[adolfojp]

I help manage a few associated medium sized reddit communities. We share a mod team. We are joining the protest.

We talked to an admin who reviewed our logs and they were surprised by the fact that our community was modded as a team because most of the communities that they had seen and worked with were apparently modded almost exclusively by a single person.

I thought at first that this was a joke because our head mod does most of the work and because we get new mods every year and they always leave.

So when our head mod leaves the subs will die. We'll become /r/worldpolitics. And there's a good chance that he'll leave during the protest.

What I'm trying to say is that we often see moderators as interchangeable, one leaves and another joins and nothing changes, but the reality is that good mods are scarce. I don't expect an inexperienced mod to join a sub with half a million users and know what to do. Most of our team doesn't know how to use the automoderator. I'm the only one who knows how to use the custom automation bot that I wrote. And then there's the issue of understanding the culture.

So whether reddit lives or dies in my opinion won't be a matter of how fast reddit can replace moderators but a matter of how many moderators will stay and put up with the bullshit because it has become part of their lives.

[8note]

Yeah, my experience was that there's like 20-100 people total that spend all day every day actively modding for the whole of reddit, then a ton of people who do next to nothing

[danudey]

This is the issue that it feels like Reddit doesn't get. Maybe those people are 0.0001% of the user base, but if they leave then everything they were managing goes straight to hell, subreddits become choked with off-topic posts, spam, porn, and toxic behavior. The 99% of users who only ever lurk, and only rarely if ever comment, will stop having a reason to come around, and they'll just dwindle away.

It feels very much like every story of the toxic boss who says "my way or the highway" and then is all surprised pikachu when the only person who knows how things work chooses "the highway" and everything falls apart in their absence. I guess we'll see how it actually plays out.

[fastily]

A lot of community run websites are like this. On Wikipedia, ~200 volunteers do 80% of the admin/moderation work. And yes, it’s totally unsustainable.