It's often struck me as odd how some moderators can be modding 50+ sometimes even high as 100+ subreddits. Why so many? I doubt they can be reasonably expected to moderate all of them. Shouldn't there be a limit?
I will say that most moderation work on Reddit can be done independently of a particular sub and scales okay across subreddits. Like the additional effort of moderating 100 subreddits vs 1 would be nowhere near 100x. It would probably be closer to like 5x the amount of work.
And there are benefits to moderating many subreddits.
Most moderation is keeping your automod filters up to date to stop the never-ending onslaught of porn bots, crypto scammers, and obvious fake accounts looking to farm karma. Everyday I'd scan through both the stuff the filters caught and the stuff they didn't and tweak the automod settings to be better, then most of the time I'd copy paste those settings across subs.
The other hard part of being a mod is communicating with the other mods. Like I would only be online moderating one hour out of the day and so all communication with async with anonymous strangers. This again benefits from having mods span many subreddits because you can quickly get to know the other moderators in similar spaces and you all pass information around to each other.
For subs that require user verification this again is a better user experience if you moderate several similar subs because users can verify with you once and be approved across many subs.
The communities actually tend to do a pretty good job of moderating themselves via reporting and downvoting so even if there's only one mod on a subreddit they act way more like an appeals process than an initial judge of fate, most content moderation is actually outsourced to the community as a whole with the mods only responsible for curating a space free of obvious spam and acting as an appeals process for people who have content on the borderline.
With that said consider a subreddit for a podcast or youtube channel where the host/channel might legitimately want to have total control over moderation and I don't think it'd be appropriate to remove them.
Also consider that the vast majority of subreddits are moderated by volunteers who are only doing it because no one else will. You'd probably get more milage out of a way to force community members to take turns serving as moderators than you would having a mechanism to remove existing mods.
When someone says Reddit moderator you're thinking of /r/news or /r/funny not the person running the sub for their favorite book or local sports team or interest group. There are way more of those moderators and you almost need to handle the two use cases differently.
For the truly top subreddits I think Reddit should be employing people directly or indirectly to do the moderation. At the very least they should be compensating those people and reviewing their performance.
Reddit should also make better mod tools and do way more to help with moderation. It's offensively bad what they offer today. If Reddit actually gave a damn they would force every software engineer at the company to spend 2 weeks as the moderator of a subreddit once a year and I guarantee this problem would be solved quickly.
I also think some semblance of moderator hierarchy would be extremely helpful. Have some sort of mod council that oversees all of Ask* subreddits and another for sports subreddits and another for NSFW subreddits. Those content domains will all have similar needs and having someone looking at the bigger picture across individual subs would be very helpful.
that has been the standard in all of reddits history.
The perception that Mods are all power hungry and looking to impose their will is all consuming in some circles, ans it frustrates me. Most of the moderation is pure drudgery that is uninteresting and un controversial. Occasionally a mod will be wrong, or cross a line, and that sucks. But there is a real lack of appreciation for the work these volunteers do day to day.
Like, when I talk about this stuff with some friends who are nerds but don’t hang out in the same circles as any mods, they have no idea that mods are actually doing work beyond occasionally banning someone.
Then once that subreddit grew a little bit two things happened: first moderators of similar subreddits asked if I would be willing to help them out on their subs. The second was that moderators from other subreddits who enjoyed the community would reach out and ask if I needed any help moderating the sub. I both cases I said sure and eventually I ended up just being added to a bunch of subreddits as a moderator.
I would spend about an hour a day doing it and I think I kept it up as long as I did for the social aspect of it - I didn't want to burden the other moderators by leaving.
Then there was a highly politically charged let's say discussion that cropped up on the subreddit around some specific language (think similar to the default git branch being called "master"). It was exhausting to moderate, and it all suddenly felt like it wasn't worth it.
I also said to myself, hey I've got a lot to lose here, I've got a high paying job at a top company, and what happens it someone upset about this issue decides to email my employer and cause trouble? That could have real consequences for me. I'm taking a risk here and it's no longer worth it.
So yeah, I deleted the account and just walked away.
It's the same group of people who strong-armed a lot of smaller subreddits into participating in this 'protest'.
The end result of this protest looks like it's going to be that Reddit is going to remove a lot of the mods that the community has despised for years.
It would seem this mod pity party is backfiring in the most spectacular way possible.
This was during the NBA finals, mind you. Hard to put that sort of result on a small group of mods.
Those votes were brigaded by people pushing the blackout, they are not representative of the overall community.
The average user of Reddit completely ignored/scrolled past those polls because "whats this doing in the NBA sub"
I find it hard to have any faith in those polls considering one of the subs that I mod that has ~3500 members got just over 4800 votes on the poll.
The other sub I mod with 1300 members got 800 votes (which averages 10 posts per week from a core regular group of users)
I do not believe for a second that a sub with less than 100 'active' monthly members had more than 60% of the total lifetime population of that sub come online all of a sudden and vote in the communities best interest.
Then on the other side of it, you've got subs with millions of members that had 20k responses. The average user did not (and does not) care. Now that those subs have been re-polled without being flooded by protesters, it's a overwhelming "No, leave us out of this"
I understand the value of the site even if I don't use it that often. It seems to be on the road to death and was hoping that it could be saved.
I mean, the user above just provided his personal testimony on the subject.
In any case, why should we have a presumption that a poll with say 10k votes on a sub with 10m users is a representative sample of user opinion? Not only would I say that we shouldn't, but I'd say that we shouldn't for reasons that the pro-blackout people often point to - that even if the changes don't impact most users it does disproportionately impact powerusers and mods.
But when someone says "maybe powerusers and mods are disproportionately influencing these polls" then we're suddenly asking for strong evidence??
"I barely visit Reddit so I'm completely cool with them staying offline" is kind of a given.
Now if you have actual evidence of brigading then by all means. Post it. Post those 're-done' polls.
I would suggest that they are representative of the most invested users.
I don't have a Reddit account. I just scroll and pass the time. But contributors have different needs / concerns than I. (I'm in favor of u/spez being replaced, however. What a dick.)
People will say statistically 8000 votes is sufficient for an accurate sample, but only if the voting isn't brigaded.
All comments on other basketball subs at the moment are overwhelmingly in favour of re-opening the sub.
Reddit was the best place for self governed forums. I don't think arbitrary limits for how much one can mod would affect the quality of the site in the slightest.