this post was submitted on 16 Sep 2025
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At the risk of agreeing with Reddit:
That sounds perfectly reasonable. Reddit has a massive powermod problem.
Given Reddit's past unreasonableness, I wouldn't be surprised if this otherwise reasonable explanation has an alternative motive.
*ulterior
While ulterior is probably a better way to say that alternative motive also makes sense given the context.
Thanks, I wanted to say that but I couldn't figure out how to spell it.
That's what I guessed. Alternative is a fine alternative word though.
*exterior
*widdershins
The motive is these mods hold a decent amount of power on the platform that they wish to reduce. They don’t want a repeat of the API protests.
Gotta boost user numbers.
Or obscure them considering not letting people see sub count only daily/weekly activities
That's it. It's the illusion of fairness and it takes away reddit jannies' ability to show off their powermod status, and that's the only incentive they have not to use sockpuppets for every sub they mod.
This is actually another of Reddit's decisions that I'm in agreement with. Subscriber count isn't a very useful number, it largely just measures how old a subreddit is. You can already see how old the subreddit is much more accurately by looking at its founding date.
If they'd added, yes. But removing it completely is just a way to hide how many are on the platform.
Or left in a protest
You’ve got that backwards.
Active users are literally all that matter. When a user is banned permanently from Reddit, they aren’t unsubscribed from any subs. They’re still included in the total subscriber number.
Showing total subscriber numbers is hiding the details. Showing active user counts is the opposite.
The user numbers were bogus anyway since Reddit didn't automatically decrement the user number after banning a member. The banned member had to manually unjoin the subreddit. So the membership count was inflated with banned members.
Total subscriber number is useless, daily/weekly/monthly active users is infinitely more important and useful.
True, but Reddit let this problem fester for a long time.
What's interesting to me here regarding this, is Reddits current preparation timescale. This isn't going to be enforced until March 31st, 2026. This tells me that Reddit would have been unprepared for a complete mass-walkout of community moderators during the 2023 Reddit API strikes. A large chunk of Reddit during that period was genuinely inaccessible. But after a few token gestures and a few examples made of some especially rebellious mod-teams, most of the striking moderators returned.
A huge opportunity was missed by people running major communities to functionally degrade Reddit in at least the medium-term as a website. You can't just hastily promote random people to replace moderators Reddit is either forced to remove or who leave voluntarily. The average person is likely too lazy, too arbitrary and too corrupt to effectively oversee communities of notable sizes.
The quality of reddit took a massive hit after the strike and never recovered.
it took another one from the series of purges this year too. i think the purges did alot more damage than reddit is letting on. since they were doing it for months on end, i was seeing a real decrease in users posting, and mostly it was replaced by bot posting.
I was on one of those “especially rebellious mod-teams”. We were even interviewed by Ars Technica about it all at the time.
On advice of a majority of our users, we took our sub offline and kept it that way until Reddit booted us as mods. Honestly, this was the outcome I was expecting — hell, I was pretty open about goading them into it. What was the alternative — to cave to the platform that was abusing us so I could keep working for them for free?
That’s the part I didn’t understand about my fellow mods from other subs. Many of them caved pretty quickly. Their identities seemed to be so tied up in being a Reddit mod that they couldn’t let it go, even though the relationship was obviously very unequal. Too many other people stood up after witnessing the mod abuse to take over from those who got the boot, just asking for the Reddit boot to be applied to their necks instead.
Well, I wish all the mods the kind of treatment they forgave/ignored the last time around.
at least you wernt like that anti-work mod that went ON FOX, that actually drew negative attention to the site.
I have way too much self-respect to ever show my face on FOX 🤣.
actually, thier purges since the election was too effective, and removed so much users and mods by banning them. plus the shadowbans have dramatically increased, because they made the filters to sensitive to "potential bots/spammers). 50/50 irl users/bots. at least right now, its reddit is filled with charlie kirk propaganda(negative and positive), with a little hint of luigi.
That was my reaction too. I don’t feel like digging in to see if it’s actually bad though. Not gonna affect my life.
Its probably related to the whole paying users thing.
We all presume that being the mod of several large reddit communities doesn't include the possibility of sidehustle financial benefits.
Yet, humans are innovators of corruption! And I can only assume that any multi-mega-subreddit moderator has worked out something to make what is obviously a full time job worth their time.
Yeah. I mean, I remembered seeing someone named awkwardturtle on there and they moderated like some 30+ subreddits? That's ridiculous.
Users like that should not have that much power.
reddit might want AI to control some of the subs, dont you think?
It would have made sense if done years ago. Doing it now is suspicious.
This was desperately needed.
But I'm not convinced they aren't just going to make alts.