For example, people on Reddit asking redundant questions and give equally redundant or unhelpful answers.
Whenever every ‘What’s the worst show you’ve seen?’ is asked, you’ll get 10,000 “Kardashians” answers, which is just easy karma farming.
If someone posts in a community that’s geared for something like opinions, but someone elects to just go on a full scale rant instead.
You’re giving them too much credit. Although some are altruistic, many are greedy power hungry scabs who’s entire life revolves around holding whatever merger power they can over others.
I stepped up once and made a sub for a small niche game I liked when none existed. The devs noticed, reached out me with free copies of the game to give away on the sub and everything. Then some power mods got wind of it, made their own subreddit for the game and completely overwhelmed my little sub though cross promotion via their other subs and with their army of alt accounts too.
Most of them don’t want help, their cries are just to elicit sympathy and get free stuff out of it. Power mods are the scourge of Reddit.
I’d wager it’s the other way around. Most of us are decent people, it’s just a few bad apples that make the rest of us look bad.
And yes, I’ve been a mod for a couple decades on various platforms. On reddit I ran about a dozen smaller subs for years. Almost all the mods on my teams were decent people, only a single person was the exception.
And the problems with reddit are more systemic than “hurry durr power mods r bad.” It’s like having a cough, then blaming your mouth for it. Don’t just look at the guy doing work for free, look at the people getting paid off the backs of free labor.
Reddit is a fairly unique exception to the usual moderator experience. I too used to be an admin on a couple of large forums and IRC servers and I’d say most of those people were decent. Reddit however is plaged with a large number of power mods in many of the medium to larger subs who’s sole purpose in life is to be an online lord of opinion and toxicity over others.
That’s not to say there’s not decent people too but I imagine your experience is squewed a bit if you ran smaller ones.