I recently activated my account on there and went to the forum for my country. It was already taken over by moderators. Then I looked at the mod and he took all real estate that is already available on Reddit that is related to said country. So in a way, he was probably the first account on there and became god-king for eternity for the subreddits related to the country. I had no idea who he was, what he stood for, what his plans were for his newfound digital real estate etc.

I feel like the moderated subforum is a fundamentally broken system for dealing with content. I much prefer the Federated / X / Instagram approach where I can deal with users and have the tools needed to curate my own content, instead of relying on some ideologically captured no-name account that chooses what I can or cannot see based on whims.

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vintermann 4 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Your country wouldn't be Norway by any chance? I remember that on Reddit there was one powermod who was dead-set on owning every Nowegian-language forum, and every name that could potentially be a base for people trying to escape him.

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p2detar 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

The absolutely broken moderator system of Reddit made me leave it forever after being a regular user for more than a decade. The “god-king” thing simply doesn’t work.

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asmor an hour ago | parent [-]

And even if it does, the mods don't have real control to moderate communities either, so you get the worst of both worlds. I don't go to most queer reddit communities anymore because a lot of them have bots that downvote trans-positive posts, even if the community is specifically meant to be inclusive. There's nothing to couple active participation to voting weight or anything of that kind and voting is not considered "brigading" by reddit if the coordination happens off-site (at least not in a way that'd lead to any enforcement action).

It's makes a great propaganda machine though, given humans have a tendency to measure their own opinions on social clues.

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gzread an hour ago | parent [-]

I still haven't been able to figure out how to make an account without it being immediately shadowbanned or normalbanned. Tried again the other day, it was something in between where logged-out users could see it was banned but I couldn't.

	▲	mschuster91 23 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		You need to ditch and replace all your devices and acquire a new phone number. I'm serious. Virtually all large websites these days employ a lot of fingerprinting and persistence technologies. And yes, ditch them. Even well over a decade ago, Wikipedia of all places already employed IP address matching to link sockpuppet accounts. You must be extremely careful of never using any device that was associated with your old accounts on the same network as the devices associated with your new account. And that includes devices only seen by association.

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guerrilla 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Yes. Subforums should elect mods democratically.

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dijit 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

sadly, a nice idea that is painfully naive with how computers are used in reality.

One need only remember how easy it was to take over IRC channels with a few hundred bots to see the endgame of this rationale… it cannot be patched out, it’s inherent to the internet.

That which would make a vote valid; can (and will) be gamed.

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johannes1234321 4 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

As long as sub forums can be created easily, users may pick their sub forum and thus indirectly moderator.

In this setup having users elect the moderator leads to cases where small groups create their special interest group and then some trolls challenge the moderator.

Their may be some oversight on the large sub forum, but not all.

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leoedin 23 minutes ago | parent | next [-]

You see this in city-focused subreddits. But the reality is the name is power. New users type in their city and join the original one. The hostile mods suppress mention of the new one. It never manages to get critical mass.

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gzread an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

Necessary for this is that subforums can't have unique names. If a bad mod can squat all the words like "computers", "programming", "coding", newcomers aren't going to know the best subforum is called "RealProgNoBadMod"

	▲	johannes1234321 35 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		Yes, the "important" ones need some special attention. If "democracy" where anybody can create arbitrary amount of accounts is however questionable. The vast majority of sub forums however are more targeted and smaller to begin with.

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twic 2 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Stack Overflow does this and it works far better than arbitrary tyrant style moderation.

	▲	gzread an hour ago \| parent [-]
		Stack Overflow is dead now.

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Gud 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Why? Genuinely curious.

I am a big proponent of (direct) democracy in general.

	▲	mavhc 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Internet is way behind on democracy. In general everyone likes democracy until they're in charge, then they realise they're the best person to be in charge and the idiots who vote don't have a clue, and should probably be banned if not beheaded for speaking out of turn. You'd have to weight votes by some kind of participation metric to solve the problem of very little authentication of the voters

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basisword an hour ago | parent | prev [-]

>> I recently activated my account on there and went to the forum for my country. It was already taken over by moderators. Then I looked at the mod and he took all real estate that is already available on Reddit that is related to said country.

Are you sure? My understanding is that accounts were only allowed to create two communities.

	▲	gzread an hour ago \| parent [-]
		On Reddit? It's horribly intransparent but there seems to be a special class of people to whom the normal rules don't apply. That limit wouldn't stop you creating more communities with more accounts anyway.