Screenshot: David PierceĪt its core, what's happening on Reddit feels evocative of this moment on the internet - and society - as a whole: a deep mistrust of authority yields a relentless and potentially destabilizing search for the secretly powerful hand keeping people down. One of the most popular versions of the PowerMods list that's been passed around Reddit in recent weeks. The dispute, both about the post itself and the way the post has been handled all over Reddit, has turned into a brawl between the platform's users and its moderators. A pattern took hold: The list gets posted and then deleted - sometimes because it doesn't follow subreddit rules, other times because it causes uncivil conversations, or for no stated reason at all - and then gets posted somewhere else. That was May 12, which was approximately when things went haywire. Soon after, rootin-tootin_putin faced other bans and was eventually suspended from Reddit altogether. (Yet.) They were banned from r/comedyheaven, a subreddit "which I hadn't posted in or referenced in months." One of the sub's moderators? Cyxie. But rootin-tootin_putin wasn't banned from the places they'd posted. Rootin-tootin_putin's post was quickly removed, without much explanation, and they got a notice they'd been banned from a subreddit. The post promptly went viral - at one point it was among the most popular posts on Reddit.
#Sites like reddit and 4chan mods#
"I saw a link to it somewhere," rootin-tootin_putin told me, "which caught my attention due to negative run-ins with mods before." Those three subreddits have almost 9 million subscribers among them. The list hit the big time when a Redditor named rootin-tootin_putin posted it to r/ThatsInsane, r/mildlyinfuriating and r/interestingasfuck. It went to weird places, like subreddits devoted to Philip DeFranco and Lil Uzi Vert. It hit conspiracy-minded ones, like r/conspiracy-commons, r/conspiracies and r/topconspiracy. It hit other Reddit-hating subreddits (which are surprisingly common), like r/subredditcancer and r/DeclineIntoCensorship.
Over the next several weeks, the list rocketed around Reddit. But that fact paled next to the post's ominous subtext: These are the people who run Reddit. The list was at best deeply misleading those subreddits often have dozens of moderators, and all Steve_Cuckman1312 had done was cherry-pick names. The name Siouxsie_siousv2 appeared 14 times Merari01 20 times Gallowboob 23 times Awkwardtheturtle 24 times and Cyxie a whopping 45 times. It was titled "92 of top 500 subreddits are controlled by just 4 people." There were actually five Redditors in the table. The post was simple: a screenshot of a table, listing popular subreddits in one column and moderators in another. It came from a user named Steve_Cuckman1312. The first version I found was from March 16, posted to a subreddit called r/WatchRedditDie (users refer to subreddits as "r WhateverTheNameIs," and write them with a slash in between). But the fight that has consumed the platform in recent weeks definitely started well before it went viral. As with anything on Reddit, it's hard to know exactly how it all started.
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