The message and intention is inspiring and I think engineered poverty is the greatest problem with American society, creating wells of trauma and hatred that make rational governance impossible and make political oppression very simple.

There's other stuff - I strongly support a VAT and stuff like that, but the poverty>hatred pipeline is what I'm truly interested in.

Because (s)he believed in something and wanted to make a change. And a lot of times this will be for nothing, but believing enough in something to sacrifice a lot or even yourself is how almost any type of progress happens.

I have a high level of skepticism for anyone who is a reddit moderator. This is purely speculative and anecdotal, but the ones I've known are not generally healthy, stable people.

I was a redditor for a decade before I did this, and I TOTALLY AGREE.

Reddit moderation, esp for large subs of like over 50k, is outrageous. The power you can muster to influence debate and exposure at that level is immense, and there's basically no repercussions for abusive mods. The amount of time you have to devote to managing a community is immense, the ability to keep your mod team on point is hardly possible. It's really hard and thankless and can totally twist your head up.

I'm a reddit mod for a 100k+ geographical sub.

I volunteered when I thought the mods did a poor job on something and DM'ed them, and one invited me to help.

So every day or three, I hop on and help clean out the report queue if it's stacked up.

Being a decent person, modding can be difficult because the internet is full of bad-faith people and idiots. Applying a consistent standard in a way that keeps the sub clean while allowing real conversation is tough, so it is a lot of judgement calls.

I could go on, but it is a tough job. I do it because I want the "chatroom of the city" to be as friendly as possible. I tend to let "merely stupid" comments get downvoted to oblivion, but name-calling or straight-up disinfo (I tend to look at their profiles for context) gets deleted quickly.

And yeah, I step away from it a few days a week, simply because caring too much will keep you steeped in horrible comments and stupidity far too much.

Edit up front to say, it's unfortunate that you read that one line and got extremely nervous rather than take anything else I had put into consideration.

I personally don't care where you post if you're being polite on the sub I moderate. I try to think of it like being the chairperson of a meeting, or the bartender at a local bar: Let people debate and disagree and even say stupid stuff, but if they say something obviously offensive or start name-calling, you get modded.

And if I then look at your comment history and see a stream of vitriolic behavior, that shows me it wasn't "just one time" you got out of hand, but a pattern of undesirable behavior.

I do know other subs, mostly political, that will instantly ban you if you have a different set of beliefs than they do. It's very frustrating. But that's not what I'm discussing here.

I was hopefully tactful enough in my wording to raise the concern with the sentiment but not make it an accusation. I'm obviously reading into a statement you made a bit offhand. Please understand that I'm not saying you engage in any malfeasance.

However, different subs run differently. I may well engage in a nuanced and sourced debate in one subreddit, and frankly tell someone off in another. Subreddits are communities and communities have different standards of behavior.

Likewise, community membership is a terrible proxy for actual opinions or beliefs. I belong to many communities I disagree with, but I find monitoring them to be useful and sometimes engage in debates. I've found my debates with anti-vaxxers to be very enlightening - I still think people should get vaxxed but I understand my opposition.

All of this to say that a top down examination of a profile without context is worse than useless - it is actively misleading.

Honest question: what's the alternative? Maybe sign-off from multiple mods on every action? That'd be a tough sell to require double, triple, or more time from mods. Some sort of random review of x% of mod actions maybe?

Have a N strikes policy, track in-sub user infractions.

Have a public moderation log.

Reddit is unfortunately woefully under-equipped for moderators so the above is a strictly out of band process for Reddit specifically.

There's definitely some "politics" where that's an extremely wise move. For example, people who regularly post in a subreddit dedicated to holocaust denial don't really deserve benefit of the doubt when they've already posted something bad enough to require moderator interaction in /r/lego.

I don't have to imagine. Many subs automatically ban you if you post in few specific subs.

Reddit moderators are a whole breed of their own. Any that I've encountered (mostly for 100k+ subreddits) have lost any shred of empathy they once had.

Like living a thousand lives in parallel as a Walmart cashier. Shudder