So /u/DavidReiss666 saw the previous post I made and made me a mod for a while to give me a chance to fix the problems I complained about. My goal was to fix the problem of lots of comments being filtered out, and also make the moderation much more transparent to the users.

A summary of my experience:

Banned domains, banned user lists, and shadowban lists, are all extremely extensive and liberally used. There is not even a remote attempt at being transparent moderators. They simply ban and delete at will without any notification, comment, or reply to users. It feels incredibly abusive to be on the receiving end of their style of moderation.

Many of these guys seem to be the epitome of the "power hungry & abusive internet forum mod" meme.

Some seem to think of themselves as "reddit". For example, reddit has a 10% limit on self promotion. This in itself is simply a guideline, not a hard rule. Yet these mods will straight up ban someone without any warning for breaking that guideline. When asked why the reply was "reddit identified you as a spammer".

The mods:

Davidreiss666 says he's too busy to do or respond to anything. He wanted the mod team to discuss and agree together on rules & changes. mvea was essentially the only one that did. The others would not participate in any discussion and just randomly did what they wanted.

Luster does some very specific things here and there (mainly automod config edits, bans, and shadowbans), but ignores a lot of other things like modmail, and seems fairly inactive (or just very choosy in what he decides to deal with) overall.

qgyh2, maxwellhill, and CG10277 are just completely inactive squatters. They don't reply to modmail or PMs.

Anutensil & progress18 are two of the worst people you could ever put in charge of anything. They don't communicate with the other mods, and just do whatever they want. Davidreiss666 wanted us to discuss and agree on rules/changes. Anutensil simply did not participate at all, and I thought they were just an inactive squatter till they randomly came out of the woodwork to delete some rules which were agreed upon by the group. They then de-modded me later on (of course without any comment) after I mentioned that they were removing user's comments without any notification.

Progress18's only contribution to discussion was to say that we should liberally ban people. When asked why he gave no reason, but went on to ban about 20-50 people per day. Most of the bans were obvious spammers, but some were undeserved in my opinion, and when I agreed to give a person a 2nd chance Progress18 just rebanned them without saying anything. If a person replied to modmail asking about their ban Progress18 would just do the 72hour mute thing without saying anything. He would also revert changes in automod without any reason/notification given, and would not respond when asked why. The fact that he's been made a full mod is so alarming to me. Not only is it doubling down on the original problem, but it shows how inept some of the "most powerful" mods are on reddit at choosing other mods. I guess they go for people similar to themselves.

mvea was modded at the same time as I was, and is pretty much the only normal/sane person on the mod list.

The problem is that any of these users can (and probably have) make multiple accounts. So this warning about them is somewhat limited in its affect, even if any head mods that see this post decide to remove them or not mod them. It wouldn't surprise me at all if progress18 was an alt account for someone like anutensil for example. They share so many similarities.

Overall the reddit admins desperately need to make some basic rules for moderators, and do more to prevent problematic mods from modding major subs & multiple subs. In my opinion the bare minimum in every sub should be:

1. Any content (comment or submission) that is removed needs to be accompanied by a notification & reason which cites a rule. This includes automod removals.
2. There should be an activity detector that shows a counter to the admins (and maybe users as well) of how many modmails go unanswered, how long it takes for a response/action, etc.. Many of these mods are active on reddit but ignore PMs & modmail.
3. A report system should be put in place so users can report single mods or a specific sub's mods. Perhaps one admin could be dedicated to "mod janitor". IE: removing inactive & abusive mods. They should be as harsh on the mods as mods are on the users. This way mods will actually have to worry about the same things their users do. Currently there is 0 incentive for mods to behave with integrity, and the most problematic people seem to get into these positions. The kind of people who should never be given a whiff of power anywhere over anything whatsoever. It would be fantastic if the admins treated mods the same way mods treat users.
4. Voat puts a limit on how many subs one person can mod. This seems like it would be helpful.

In many subs the problematic mods also prevent the users from discussing/complaining about the mods and arranging to organize a new sub. So "go make a new sub" is almost never a viable solution. /r/BetteReddit was suggested in the previous thread, but virtually none of those are successful.

These problems have been ongoing for many years, and are a big reason voat exists. I see these mod issues brought up in almost all of the admin announcement threads, and it's really sad to see the admins consistently turn a blind eye to arguably the biggest problem with reddit. It's hard to believe that the admins could actually be active on this site and not be negatively affected by these kinds of mod problems. Or maybe, just like with regular users, they don't even notice when mods remove their content because there is no notification given. Or maybe admins are exempt.

Reddit used to be this awesome place for sharing information. But because of corrupt/abusive/inept mods & terrible automod settings, this is no longer the case. Mods are using automod to opaquely/silently remove a TON of legitimate content in a wide variety of subs, so it's getting harder and harder to share information and discuss/debate topics.

There was a user in the previous thread who tried to come up with a bunch of reasons why the mod behavior was justified, and from what I saw while I was a mod, literally none of the reasons he came up with were valid. If mods do not have the time or ability to mod properly they should not be mods, especially not of dozens of subs. There are plenty of users (such as myself) who are willing to step up and make sure modding is done transparently, with integrity, and without abuse.

EDIT: wow

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