Moderator (on Reddit)

What is a Moderator on Reddit

A moderator on Reddit is a normal Reddit user who has been granted moderation powers over a subreddit. The user who creates a subreddit automatically becomes its sole moderator, and they will have the power to invite other users to become moderators as well.

On Reddit, "moderators" (mods) are normal users, while "administrators" (admins) are part of the Reddit staff. If the staff started moderating the moderators, they would have never-ending working to do, so they often just leave the moderation to these unpaid volunteers. Consequently, many subreddits have moderation issues such as:

1: There aren't enough moderators for the number of posts and users in the subreddit, since they're just unpaid volunteers who have other things to do in their lives and aren't on Reddit 24/7.

2: A lot of moderators were assigned and some of them are abusing their powers since they don't really have a life outside of Reddit and just stay there micro-policing every comment and post 24/7 trying to create a perfectly clean forum.

3: Some moderators are literally children. Reddit has a subreddit called /r/teenagers with thousands of users who claim to be teenagers, and a non-zero number of these users are probably moderators of some subreddit.

4: Practically every large subreddit has an insanely long list of rules that would make any serious person scoff at the idea of ever joining the forum in first place. This list often including a "no trolling" rule that bad moderators routinely use to permanently ban whoever they want as they don't like. Many have a "no self promotion" rule, which in practice just means you can't self-promote if you are honest, but you can do it if you create a second account and pretend you're someone else, or if you have some secret deal with corrupt moderators to push your own posts to a subreddit's members.

5: Real trolls can easily just create a second account to evade a permanent ban, while upstanding users only have a single Reddit account, nevertheless moderators will often permanently ban every user on their first offense (something unthinkable in traditional forums or anywhere else), harming good users instead of entertaining the possibility that they made a mistake in their moderation. Users can appeal by contacting the moderators, but moderators can mute users who abuse this feature for up to 30 days (they would permanently mute if Reddit let them). In many cases, mods permanently ban and mute the user for the longest period they can, even before the user uses the contact feature. If you do manage to contact a moderator, chances are they will be condescending and treat you like a child, and you're just going to get muted anyway without being unbanned. Reddit does let you report the moderation in cases like these, but nothing actually happens if you do that, since if they removed the bad mods, there wouldn't be enough mods left to do the unpaid moderation work for the website.