Reddit Is Removing Mods over NSFW Protests

This fiasco reminds me of the time Burning Man decided to make tickets on a lottery system. When they did this, everyone panicked and overbought tickets by having friends and family enter the lottery. End result: a lot of the volunteers and groups who actually made Burning Man happen didn't get tickets. Huge fiasco, the BMOrg ended up having to make panicked changes to their plans to ensure that their free labor could actually keep doing free labor.

The parallel here is that reddit is burning their free labor, and honestly the last phase of this is probably the moderators just quitting en masse. When this happens there are two possibilities: new moderators jump in, or reddit uses paid staff to moderate these subs.

If new moderators jump in, there's a good chance they will do a bad job, either unintentionally or on purpose (assuming good behavior from internet strangers is rarely a winning strategy, especially at scale). Either possibility is bad for reddit.

If reddit is forced to use paid staff to handle it, it'll be a cash bonfire and will also expose reddit to a lot of PR headaches where flawed moderation will be blamed directly on reddit. So, torched revenue and reputation damage.

Third possibility is they could learn from Burning Man's mistakes, hire a good PR firm, and listen to them.

I find this interesting, because the management of Reddit allowed this sort of abuse against r/ivermectin when the war against free spee, uh, disinformation was at its height.

The abusive moderators are only acting as Reddit's spent the last three years before this training them to act.

Abusing site functions / mod powers because you disagree with what the site owner is doing is so childish. This whole thing is embarrassing. Just quit being a mod.