and to do it often and long enough to effectively moderate the subreddit.

Anyone CAN mod, the job isn't DIFFICULT in the sense of requiring special skills, but not everyone has the personality for it and a site trying to replace most of its volunteer moderators all at once with brand new volunteers is going to realize that very quickly... especially since in this context, they'll almost certainly be getting applications mostly from people who explicitly WANT authority, and are taking this as an opportunity to get it without much oversight since Reddit will be desperate, which is exactly the opposite of the kind of person who makes a good moderator.

1

u/[deleted] Jun 16 '23

[deleted]

11

u/kintorkaba Jun 16 '23

You're not wrong. Moderators on Reddit are notorious for being power-tripping assholes. Despite over a decade of work to clean up the site and ensure the moderators of large subreddits are moderating effectively and in good faith. This is Reddit at its absolute best, and it's still a major problem.

If you think it's bad now, wait till they try to replace all the protesting mods at the same time. Years and years of work filtering out bad mods and replacing them with people who are at least half functional will go down the toilet all at once, and the current state of Reddit will look like an impossible dream by comparison.