[graeme]

Finding new moderators would be a incredible challenge. If someone wants to be a moderators badly, that is usually disqualifying.

You get an immense amount of power with very little accountability except to the community. Put that in the wrong hands and you can destroy a community incredibly quickly.

Or, put power in the hands of a dilettante, and you get overrun with spam and insults very fast.

[superkuh]

Nah, there's plenty of people just waiting to take over even the smallest of niche subs. I saw it firsthand back during the 2nd wave of gentrification in spring 2018 when a bunch of commercially uncomfortable subreddits like r/gundeals and their users (like my 2008 reddit account) were banned. The subreddits I moderated like r/radioastronomy were given to other users to moderate within a month or two. Reddit eventually admitted it was wrong about banning r/gundeals and reinstated the sub but my account was never unbanned.

And any sub with serious activity will have power mods submitting applications for take-over so they can commercialize it.

[graeme]

I checked into the history:

1. A reddit request was made in 2018 when you were banned. This was manually approved by the admins: https://www.reddit.com/r/redditrequest/comments/8m8cdm/reque...

2. The new mod heavily restricted posts, seemingly for three years. They declined to reply to messages for nine months, until a new Reddit request happened on Jan 3 2021. A comment in that thread said "there hasn't been a new post in ages!", confirming your replacement had locked the place down: https://www.reddit.com/r/redditrequest/comments/kpf083/reque...

3. Sometime between Jan 3 and Jan 19th, the request was approved. Likely closer to the 19th, the day the new mod posted: https://www.reddit.com/r/radioastronomy/comments/l0j6qj/new_...

Sub seems alright now, but after a three year long false start with an inactive mod who locked the place down.

Further, it took up to 16 days to handle the request. For a very small sub. And I've seen reddit requests take much longer.

Now reddit would have to, at a stroke, replace at least 8,000 of their most active subs, all at once, and make sure they don't appoint people who are insane, or draconian, or power hungry, or in it for their own profit, etc.

I don't see this working. You may have some knowledge of /r/radioastronomy in those periods which contradicts what I wrote, but the public record suggests the transition wouldn't bode well for mass replacing every single moderator at once.

92% of reddit is down right now.

[EA-3167]

I'm pretty sure that Reddit doesn't have enough paid employees to undertake that sort of vetting at the scale required, even if they wanted to. I think they're probably just hoping and praying that this all blows over, that most mods are more addicted to their communities than anything else.

It's a very cynical move, but you've laid out in exquisite detail why it's their ONLY move, other than walking back their policy. While the company as a whole would benefit from that walkback, I think Mr. Huffman himself would probably lose his job.

[graeme]

Yeah they really put themselves in a bind.

A reddit admin just posted this:

> We also want to reiterate that we respect your decisions to do what’s best for your community, and will do what we can to ensure you're safe while doing so. However, we do expect that these decisions have been made through consensus, and not via unilateral action. We ask that you strive to ensure that your moderator team is aligned on community decision-making – regardless of what decisions are being made. If you believe that your community or another community is being subject to decisions made by a sole moderator without buy-in from the broader mod team, you can let us know via the Moderator Code of Conduct form above.

They’re hoping to have some lower level mods who disagree with going private turn to the admins. I doubt it would work but might reopen a few subreddits.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ModSupport/comments/147ysr6/moderat...