Niche subreddits are still good, but above a certain size they all seem to become awful. Moderation is a major problem - not just the unpaid nature of it, but because so many of the moderators are terrible at their jobs or just sold out to some other cause. I've found myself drifting away from Reddit in the past year and now actually spend more time on dedicated forums (I was surprised by how many are still out there!)
The biggest problem with mods is that normal people do not have the interest nor energy to moderate a subreddit past a certain point, so they end up getting muscled out by weirdos as a sub grows.
It almost self-selects for the worst type of people. You not only have to have tons of free time, you have to be willing to be "paid" for your work in the small amounts of power you can wield in an online discussion board. In theory if you have a few people they could contribute a bit of time and have it covered... but like you say, the weirdos "out-spend" them on time and muscle their way in.
Worst of all, we probably have now immortalized this behavior in-the-before-AI-times archive, so that if you want to have an AI moderator, it will probably try to mimic the broken behavior.
I briefly modded a subreddit (before deleted my account in the blackout).
It was neat at fist, but then it basically became people getting uptight about everything. “Your rules don’t say we can’t posted obvious spam”, “you need a transparent process for appealing things”, “mod suck here”.
Like, I don’t care enough to provide a service for a multi-billion dollar company. If you don’t like it, start your own sub.
Yep. Most people don't read the rules, and are then surprised when we remove posts or comments. Some get very angry when we don't allow them to post wildly off topic content, or outright spam. I had to make an alt account after someone started sending death threats.
