this post was submitted on 23 Jun 2023
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Eh... If I logged on to my Workplace account (Facebook for corporations) and saw that I was made moderator of a Jailbait community would I:
A) Do nothing for years
Or
B) Immediately remove myself and investigate that community to see if additional action needs to be taken
๐ค
Do we know he did nothing for years, though? Like, I'm not checking /jailbait is still up on Internet Archive to see how long he was on their mod roster, I don't want to end up on that list, but I've never seen anything that indicates he remained on their list for any particular amount of time.
Didn't do shit about the community as an Admin, for sure. That took way too long from all of Reddit. But that's also separate from the recent narrative that he stayed as a mod for rather a while or was a willing and active mod there.
I don't know if a timeline was made public but i imagine back then that either a) you might not even get the notification when made a mod somewhere or b) filterng wasn't good so that particular one was lost and drowned in a ton of notifications.
So it becomes somewhat plausible that spez was actually unaware of this fact for a bit.
That said, my gut feeling is that he knew about it but tried to justify it publicly and to other reddit employees as some kind of "for free speech!" sort of thing. I dare not go any deeper and speculate about his private thoughts on the matter...
Apparently in the early days of reddit, you could add anyone as mod and you didn't need to accept, it just automatically added you. IDK when that changed, but I was told by a user on modcoord that spez was added to that sub without his knowledge. I mean it's bad enough that admin allowed subs like this to proliferate and continue their activity.
The guy is a major DB, and has, for sure, done a lot of questionable to unethical stuff, but apparently modding that sub knowingly isn't accurate. I like to be right when I'm criticizing the dude and there's plenty to choose from.
This doesn't answer the questions. (How long was his account listed as a moderator for that sub? And did he even know about it? Finally, if he knew about it, why didn't he remove himself right away?)
I wasn't really trying to answer the question of if he knew or not. idk if he did or not. I was just agreeing, based on what someone informed me, that yes what you said is probably correct, that he didn't initially realize it. I guess my point is, it doesn't really matter when he realized. He was added without permission, and removed himself. The fact that he was or wasn't mod doesn't negate the fact the reddit tolerated these subs and he has done plenty of shit that's easily proven that it's not like anyone really needs this issue to be the defining moment.
Ah, gotcha. Sounds like we are in complete agreement then.
He allegedly didn't realize it, but his frequent comments in various related AMAs (and the custom Reddit trophy sent to one CP-focused user) do not paint the picture that he minded being nominated one bit. Coupled with the fact that said removal of his status was not immediate? Yeah, not innocent in the slightest, but he's BDE now and makes up the rules as he goes. What could go wrong?
It's hard to say exactly what actually happened because all we have are account from users who were active back then, but I can't seem to find any archives of the moderator list. Some old Reddit users say that it was indeed possible to add people as moderators without their consent ~~(something I noticed recently that you can also do on Lemmy, hope it gets fixed soon ๐)~~ , and apparently this was commonplace. Beyond user accounts it's unclear when and how he was added as moderator, for how long he was a mod or how active he was on the sub.
I tried looking for some archives of the subreddit and spez's account, however I didn't find anything that helpful. I only found two archives on archive.is from 2010 and 2011 (which I'm not gonna link here for obvious reasons), and the moderator lists didn't include spez. I also tried looking at archives of his userpage to see if he was listed as a moderator of the subreddit, but it looks like Reddit only added the list of moderated subreddits to the userpage after r/jailbait had already been banned.
Can confirm, that's how I got put on the modlist at /DoesAnyoneElse for a spell. Someone figured I'd be a good hand on deck, hit the "add" button, and suddenly my mod queue was filled with a lot more bullshit than it was the day prior. I had to go hunting through their modmail to figure out if I'd been added deliberately or in error.
Just ...
That also checks out with my recollections. I was pretty involved in some of the calls to get /jailbait taken down when it first came to site community attention, so while I'm open to being wrong - I feel pretty confident that it would have been something we'd talked about at the time if he'd been there particularly long or was particularly active.
As a somewhat separate point, I think VA - head mod there, among other places - would absolutely have burned Spez on the way out if Spez had that sort of clearly voluntary connection to the sub. Reddit had encouraged him to be there, then hurled him under the bus the moment national press caught wind of the sub's existence.
I'm a Reddit user of 16yrs and can safely say: He didn't just "doi nothing". Reddit and Steve himself actively promoted and supported the sub AND the main moderator (violentacrez). The mod had a "Pimp" badge added to his profile specially for him. He also had a golden Reddit Snoo trophy sent to him personally.
The original and main mod had a couple of AMAs that were often commented in by admins like Spez and Ohanian.
I'm at fifteen - same username - and my signup predates the subreddit system, I was definitely there at the time.
That's why I'm expressing doubt - this telling isn't really adding anything I wasn't aware of, I just think you're missing a few details and filling in the gaps with a more lurid narrative than would be strictly accurate.
I never saw site Admin or Steve promote /r/jailbait, and I was one of the voices yelling at them to take it down, so I feel confident that I was genuinely paying attention to the issue while it was live and present. That a huge part why I'm asking for some more concrete confirmation that they did promote /r/jailbait, if it happened. I did see them honour VA and give him the custom award - for the sake of being specific, it was actually titled "Pimp Daddy" and it was related to his running some hundreds of different porn subreddits.
Reddit Admin made a huge deal about fussing over him because he personally oversaw that some 95% of NSFW subreddits were compliant with the law and with Reddit rules. The fact that "jailbait" and similar distasteful subs were included in that sure is shitty, but leaving out the context that VA collected NSFW subs, in large part because he didn't trust who might otherwise want to run them, does leave this version as something that seems like it's sacrificing strict accuracy for the sake of feeding the current anti-Spez sentiments.