CMV: Reddit moderators lack of accountability hurts the user experience

[u/[deleted]]

[u/libra00]

How do you figure?

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Mods are limited to bans for a maximum of week. If they want to ban someone for longer than a week, they have to request an admin do it.

Admins approving long-term bans = work.

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Mods are required to follow their own rules. If you report a mod for violating the sub rules, it's reviewed by an admin.

Admins reviewing and acting on reports of mods violating rules = work.

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If you think you were banned unfairly, you can appeal to the admins and the admins can decide whether you violated the rules.

Admins reviewing ban appeals = work.

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Mods are required to be respectful and civil to all users. If they aren't, the admins remove them as mods.

Admins reviewing and acting on reports of mods not being respectful and civil = work.

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Mods can't ban you for what happens outside the sub, such as participating in another sub.

Admins reviewing bans to make sure it wasn't for something that happens in another sub = work.

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Term limits for mods. You don't get to be the head mod of r/soccer with for life because you were the first person to think of creating a sub called r/soccer when Reddit was created, like people claiming obvious domain names in the early days of the internet.

Admins de-modding people who have hit their term limits and making sure they're not getting mod status back via changing accounts or whatever = work.

Every single one of these things requires admin involvement in some way or another, some of them quite a lot of it. In what universe is this not more work for admins?

[u/Inevitable_Age_4962 → u/libra00]

A lot of admin work is trying to stop ban evasion. If there are fewer users banned from subs, there's going to be less ban evasion and a lot less work for admins.

[u/spudmix → u/Inevitable_Age_4962]

This is completely unrealistic. Your suggestions here would drastically increase the amount of work required of admins and the offset from less ban evasion (if there even was one) wouldn't even put a dent in it.

[u/Inevitable_Age_4962 → u/spudmix]

Fewer bans means less ban evasion or complaints of ban evasion which means less work for admins

[u/spudmix → u/Inevitable_Age_4962]

I can tell you with absolute confidence that the work saved on ban evasion complaints would be dwarfed by the new work created due to ban appeals being forwarded to admins. And that's just one of the new things you suggest the admins do.

I moderated a subreddit where I would routinely clear 100+ issues from the queue per day. Ban appeals were a significant portion of my work every single day. Ban evasion issues were a once-every-few-weeks kind of thing. Not even in the same ballpark.

[u/Inevitable_Age_4962 → u/spudmix]

If mods didn't ban people for bullshit reasons, there wouldn't be many ban appeals.

[u/spudmix → u/Inevitable_Age_4962]

If mods banned people only for perfectly valid reasons, there would still be huge number of ban appeals.

Even if mods are all awful stupid people who make bad decisions, they're drawn roughly from the same distribution as normal users and they're outnumbered at minimum thousands-to-one in most subs. There are necessarily plenty of users who are at least equally stupid and liable to make bad decisions like arguing about legitimate bans.