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Comment by PhasmaFelis | Hacker News Reader

I doubt there were many people who didn't already hate the mods who were swayed by an unelected dictator gabbling about the importance of democracy.

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The point was to remind the moderators that they aren't the democratic leaders representing the will of users as they framed themselves to be. Some mods are well liked but a great many of them are widely hated and know they would lose elections. Nobody mistakes the King for a democratic leader, even when he threatens the mods with elections. Nobody thinks even for an instant that Spez might let his users vote him out, Spez knows it too. He isn't pretending to be democratic, he's making an overt power play by proposing elections for those under him but not himself.

I wouldn't say mods are unelected. Readers basically vote by visiting the subreddit they mod. If a bunch of mods become too much of a problem, you can just "leave the country". If enough people leave, those mods will just be dictators of an empty subreddit.

You can't "leave the country" for the large default subs. That kind of argument doesn't scale well into the millions+ subs where even if every mods on that board being a dick to 2-3 people a day, they would still need years to make the current population of user to get noticeably affected. And because they are basically the default subs, their new users make up for whoever is leaving anyway.

The mods for those big subs are literally untouchable and can do whatever they want, with no accountability.

What presumably scales well with subreddit size is the amount of spam and abuse moderators have to deal with. So if, on a million+ sub, they manage to only "be a dick to 2-3 people a day", and the subreddit otherwise isn't rapidly bleeding users due to an onslaught of trolls and spammers - I'd say the mods are doing a goddamn great job. It's not like bad actors keep themselves away.

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