“The quality of their subreddits is not important to them. “The community they are supposed to represent is not important to them,” said theredditpope, a former r/politics mod. Thanks to his senior moderator status within r/technology, maxwellhill was able to submit a link with two of the banned terms and push it past the bot. Only he did it a little differently this time around. While news of this banned terms list began to circulate around Reddit, maxwellhill continued doing what he did best: submitting links. It was the only real way to stop spam from reaching the front page, according to agentlame, an r/technology moderator. With no help in sight, r/technology moderators used a bot to automatically filter out submissions containing about 50 different terms.
#Reddit all the mods mod
Two of these inactive moderators included Ohanian, who removed himself as a moderator before admitting that he hadn’t been an “active mod on *any* subreddits in years,” and maxwellhill. Moderator responsibilities include banning users for breaking Reddit’s rules, removing spam posts, and recruiting new moderators. The most recent victim of maxwellhill’s antics was r/technology.įor years, about half of r/technology’s moderators have been completely absent, forcing five redditors to manage a community of more than 4.5 million users. In the past nine months, r/politics and r/technology have been booted from Reddit’s list of default subreddits for a laundry list of issues that include controversial domain banning and, most notably, moderator drama.Īt the center of each kerfuffle is maxwehilll who, like a British monarch, has gotten fat off years of inaction, behind the scenes shenanigans, and ignoring his communities.
Today, he is perhaps the most reviled person on Reddit and emblematic of an antiquated moderator system that seems to be cracking under the weight of the sites’ exponential growth. He was proclaimed one of the most viral people of 2011 by Gizmodo and was the first redditor to collect more than 1 million karma points through Reddit’s gamified voting system, which rewards users for providing the community with popular content and which is completely useless in the real world. Posting new links was such an important task, Huffman and Ohanian created “tons” of fake users they’d use to submit links.īy 2011, maxwellhill’s diligence paid off. I would not comment on my own submissions either I stayed strictly a content provider, sticking to the ‘platform’ approach I had identified early on.” (Otherwise I would appear biased, and could alienate a general audience.) Sometimes I had to make the title interesting, but I would never distort the story or be misleading. “I would change the title to reflect the gist of the article, but I would never editorialize it. “I focused on building a reputation for quality links with a style of my own: I avoided pics, jokes, and comics if at all possible I focused on well-written articles from reputable sources,” maxwellhill wrote on Gizmodo a few years back. With top posts in each of these three subreddits appearing on Reddit’s front page-and as the first subreddits each new Reddit user was subscribed to when they signed up-it was important for the site to look busy. This was crucial for Reddit, whose cofounders Alexis Ohanian and Steve Huffman were eager to have people contribute to their link-sharing website. One of the first moderators of default subreddits r/politics, r/technology, and r/worldnews, maxwellhill joined Reddit eight years ago, and immediately made sure each forum featured links to hundreds of news stories a month. Maxwellhill, one of Reddit’s first and most important users, has now become the site’s own worst enemy.