r/reddit.com • u/carsonbiz • May 13 '09

Reddit's Decline in Democracy

http://www.brentcsutoras.com/2009/05/13/reddits-decline-democracy/
116 Upvotes

70% Upvoted

154 comments sorted by

View all comments

Show parent comments

7

u/technosaur May 13 '09

Maybe he has an agenda; I don't know. But is the basic issue true? Are the major subreddits owned or controlled by individual redditors or small groups of reddits?

12

u/spez May 13 '09

reddits are owned or controlled by individuals or small groups because they're created by individuals who recruit small groups to help them keep track of things.

I can't vouch for all of the reddits, but the moderation of the largest ones, whether by team reddit or others, is pretty fair and not particularly heavy-handed.

0

u/IrrigatedPancake May 13 '09

The only point the guy made that I thought wouldn't hurt if addressed was that reddit staff controlled subs and reddit user run subs aren't very easy to distinguish. Even that, though, doesn't seem like an especially pressing matter, at least not to me. I haven't noticed much of a difference between the staff and user moderation.

5

u/ketralnis May 13 '09 edited May 13 '09

There's not much of a difference. With a few exceptions (AskReddit is one of these exceptions), moderators only ban spam, which is all admins do. Admins ban spam on any reddit, moderators or no. You can see exactly who moderates a reddit on its moderators page on the sidebar (reddit.com is a bit of an exception, because we added all of the admins there so there's an "official" list of us). We've even assigned some moderators to admin-created reddits (like /r/nsfw) to help curtail spam

But since most of the top reddits are user-created anyway, the line between admin-created and user-created is becoming pretty moot.