Hacker News Reader

the point is not if they're getting replaced but if they're able to do so, everyone can become a moderator but how many people can actually moderate?

View on HN

I view moderators a lot like open source maintainers. It’s often a thankless job you do for free and you have to put up with a lot of shit. Also a lot of people think the job is easy and “anyone could do it” when we know that’s not the case in reality. You need someone who cares in that position. Are there bad mods and bad OS maintainers? Absolutely, but it’s still not as easy as people make it out to be to replace either.

I'd argue there are a lot more people who can moderate than can code, and it's much easier to learn to moderate than code. How many millions of redditors are there?

I think people here really want Reddit to die for it's bad behavior and are doing a lot of wishful thinking.

It's turning around a bit, but historically half of a moderator's job was coding, either specialized bots or managing gigantic automod configs.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com