this post was submitted on 18 Jun 2023
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According to the AMA where a lot of this came up, from what I understand, in the early (like, super early) days of Reddit, you used to be able to appoint people as mods if you had X amount of karma - I think it was 100k. I can't find that comment thread now that fully explained it, but I wouldn't be surprised if it was removed. The gist of it is someone appointed him as a mod there and it didn't last long.
So mostly true, but in that technical and disingenuous way, as he didn't set out to be a mod of his own free will.
Someone feel free to jump in and correct any specifics I missed or got wrong.
That's what I've been told as well. I think that's why there needs to be approval to appoint mods now. I think the bigger issue is why reddit let that sub remain for as long as it did. It had to be covered by the media for it to be banned (iirc. or was that a different sub?).
Edit: yeah, it was Anderson Cooper who did an expose focusing on that sub.
Back then they intended to be a bastion of free speech and wanted to stay true to that, despite not wanting the sub
It was only a matter of time before they grew large enough that they had to drop the philosophy for the benefit of PR and advertising.
The original users from those years were split on the matter, because it meant a change in what Reddit was.
Nearly everyone knew it had to restrict itself beyond just what was lawful sooner or later.
As I recall, there was an uproar back then as well when they started cleaning up subreddits. (/r/jailbait was one, /r/beatingwomen another, /r/fatpeoplehate, and a bunch of subreddits about various illegal activities.) People were really into "free speech over anything else" at that point.
In fact the vitrol directed at spez currently really reminds me of that, there were pictures of the then-CEO's face everywhere along with "fuck Ellen Pao". Then, funnily enough, spez came in (came back) as the replacement and people were happy again because he was one of the OG admins.
I never subscribed to the original, but the aftermath of that created loads of parody subs, my favourites being /r/fatpapalhat (pictures of the pope with his photoshopped larger), and /r/farpeoplehate (pictures of people a long way off with comments calling them bastards)
This is something we are going to be dealing with a second time with the fediverse, instances now each have the unilateral right to determine their own code of ethics and culture.
We are going to have some growing pains as each instance chooses whether they should be in charge of curating access to the fediverse or if their users should be in charge.
Even if an instance decides in favour of absolute free speech, they are going to have to deal with the fact that they have no control over the moderation of other instances and the possibility that unlawful content will end up on their own server by proxy.
My instance is located in Australia and chose to block all NSFW focused instances to avoid the potential legal headache all together. I do believe in the future people will be able to spin-up a personal instance as easily as they can install Plex or Signal.
eh... Happy wasn't the reaction I would describe about spez at the time... But...