Heavily moderated subreddits are Reddit's biggest problem. Time and again, the volunteer moderators prove that they cannot be impartial, and bias creeps in, inevitably culminating in a bizarre power struggle with the normal users. I've seen it so many times.

This isn't helped by the fact that the majority of popular subreddits are moderated by the same people, resulting in a kind of weird cabal situation.

I'm not sure what the solution is. Personally I think no moderation, simply relying on up/down votes would be better, but without going to that extreme, perhaps only allowing one person to moderate one subreddit (or a small number) would help.

>This isn't helped by the fact that the majority of popular subreddits are moderated by the same people, resulting in a kind of weird cabal situation.

This is because moderating is a shitty job and hardly anyone wants to actually spend time doing it.

>Heavily moderated subreddits are Reddit's biggest problem.

The problem isn't heavy moderation, it's poor moderation. Moderation is basically a requirement for any community of a decent size (and becomes more important as the community grows).

But as I said above, moderating is a terrible job. It's generally unpaid, a time suck, and you spend all your time dealing with the worst members of the community (which sometimes funnily enough also includes tends some of the most popular members of the community).

In my experience in the past, the people most vocal against moderators/moderation were the people causing the most trouble in the community.

The other problem is that community gets to decide what content is on top of the page by upvoting. As the community gets larger some more quality in depth and technical submissions won't get the same upvotes as a simple meme post.

I generally agree that heavily moderating a subreddit is a bad idea, however for subreddits like http://www.reddit.com/r/science and http://www.reddit.com/r/askscience, they have been able to scale up to frontpage levels without a serious drop in content quality.

I disagree. I think responsible moderation is not only positive, but mandatory for a community to maintain any sort of quality. Hacker News is moderated (usually quite well), and it would be far worse without that moderation. Likewise, /r/science would be a shit show without moderation; and /r/science is perhaps the heaviest moderated subreddit I subscribe to, including some quite controversial ones.

I don't know that the "one sub per mod" rule would be a net win; responsible volunteer moderators are hard to come by.

The Reddit admins seem to be aware of moderation issues, but doing something to fix it would cause a shitstorm or require a major redesign of the site. A while back, they introduced a limit on the number of defaults subreddits you can mod (I think it's two or three). It's a start but it didn't do a whole lot.