I’m not and never have been a mod. But can understand the conflict of not wanting to reopen but if you don’t you lose a position that you’ve spent a lot of time and energy. They’re probably passionate about their community. Giving that away and seeing someone else destroy all your hard work? Glad I’m not that invested.
It’s called the sunk cost fallacy. “I can’t possibly quit because I’ve put so much time/money/effort into this.”
But… they are literally the mods of r/antiwork, a community based around calling out unfair treatment by bosses and gathering strength to quit and find better employment.
You can’t make this shit up, it’s so stupid - it’d be unbelievable if it weren’t for the fact that it actually happened.
In their mind their worried about the stakes of losing complete control of their haven on reddit and watching a community they built in their free time, start blindly following some puppets appointed by reddit. Reddit will always have that power but so long as the mod sees a possibility of maintaining control Reddit can cowtow them under the guise of “You’re the best mod we have, we want you in control, we just need you to accept this is the reality.”
True, but there is a real danger of changing the tone and direction of a sub with a mod swap. That sub has gone through it.
Don’t forget the addiction to power. Yes, there are all kinds of moderators.
This is such a common attitude, and it’s nonsense. Non-moderators think moderators are “power hungry” when they ban people. While there are some few exceptions, moderators don’t ban people because they like power. Moderators ban people because they’re disruptive and causing trouble.
What moderating is really like, part 1
What moderating is really like, part 2
99% of the people I’ve banned who were not obvious spammers or bots are one kind of troll or another. Usually they fall into three categories: Concern Trolls (“But I’m only saying this for your own good!”), Factoid Trolls (“I’m here to tell you the TRUTH!”), or Disruptive Trolls (dick picks, offensive memes, slurs and racism, etc.).
Roughly 1% of the people I ban apologize for their mistake, remove their rule-breaking content, and either follow the rules or quietly leave.
I regularly get called a power-hungry mod by the crybabies who get angry when they aren’t allowed to break the very clearly stated rules, and repeat their offenses after getting first, sometimes second warnings. They run to other places and go try to stir up other crybabies to come and cause the same kind of trouble.
Moderating is tireless and endless. Jerks don’t get banned for saying “Dur the mods suck! Free Speech!” Jerks get banned because they think the rules are for other people, or because they think that the rules are wrong so that means they don’t have to follow them.
Thank you for coming to my Moose Talk. (Ted is taking a nap right now.)
Different platform, but exactly the same deal moderating Twitch chats. I think my favorite insult that I’ve received was that I was personally “the downfall of Western civilization.”
The upshot to those disruptions happening in an active chat like that though is that everyone sees how much of a knob that person is being and is perfectly happy to see them gone.
“I regularly get called a power-hungry mod by the crybabies who get angry when they aren’t allowed to break the very clearly stated rules, and repeat their offenses after getting first, sometimes second warnings. They run to other places and go try to stir up other crybabies to come and cause the same kind of trouble.”
Isn’t there something about this in the rules/code of conduct or something?
I’ve seen the vitrol that mods get called on the daily.
Why isn’t Reddit taking concrete action against this?
I see it as Reddits obligation to educate the community about moderators and what they do on the daily.
It is in their best interest to of course not do the above because otherwise moderators may actually feel like an important part of the eco system.
And Reddit would not like that.
Eh, I have had mixed results.
There are also moderators that ban out of some weird form of spite/echo chamber enforcement.
Ive seen some examples of feminist / human rights forums/subreddits that had it explicitly in their rules that hate speech and attacking people based on gender was against the rules. Someone was going on a long hate filled speech about how all men are trash and terrible, and I just reported it to the moderators that it broke the rule and I proceeded to get banned for making the report (not even engaging with the chat, just reporting)
I also got banned from /r/askscience during the late stages of COVID and was accused of being an antivaxer by the moderator… Thing is I am extremely pro-vaccines, lol
The reason I got banned? Someone posted some faulty stats interpretations of information and I posted the correction, giving an example case to demonstrate how there was a hole on their claim. Largely speaking they were, in a damaging way, accrediting assumed success to vaccines that wasnt quite proven yet, and I was just like “Well we’d need to the info for X/Y/Z to make that assumption, its very possible but we are missing key info”
Moderator sent me this lol:
We don’t allow conspiracy anti-vaxx nonsense here. Your understanding of stats in general is incredibly flawed.
So yeah, sometimes you just have moderators that are complete assholes and genuinely seem interested in enforcing some kind of weird echo chamber deal, where rationality is not supported.
That one in particular sticks out to me because you’d think that a place like /r/askscience would be understanding of calling stuff out like confirmation biases… >_>;
I love how the many users are quick to call mods power hungry. Some of these people spent hundreds of hours building up a subreddit and maintaining it and you call them power hungry because they don’t want to lose what they worked so passionate for - for free.
I love how the many users are quick to call mods power hungry.
@Hovenko wrote that really carefully. If you interpret it literally, it basically says “some moderators are addicted to power.”
Which is true. You are also right, most aren’t. But some are.
Not only that but handing over the sub to people who might be power-hungry and/or abusive. Hard to see a community you’ve worked for be taken over by those who don’t care about it.
