>Yet Reddit removed both moderators from their positions this summer because the mods refused to end r/canning's protest against Reddit and its new API fees; the protest had made the entire subreddit "read only." Now, the ousted mods fear that r/canning could become subject to unsafe advice that goes unnoticed by new moderators. "My biggest fear with all this is that someone will follow an unsafe recipe posted on the sub and get badly sick or killed by it," Dromio05 told me.

bikespokememe.jpg

I totally buy the argument that the protest probably lead to their being some sort of marginal shift from hobbyist moderators to admin-friendly powermods. But to this point:

- This happened to the extent that hobbyist mods rendered their own forums unusable on an indeterminate basis. They chose the hill they died on, and cannot claim they were acting in the interests of their community in doing so.

- Powermods dominated wide swaths of the site prior to the protests and this sort of concern was never raised (there were concerns about powermods, but not powermods vs. hobbyist mods.) So the entire article likely represents an act of concern trolling. The underlying point may still be valid, but its bad-faith motivations deserve to be called out.