Everyone would ask them about what was going on behind the scenes and if Spez is as short-sighted as he seems. They’d reply they signed NDAs about most of the questions being asked and quickly regret creating a spontaneous AMA and then never log in under that username again.
Well, I would welcome said admin on the glorious Fediverse and ask how the last few weeks must have been. No need to act like a rabid redditor. We must be better. (Then watch the admin burst into tears, because that was their first friendly human interaction in years)
I’m glad that you are one of those who isn’t revenge hungry. I was concerned that if they introduced themselves, the mods everywhere would ban them in an act of revenge.
I’m not sure that they would be able to cope to be honest. The power that being an admin, small as it may be, is abused systemically in that organisation. Not sure what they would do if they couldn’t mute/ban anyone and everyone around them.
I was a mod on reddit and it’s honestly a relief to not have that responsibility here. It took a toll on my mental health, cleaning all that shit up twice a day. I have kids IRL, I don’t need to be parenting churlish youths on the Internet, too.
That's the thing: it's endless, it's mostly thankless, it's annoying AF, and some people wouldn't so much as spit on you to save your life, though it's also mandatory for the place to not become a hellhole that nobody wants to go to. Thank you for your service, both in teaching your own kids irl and also on the internets:-).
I had a somewhat comparable thing happen. A sub blew up in a modgate. The mod claimed the user base was behaving like children and put us in a timeout (they locked the sub for a while). Then they took away any and all mechanisms for holding the mods accountable. So similar to spez’ approach in spirit.
The users who were upset eventually formed their own sub reddit, the original sub blocked the hell out of users and mentions of the new sub. Eventually the mods had an internal issue and … Came to the new sub to complain about other mods. After a while some newer mods from original sub kept coming over promising every rything and anything was in the works to improve things.
Initial reaction was distrusting, cautious, somewhat constructive and mostly friendly to the newer mods and rather unfriendly to the mods who tried to bring their internal drama to our new space. Eventually newer mods promises went nowhere and then the user base became A LOT more jaded towards newer mods.
In this example people had been shadow banned and abused in modmail, blocked without reason and so on. So the mods had personally and intentionally hurt many users. For reddit the scale is bigger and the pain for most of us isn’t that personal. So I’d hope the reception would be slightly warmer.
But in all seriousness, we would probably ask them what they think about reddit's working environment and a few questions like that, and then everybody would move along
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