>...there's absolutely nothing preventing you starting a new subreddit. Except for discovery. If you want to talk about, say, Python, you'll probably go to /r/python. But what if /r/python's mods start sending the sub down the drain? Go to /r/python2? /r/python3? /r/python_lang? New users are still going to go to /r/python and be sucked into a bad community. If they're really invested in discussing Python, maybe they'll find /r/python_lang, but if they're not they'll just bounce off and the entire community won't grow.

IMO reddit needs namespaces. Back in the beginning, there weren't subreddits, just reddit.com (like HN is now), and as reddit grew they created subreddits to divide discussion. I think it's time for another subdivision. This might work well with their attempts to become more of a people-focused social media company: a person can start a subreddit and appoint their own moderators: /r/ranger207/python would be an entirely different subreddit from /r/antihero/python. This reduces the "default name" problem: if you want to discuss Python and search "python subreddit" you'll get both results. You won't automatically assume /r/ranger207/python is better than /r/antihero/python like you would assume /r/python is better than /r/python_lang. Anyway, that's a big digression...

This didn't use to be a problem. Famously people moved out of r/marijuana to r/trees because they had issues with the mod.

This was subreddit splitting/budding. Which has stopped because of automation.

Thats the tradeoff. Automation allows you to moderate and stop the hate speech.

It also means you can stop people from using the name of the new sub, so discovery is stalled.

So even your solution won't stop it, because we can't survive without automod.

Enjoy!

What would happen when that moderator inevitably dies or steps down from a vibrant community?

Large subs like your r/canada example can and do split. r/unitedkingdom has basically been replaced by r/casualuk in size because a substantial part of its userbase was tired of its constant misery and moaning.

> tired of its constant misery and moaning

This reason to depart the UK predates the existence of Reddit by some centuries.

> because something like /r/canada can't easily be replaced.

Yeah. As it became more and more clear that /r/canada was modded by reactionary bigots, a lot of people started moving to /r/canadapolitics and /r/onguardforthee.

You still have the issue that r/canada is the default place to go if you're new and want to talk about Canada. To make matters worse, r/canadapolitics isn't advertised on r/canada, so how are new users supposed to find out about it?

Exactly this! You can create new subreddits as and when you like it, but country subs are the issue. You can't just simply create a new sub when the old subreddit is the default a person visits.

I disagree. Giving them too much power puts them into power trip mode. And defeats the purpose of reddit: curated content from the userbase.

If I wanted to be told what articles to read by a bunch of mods I'd go to CNN or Fox news.

Reddit mods should let their communities decide and have most of the power. This is the spirit of reddit. Not auto-bans and IP sniffers. They should only be responsible for removing illegal or threatening content such as doxxing.

Mods are very clearly abusing their power. Reddit is alienating some of its core most loyal userbase.

And RPAN also sucks while i'm on my soapbox.

>...curated content from the userbase. The key word there is "curated". Just upvotes/downvotes is not sustainable for quality discussion. It just leads to low quality easy effort content like memes. Moderators are important to keep discussion on track and prevent the sub from becoming a cesspool. Of course, they can and do still power trip, so still a problem.

I don’t think there’s really a good solution here... Anyone can go rogue anytime.

Stack Exchange attempts to solve this using three methods: their “reputation” method (gamification), elections, and paid moderators. If you can prove to the community you’d be good, you and a few others are “elected” community moderators (happens once a year?). If you get 10k reputation on a single site, you get access to those moderator tools as well.

And for those with less, you get a smaller set of the tools. For example, IIRC, the “close votes queue” is unlocked at 3k(?). It seems to work well enough.

Paying your mods. There's a novel idea!

Absolutely agree these systems can work when designed the right way. Reddit has designed its system as punitive.

Yep. AFAIK, some of SE’s employees are assigned to work as mods