How can you be a moderator on reddit, defend reddit on other sites, meanwhile they still don't have adequate native moderation tools that have been promised for months now? I genuinely don't get such allegiance. At least get paid for it or SOMETHING.
My issue is most subreddit moderators are young guys who, for the first time in their life, have some small authority over a group of people and are total shitheads about it. They have no credentials other than having thought to make the subreddit before anyone, and have done nothing to deserve a cut of profits of anything. If I owned reddit, I wouldn't want these people to work for me.
The problem is that Reddit's own features for moderators are abysmal. I don't know what Reddit's 2.000 employees are doing all day, but people have lamented that for years now without much significant change - and then Reddit just shut down the public API, which made moderation work muuuch more difficult.
I would assume moderators are the big hurdle here. Unlike those other companies, reddit depends on a small army of dedicated volunteers for it's survival. If all the moderators decide to fuck off, or if they're being honest and the default reddit tools for moderating are unworkable, that could be a serious problem.
On the flip side, moderators curate content for Reddit, and are expected to police their users, basically working for free to keep eyeballs on Reddit, for the benefit of the company. They've been begging for more tools since the creation of the site, and using every trick they have to create better content for their users.
Reddit removed some of their dark patterns, because those were the only tools they had, and now their content shows a net loss.
Reddit needs to stop making empty promises, show that they actually care about their moderators, and give them the tools they need. They're dragging their feet on helping mods curate this content and love to wag their fingers at the moderators who are working with rudimentary tools, but they sure do love to name drop the high profile posters they get.
1/ Moderators aren't always aligned with the community (see recent /r/antiwork scandal).
2/ Reddit does not pay moderators for the labor they provide. Moderation is basically a job that takes hours of time and they profit off the backs of that free labor.
Funny enough paying for professional moderation will actually help Reddit. The quality of almost every major subreddit is trash due to mods on a power trip (or paid by a third party to push an agenda).
The reason Reddit is so heavily moderated is because despite receiving more than $100 million in quarterly revenue, they refuse to pay full time moderators. And the only people willing to do that work for free are crazy, terminally online NEETs who want to push their political agendas.
Ego stroking of some mods is far from what is happening.. please get the full picture. Those unpaid mods that did work for Reddit for free get their tools taken away they need to do this unpaid work reasonably, while at the same time Reddit starts price gouging 3rd party apps to extract more value for their IPO - Reddit wouldn't be there where it is today if it wouldn't have all the free content of the users and free work of the mods.
Kind of ridiculous, but I mean how Reddit is acting, they can just remove those unpaid moderators, replace them with paid ones and restore everything back to normal: If that is your's and also Reddit's view, where is the problem then?
Most of the reason Reddit works at all is because of the huge number of volunteers doing moderation because they're passionate about their sub. If Reddit had to pay for moderators they would be bankrupt in a very short time. And even if it did replace mods with its own people (whether paid or not) the quality of the sub will drop.
Reddit's moderator system isn't perfect, by a long shot. As with its voting systems, it's subject to abuse: calous moderation, power-tripping, and a lack of integrity, if not outright corruption. Reddit's own rules make ensuring quality moderation difficult -- admins cannot remove moderators unless they violate site rules. This leads to situations such as /r/xkcd being overtaken by a group of neo-nazi holocaust denying anti-semitic MRA promotors. Eventually resolved (see the subreddit's wiki for details).
But: Reddit absolutely relies on moderators. Which means that it's putting power in the hands of an unpaid workforce.
I actually find Reddit's moderation tools and systems pretty useful and better than most, though I manage only two small subs (each <300 subscribers)
So, no, individual Redditors may not individually care about the personal plights of moderators, much as you probably don't put much thought into the working conditions of the person who installed and adjusted the brakes of the car heading toward you. But you absolutely have a vested interest in the consequences of their work.
More on what does and doesn't work well at Reddit, from about a year ago:
Is there a long list of people willing to do unpaid labour for Reddit at the moment? Or is Reddit going to make their employees/contractors do the moderating instead? At least then you wouldn't have to deal with dissent.
Reddit should consider paying its moderators. Or employ moderators who don't use their vast unchecked powers to astroturf the site on behalf of shadowy companies.
It seems the one of the fundamental problems leading to this situation is that reddit moderation is unpaid yet requires large amounts of time. So anyone who becomes a 'big' moderator has to monetize their efforts externally, leading to communities being suspicious of the motives of any big moderator.
Reddit moderators are a whole breed of their own. Any that I've encountered (mostly for 100k+ subreddits) have lost any shred of empathy they once had.
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