[thebouv]

So, I don't get it.

Why does it matter if a few volunteer mods manage a ton of subs?

Isn't it hard to do? So they have a hard job? And it's volunteer?

And .. what? I don't understand the outrage directed at mods I guess.

Note: I'm a light Reddit user. I follow a handful of subs. And I can't name a single mod of any of them. Maybe this is more meaningful for people who spend more time on the site and are more involved in their particular subs? What, they just bash heads with mods sometimes?

[BitwiseFool]

As a moderator you have the power to control what people see - subscribers and visitors alike. To me, it's easy to see how moderators with an agenda can curate content to match their views. It also wouldn't surprise me if some moderators are compensated - under the radar - by influencers and marketers.

[txcwpalpha]

>It also wouldn't surprise me if some moderators are compensated - under the radar - by influencers and marketers.

In GallowBoob's case, he's admitted before that posting on reddit is his job. He used to work at Unilad, getting paid by his company to promote viral shit all over reddit. I think now he's moved on from Unilad but does the same stuff at other companies.

It's pretty egregious that reddit admins allow him free reign to use reddit as his own astroturfing platform. I say good riddance to him if he truly is "done", though I have my suspicions that it's just a ploy for him to make an alt and do the same stuff with it.

[Quekid5]

To add to that, he's been accused of deleting posts, then reposting the same links/content without attribution. If you're watching closely I imagine it's pretty easy to see if a post is starting to gain a little traction and just... do that.

He's also been accused of lots of other shitty and possibly illegal behavior. I will say that evidence of this may be disturbingly easy to forge since it's all digital and everyone can use Ctrl+Shift+I in their browser. However, one redditor did mirror a nude which GallowBoob had allegedly posted to minors. I can personally attest that the photo itself definitely exists, but the circumstances around who it was sent to, etc. is... cloudy at the very best.

(Incidentally, I went to look at his profile to check up, but it turns I've blocked him ages ago. Good riddance.)

[charwalker]

Benefit of the doubt, I could see removing quality content by a PITA user and reposting to keep that content alive without feeding the user, but at that point the system seems broken enough to step back and re-access entirely.

[thejynxed]

He was caught red-handed doing it so he could get the karma. He was called out by the orignal poster who was not just the original poster, but the creator. He proceeded to ban that user and anyone who commented in support of that user.

I feel zero sympathy for gallowboob whatsoever.

[Quekid5]

You're far too generous. We're talking dog videos and such... and as adorable as dogs can be, there's not really any reason to keep that sort of content alive.

[commandlinefan]

When I first started on Reddit like 10 years ago, it leaned pretty libertarian (pro Ron Paul, pro free speech, etc.). I noticed over time that it leaned farther and farther left, and I wondered what had happened to all the previous users. Then there came a conspiracy theory that a handful of users had gamed the moderation system to take control of the tone of the site overall - especially the one that's the topic of TFA. There seems to be more and more evidence that the conspiracy theorists were right all along.

[dariusj18]

I think instead you would find that it has only become more partisan. Stratification of subs where people with opposing ideologies don't mix, and if they do they get hella down-voted.

[JoeSmithson]

I think they just got drowned out as it grew. Libertarianism is a very niche political position outside of the "opinionated hacker" crowd. I'd be very surprised if the actual gross metrics for /r/Libertarian have decreased rather than increased.

[mundo]

You don't need a conspiracy theory to explain why the majority won a vote.

[jboog]

I started on Reddit about a decade ago also.

Early reddit was a lot more like current HN. You're right you'd see more pro Ron Paul and libertarian stuff. Then the site went mainstream.

Users on the internet are more liberal than the general pop. Add that to the fact that Reddit up/downvote system does a terrible job of allowing unpopular/controversial views to reach the top.

Those same Ron Paul fans are all in r/conservative or r/The_donald, or other conservative subs now. There are way more now than there ever were.

You don't really need a conspiracy theory when the very nature of the site and the internet explain what happened really effectively.

[Mirioron]

>Those same Ron Paul fans are all in r/conservative or r/The_donald, or other conservative subs now. There are way more now than there ever were.

Is this true? I hold quite a few libertarian beliefs and those conservative subs don't seem any more inviting than their left wing counterparts. It's so much about partisanship that it's off-putting to me.

[camel_Snake]

The conservative subreddits have definitely experienced a tonal shift since Trump's candidacy. I would pop by occasionally for news/discussions and the change is extremely noticeable to even infrequent users like me.

Smaller political subs are probably your best bet. things like /r/moderatepolitics or /r/tuesday

[nl]

I think it's more like a bunch more people from different backgrounds joined the site.

[MagnumOpus]

These positions are unpaid volunteer positions. Moderating more than a handful large subs is a full-time job.

There is a good chance that a proportion of these people willing to do an unpaid full time job that can direct the attention of a billion pairs of eyeballs have ulterior motives, or are indeed paid by third parties (companies, political parties, governments) to promote or censor certain news/memes/opinions.

[Zooper]

It's not a good chance at this point, it's the height of naivety and ignorance to assume that this isn't actively occurring. There's absolutely no incentive for it not to occur and there's significant incentive for it to occur.

[Ajedi32]

Mods on Reddit aren't _just_ mods; they're more like administrators for the subreddits they moderate. Not only do they enforce the rules of each sub, they also have free rein to decide what those rules are in the first place, and there are no formal mechanisms in place for community oversight or recourse for moderator actions.

If the head mod of a sub about cats decides that henceforth only posts about dogs will be allowed, that's how it'll be from now on and there's nothing anyone can do about it short of everyone leaving the sub or direct intervention from Reddit employees (pretty rare).

This isn't usually an issue; for the most part moderators are benevolent dictators. But for large subs, especially those which are automatically recommended to new users by Reddit and those which deal with more serious real-world topics like politics, you can imagine how this dynamic might create a certain level of tension between moderators and the users of the subreddits they control.

[bredren]

> This isn't usually an issue; for the most part moderators are benevolent dictators.

Glad you used this term, because it is descriptive of the idealized leadership of a sub.

[tensor]

It's not that innocent. There are numerous examples of subs being taken over in order to push political agenda. Two notable ones are r/canada, which has been taken over by white supremacists who push alt-right ideology, and long ago r/atheism was taken over by convincing the admins to oust the top mod on a technicality. In the r/atheism case the new mods had their own ideas about what sort of content should be posted and banned and silenced anyone who dissented. The majority of the people were very upset and didn't agree with these changes, but after seeing people drop like flies with the bans people either got scared into submission or left.

A bunch of these famous mods are part of a private sub where they discuss their pet theories on how to manipulate people, and on what sort of content merits being allowed to rise. They are explicitly against what they deem "low value" even if "low value" comments and posts are popular. Of course, it's pretty easy to define low value as anything you don't like, and you start to see the problem.

[vertex-four]

The argument is that these mods are biased in their moderation, and because of how many subreddits they moderate, that bias is reflected across those subreddits.

[myself248]

> I follow a handful of subs. And I can't name a single mod of any of them.

I unfollowed all of the default subs, they're just not interesting to me. I use reddit for a few technical subs, a few local subs, and a few off-the-beaten-path funny subs. None of them even made the list of top-however-many that showed how they all had a few mods in common.

All these critical articles seem to assume that people consume the default reddit front page, and seem to have little relevance to the platform as a platform.

[s9w]

These people don't just control the big subreddits. r/programming is controlled by spez for example. Not that he would have a problem with just changing the Reddit database manually anyways.

[notatoad]

the argument against any real oversight in how a subreddit is run or an appeal procedure for moderator decisions is that if you don't like the rules, you can find a similarly-themed subreddit to participate in. When all the subreddits are run by the same couple of people, if you disagree with the mods you have no recourse other than to leave the site.

[ufmace]

I'd say it suggests a very different kind of site from what some might have expected.

You may think it's a site where there are many thousands of diverse communities, all with their own standards, viewpoints, preferences, etc. But this sort of thing suggests that the whole site and all of its communities are much closer to being a playground for a cabal of a few dozen super-elite power users. All of the supposedly different standards just reflect slight variations on the same standards held by this elite community, and nothing really outside of their standards can ever get any traction.

In short, we thought the internet was the world's greatest exercise in democracy. Instead, it seems to have morphed into some sort of feudalism or something.

[tsukurimashou]

ffs the place is already a big echo chamber and controversial opinions are downvoted to oblivion, do you really want on top of that to add a single guy to moderate all top subreddits? remember most people have political agenda and tons of bias they don't even realize

[Goronmon]

Why does it matter if a few volunteer mods manage a ton of subs?

The concern basically goes like this...

1) Mod/Subreddit does something a user doesn't like (literally anything, doesn't matter how reasonable or trivial or toxic the complaint is, that isn't important, what matters is that someone isn't happy).

2) They want to find evidence that the Mod/Subreddit in question is "bad" or "corrupt" in someway to support that grievence from 1.

3) Users points to mod list as evidence that a "corrupt" group of mods is actually in control of everything.

4) Now that the "corruption" has been found, the Mod/Subreddit involved in 1 has been "proven wrong" and now can be safely ridiculed and labeled as such.

[buboard]

I assume it has been going on for too long, so their age matters. They apply the norms of a previous generation, while reddit's audience is consistently young. It was probably never a concern when reddit started, but things like mod-ship should have expiration dates.

[mundo]

> Why does it matter if a few volunteer mods manage a ton of subs?

I asked this in the last two HN threads on this topic, and was downvoted but not answered. It seems like a lot of people intuitively feel like 'power mods' are bad, but not in a way they are willing to explicitly state.

I hate to say it, but I think this might be political. There are a lot of people who feel that Reddit is too left-wing and that conservative voices are drowned out there. This (and the same complaint about Twitter, FB, etc) comes up on HN from time to time.

It seems like they (meaning, people who already thought Reddit was biased against them) saw this list and took it as evidence of their position, without really thinking through the details that detract from the idea (like the fact that these subs are mostly non-political subs full of pictures, and the users in question are mostly pretty far down the modlist and not very active).

[s9w]

These people are powerful and get paid to further the agenda of their employers.