I'm not so sure, yes the mods are pretty anonymous on the bigger subs, but they do a tonne of work and have a tonne of experience on how to actually moderate the subs. There's a whole host of rules that have grown up around each of these communities that have been learned through bitter experience. So sure, you might not notice tomorrow if /r/pics moderators all got replaced, but I guarantee you over the next 6 months the sub-reddit would change in character significantly.

You can employ paid moderators, I don't think it's a terrible idea from a quality of user experience perspective. It's an awful idea from a "We're desperately trying to get this fucking company to IPO".

> If Reddit replaces volunteer mods with paid mods we would get a more > consistent moderation and almost certainly a more professional experience.

I can guarantee you the opposite. You'll have a site-wide abusable Scunthorpe-incompatible report-based automated moderation with no proper appeal mechanism in place because half a dozen underpaid interns/offshored employees will be responsible for taking over the work of hundreds of moderators.

It's already happening in some cases. There's ways to make reports go directly to the so-called Anti-Evil Operations team who will irrevocably override any moderation decision and enforce abusive reports.

It's easy to get people banned, post some hateful content, wait for reports, and then report the reports for report abuse.

> But I can't think of any other social site that has such a bad rep for moderation.

There are some legitimate cases of poorly moderated subreddits and mod abuse (and the whole powermod issue), but beware, most of the time people complaining about power-tripping mods and "not being able to say anything anymore" have been banned for very good reasons (those reasons being straight-up hate speech most of the time).

Yes, but we even give murderers due process. You don't have any civil liberties with reddit, but if the punishment doesn't fit the crime or you know they just used the rules as a pretext to squash dissent, it's going to leave a bad taste.

They can do whatever they want with their platform, but I can also not like mods who make decisions I don't agree with.

I also don't think mods should be allowed to ban people just for being subscribed to other subs or having posted there. The whole idea that I co-sign everything the sub stands for just because I read it tells you all you need to know: they expect and often demand that you do in fact co-sign everything the sub stands for.

And that's the fundamental problem with reddit, really. It's not just the keyword squatting mods: it's that it's a giant social experiment that distills the worst of mob behavior and anonymity.

Fixing reddit requires some kind of check on the mods and the elimination or complete overhaul of the karma system.

> If Reddit replaces volunteer mods with paid mods we would get a more consistent moderation and almost certainly a more professional experience.

Did you mean "more advertisement friendly"?

Like no shitting on a big mobile publishers, no criticism of Blizzard, or EA, or other big corp.

No. I gave clear examples of what I meant.

> Moderation is an important job. It's needed. But I can't think of any other social site that has such a bad rep for moderation.

Pretty much every other social site of note doesn't have a rep for moderation, on account of not having moderation at all. A solid 20% or higher of the YouTube comments I see are straight-up phishing scams, Facebook and Twitter are complete cesspits where only content that's literally illegal to post ever gets removed, and the less said about imageboards the better.

Wikipedia is the only even remotely comparably large site I can think of that actually has anything resembling moderation, and you'll find the exact same crowd criticising them for enforcing their rules as well.

>on account of not having moderation at all

I think you may be making a mistake....

Years ago I had to manage SMTP servers. Of course a huge part of that is dealing with spam. Users were mad about how much spam they got and asked if "I was even doing my job". In one particular users case, they did get a lot of spam, and it was a pain in the ass to deal with and they always had lots of complaints. So I showed them for ever 3 messages they received I blocked somewhere near 1000 messages to their address.

If you've never been on that side of the system you don't know what 'not having moderation at all' looks like, but I can tell you it looks far, far, far worse than YT psts.

What you're describing is administration, not moderation. Very similar concepts, but there's an absolutely gigantic difference in the feel of a community with active moderation versus a site like YouTube where the overwhelming majority of all user-submitted content is never looked at by a single human with the ability to remove it. Often by design - an SMTP server does not have the same use cases as a forum board, and doesn't need the same kind of hands-on attention that a social service requires to be enjoyable.

In theory channel owners have the ability to handle that for YouTube specifically, but in practice the tools and incentives aren't there to make it actually happen.

Facebook groups have them as well.