Technology

Ever worked somewhere where management got cleaned out and replaced with new people who had no existing connection to the place?

Bad mods have always been an issue, but for most places there would at least be some sort of chain of succession where the person who started the community brought on somebody they thought was good, and so on. Most places in having multiple mods would have crossover between new and old mods.

Nuking all that and appointing some rando has a much higher chance that the new mod is going to be bad. Look at the snackexchance drama where some rando totally “randomly” got appointed head mod and his first action was talking about getting government ID verification going for exchanges without asking the community anything.

Reddit will likely be able to subdue most subreddits eventually, but the time and effort spent doing so will be wasteful and publicly ugly as they parade in various mods, and have to step in to crack down on userbases bent on being disruptive.

This is a common argument that I usually see people making, there are a few big problems though with the idea of just getting new moderators. The first problem is that moderation is difficult. It's really easy to look at online posts talking shit about moderators and think that you could do a better job than them but you couldn't and neither could most people, it is a very tedious and difficult process, while there may be many people who are willing to do it there are not as many people who are cut out to do it.

The second problem is that the API changes that Reddit has imposed will make content moderation ever more difficult due to the loss of automated tools that help. People are going to bring up reddit's promise to bring moderating tools to the mobile app or to improve moderation tools in general, this is most certainly an empty promise and even if fulfilled they will do the absolute bare minimum. This is a problem because it means that even for seasoned moderators content moderation is going to become increasingly difficult. Now imagine for somebody who isn't a seasoned veteran moderator, who was freshly appointed by Reddit's administration to fill the roles of mods who quit. I imagine they're probably not going to be able to do this job effectively.

Even If you hired a paid moderator team they would still be nowhere near as effective as the volunteers who poured their heart and soul into it, especially considering that those moderators will be working regular jobs. They're not going to be able to moderate to the lengths that an unpaid volunteer could. This is also ignoring the fact that Reddit very much cannot afford to appoint paid administrators to moderate all of the largest subs on Reddit, considering that making a lot of money is their goal that just isn't sustainable.

So yeah while they could get new moderators it would not be a very easy task for them, and would definitely come with severe drawbacks. Obviously Steve Huffman doesn't really care, he'll probably try it anyway and who knows maybe it'll seem to work out short term, the new moderators won't really be put to the test until they have to deal with a large scale bot attack, either coordinated or uncoordinated. A good thing to keep in mind is that the scammers are watching this scenario, they've already started using it to their advantage by messaging moderators pretending to be administrators as a phishing attack. An experienced mod might be able to Ward this off or not be affected, but in unexperienced mod may fall for this kind of attack without knowing better.

They won't deliberately wreck the place, but they won't understand what made reddit a great site.

Unless they pay for new mods, their only option is to take volunteers.

The people who would volunteer to be the new mods after this shitshow are not the kinds of people that can run good communities. It's going to be power tripping psychos and uncommitted absentees and, yes, saboteurs that want to wreck the place for fun. They'll get a few good mods, but they'll be outnumbered.

Its not just replacing mods though. Take the issue that happened with that snack sharing subreddit. The current mods held it for 10+ years. They built several tools that automated verification and rating people who shared with each other and it prevents a LOT of drama and scams. Then reddit replaced them because of the protest. But what about the automated tools that they personally made for "their" sub. The owner of those tools took them down. The new mod put them back up. They will die on the 30th anyways because they wont make the API requirements and if they are forced to stay up byt he new mods then the person who will have to pay reddit for the API usage is no longer the mod there.

This is not a unique situation either. Tons of people made auto moderation bots and tool over the past 16+ years. Most of those tools break today and if the mods are replaced then those tools are stolen from the owners. If the owners remove the tools reddit sees that as protesting and removes the mods.

It's going to be a train wreck and a legal nightmare.

Even in a perfect world you are replacing mods that know the communities and have created them and worked on them for years with a new set of mods with no attachment or experience running those communities.