starting in late March 2026, there will be a new limit of 5 high-traffic communities per moderator. Only communities with greater than 100k weekly visitors count toward this limit, and there are no limits on communities under that amount.
For those who are impacted (less than 0.1% of active mods), we’re rolling out in several phases over 6 months to ensure mods have sufficient time to prepare. We notified all impacted moderators last month, and you can also check your status anytime here.
More details in the thread.
We could also consider policies around this on an instance level. I don’t think it’s that big of a problem yet, and “X communities with >Y users” might not be the best metric for us, but it’s worth discussing
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What’s interesting to me here regarding this, is Reddits current preparation timescale for the changes here. This isn’t going to be enforced until March 31st, 2026. This tells me that Reddit would have been unprepared for a complete mass-walkout of community moderators during the 2023 Reddit API strikes. A large chunk of Reddit during that period was genuinely inaccessible. But after a few token gestures and a few examples made of some especially rebellious mod-teams, most of the striking moderators returned.
A huge opportunity was missed by people running major communities to functionally degrade Reddit in at least the medium-term as a website. You can’t just hastily promote random people to replace moderators Reddit is either forced to remove or who leave voluntarily. The average person is likely too lazy, too arbitrary and too corrupt to effectively oversee communities of notable sizes.
People whine about terminally online moderators being power-hungry and garbage, but I can assure you hastily promoted randoms given the keys are far worse in most cases.
Only about 15 years too late.
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.
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.
I am quite convinced that in the near-future reddit will make large® subreddits at least governed by AI tools, removing mods entirely.
That’d definitely piss off some powermods.
And wider reddit mods because part of the appeal of this to many mods is to grow and organise a community. Power-tripping aside - if they can’t do that anymore (ie can’t curate content via banning people) then it negates the value of the platform to them.
Gallowboob is in shambles…
Sure, but what about Gallowboob2 and Gallowboob3? I’m sure those totally different people are going to be fine. Isn’t it funny there was no mention of the shitty ‘real ID’ verifications for these power mods?
I wonder if this has anything to do with the r/art mod tantrum that MoistCritical covered recently?
Doesn’t seem to, they announced this a couple months ago
As part of the community team for LW, I’ve worked towards this goal as long as I’ve been here. I do not have the authority to make it policy.
But considering, A. There aren’t that many big communities, and B. Users seem to hate any kind of moderation anyway, it doesn’t seem like a big stress point at the moment.
The users have demanded that US news should be allowed in World News because anything that happens in the US affects the world. And, uh, I’ve tested this and it seems to be consensus. I hate it, but any mods that tried to enforce something sane have left, and the users have gotten their way.
I guess everyone just browses all anyway, for now. So they don’t want things removed that have comments regardless of where it’s posted.
Learning that the Lemmy.world team will capitulate to whatever it’s loudest users want explains a LOT.
I guess everyone just browses all anyway, for now. So they don’t want things removed that have comments regardless of where it’s posted.
Yea I’ve seen this as well. I think part of the problem is a lack of an automod, since rule breaking content sticks around for hours accumulating comments before a mod sees it. Users are good about reporting spam, since it’s very obvious, but not everyone is familiar enough with community rules to report based on those.
I do not have the authority to make it policy.
Who does?
