[thepasswordis]

I think that’s most subs. This is why I’m actually torn between which group I dislike the most.

On the one hand, the admins are being absolute children to the mods. But that said: most (all?) if the Reddit mods I have interacted with are also overgrown children.

The “mods vs admins” thing seems like two toddlers screaming at each other. It’s at a point where I kind of want both sides to lose.

Something in the culture changed 4-5 years ago where being a mod went from a job where you remove spam posts, to a role where you decide what is allowed for discussion.

On my city subreddit, for instance, they’ve gotten it to the point where practically anything which isn’t a photo of a sunset is seen as off topic and removed.

And then there’s stuff like: mods will decide to “lock” threads they don’t like. There was a discussion on /r/Catholicism talking about an anti-Catholic group being invited, then uninvited, then reinvited to perform at a baseball game. After a few hours of discussion the mods “locked” this, meaning you couldn’t participate in it anymore.

It’s extremely annoying.

[evandale]

> Something in the culture changed 4-5 years ago where being a mod went from a job where you remove spam posts, to a role where you decide what is allowed for discussion.

> On my city subreddit, for instance, they’ve gotten it to the point where practically anything which isn’t a photo of a sunset is seen as off topic and removed.

Yep, this is what needs fixing. My local city subreddit decided there was too much news in the city about crime and banned posting stories about crime in January. It's now June and still a rule. You can only post a story about someone committing a crime or getting arrested if their crime had a city-wide impact.

There was a story about teenagers shooting fireworks off on a public bus around Victoria day this year and that post was allowed. People shat on the teenagers and said whatever they wanted about them. It got as nasty as you'd expect. The post announcing their arrest though? It turned out to be a group of POC and so the mods locked the comments within minutes because they anticipated "bad" comments and it was going to be too difficult to moderate.

The other annoying thing before that was a small group of powerusers getting annoyed with people asking too many easy-to-Google questions. So a few choice posters would always come in and make the same "I recommend House of Lancaster" (a strip club with a reputation) for every question that got asked. It didn't matter what the question was, there was at least 1 house of Lancaster suggestion. It turned into a meme, the moderators noticed people were hostile to newcomers, and rather than outlawing being hostile to people they banned questions!

It’s _extremely_ annoying.

[ink_13]

Sounds like the real problem is that those questions were drowning out all other content. Personally I don't object to moderators setting rules that reduce noise. Or, to put it another way, moderating.

[evandale]

They weren't though. The bad questions stayed buried in new with 0 votes. Removing questions literally only affected people who browsed new and most people don't browse new.

Reddit has tools to hide posts you personally don't want to see without affecting the entire subreddit with silly rules. If you browse new you should be aware of these things.

[thepasswordis]

Oh my god the banning questions thing is infuriating. Just let people not answer it if they don’t want to. Linking everybody to an FAQ from 4 years ago is not helpful. We don’t need more room for pictures of sunsets, and even if we did, nobody is paying per character.

My actual hope is that what comes out of this protest is that the majority of moderation is simply removed.

Forgive me for not shedding any tears because mods wont be able to stalk users using push shift anymore. The horror.

[evandale]

> Just let people not answer it if they don’t want to.

hah, I tried making this argument for months, no years, after the decision was made - that they were banning the wrong thing. It's trivial (and a built in Reddit feature) to automatically hide posts after you vote them (up or down - you have full control) and there's even the hide button to hide posts you don't want to vote on. It would have been so easy (and made nearly everyone happy) to have the rule to be against bad faith answering questions. To encourage people to downvote and ignore questions you they want to answer. If nobody is answering or voting for the questions then people will stop asking them.

Well powerusers didn't want questions period (and I think some friends of the mods already had control of the question subreddit) so they punted questions off to a different subreddit.

The mods definitely get some enjoyment through trolling people and making the experience on the city subreddit miserable - most of them are extremely active in a shitposting subreddit that was specifically made for making fun of users in the city subreddit. The powerusers that were involved in the bad behavior own the shitposing subreddit too. It's a small sort of r/drama or r/subredditdrama for a local subreddit. If you make the "right" comments in the city subreddit (i.e. dunk on the "right" people) you get invited to mod the shitposting subreddit.

What's really needed is a public moderator log outlining what gets removed. I wouldn't care about things being removed that much if I had an option to see it. I really hate that they can remove things that _someone_ found interesting about the city and I can't see it at all because of arbitrary rules the moderators made.

[Sunspark]

This is why Reddit if they want to be a community needs to allow ELECTIONS.

Our MPPs and MPs are elected for multi-year terms.

Why not require that mods be elected for a 2 year term and that they have to campaign to be re-elected? If they are a hated mod, they won't get re-elected.

Instead we have dictator-for-life Eric Cartman moderating multiple subs.

[ajmurmann]

Are there actually enough people willing to do the mod job? I am only in one sub where everyone hates the mods, but even there I haven't seen any discussion of anyone becoming a mod. Maybe it's because mods delete insurrectionist posts. However, I cannot imagine many people want to do such a thankless and stressful job that pays nothing at all.

[Sunspark]

It's not thankless or stressful if all you do is just enforce the overall corporation rules plus perhaps some locally agreed upon additional rules.

If people want to post sunsets and nobody is writing you emails to complain about it, then have at it. It's the voice of the people.

[ajmurmann]

It's all easy till the fuzziness of reality hits with it's ambiguity, anger, etc. Have you read Yishan's famous thread on the topic? https://twitter.com/yishan/status/1586956430162083841

[Sunspark]

I had not, good thread!

It seems to come down to that people need to debate on the same level. Some drunk bum is not going to walk out of a bar and into a classroom and debate a professor. But that's what happens on social media.

[fakedang]

I'm pretty sure mods are paid from somewhere. I remember reading some stuff about 4 or 5 years back, about how the left-wing party of that country (I think it was UK Labour) had taken over mod duties of the country subreddit.

[ajmurmann]

"On my city subreddit, for instance, they’ve gotten it to the point where practically anything which isn’t a photo of a sunset is seen as off topic and removed."

hah, my reference to the one large sub where the mods are widely hated was about my city's sub which from your description might be the same. Edit: In this case, I have some empathy for the mods though, since that sub faced invasions from people outside the city who hate it.