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.

Some old Reddit users say that it was indeed possible to add people as moderators without their consent

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 ...

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.

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 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.

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.

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.

The original and main mod had a couple of AMAs that were often commented in by admins like Spez and Ohanian.

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.