Mod of /r/tumblr removed during blackout

DoucheAsaurus@kbin.social to Reddit Migration@kbin.social – 4 points –
famichiki.jp

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#redditmigration #reddit One of my friends is a mod of a very large subreddit that went private for the blackout. Last night she received a message saying that she had been stripped of her moderator rights and the subreddit was taken public again. To be very clear, the subreddit members had specifically voted in favor of going private. It seems like reddit will stoop lower and lower to try and break the blackout. I'm seething.

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IMPORTANT: I have talked to this mod one on one, they are in my server. I'll refer to them as T. What we were told is that T doesn't know exactly who demodded them, just that the top mods did not agree to the protest (they are inactive power mods, one of them mods 60+ subs), and when T made the sub read-only because the members of the sub voted to go private, they were demodded. Then the sub went private anyway for unknown reasons (speculated it was to quell the drama after mods got caught removing T's comments). We do not know, nor did anyone or T say that this has something to do with admins.

This is the nature of Reddit. There's potential conflict from any mod who has seniority over you, as well as the top level admins. When we hear stories of this, we need to be able to definitively qualify whether it was just a higher level mod, or actually a Reddit admin. Two entirely different things.

Might just be me, but I find it baffling that the concept of seniority exists among mods because ??? what's the point lol aren't they all there to do the same thing?

The point is that mods are not infallible and can go off the deep end; without an ability to remove them it could lead to any mod being able to single handedly kill a sub. Seniority works simply based on when one was modded, the earliest mod has the most seniority. This means that only the top mod could do great harm unchecked, rather than any of the many mods a sub may have being able to.

Subs will also have differing levels of moderators, where some mods won't have the ability to remove others.

Any system will have scenarios like this. Requiring a majority of mods could lead to gridlock if enough mods stop being active. User vote would be prone to abuse by brigading or bots.

Seniority is the simplest: you make the sub, it's yours. The escape hatch is either Admin action or someone else making their own sub with blackjack and hookers.

Moderators are not just having their account banned, they are having their IP and email addresses scanned by the admin team to permaban them for life.

Proof? As this seems unlikely. Aren’t email addresses optional?

Proof would be good but honestly this seems pretty likely. Power users like mods are going to want the account recoverability so they're mostly going to be using authenticated accounts tied to real emails. And reddit sure isn't going to want them coming back to stir up their users. If I were reddit trying to double down this is absolutely a step I'd take.

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I mean so what's the end game here? remove the top 5% of subs mods and replace them with... who? the people who would make quality mods of the biggest subs are already the mods of them, and it's not like having stooges replace them will make the problem with mod tools etc go away... so you're left with either a revolving door of quality mods that burn out because you took away the thing that made it bearable, or a bunch of idiots who screw up the sub, hard to see how either is a win from a community standpoint or an IPO one tbh

I typed a long response but it seems to have disappeared.

It wouldn't be hard for Reddit to find sympathetic mods to jump in. Any mods of big subs that didn't participate in the blackout would likely be thrilled to grow their empires.

If necessary, Reddit could throw some interns or some contract employees at the problem. A huge part of the job moderating the giant subs is removing spam and other obvious rule violations. It doesn't take specialized training to check a report to see if it is accurate and click ban/remove/approve.

The parts of moderating a sub that do take special skill -- the parts related to growing and tending a community through thoughtful application of subreddit specific rules and norms -- will not be missed in the million+ subscriber subreddits in the short-to-mid term. r/funny and r/TikTokCringe and whatever other giant subs don't really have any quality standards to speak of anyway.

I've found that when typing long replies kbin.social can time-out on its cloudflare protection, and clicking the "add comment" button does nothing. It's necessary to refresh the page, or open another kbin.social page in another tab, to get it to refresh the cloudflare protection at which point the add comment button works again. Might be what happened to your long response.