It's super ironic, I completely agree.

In their mind their worried about the stakes of losing complete control of their haven on reddit and watching their community just blindly following some puppets appointed by reddit. Reddit will always have that power but so long as the mod sees a possibility of maintaining control Reddit can cowtow them under the guise of "We want you in control, we just need you to accept this is the reality."

Yes that's the risk of a strike, and reddit knows that. When asked if they'd stick to their principals they gave up. Easy as that.

Different platform, but exactly the same deal moderating Twitch chats. I think my favorite insult that I've received was that I was personally "the downfall of Western civilization."

The upshot to those disruptions happening in an active chat like that though is that everyone sees how much of a knob that person is being and is perfectly happy to see them gone.

"I regularly get called a power-hungry mod by the crybabies who get angry when they aren't allowed to break the very clearly stated rules, and repeat their offenses after getting first, sometimes second warnings. They run to other places and go try to stir up other crybabies to come and cause the same kind of trouble."

Isn't there something in the rules/code of conduct or something?

I've seen the vitrol that mods get called on the daily.

Why isn't Reddit taking concrete action against this?

I see it as Reddits obligation to educate the community about moderators and what they do on the daily.

It is in their best interest to of course not do the above because otherwise moderators may actually feel like an important part of the eco system.

And Reddit would not like that.

No need to get offended just because I mentioned one of the valid reasons.

Eh, I have had mixed results.

There are also moderators that ban out of some weird form of spite/echo chamber enforcement.

Ive seen some examples of feminist / human rights forums/subreddits that had it explicitly in their rules that hate speech and attacking people based on gender was against the rules. Someone was going on a long hate filled speech about how all men are trash and terrible, and I just reported it to the moderators that it broke the rule and I proceeded to get banned for making the report (not even engaging with the chat, just reporting)

I also got banned from /r/askscience during the late stages of COVID and was accused of being an antivaxer by the moderator... Thing is I am extremely pro-vaccines, lol

The reason I got banned? Someone posted some faulty stats interpretations of information and I posted the correction, giving an example case to demonstrate how there was a hole on their claim. Largely speaking they were, in a damaging way, accrediting assumed success to vaccines that wasnt quite proven yet, and I was just like "Well we'd need to the info for X/Y/Z to make that assumption, its very possible but we are missing key info"

Moderator sent me this lol:

We don't allow conspiracy anti-vaxx nonsense here. Your understanding of stats in general is incredibly flawed.

So yeah, sometimes you just have moderators that are complete assholes and genuinely seem interested in enforcing some kind of weird echo chamber deal, where rationality is not supported.

That one in particular sticks out to me because you'd think that a place like /r/askscience would be understanding of calling stuff out like confirmation biases... >_>;

I love how the many users are quick to call mods power hungry.

@Hovenko wrote that really carefully. If you interpret it literally, it basically says "some moderators are addicted to power."

Which is true. You are also right, most aren't. But some are.

Maybe you should read what I have written first.
You are talking like there was no such thing as addiction to power among mods. And once again - there are all kinds of mods. Gaussian curve applies here as well.

You notice how a bunch of subreddit mods are staying on Reddit and reopening their subreddits after the old mods were forced out? Those are the power-hungry ones who want to lord over others, I suspect. They know they won't have any power over anyone if they leave.