I don’t have too much issue with Reddits politics at the moment, but I do think it’s odd that such a powerful platform in society is managed by volunteer (mostly) anonymous moderators.

I will be explicit in that I am not condoning doxxing Reddit mods. I just don’t think we’d be fine with this in normal day to day life.

Do you know the editors at your local TV stations? The local radio stations? The people who curate the datasets that train the YouTube recommendation model?

> Do you know the editors at your local TV stations? The local radio stations?

Not personally, but their names are public, and if they were taking backhanders there would be a scandal. Remember the payola lawsuits?

Slightly off-topic: Do you know if Spotify (and other music streaming services) are allowed to accept payment to play/recommend songs for users? I am unsure if payola rules in the United States are strictly for radio stations.

They openly allow you to pay to put your songs in playlists, but they're marked as sponsored songs and users can opt out. Supposedly that's them following the rules; there are rumours of shadier deals going on as well, but there always are in the music industry.

That was 65 years ago. There are way more sophisticated ways now to influence things.

I would argue that one should know those things.

> who moderates the moderators?

Advertisers currently

Users moderate the moderators, if they don't like the tone of a subreddit they split off into another subreddit.

Nah, what we are seeing is that they just leave the site, and the site becomes more radicalized overall.

Banning the_donald was the beginning of the end for Reddit, at least as far as balanced discourse went. At that time, the r/all was relatively balanced and you'd see major news stories from both POVs.

Now it's a hysterical echo chamber full of thinly veiled death threats towards the sitting president.

Disclaimer: I have money invested in RDDT.