The thing is, Reddit doesn’t allow subs to run unmoderated, so IIRC there were instances where they’d kick out the moderators for not re-opening and then have to close the sub again for being unmoderated.
r/interestingasfuck has been without mods for 2 weeks now. It’s just so idiotic. They remove all the mods and then… don’t replace them? Now there hasn’t been a post in 2 weeks on a sub with 11+mil members.
I wonder if they just forgot about that particular sub?
Maybe it’s to make an example of them? Let the zombie subreddits stand as an example of “This is what happens when you cross the admins.”
I guess it’s possible, but what good would that do reddit? That’s millions people who aren’t going to be browsing that subreddit anymore, and presumably at least some of them aren’t using any ad blockers, so they’d be losing revenue…
They are already finding scabs to come in and moderate. The quality will be shitty but they don’t care.
The quality started out shitty on some subs. Fuck spez, but he’s not completely wrong about the mods. Some are people who never have and never will have more power in their lives and it goes right to their brain. Where he’s completely wrong is blaming this situation on the mods when they are just the group of users who can frustrate him the most. I bet he thought he could throw the mods under the bus because they were already generally unpopular (though some subs were bad and others were fine) before all of this.
Something nice about the fediverse is that instances can be dedicated to mod evaluation. They don’t have to honour deletion requests; they could specifically highlight them instead to see what kind of posts specific mods are suppressing. Hopefully that can be used to check their power and reduce how much of it goes to their heads.