I don't see how they'd have difficulties replacing the mods. Even if it's hard to find replacements within the Reddit community there are lots of blue checks on Twitter who'd probably be thrilled to take over Reddit moderation and might even pay Reddit for the privilege.
Yes and no. They can force the the subs to go public again, but then the mods might quit. Losing a lot of mods is a bigger deal than losing the same number of users.
Trying to find a bunch of new mods will probably be an issue. Right now there isn't _too much_ complaining about mods. It's a very fine balance and replacing a bunch of existing ones with new ones might cause mayhem.
Yes, however once they demod everyone, they will find other mods willing to do the work. There are a lot of people on reddit, something like 500 million monthly active users, at least some of them would be able to mod subreddits.
Yeah it depends on their goal. If it's to scare individual mods out of participating this would work, if it's to just take over whole subs, then obviously reddit could just do that no problem all over the site.
This assumes there's an army of competent mods in waiting that the admins can tap into, who could take over (without many of the tools the previous mods used) and effectively run some of the largest communities on the internet.
Yeah, I do honestly think that that would be the only way this works. If the majority of mods were just like "yup, we'll shut it down and leave", forcing reddit to replace _large_ swaths of moderation, things could get ugly for them. As it is, as far as I have seen, very few subs are committing to being permanently closed, and Reddit will only boot mods from a _very_ small number of subs over a 2 day closure, so they don't have to find much replacement talent.
Right now, admins will probably replace a few dozens of mods, and then the rest of the site will be back in 2 days, and nothing will change.
I don't think the problem with ditching the existing mods for new ones has much to do with how users would perceive the shift. You have to ask how the hell Reddit would vet that number of replacements in any way, how they'd find the required number of able replacements, and not just people who would (through incompetence or malice) run things into the ground. That's doubly true for the mega-subs which genuinely require a LOT of constant moderation, specialized automated tools, and so on.
That doesn't seem like a feasible path to me, and I think if it was remotely possible it would have already happened. The only way it COULD work is to get rid of the volunteer mod system and replace it with paid mods... and I don't think Reddit has the funds for that.
From a technical perspective, there's no reason they couldn't. God help me, part of me wants to see what would happen next if they did. There would certainly be some positive consequences to doing so (more of that sweet, sweet traffic, and establishing once and for all who is the daddy) but also some huge negative ones: for one thing, some already angry moderators would likely quit, and for another it would basically destroy any shred of remaining good will or feeling of community. It would be a slap in the face. They can still walk back their API pricing changes, they can even hope this bad press blows over, but I don't know if they could salvage their reputation if they just exerted autocratic control over their community-based platform. If moderators don't feel like they're in charge of their own subreddits, that they're just fungible, unpaid workers, they'd probably realize they're being used and go away.
They do this all the time actually, though it's mainly here the reddit admins personally don't like the existing mods. So they're completely willing to do so for their own whims.
What does that really accomplish? Reddit mods are often bad enough as is, imagine what Reddit scab mods would be like.
It would also be a huge invitation for the displaced the rest to make life unbearable for those new mods and the handful of admins overseeing them. Reddit as a community would make for one hell of an intellectual DDOS.
I suspect if Reddit starts replacing those mods outright you could see other mods leaving, it might work out for Reddit but it's a dangerous game. Also, which mods get removed, and would they be banned completely? The big subreddits have lots of mods, many who just help with small stuff and from my understanding do so over a lot of the large subreddits, so the actual details here of who stays, who's leaving what subreddits, etc. probably get murky pretty fast. (And that's besides the fact that the new mods would have little idea how things were currently run, unless some of the existing mods help them).
Sure, they’d get plenty or people who would want to get moderator rights. How many of those would actually put in the hours ? And how would you know before you hand over the sub?
Not only that, it would create a revolt among the moderators who were still left so you’d have to do this for all subs at once. Tens of thousands of people.
I don’t doubt they’ll have people lining up out the door to be mods… whether someone you picked with zero vetting because you’re in dire straits is going to be a good mod though is very doubtful.
I can see things going very sour if they choose to replace long standing mods.
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