The power trip is enough for most people. And for the right subs, brands approach you with outrageous offers. It can EASILY make you six figures *a month. When I read, it was much smaller. Years ago when reddit it was much smaller and I was working for an agency. We paid $60,000 just for 2-3 months of “posting support”. It amounted to something like 12 posts. I know first hand how much some mods get compensated. And this wasn’t even a major subreddit.

> it's a ton of work, with people constantly bitching at you, for no compensation.

One of my favorite things about Mod self pity that always seems to come up is this insinuation that they did not want the job. The literal opposite of reality. All mods BEG to be mods. They lobby and work hard to get into their jobs and jealously guard them. They deeply resent and fear the idea of the community operating without them.

There have been times where I've thought, I have enough free time to be a help to a community I'm part of and would be willing to mod. But I've never done it because I wouldn't even know where to start. I'm not building a job application and selling myself for this or carefully waiting out position openings in Discord/IRC channels. I don't care that much. Use my labor if you want it or not. The mods that actually ended up mods? Oh they care and worked for it. You're free to quite any time if you don't want the job. Go on.... do it.

Also I question how much work there really is beyond mission creep. Filter out the spam and the occasional super psycho and you're done. Now if you make work for yourself by trying to be a gestapo nanny that deep reads all comments to weed out wrongthink and confers with mod star chambers on what is to be done to shape the community. Then yeah, maybe you can make a lot more work for yourself.

>First, look at the incentive structure for being a mod of a large subreddit: it's a ton of work, with people constantly bitching at you, for no compensation.

And they'll find new people to do it for no compensation, just as they did before the mod tools in question existed.

>The vast majority of reddit users, at least in the subs I've seen, support this - a bunch of the subs even had polls to ask what they should do.

The support is vast but shallow, and this will become clear quickly when extended blackouts cause admin interventions and no one cares except for a vocal minority that will then attack the site in other ways (spam.)

Well said! I saw a chart on r/dataisbeautiful a few years ago showing that a small percentage of Reddit users ever comment or post. Most people just read content. I topped the front page a couple of times and I used to moderate a default sub. It's a huge amount of work. You don't need to lose many power users to change the feel of Reddit forever.

With that said, maybe Reddit management wants the site to change. In the future, this could be seen as a shortsighted failure or as an MTV-stops-showing-music-videos pivot to a different audience.

> The vast majority of people with a life are not going to want to do this.

You don't need a vast majority to do it. Lots of people would love to be a mod, just for the power-tripping aspect.

> Disagree with this for lots of reasons

You might have visit a different reddit then. GP's comment is spot on. Oppressive moderation is rampart on reddit.

haha, look how users scoff the mod of r/AskReddit because they don't participate this