> The “top” moderator of r|AdviceAnimals — who had taken fewer than a half dozen moderator actions over the past year — chose to exercise power to shut down r|AdviceAnimals, without the consent of (and against the wishes of) the active moderator team of r|AdviceAnimals.
> The active moderator team of r|AdviceAnimals filed a protest with Reddit Admins, who altered that moderator’s privileges / permissions to prevent the account from changing the configuration of the subreddit or closing it, and then the active mod team of r|AdviceAnimals re-opened it.
Please don’t misrepresent this.
The interesting thing about it to me is this opens a huge swath of "plausible deniability" actions on the part of Reddit administration. For example:
1. Can the admins invoke this rule to say that mods who force a blackout are "not active" and therefore can be replaced?
2. Is it conceivable that admins will spin situations to smear mods doing a blackout? How would we know, if they can delete evidence of what was transpiring beforehand, and much of it would be behind the scenes anyway?
To be clear, I am absolutely sure there is a lot of inter-moderator conflict going on right now and have no doubt there are cases of mods blacking out subs against the wishes of other mods. This could certainly be one of those cases (if forced to guess, in fact, my guess it probably is). But at the same time, this sort of comment makes my antennae go up because it points to ways in which the narrative can really be twisted to suit the Reddit admins.
* Absentee moderators, especially when they are at the top of the moderator hierarchy
* Power moderators who control moderator powers for dozens and sometimes hundreds of popular subreddits
Who owns the platform controls the message.
Sometimes metaphors help me... This is like drivers who drive Google buses going on strike over what Google is doing (hypothetically). Now some of the staff support them (drivers spoke to their passengers). But.. Google own the busses, and the regular workers aren't striking, they are just saying, well look we can't come into work cause there's no bus... But Google own the buses, and the workers aren't striking...
I guess what I'm saying is unless the user's go away, not much is gonna happen.
It's already too late tho, writing is on the wall, you're either making content for Reddit or you're going to go somewhere else
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36313927
The mods have no power here, they compete to work for free for Reddit. Reddit will win, there's always another scab.
Please stop misusing this word for some sort of charged effect. Reddit moderators aren't union labor, and their protest isn't even over their specific issues, but that of 3rd party APP apis.
If people have a different opinion than them, and wish to continue using a website, that is their choice and not one they should be condemned for and it certainly in one way classifies as being a scab.