There has been a drama cycle at Reddit as old as the site itself. X event happens, moderators censor comments, users flip out and complain, mods censor complaints, and then an inevitable diaspora of free speech lovers and sh–posters to a new subreddit. Just look at r/news to r/uncensorednews, r/cringe to r/cringeanarchy, r/asoiaf to r/freefolk, and r/the_donald to r/mr_trump. The list goes on and on. Tiny revolutions and counterrevolutions against tiny online dictators ending in inevitable schisms.
Mods make unpopular decisions all the time on Reddit and there is very little that any subreddit’s user base can do about it. Complaints to the admins are often ignored. While the top mods can remove lower ranked mods, nothing can be done if the top mod is a tyrant. Essentially, they rule for life until they quit or become inactive.
There is no democratic option for ousting mods, and semi-active subs can even be taken over by bad actors and dismantled. Despite claiming to be a haven of free speech and expression, Reddit is at the mercy of these little Napoleons prone to power trips and bouts of megalomania — and some, I assume, are good people.
But they do it for free, so how bad can it be?
Some of this mod cancer is due to over-moderation — that is, over-policing of submissions due to an increasingly restrictive set rules.
Just look at r/cringe, a once thriving place to make fun of awkward moments in YouTube videos, now gets only gets a smattering of submissions, mainly old reposts, due to overaggressive mods. First they banned photo submissions, then they wouldn’t allow videos unless they included an interaction with two people. Some of the best early submissions were lonely YouTube vloggers alone in their mom’s basement. (They even deleted my highly upvoted, high-quality Donald Trump motorboating Giuliani post for being “fake.”) The mods of a sub that is supposed to make you laugh are just a bunch of fun hating ruiners. The less restrictive cringeanarchy offshoot has become much more active and vibrant.
Donald Trump in a weird sexual skit with Rudy Giuliani in drag from cringe
The worst problem pertaining to mods is undisclosed political biases. This came to a boiling point when r/news mods started censoring posts about the Orlando shooting after it came out that the shooter was Muslim. They locked threads and deleted comments. When users complained about the censorship they basically told their users to stop being babies and move on. One of the mods even told a user to kill him or herself. The decision by the mods essentially paralyzed the site’s discussion of one of the most important news events of the decade.
Then, of course, when the admins investigated the incident, they found no censorship and instituted changes that did nothing to curb the problem of mods restricting conversation.
The examples of this behavior are practically endless. Mods at r/politics, the supposedly nonpartisan but actually just a Berniebro echo chamber subreddit, deleted any post relating to attacks on Trump supporters in San Jose. R/europe mods deleted posts about the spree of sexual assaults in Cologne on New Years Eve. Just recently, a particularly eloquent and twice-gilded comment got deleted in r/worldnews just for being pro-Brexit.
The pattern often with this political censorship is that the left-wing mods censor conservative opinions and create an offshoot right wing community. Even r/the_donald, Trump’s subreddit has more conservative offshoots with r/mr_trump and r/the_donaldunleashed due to censorship.
While advocating for free speech, these diaspora communities have a habit of quickly turning racist and xenophobic. R/european was created as a legitimate reaction to censorship in r/europe but quickly digressed into a white supremacist sub that was eventually quarantined by the admins.
Subreddits can also be completely dismantled by trolls who assume the moderator job. Users can request moderator positions on r/redditrequest if the current mods have been inactive for 60 days. A troll, /u/rulerofthefempire, used this mechanism as a way to take over and ruin semi-popular subereddits like r/100pushups, r/insertions and r/nsfwgif. Rulerofthefempire regularly taunts his subjects in insertions by declaring edicts such as “wish me happy birthday or I’ll ban you.”
The once popular r/punchablefaces was handed over by a frustrated mod to a member of the militant feminist wing of Reddit, ShitRedditSays. The new regime for a period would only allow pictures of white male faces, “the punching up rule,” and has now devolved to only Despicable Me minions images.
Reddit mods have even been caught accepting bribes from a large corporation. Mods at the Star Wars Battlefront subreddit were given access to the game’s early alpha by representatives at EA in exchange for removing any leaked images or video of the game in development. To the admins’ credit, this time they stepped in and their punishment was swift and severe.
While there are plenty of examples of abuse, most of the mods on Reddit are normal people, generous enough to give their time weeding out spam and keeping their communities thriving and on topic. But the checks and balances to their power are almost nonexistent, leading to never-ending cycles of revolutions and counterrevolutions. Perhaps a dose of democracy to the current oligarchic system is what Reddit needs to curb the perpetual drama.