[ryandrake]

Reddit is a pretty extreme example, though, where mods are basically subreddit dictators. For whatever reason, Reddit gave enormous amount of censorship and conversation-shaping power to mods, to the point where a handful of like-minded mods can enforce in great detail what is allowed to be discussed and what isn't.

Pretty sure if you unmasked the subreddit mods, the reason for the "circling around a particular brand recommendation" observation would become clear.

[trumpdong]

Mods are also not as independent from each other and from Reddit staff as Reddit would like you to think. At the beginning it may have been whoever created the subreddit, but that stopped being the case over time - we saw the extreme case in the 2023 API crisis when Reddit staff simply fired all the moderators who disagreed with them, and installed moderators who agreed with them more.

[suburban_strike]

> For whatever reason, Reddit gave enormous amount of censorship and conversation-shaping power to mods

It's been "bad" since the 2010s, but censorship went into overdrive once OpenAI struck a deal with Reddit a few years ago (2021?). The mods do the dirty work of aggressively sanitizing all future training data for "safety" so the entire site is curated to align with ChatGPT now.