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Comment by jsz0 | Hacker News Reader

Seems like a very risky investment to me. Unsupervised non-employee mods have a tremendous amount of power over the day to day user facing operations. Why would anyone invest money in a site that could be quickly destroyed due to a fashionable political trend at anytime? For example if the mods band together and decide Jews can no longer use Reddit or something equally ridiculous the stock will plunge.

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> if the mods band together

I think you're over-estimating how singular the mod community is. They can only impact their own subreddit, and even at worst, if the top ten subreddits did collude somehow - which is, fine, possible if not probable - that still leaves a wild long tail of Reddit content which is arguably a much better place to put ads than r/pics or r/amitheasshole.

I used to moderate three subreddits, one of them on a pretty serious basis. We couldn't even fucking get the mods of that community to "band together" on anything.

I wonder what percentage of mods will buy stock? I would think that if you are willing to give that much of your time and attention to Reddit, you would be interested in owning a piece of the company. The more mods own stock, the less chance of them deciding en masse to tank the stock.

Thats in part why I subscribed to the IPO - also, its 800 dollars a small stake, enough that if I lose half of it, I wont care.

If Reddit has stored historical mod actions, they could probably train an AI mod that mimics the behavior of the existing mods. Mods have much less leverage than they did 5 years ago.

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