I see this argument all the time, but isn't this just human nature? In any organized structure, some people are going to seek out "power" and abuse it. You will find people making the same complaint about their neighbor who is the head of the homeowner association. It's also part of why people become cops, or if they can't get there, security guards.
Every broad "type" of community on the internet has had this problem. I remember growing up, there were plenty of capricious IRC moderators and admins as well as moderators of individual forums. Little dictators.
I will say, I feel like there was a concerted effort to frame these API changes as specifically being harmful to those with disabilities and moderators (I guess in an attempt to point to short term, immediate concrete harms that would come from this), which opened things up to reframing the whole discussion around as a referendum on moderation.
And apparently most people can't make a simple connection and ask "Why did Reddit not care about these flagrant power abuses before? Will they keep caring after this is over?"
And it seems like that's been fairly successful. But I still think Reddit has doomed itself with this move.
It's funny lore and it lead to the site having culture of a sort, but it points to a failure in upper-level administration. Reddit simply doesn't care about the product it's putting out, beyond some very basic rules aimed at trying to prevent the site itself from being sued, and it shows.
I tried to "play the tape through" on this, and imagine what it looks like. If Reddit had proactively tried to implement some kind of intervention system to remove abusive moderators from subreddits.
It puts Reddit as an organization in a tough position, because they have to mediate disputes. And it opens up a bunch of other questions. How big does a subreddit have to be before they qualify for this intervention system? Does one submit an organized case like filing a lawsuit? What if the accused moderator is the only moderator of the subreddit?
And what new rules does Reddit add to try to curb abusive moderators? There'd have to be some kind of ethical guidelines drawn up. So now unpaid moderators can be disbarred like lawyers?
Every thing I think of (admittedly not having spent a ton of time thinking about this) is open to potential abuse. Even if you set the trigger to be a 90% vote of "no confidence" by subscribed members of the subreddit, the subreddit would be vulnerable to "raids". If you gate it to "you have to have been subscribed for X amount of time" the time will either be too short and leave raiding or create a new "class" of "landed gentry" that have a disproportionate say in how the subreddit is run.
So I don't know if it's actually a failure. Some of the stuff Reddit did early on, things like vote fuzzing etc... show a willingness to experiment with using the platform itself to enforce better behavior. They might have been able to figure something out, eventually. But then I think of really simple stuff that even Hacker News has implemented (ex. you can't downvote a direct reply to one of your comments) and how Reddit doesn't have that.
Yes. It's not easy.
But Reddit knowingly went into a community moderated forum industry. It's not as if this situation was forced on them. Having some plans for this would have been normal business planning.
A lot of this sounds like the plan was:
1. Cool website
2. ?????
3. Profit!!!
Except they never got to 3 and now are scrambling.
What I am arguing is that Reddit did have an established doctrine around subreddits. That doctrine was to give as much autonomy (and free speech) as possible to people who create subreddits. And that was intentional, not a result of lack of planning.
Until now, this has been backed up by their actions over a long timespan. There were many subreddits that Reddit allowed to exist that are almost inconceivable today and only banned after enduring long campaigns of immense public pressure. When they did ban them they changed site guidelines to reflect new rules.
I think overall, the additional content guidelines that were hammered out through this process are fair. I think content guidelines that ban content that may not be illegal but are harmful makes sense. Things like "No non consensual pornography" (aka revenge porn) and "No advocating violence towards groups of people" (no organized racism) are very reasonable.
But it also allowed for subreddits to be created that Reddit as an organization would never have thought of or been able to nourish to a point they became very large. I really think that's what Reddit's secret sauce is and has been.
Gigantic subreddits like r/IAmA, r/todayilearned, r/wholesomememes came from users and grew organically. Yes, this approach has had downsides such as the emergence of powermods and the creation of bad subreddits like r/jailbait and r/fatpeoplehate.
Because of the numerous issues I outlined above, I'm not sure Reddit would have been successfully able to implement or outline a process for keeping the magic of subreddits and a fair system that scales for removing mods and they had no incentive to try. They're going to have to try now though, because I don't think there is any coming back from this.
Reddit does not want to control its moderators in any way. Because of that, they dont even have any willingness to try to make the mods more accountable.
Does it need to? Reddit doesn't care about the local squabbles, and misleading sub names or bare minimum moderation aren't against their rules. it cares about ad revenue. So while it feels hypocritical to suddenly care about maliciously compliant mods, it's consistent in their goals.
I do agree that even if they don't care, they should fit in SOME ability to hoist a mod by some mixture of the community other mods who disagree but simply weren't there first.