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Comment by I_Am_Nous | Hacker News Reader

Reddit mods who are historically very power hungry and abusive acted in power hungry ways which abused their power to make money.

However they aren't paid so I could see how someone could easily justify doing this as "payment" for their hard Reddit mod work they have put in.

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It's not just Reddit mods. It happens to almost all mods. Except dang.

I guess it just shows how few of us can actually be trusted with power then :(

This and everything else shows that. It’s hard to find examples where trusting groups of people with power has worked out well in the medium/long term.

Singapore?

The difference is that dang is one of the rare mods that’s actually paid for the work. I assume this means it’s a job to him, rather than a means to satisfy some desire for power and control.

I have a feeling that some of the "mods abusing power" phenomenon is that they may be subconsciously afraid of losing their mod position and all the power and authority that comes with. They have no method to hold that power tight except to wield it against any perceived threat.

So paying mods might reduce that behavior since their power is tied to them doing their job properly and there is an authority to appeal to if they suck and abuse power.

Not to say dang isn't doing a great job only because he's paid to! But I agree with you, paid mods have different rewards and goals than volunteer mods.

I doubt even that level of shame / rationalizing of it took place.

I was a reddit mod back in the day, and, from what I've seen, the "power hungry" meme is because people don't like having rules applied against them.

Also, in this case, mods didn't use their power, they used their information.

Yeah really strange that people don't like other people with the power to write, interpret, and enforce riles against them, and who they have no power to remove from their position if they abuse it.

They used their privileged information. Privilege is a kind of power, and in this case they acted in ways they could only do if they were in those privileged positions.

I have a feeling you are correct in some ways (depending on which sub you were a mod of, r/the_donald was a very different crowd with different mod practices than something like r/pics) but a lot of the complaints also come from disagreements about particular interpretations of the rules and lack of recourse to an adjudicator with higher authority. I'm sure there are plenty of petty mod actions, especially on Reddit when posting in one sub can automatically get you banned in another if a mod checks your history.

Reddit is a special rodeo that I spent way longer than 8 seconds on. Positives came out of my time there but my, my was it too much time overall lol

People don't like having rules they didn't have a say in applied against them.

Also fairly draconian punishments without a reddit-mandated ratcheting policy for further violations. I once got a 30 day ban for a first offense that was easily dealt with within 5 minutes of my post (which I was in the process of editing) by shadow-banning my post.

Then people should participate in democracies rather than tyrannies, I think. You can't willingly participate in a community where the mods unilaterally decide the rules and then complain that you didn't have a say in them.

Of course you can. Complaint is the fundamental bedrock of civilization. Complaint is the first thing which facilitates the overthrow of tyranny. Without complaint compatriots would never have gathered to assert their collective will against powers stronger than any single one of them.

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