I just had a thought when responding to one of the comments here.
The possibility that the one power mod account is a managed account that is shared among multiple individuals.
For a big company, the one mod account could be just a placeholder and then the account is forwarded to cheap tech workers in India or Pakistan (or some other place in the world that has enough English language skills) that use the account in blocks of hours every day. The one account could literally work round the clock 24 hours a day forever as it gets passed around between six or eight people. If you had eight people working on it round the clock, they would all be working on it at three hour increments each. Which makes it manageable for one person to focus their energy and do some sort of quality work. And because they are cheap labor, they don’t have to be in different time zones, you just force them to work at any and all hours of the day.
So instead of showing the community that you hired 20, 30 or 40 cheap tech workers to act as mods for pennies, it just appears as one two or three professional mods that magically seem to be capable of doing the work of multiple people.
Paid in IOUs, maybe. I think Reddit is too cheap to pay for people to mod large subs when it can just let the large subs turn into large shitholes for free.
There are believable conspiracy theories, some say companies pay them to remove bad comments about their products, or politicians to push certain ideas.
Imagine a sub about gaming but all negative comments about certain games are removed.
There were documented cases where this kind of manipulation could be observed but I’m not aware that it was ever proven.
Not unless the one mod account is a managed account that is shared among multiple individuals.
For a big company, the one mod account could be just a placeholder and then the account is forwarded to cheap tech workers in India or Pakistan that use the account in blocks of hours every day. The one account could literally work round the clock 24 hours a day forever as it gets passed around between six or eight people. If you had eight people working on it round the clock, they would all be working on it at three hour increments each. Which makes it manageable for one person to focus their energy and do some sort of quality work. And because they are cheap labor, they don’t have to be in different time zones, you just force them to work at any and all hours of the day.
So instead of showing the community that you hired 20, 30 or 40 cheap tech workers to act as mods for pennies, it just appears as one two or three professional mods that magically seem to be capable of doing the work of multiple people.
Are they actually independent of Reddit Inc? I had assumed a lot of those Reddit accounts moderating a huge amount of subs are actually Reddit employees.
Also those type of Reddit accounts often don’t do much actual moderating. They are the reason people complain about top mods that can’t be removed, never respond to modmail, etc. & will randomly wake up to make changes to the subreddit whenever they feel like it.
Few years ago I was invited to mod a small but growing community.
About a year later the sub founder (and other mods) just gradually disappeared.
When I brought this up, the top mod (a month later and without warning) removed everyone and asked to DM him if we wanted to continue being mods.
Every single person re-applied, but the inactivity continued.
When I looked at their profile, it turned out they were moderating dozens of subs, and according to the moderation log, I was the only one who actually performed any mod actions in the last 6 months.
This was when I took my leave.
Again, we're talking about a small ~20k community.
I can't even imagine the kind of clout chasing that goes around in large subs.
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