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Comment by shmatt | Hacker News Reader

except you don't need to be born a chosen one to become a mod. its not rocket science, and plenty of people want the power

have you every thought to yourself, wow, /r/pics is so much better since /u/DM_ME_BOOGERS joined the mod team, I really feel like there was a pre-2019 /r/pics and a post-2019 /r/pics

People don't even notice that mod teams could have completely rotated out this year and they didn't feel a thing

edit: ill add an example, /u/Cyxie up until a couple years ago, moderated 20% of the top 500 subreddits, their user is now deleted

Has anyone felt reddit is worse these days since they left? Is the day they left widely known as the day Reddit became bad?

Heres your answer: no one cares about Cyxie, Reddit was fine before them, during their tenure, and after they deleted their account

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R/pics isn't exactly an example of a high quality subreddit.

Try the same thing on a subject domain specific sub, where the mods actively police the quality of comments. Askscience for example.

Somebody is policing /r/pics. I'm perma-banned because I pointed out that if people were angry about this particular pic from a bank flier that they can reach the bank at $data_in_pic to complain. They considered that doxxing.

/r/spacex is a pretty well oiled machine by the mods.

> plenty of people want the power

Is this really true? I'm not a redditor, but I used to co-moderate a certain open-posting newswire. It takes time and thought to moderate; there's no rush from the "power". Nobody thanks you for doing it; you know you're doing it OK if the users don't flee, and nobody's complaining (much).

Admittedly we were all grown-ups, not 12-year-olds; but surely a sub that's moderated by an opinionated tyrant would quickly lose users?

They definitely notice if there is a bad mod throwing their weight around.

You can pretty much leave communities in auto mode and nothing will happen. A few posts will get blocked. A few people will get annoyed. It is both difficult to encourage and discourage people to participate in Reddit communities.

Pretty much, people only notice when mod team decides to make significant changes to how subreddit works (banning certain types of posts etc.), not the power-hungry individual at hand

there’s always more people who want to mod. mods don’t own the content. i would expect reddit to have a rule saying if a reddit has over 1,000 posts it can’t go private. there’s already a ton of mod power and they can make money by keeping clearly paid content active

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