Moderators are more than guilty of abusing their powers. Reddit should remove powers from them instead of enabling. They can easily find replacements
I have some ...doubts about how well something like this would work in practice. Burning large systems down and starting over is generally not more efficient than tweaking the system you have.
We’ve learnt a lot about the necessity for institutional knowledge and continuation over the years.
Reddit with a whole new set of mods will be a worse experience overall. The largest and most general subs will probably be alright but good luck finding mods for the more focused and specialist subs.
I realize giving reddit mod advice on HN is a bit weird, but here is what we've done that has significantly helped
1. Operate off a white list for links instead of a blacklist -- allow posts from domains like twitter, github or whatever is a normal for your community. Set up auto mod to filter any domains outside of the whitelist so mods can review and approve the appropriate ones
2. No URL shorteners at all. There are very good anti-url-shortener scripts for automod. Adding this cut out 90% of the spam we got
Those are two suggestions that i would give to any subreddit. Here are some that you should carefully weigh before you implement
1. Set up automod to filter a post / comment if it gets to a certain threshold of reports. 2. Enforce a minimum karma amount & age to post w/ automod 3. Enforce a minimum karma amount to comment with a link w/ automod
To give you a starting point -- even our large subreddit, our requirement to post is an account older than 6 hours and >0 Karma. For comments with a link, we do >25 karma