That’s a recent quote from Reddit’s VP of community, Laura Nestler. Here’s more of it: This week, Reddit has been telling protesting moderators that if they keep their communities private, the company will take action against them. Any actions could happen as soon as this afternoon.
Unless they pay for new mods, their only option is to take volunteers.
The people who would volunteer to be the new mods after this shitshow are not the kinds of people that can run good communities. It’s going to be power tripping psychos and uncommitted absentees and, yes, saboteurs that want to wreck the place for fun. They’ll get a few good mods, but they’ll be outnumbered.
I’m guessing extremists (of both political sides, but in particular one) will be salivating at the prospect of getting moderator positions to manipulate more media.
Troll bot farms are already a thing. Who’s to say the same groups aren’t going to be trying to gain moderation over as many subs as they can?
Once all the good mods leave, which hasn’t happened yet, it’s going to be an absolute disaster
Or worse, there will be paid mods that are hired by corporations and special interest groups to push their own advertisements and agendas. I’m not sure how useful it could be to a presidential campaign to take over some of these protesting subreddits, but if they’re desperate for mods it wouldn’t be hard.