[mahranch]

Never, not once. The thing is that when I became a mod, I thought for sure I would see offers or have people try to bribe me. I'm kind of disappointed it hasn't happened because it sounds interesting (I have a boring life). It would allow me to stroke my ego a bit when I got a chance to turn it down. I could say, "See how much integrity I have?". But it's never happened. It's something I would brag about.

As far as wikipedia goes, that's an entirely different ball game. There's significantly less oversight. On reddit, the admins and other mods are always watching. They will see the PMs and requests and watch how those mods respond to them. If one of my co-mods started acting strangely and approving or removing things they shouldn't be, me and the other mods will call them out on it. It would be made public if we couldn't just immediately dismiss them. That happens all the time already, but it's not related to "shill" stuff. It's usually just internal mod struggles and policy disputes.

People, for whatever reason, imagine that all the mods know each other and are friends in real life. That everyone is close-knit. Nope, quite the opposite. A lot of the backroom politicking goes on is between mods within the same subreddit. You can bet your ass if someone was "bought and paid for", they would be outed by their co-mods, especially in a large subreddit with lots of mods (lots of mods = more eyes). They would do this if only because it allows them to gain more power themselves. Again, it's all about the checks and balances that are inherent to reddit's system. Those same checks and balances are absent from wikipedia's editing system. Most actions are quite public (it's easy to see when a front page post disappears) and it's also visible to the users themselves. Changes and edits on wikipedia aren't as visible and its editors aren't listed in the sidebar of every wikipedia page.