I've met a very high-profile Reddit moderator before.

I didn't get the impression that they're conspiring to control the information on Reddit for its own sake. But they are by and large a group of people who are all friends and know each other. They talk to the admins. They have a set of norms that they've settled on in terms of how and what they moderate.

It's not an active conspiracy. It's just the result of a few people having power over others and being a little elite clique to themselves.

edit: He also talked about various massive Reddit controversies and explained why they were blown way, way out of proportion. I don't remember the details, but there are Redditors who have been socially crucified who did little to nothing wrong. Most of the mods are probably decent, though there are surely some power-hungry assholes in the group. It's more like average politics than an Illuminati conspiracy.

It's just the result of a few people having power over others and being a little elite clique to themselves.

Pretty much describes life on this planet since the beginning of time.

I thought they were called clubs? People have been making them at least as far back as Spanky when he made the "He Man Woman Haters Club".

It's not an active conspiracy. It's just the result of a few people having power over others and being a little elite clique to themselves.

But that is precisely what most of us mean when we talk about conspiracies. We are talking about opaque or translucent, little-known or unknown power circles that can influence larger populations and who act mainly according to their own interests, which are sometimes systematically incentivized to do unethical things, and against the popular intuitions of how such people with such power out to ethically behave.

It is the /r/conspiratards that try to frame everything we talk about here as being about infallible unidentifiable magicians/aliens with super powers.

I think what /r/babyfelcher might mean, in relation to the definition on the right side of this page, is that yes they are a secretive group, but they are not planning something intentionally harmful or unlawful. But I agree that our tax dollars at work over at conspiritard has a different definition, informally or not, of the word, and that the media and public does too.

yes they are a secretive group, but they are not planning something intentionally harmful or unlawful.

Okay and how can you possibly ever hope to prove that if there's no transparency with the moderators and admins here? How many times do we see huge swaths of threads and comments getting obliterated (Zoe Quinn is a good recent example)?

That certain like-minded people (or people with similar interests) fraternize on Reddit = does not a conspiracy make.

The people who ended up as Mods on /r/thefappening wasn't done by design.. it was just an unintentional "emergent-phenomenon" of the fact that most of them share the same interests or Mod similar themed sub-reddits.

There's no "hidden agenda" to /r/thefappening ....it's just a central dumping ground (or central discussion ground) for events related to celebrity-nudes. There's nobody Mod'ing /r/TheFappening directly trying to influence how Members think or what they should believe,etc.

/r/thefappening isn't the result of any "conspiracy".. it's just 1 facet (of many) of the mesh nature of things that happen on the Internet.

Then it's that kind of conspiracy-- the semi-exclusive club that isn't consciously conspiring.

edit: That is, your description very aptly fits here.

You're right for the most part, but there are groups of mods who have lived and worked with Ohanian and Erik Martin; most likely as part of Antique Jetpack.

So good old boy system?

Hi, I created /r/TheFappening and I can explain this fairly easily. I saw the sub blowing up about an hour after I created it and I was getting modmail after modmail asking to mod the sub. I clicked the profile of every one who asked to see how many communities they moderated to decide if I wanted to bring them aboard. I only selected people who moderated a lot of communities or default subs because I needed people who had experience modding large and active communities. So, it wasn't that they were given mod status by default, I chose them because they are good at what they do.

I currently can't view the subreddit. Is something wrong or is it just me?

Something's wrong. The admins know about it and are looking into it.

I think you mean they banned it

Yeah, it seems they have. Too bad.

Edit: We're back!!!

Thank you for your service, good Sir! It was fun while it lasted.

Do you have a list of who the mods were, out of curiosity?

http://imgur.com/JQDuRbx

Thanks!

Is it possible it will be put back up? What was the problem, if you can discuss that?

banned

http://i.imgur.com/eK6cQdA.png

if you logout, it works though.

The subreddit has been banned

Thank you for your service.

I currently can't view the subreddit. Is something wrong or is it just me?

Re: controlling the flow of info

Yes, it seems to be that way. Reddit is deteriorating.

Relevant: 4chan has always kind of been shitty because of the Anonymous aspect, but you can get some pretty good discussions there. However, it has the same exact problems we have here: zero moderator transparency. You don't even know who the mods on the majority of the boards are.

yay I've never been a jew shill before :D

Welcome to the party, pal.

Just a question. How does a moderator do a good job moderating hundreds of subreddits? I could see someone being a mod for 5 or 10 subs. But anything over 20 sounds like a lot.

I'd imagine that the report button helps the moderating process quite a lot.

Many mods (like /u/bipolarbear0) have accounts operated by many different individuals.

It almost ensures that the users have free reign over their subs, due to there being so many.

It's a big club, and you ain't in it.

Winner, winner, chicken dinner!!!

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Because the mods are the most experienced and can offer the users a finished product and streamlined css.

It's like when the USA basketball team is made up of NbA all stars rather than untested college noobs.

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They make us so proud.

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Great point! Like the owner of the sub said earlier, he selected mods for experience and ability to transition seamlessly into the role. I was close.

Do you see his point?

[deleted]

Great! My point was that they had experience an d could handle the issues that come with larger subs. And turns out, the owner did exactly that.

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Thanks!