this post was submitted on 17 Jun 2023
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This is such a common attitude, and it's nonsense. Non-moderators think moderators are "power hungry" when they ban people. While there are some few exceptions, moderators don't ban people because they like power. Moderators ban people because they're disruptive and causing trouble.
What moderating is really like, part 1
What moderating is really like, part 2
99% of the people I've banned who were not obvious spammers or bots are one kind of troll or another. Usually they fall into three categories: Concern Trolls ("But I'm only saying this for your own good!"), Factoid Trolls ("I'm here to tell you the TRUTH!"), or Disruptive Trolls (dick picks, offensive memes, slurs and racism, etc.).
Roughly 1% of the people I ban apologize for their mistake, remove their rule-breaking content, and either follow the rules or quietly leave.
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.
Moderating is tireless and endless. Jerks don't get banned for saying "Dur the mods suck! Free Speech!" Jerks get banned because they think the rules are for other people, or because they think that the rules are wrong so that means they don't have to follow them.
Thank you for coming to my Moose Talk. (Ted is taking a nap right now.)
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.
Anything that gives you status over others will attract people. How many people do you think would actually want to mod twitch chat if they didn't get a sword icon?
Honestly... I mod twitch chat for the commands to help the streamers for which I mod. I wish I could turn off the sword icon... But I mod for streamers that typically have <500 viewers at a time.
"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.
Officially? Yes, it's all against the rules. It's against the rules to harass moderators. It's against the rules to go attempt to rile up others to cause problems. It's against the rules to have subreddits dedicated to trying to convince people to go to other subs and harass moderators.
In reality? It has to be very persistent for the admins to take real action. There have been cases where subreddits have been cautioned or (rarely) sanctioned for allowing or encouraging their users to go visit other subs to harass. There have been cases where harassers eventually get their accounts banned, but not before Reddit has smacked them on the hand and said, "No, no! Bad Redditor!" 3-4 times first. More likely, reporting this kind of crap gets you the response, "We don't see a problem."
Part of that problem is that a lot of report responses are automated, and you have to know how to appeal and get the attention of humans to even have a sliver of hope that one of them might take action.
It's a case of too many problem children, not enough human staff to deal with it.
It's against the rules to create account after account to follow and harass a moderator for over four years but 8? 9? of his alt accounts later, they still haven't been able to stop this one nutbag from Australia who gets his jollies by following me around Reddit to disagree with everything I say.
Reddit thinks moderators are as disposable as napkins.
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:
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... >_>;