> So many people want to moderate a local subreddit for Seattle that we have at least three different ones. The mod teams for each all have strong (and different) political views. But the threat of their community splitting keeps the mods acting fairly reasonable when in the public eye, because each seems to desperately want to be the Seattle subreddit.
Yeah, this is something I’ve seen multiple times on Reddit. Mods on larger subs start putting into place capricious rules, and told the users that if they don’t like it, start their own subs. Then if someone does this and the sub actually start gaining traction, the original sub gets nervous and suddenly starts relenting because they don’t actually want users to go elsewhere, they just want to exert as much control as they can before they trigger an actual exodus.
It shows the importance of competition if we want users to be treated fairly. Unfortunately, there’s strong network effects working against it (both inside Reddit, and among the web in general), and mods have made things worse by working to shut down rivals.
Either way, though, the supply of mods greatly outstrips the demand.
