I understand how on the outside it looks bad but I also know from experience what mods put up with and I totally understand reaching for this tool to avoid it.
[0] https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2020/11/10/21559458/dean-brown...
At least let downvotes do their thing. Deleting posts and banning users should be reserved for spam, persistent troublemakers, or actually-abusive comments.
I've had people walk right up to the line of the subs rules (breaking the spirit if not the letter) time and time again and it's exhausting to deal with. I've had about as close as you can come to death threats (without directly saying it) for temp-banning someone after repeatedly telling them to stop doing something. I've heard the cries of "censorship" for removing what is clearly spam. And all that was on a tiny sub. If I had identified a common source/overlapping interest with those people and it was easy to ban/block them I would have done it. Moderating is thankless work that I fell into (and thankfully got out of) and felt obligated to continue/see through to the end. I had no interest in "power", there was no "payday" or similar, it was just me trying to give back to my community and I got a ton of shit for it.
I wrote, pre-blackout, what I thought was an innocuous comment stating that I would not be offended if someone called me gay (why would I be?) and I eventually received a site-wide suspension for it. No concern was raised from the moderators of the subreddit it was posted in despite the fact that their rules dictate not violating the site rules, which I apparently did.
The panic over there is fascinating.
I moderate some smallish subs (5-10k users) and don’t really make many mod actions. Maybe 5 in the past 15 years. The subs are still pretty good as measured by increasing subscriber counts and my own enjoyment.
I think the huge subs probably get a bunch of spam, but then I ignore them even with moderation.
The cost of running something like Reddit is so cheap. I’ve run bbs servers and it’s not free, but it’s really cheap.
Reddit is just text if you stop hosting images and video.
It was profitable 10 years ago. It just want “unicorn” “profitable” for a huge VC investment and IPO. I don’t care about that.
Again, I’ve literally run subs for over a decade and haven’t seen this problem. Thousands of happy people are chugging along. No “toxic” material so far.
I think the key ingredient may be some niche topic that doesn’t attract random people but some organizing interest.