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The problem with Reddit's business model is that it relies on massive amounts of volunteer labor (subreddit moderators). Moderators are unpaid, so these positions will be filled by people who value power and status over money, i.e. progressive activists.
In theory, this is solved by people who don't like the mods of one subreddit making their own subreddit with their own mods. In practice, mods of the largest subreddits, being progressive activists, will demand that site ownership take down dissenting subreddits. Site ownership can't afford to piss off the moderator class too much, because then they lose their massive source of unpaid labor, as very nearly happened before. This inevitably degenerates into the situation we find ourselves in now, where major subreddits simply lock any potentially controversial thread and ban anyone who complains about it.
How exactly do you know their political alignment and level of engagement?
It's an old canard, but I always thought it had unimpeachable logic:
The more time a person can spend powermodding on Reddit, the less likely it is that they have a job, and the less likely it is that they have a job, the more likely they are to be poor, and the more likely they are to be poor, the more likely they are to be leftist.
TL;DR: conservatives have less time for Internet drama because conservatives go to work for 8 hours a day.
It's not a PROOF of their ideological bent, but it's a constraining of their probability density in a leftwards direction.
t. Monarchist neoreactionary phoneposting from his directly taxpayer funded job
You're ignoring a big factor - age. Young people have time to moderate, older people don't. Young people tend to lean more progressive than older people, so age replicates the claimed political dominance of the left without relying on claims of progressive activists going after moderation positions on Reddit.
That does not explain what was mentioned in another comment - how banning words like "retard" was the butt end of a joke when originally implemented by woke sub's.
Also, have you seen how many subs some of the powermods moderate? No one functional has that much free time.
Progressive activists absolutely have sought out moderations position on reddit.
Are we talking about powermods or mods in general? The original comment didn't say powermods. I agree that those people are more suspect in general - GallowBoob's deletion of critical posts and articles, the way that criticism of chtorr's removal of Marsey was itself removed, etc. But they don't constitute all mods by definition. But I know that GallowBoob gets paids for shilling, and getting paid to be an influencer isn't unheard of.
Again, are we talking mods or powermods? Pick one and show me proof that this is being done out of service to the ideology.
Fair enough. I was thinking more about powermods and even admins. Low level mods probably act more organically, but there's also a selection effect, where subs that go too far off get banned. I think I even heard stories of admins helping to orchestrate subreddit coups, but that was too long ago for me to have the details.
Evidence of it being ideological is hard to give without access to their internal communications, but their actions are a little too deliberate for me to categorize it as even "biased but well intentioned".
Yeah, if the discussion is powermods, then I just don't have as strong a prior about those people being neutral. Mind you, you don't tend to hear all the cases of "and then this powermod did boring normal things", you hear the exact opposite. Gallowboob's sponsorships, chtorr's fucking with /r/place to remove Marsey, etc.
I don't know about a coup, but after the antiwork meltdown, the now deleted powermod account /u/EphraelStern made a post to the subreddit talking about how there was an income disparity between trans workers and cis workers, among other things. I don't object to powermods having perspectives and taking part in the subreddits they moderate, but I find this post objectionable for doing precisely what led to the "women make 77 cents per men's dollar for the same work" idea. Also because it focuses on equalizing income before workers are even necessarily doing better.
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