[EA-3167]

I don't think anyone doubts that Reddit could pretty easily unlock those subs, but without mods there to run them it would be a legal nightmare. How long before illegal material was flooding the site beyond the capacity of the admins alone to manage?

I'd also worry that if Reddit moved in that direction, the mods would feel like they didn't have control over their own subs and bail. I don't believe that Reddit can afford that, especially given how many subs and what %age of the user base we're talking about here.

[Tao3300]

> How long before illegal material was flooding the site beyond the capacity of the admins alone to manage?

I guess that depends on how many people are willing to risk prison just because they're mad at Reddit. Or on what automatic moderation capabilities Reddit has. Not a moderator, so I honestly don't know how much work it does or doesn't take. They probably count on volunteer mods to filter spam and whatnot, but for legal compliance? Highly doubtful.

[EA-3167]

I think I was unclear, that's my bad. I'm not talking about the average person "protesting" that way, I'm saying that Reddit is already flooded with illegal and ad-unfriendly stuff, the mods are the ones who spend their days picking up that trash. If you open the subs, but the mods are still on strike (and forcibly opening their subs is unlikely to change that) then who's doing the janitorial work?

I'm not a mod, but I have several friends who are, and you wouldn't believe the sheer amount of gross nonsense they have to sift through. Even ignoring the relatively banal death threats, there are always questionable elements trying to sell drugs (both Rx and other), running scams, offering malware, and worse.

[irrational]

Today we learned that r/css hasn’t had any functioning mods in many years, yet it hasn’t been over run, yet.

[EA-3167]

Yeah... I'm not shocked that a CSS sub with 100k subbed isn't exactly raucous. I suspect that the same can't be said for r/worldnews or the other giants.