[abcdjdjd]

Sorry, but this argument is the same reason that dictatorships fails endlessly throughout history.

Sure, you can make an argument that maybe the leaders (in this case mods) will be benevolent and lead fairly and for the betterment of all efficiently. After all, dictatorships are more "efficient" at getting stuff done than democracy (note, not saying GOOD is done, just more efficient when you don't have to consider others concerns but your own).

However, reality is that is never seems to play out that way. Even if it plays out that way for a little while, someone always inevitably joins the higher ranks and abuses that power for their own interests and selfishness.

The same reason this fails in countries is the same reason it fails in online communities where the content is community created. Eventually, someone joins the moderator ranks (if they aren't already their) and starts pushing their own agenda when it comes to removing posts or locking posts.

I think reddit has crossed over into this stage of things on most subreddits at this point. It is clearly a cultural issue with the admins who seem to encourage this behavior, as well as no way for the user base to have any recourse against this abuse of mod power.

Thus, you get endless censorship now on most subreddits now, and no more open discussion on topics where USERS actually get to decide what they get to read or comment on. After all, what is the point of an upvote/downvote button if mods can just override it endlessly and often do?

[majormajor]

This comparison is silly since you have a lot more power to leave a subreddit than to leave a country.

If you think most subreddit is being mis-moderated in the same way, across all those different moderators... is it possible the problem lies on your end?

And even then, there seems to be easy recourse: start your own subreddit?

[detaro]

There are plenty of subreddits that work just fine (I can't say I see moderation issues in most subreddits I frequent, and if I do it's more often "spam gets through"), and if they stop doing so the user base has a trivial recourse: fork and move. (Indeed it's not unheard of for there to be multiple subreddits for one topic, with different levels of strictness regarding content). That alone breaks the dictatorship analogy.

[abcdjdjd]

>That alone breaks the dictatorship analogy.

It does not when you factor in their appears to be power mod users who moderate multiple subreddits and have power over most of the site now. Your assumption also assumes that this isn't a site wide issue and going to another subreddit solves this.

Again, the fact that power user mods exist ruins that claim for you. Also, the fact that this power tripping seems to be a norm across much of the site now also shows this is not the case.

Are there still some subs that don't have this abuse? Yes. But is it clear at this point the model that reddit is using is open for abuse and eventually it seems many (if not most) subreddits eventually fall into this abuse problem? Yes.

[detaro]

> Again, the fact that power user mods exist ruins that claim for you.

It's a far jump from "users who moderate to multiple subreddits" to "have power over most of the site". And if they mod one or multiple subreddits doesn't have much of an impact on other subs they are not involved with.

> Also, the fact that this power tripping seems to be a norm across much of the site now also shows this is not the case.

doesn't mesh with what I'm seeing, so "citation needed" on it being the norm.

[intended]

Well, communities haven't also existed at the scale and pace they do online. Plus in the real world people had to go eat, and could come back with cooler heads. Online you end up seeing that incendiary piece of text and lose your mind all over again.

As someone mentioned elsewhere - like the media and news industry, there is a Gentleman's agreement in moderation to do "good". There are few ways to punish people for breaking that rule.

Subs with strict moderation end up doing "good" for their communities. The measurement everyone lacks is whether the good of creating insular communities is offset by the harm done to the larger ability to share ideas.

And people really can go ahead and try to prove this - the whole corpus of reddit data is available, if you can come up with the toolkit to test this people could put empirical evidence to these questions.

It is also a question on how you can create balancing forces for moderator overreach. However that sounds laughably expensive. Reddit sure as heck would not want to become a court of judgement where bad mods are censured (even though they have to do it every day).

Fact is you need humans to handle humans, and humans are expensive. No one wants to pay, and debugging deception in human interactions is painful.

Far easier to talk about the marketplace of ideas and put a lid on the whole mess.

[prox]

[citation needed] on the most subreddits pushing agenda part.

[vkou]

> Sorry, but this argument is the same reason that dictatorships fails endlessly throughout history.

Dictatorships have been the status quo for the world, for ~98% of recorded history. World history did not begin in 1708, 1776, 1918, or 1920.

Dictatorships fail, but they are usually replaced by other dictatorships.