Greentext

I feel bad when Reddit mods get the brunt for stuff like this; in my opinion, it's usually not their fault. It's the fault of Reddit which relies on unpaid labor to make its entire website work literally at all. Maybe that was "fine" back in the early days when Reddit was smaller, but Reddit nowadays is one of the largest websites on Earth and represents the lowest common denominator of Internet users.

I mod a couple communities here and don't mind because this whole sphere is non-profit, the people on average are pretty cool, and vastly fewer people makes it so I can usually recognize people and resolve problems by talking. But the idea of working pro bono pseudononymously for a corporation with a market cap of 26.5 billion USD to keep their millions of (on average) stupid fucking users in line is one of the most soul-crushing things I can imagine. You really do have to take actions like this because, without stern moderation, communities will inevitably go to shit. They'll return to the LCD, and your community will just melt into the rest of the front page with tenuously related, zero-effort posts.

All things considered, I think most of Reddit's mods are doing a good job (and well more than what they owe Reddit or even the random end user, which is fucking nothing and next to fucking nothing, respectively). Yeah, the mods could quit at any time, and they probably should at least on ethical grounds, but I also understand sunk cost and wanting to continue fostering a community about a subject you like that hundreds of thousands of people can enjoy.