alt Hacker NewsI don't know about this particular case, but, generally... bad actor subreddit moderators have been an occasional thing for well over a decade.
And it's also been widely known for that long that Reddit is an influential venue in which to take over a corner -- for marketing or propaganda.
What's an equal concern to me is how insufficiently resilient Reddit collectively appears to be, in face of this.
A bad actor mod of a popular subreddit can persist for years, visibly, without people managing either to oust the mod, or to take down the sub's influence.
(Subreddit peasants sometimes migrate to a new sub over bad mods, but the old sub usually remains, still with a healthy brand. And still with a lot of members, who (speculating) maybe don't want to possibly miss out on something in the bad old sub, or didn't know what's going on, or the drama they noticed in their feed wasn't worth their effort to do the clicks to unjoin from the sub in question.)
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> And it's also been widely known for that long that Reddit is an influential venue in which to take over a corner -- for marketing or propaganda.
Capturing moderation of a subreddit has long been a strategy of marketing agencies.
Even when they can’t take over the actual mod positions, they’ll shower the mods with free product and make them feel like a VIP. I watched this happen from inside one company and I couldn’t believe how easily the marketing team turned a mod into our biggest advocate by sending free products to them from time to time.
> A bad actor mod of a popular subreddit can persist for years, visibly, without people managing either to oust the mod, or to take down the sub's influence.
In some of the subreddits I followed, the remaining subreddit users felt some relationship with the mods over time and felt they were on the same side. There are subreddits like /r/nootropics where many users don’t realize the mod team has been captured by a supplement company (Nootropics Depot) and that they have a history of deleting some posts critical of Nootropics Depot. You would think this would be grounds for a subreddit riot, yet whenever I check it feels like everyone there is fans of Nootropics Depot and therefore they get a pass. Note that the quality of the science discussed on /r/nootropics is generally terrible and of very poor quality in recent years, which is certainly a related factor. It’s also not hard to find comments in other subreddits from people who were banned from /r/nootropics.
I think this happens across a lot of subreddits. Moderators find reasons to ban the dissenters and shape the conversation until the hive mind consensus favors the mods, so any issues aren’t discussed. People who object are banned for different reasons and minor infractions, then get tired of Reddit and move on. What remains is captured by companies pushing their products to an audience who thinks the mods are doing them a favor.
Think about a Reddit mod's incentives.
They:
- Don't get paid
- Spend time having to do some really thankless work
- Don't really have a regular work schedule
So what kind of person is going to do it?
Someone who is willing to do the work for no pay. For smaller subreddits and areas where the work of moderation isn't that heavy, you'll find passionate individuals.
Mods that moderate more time consuming content or the power mods modding many subs are chasing some other incentive. For some that means explicitly monetizing their time by pushing products and companies who pay them. For others it's the ideological satisfaction of pushing viewpoints they want pushed and suppressing viewpoints they want suppressed. For some it's prestige. For most it's probably some mix of all three.
What's absent is any incentive to surface organic, human content. That's merely a side effect of what mods do, not their main job.
> A bad actor mod of a popular subreddit can persist for years, visibly, without people managing either to oust the mod, or to take down the sub's influence.
This happens because the regular users have no power. I remember seeing some article that said a small number of mods control most of the popular subreddits. Many of them put their own bias into the system by banning users, banning sources, deleting content based on ideology, shadow banning, etc.
The other issue is as these mods linger for a while, they drive away or ban everyone who might disagree with them. So then the “community” ends up not actually disagreeing with the authoritarian mod. Reddit ends up not being resilient because it doesn’t want to be. Everyone else, is gone.
Reddit has a serious abusive moderator issue. I suspect they will all be demoted to "VIP community member" soon enough and have that entire layer handled by AI. There's just too much ego involved for a human to do a job like that.
Not cool you calling users “peasants”, they can’t do anything. Have you posted on Reddit, like, with actual personal opinion? You will quickly find out that it’s a moderator’s walled garden of opinions and your posts removed without explanation and notification. and complaining does not do anything.
Reddit has a moderation problem, and it's a big one.
They've now been asked to appear in front of Congress to address concerns about politically motivated violence being incited through their platform: https://oversight.house.gov/release/chairman-comer-invites-c...
Personally I believe I've seen more people in the past few years wish a politically motivated death on somebody else via Reddit, than I have anywhere else in my life.
Now if it was "just" the incitements to violence, or if it was "just" the libeling of random businesses, that would be one thing. But the fact that BOTH types of illegal speech are becoming a problem at the same time suggests to me that Reddit's failure to moderate is systemic and total.
It is becoming exhausting watching all of these tech companies commit crimes, or enable someone else to do so, and getting off with a slap on the wrist.