I have moderator abilities on a bunch of subreddits on reddit, i believe a little over 50. The vast majority are just me playing around with making subreddits based on particular ideas, but never actually doing anything with them. only about 3-4 are active to any substantial level - and i barely do anything on those because there doesn't seem to be much need for moderation of them. I've had a few people message me requesting ownership of a subreddit or two, and probably 50% of the time I hand them over - the other times it was just someone or other being a dumbass.
In all honesty, the ones that are active and have other moderators, I only remain in the top-mod spot as a safety check, just in case someone does something really bad and the community gets pissed I can revert it and boot whoever it was. On one of those active subs, my mod position is mostly just honorary and not substantive.
So while i do "moderate" a ton of subreddits, I'm probably not the sort of powermod you're talking about. I just wanted to share that just because the list of subreddits an account is a mod of may be long does not necessarily imply anything overtly nefarious. Even those who do moderate tons of large subreddits may not neccesarily be corrupt or have nefarious intentions. With a sub that active, you kind of have to have a large team to handle all of the reports and cleaning of the spam filter from what I understand. It makes some sense to invite people who have demonstrated effectiveness at handling that sort of thing in other busy subs, so the workload can be distributed and everyone kind of pitches in when they can.
That said, I do suspect that some of the people who mod tons of active subreddits are very likely doing shady things, especially those who moderate default subreddits. Corruption is definitely prevalent in those. I've interacted with a few mods of very large subreddits who have serious personality issues, and should not be in those positions at all.
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Mumberthrax ago
I have moderator abilities on a bunch of subreddits on reddit, i believe a little over 50. The vast majority are just me playing around with making subreddits based on particular ideas, but never actually doing anything with them. only about 3-4 are active to any substantial level - and i barely do anything on those because there doesn't seem to be much need for moderation of them. I've had a few people message me requesting ownership of a subreddit or two, and probably 50% of the time I hand them over - the other times it was just someone or other being a dumbass.
In all honesty, the ones that are active and have other moderators, I only remain in the top-mod spot as a safety check, just in case someone does something really bad and the community gets pissed I can revert it and boot whoever it was. On one of those active subs, my mod position is mostly just honorary and not substantive.
So while i do "moderate" a ton of subreddits, I'm probably not the sort of powermod you're talking about. I just wanted to share that just because the list of subreddits an account is a mod of may be long does not necessarily imply anything overtly nefarious. Even those who do moderate tons of large subreddits may not neccesarily be corrupt or have nefarious intentions. With a sub that active, you kind of have to have a large team to handle all of the reports and cleaning of the spam filter from what I understand. It makes some sense to invite people who have demonstrated effectiveness at handling that sort of thing in other busy subs, so the workload can be distributed and everyone kind of pitches in when they can.
That said, I do suspect that some of the people who mod tons of active subreddits are very likely doing shady things, especially those who moderate default subreddits. Corruption is definitely prevalent in those. I've interacted with a few mods of very large subreddits who have serious personality issues, and should not be in those positions at all.