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Moderation is one of the huge Achilles’ heels of Reddit. I’m confused why Reddit thinks a monarchy with no term limits will work on a website when it has never worked in human history. There is no voting whatsoever where users can give feedback on how they think the moderation or the subreddit is going. You get entrenched subreddits like /r/movies and their obsession with movie posters instead of movie discussion or /r/running, which is incredibly unused because the mods insist on removing almost any discussion of running outside the weekly threads except for idiotic race reports in obscure places that no one reads or cares about.

The nice thing about reddit is that no one is forcing you to follow such broach subreddits which appeal to the common denominator. In my experience, any subreddit which has more than a few millions members is going to be pretty terrible.

Find a more niche subreddit like /r/<city_name>running (although location subreddits fall into a similar trap) or /r/longdistancerunning and you'd probably find them to be more interesting simply because moderators are beholden to a smaller community and their job is more about making things interesting for their niche and cultivating a community rather than just dealing with slurs, bots, and spam.

You are confused.

You seem to think Reddit Inc wants anything but control over the users. They are not at all interested in discussion or being a social network. If they could achieve their real goal without all the annoying comments, they would shut those off instantly.

Reddit is a narrative pushing machine first and foremost. The money they make on advertising - IS NOT - from the one of two ads you see per page.

The Reddit stock price is not at all reflective of their tech. It’s based on ability to push thoughts to users.

I agree with your comments about the large subreddits, but I also agree with Mistletoe that even many niche subreddits (or at least "midsized" subreddits) suffer from the same moderation problem.

Namely, once a subreddit becomes popular or has basically "the default" subreddit name, it's extremely difficult to just start a new subreddit if you don't like the moderation on the old subreddit, because it's so hard to get people to know about or move to the new subreddit. There was some drama years ago where some r/lgbt mods went on a major power trip, which caused other folks to start the r/ainbow sub, but still most folks go to the lgbt reddit as it's what comes up first if you just search for "gay subreddit" or similar.

You say "because moderators are beholden to a smaller community", but that's the point - mods aren't really beholden to anyone at all, as it's not like electing mods is a democratic process. Note nor do I think it should be, as being a mod is a ton of grief and labor that people donate for free. But I do think Reddit could make it a lot easier and "fairer" if people wanted to "fork" a subreddit if people wanted to discuss the same topics with the same community, just with different moderation rules.

Their annual report, and their advertiser platform doesn’t really back up whatever it is you are implying here.

I would be incredibly surprised to find that reddits officers are willing to risk life ruining fines to lie in their filings about this.

As someone who has moderated multiple subreddits, and single handedly brought a subreddit from 0 to 100,00 subscribers, this misunderstands subreddits, moderation, and the relationship between Reddit and moderators. IMO subreddits were supposed to be like random forums on the internet of old, but with a shared substrate. Those forums were singularly owned as well and if you didn't like the operators you moved on, because there was no one you could escalate to.

There is fundementally a social contract between Reddit and its moderators. Moderators get autonomy and control, and reddit gets content that keeps users around. As long as Reddit does not pay moderators, autonomy and control is all they can give moderators. I'm investing a lot of effort, and I'd like to retain some control. IMO creating a community is more like starting an open source project on Github with a lot of community contributions.

If you take away autonomy and control from moderators, what is in it for the moderator? Imagine if github started seizing projects wholesale, taking them over and installing new maintainers. People would move off the platform.

Some people say that moderators are unpaid employees, but IMO that is only to the degree that moderators are required to carry out Reddit's agenda and priorities. We don't call OS maintainers github employees. I don't mind if Reddit benefits from my communities, as long as I can run it the way I want. If you take away autonomy and control, moderators absolutely become unpaid employees.

If Reddit didn't like my policies and took my subreddits, I would take that as a strong signal that Reddit is not the place to build my communities. The API debacle, protests, and mod removals caused me to decentralize my community more. I spam a linktree in my subreddit that links to Discord and other resources, exactly to protect against community seizeure by Reddit.

I think you touch on some real issues. One is of namespacing; folks can sit on valuable portions of the namespace and basically extract rent. We have the same issues for domains, and haven't solved it there. Some places like github semi-solve it by putting repo's in organizations, but that shifts the namespace issue to the organizational level.

The other problem is second generation moderators. Most moderators are terrible at succession planning, and so generally chose terrible successors. Many second generation moderators don't understand the original decisions that shaped the community, and what makes the original community successfully. Reddit should do more to encourage succession planning, and teach moderators how to do it.

If someone/some group can’t successfully create a smaller competing subreddit, what prospects would they have to successfully convince over half the existing userbase of a subreddit to formally vote for a “fork”?

the issue is that it's very hard to even let their desired audience know that they exist.

the only feasible way (short of like, scraping every comment made on a subreddit and dm'ing each of those users) to reach the audience you're trying to convince to switch to your alternate subreddit is by... posting on the original subreddit. the original subreddit has no incentive to allow your post, and public moderation logs aren't a thing on reddit, so...

So…? It still makes no sense to expect there to be any prospects of accomplishing something vastly harder, regardless.

> Find a more niche subreddit like /r/<city_name>running

Maybe that works in the US, since half of all reddit users seem to be from there, and for very general topics like running.

But for discussing local LLMs, you have just about one place to chose between, and if the moderators somehow are silencing discussions there, there doesn't seem to be much you can do about it.