Keeping a handful of power mods and occasionally hiring them to be paid Reddit admins was a great way for Reddit C-suite to run most of the top subreddits while maintaining plausible deniability and the (false) appearance of impartiality. Admin got to control the direction of literally hundreds of millions of Redditors fairly directly through the powermods without ever looking like it, and in return powermods got to do pretty much whatever they liked without restraint or consequences.

For example, remember Aimee Challenor and how admin kept quashing that mess for weeks until it got Streisanded beyond their wildest dreams and it hit the media so that they were forced to act, pretending all the while that they didn’t know? And that was some sick shit. We can all point to various examples of overt rule-breaking behavior by powermods that Reddit did nothing about even when faced with incontrovertible proof, to the point that it’s kind of like their trademark not to do jack shit until/unless it hits the media, and then it’s all apologies and “we didn’t know.” Whatever.

The powermod arrangement was unethical and duplicitous, but clearly fantastic for both sides, which is why they never changed it. They made little noises with their mouths and words came out, but that’s literally all.

But now, suddenly, after all this time, Reddit admin sees a need to drastically reduce the reach of powermods, even though in 2023, it wasn’t the powermods that rebelled: it was all the thousands of others. For the most part the powermods proved their loyalty. And not only that, but with bots running most of the site and creating more than a little of the content, the actual reach of any powermod just isn’t what it used to be anyway.

In fact, Reddit’s not actually doing anything but making and enforcing a rule that no single mod can directly control the Reddit experience of more than 500,000 users, going by sub membership. It’s very new and very tight restriction of power and influence that applies to “less than 0.1% of active mods” going by the above post.

So why now? There is literally no reason for this mutually beneficial arrangement to end now after all these years . . . unless Reddit admin has something planned that they know will piss off even the powermods, and are trying to ensure that no single person or small group of people has the ability to lead an effective sitewide rebellion.

They’re planning something that the powermods could and would fuck up for them, is my guess.

So when the clock Reddit has set for this change to take effect, look carefully at what happens next, because this is neither arbitrary nor some newfound ethical concern they pulled out of their collective ass after all this time. There’s a reason. And whatever it is, I am personally thrilled to be nowhere near it, on a site where my desire to interact with other humans means I create content for Reddit which they use as a noose around my neck to control what I may say and to whom, and as a driver for ad delivery, while they scrape it, sell it to data brokers, and sell it again to train AI, all while denying me the ability to permanently delete my own words. Fuck Reddit. That place is cancer.