> This is despite being pretty ban-happy in general about topics they don't like. So now they've got the worst of a censorship-heavy platform and the worst of a censorship-free platform.
I think you have to separate the admins, who are reddit employees, and the subreddit moderators, who are mostly not.
The admins are ultimately accountable to the CEO, who is accountable to the board and, by extension, the investors. The admins want to maximise traffic, because that maximises their ability to monetise the users. A certain degree of controversial content is actually good for that as long as it remains below the threshold where you start losing advertisers (see 4chan).
Meanwhile, the moderators are usually volunteers, but there are a few very active "powermods" (or groups thereof) who have control over one or more large default subs. This has allowed them to carve out their own personal fiefdoms. Some of them are abusing this power to enforce their own idea of how things should work, or to push their ideology and narratives. Some others (like the infamous GallowBoob) have even found ways to monetise their influence by getting paid to promote content for 3rd parties without disclosing that fact. This often goes hand in hand with abusing their moderator privileges in order to increase visibility of their own posts (e.g. by removing highly upvoted posts from users, so their own posts can take the top spot in that sub).
This is a real problem, but reddit are mostly unwilling to intervene unless there is a large degree of external pressure, like we saw with the "creepshot" subs that got banned in 2013 after the media picked up on their existence and the one user behind a lot of them.
I see reddit as having three levels of censorship. User (downvotes), moderator, and administrator. The users can give a sort of "wisdom of the crowd" analysis that lets them evaluate subjective/borderline decisions better than moderators. Moderators deal with more clear rule violations like spam. Admins take a minimalistic hands off approach only getting involved when communities are bringing bad press to the site, bothering other communities, posting illegal content, that sort of stuff
The problems Reddit is facing now are largely a result of the admins getting more activist as Reddit is more visible than ever. They're not just merely banning subs now. They're quarantining them. They've systemically changed their algorithms to stop controversial content from being seen by most users. They're saber rattling against mod teams more and stacking mod teams. The users have gone from a core of mostly geek to well your typical eternal september users. The moderators are censor-happy and seriously don't know how to fuck off.
Reddit will never be as good as it once was because its size is such a liability. This is a site which went from a founding member risking jail to post stuff from JSTOR to the internet to founders who decided they've "Grown up" ($$$) and don't care about free speech anymore.
> The problems Reddit is facing now are largely a result of the admins getting more activist as Reddit is more visible than ever.
Really? It seems to me that the problems come from not banning things, still: see all the complaints about racism and other "undesirable content" on the site.
> I think you have to separate the admins, who are reddit employees, and the subreddit moderators, who are mostly not.
Admins created automod which delegated shadowbanning to moderators. Who's to blame for that? The mods or the admins? It's an age-old question whether kings or peasants are to blame for humanity's imperfections.
Some mods probably would have scripted something themselves, yet admins helped them and others along. You can go in circles trying to assign blame. I'm not sure there's an answer except to continue to try making it better.
They did not. Automod was created by a user as just another script that interacted with reddit's api (albeit, a powerful and useful one). Deimorz eventually joined reddit and became an admin, and Automod was eventually integrated into the site code (primarily for performance reasons), but that was completely user-created, and in fact a great example of how reddit's community governed the site for a long time in absence of much direction from reddit Inc.
Okay, user created, and promoted to be on-server and faster by reddit. Automod is a heavy-handed tool that both mods and admins played a role in creating.
I think you have to separate the admins, who are reddit employees, and the subreddit moderators, who are mostly not.
The admins are ultimately accountable to the CEO, who is accountable to the board and, by extension, the investors. The admins want to maximise traffic, because that maximises their ability to monetise the users. A certain degree of controversial content is actually good for that as long as it remains below the threshold where you start losing advertisers (see 4chan).
Meanwhile, the moderators are usually volunteers, but there are a few very active "powermods" (or groups thereof) who have control over one or more large default subs. This has allowed them to carve out their own personal fiefdoms. Some of them are abusing this power to enforce their own idea of how things should work, or to push their ideology and narratives. Some others (like the infamous GallowBoob) have even found ways to monetise their influence by getting paid to promote content for 3rd parties without disclosing that fact. This often goes hand in hand with abusing their moderator privileges in order to increase visibility of their own posts (e.g. by removing highly upvoted posts from users, so their own posts can take the top spot in that sub).
This is a real problem, but reddit are mostly unwilling to intervene unless there is a large degree of external pressure, like we saw with the "creepshot" subs that got banned in 2013 after the media picked up on their existence and the one user behind a lot of them.