Reddit

Reddit doesn't seem to make a lot of choices or take much action in its own good interest. I moderated a 25+ million subscriber sub there for a number of years. The minimal effort the admin put in to assist was laughable. The brigading against the sub, mod harassment, chronic abusers, the mediocre tools, it was just a poor experience. Four things stand out to me:

1. At one point this user harassed us via modmail over and over so we got his account suspended from all of reddit for 24 hours. This prompted them to create a throwaway, mail us, claim to be law enforcement and state that he was essentially going to hunt us down. The throwaway was banned, but the original account allowed to serve out its 24 hour suspension and then just carry on. We never got an answer on why nothing happened to that account. The decisions they made were mind boggling. We had a banned user make a new account, and it took a few months to realize that it was him. It's not like the account didn't cause trouble, it's just they were previously banned for making chronically bad posts to karma farm. Just really subtle, but not egregious rule breaking. They'd been contacted numerous times to not post low effort/low quality/inappropriate stuff and after numerous attempts to correct it, with no real come back from them, we banned them. After awhile, and many many removals of their submissions, I realized this new single purpose account was them, sent it in for a ban check, confirmed, only to find out an account which had been used for no more than chronic ban evasion (it posted in no other sub) was handed a 2 week suspension and then just allowed to carry on. It was very frustrating as a mod trying to address abuse when the admin didn't really seem to care.

2. I found this guy spamming hundreds of subs selling fake masks during the pandemic. I had to personally write 3 bots and chase him around Reddit for weeks to eventually shut him down because the admin were so slow and so inept at dealing with him they simply couldn't do anything. This guy was operating by leaving his posts up for around 15 minutes when he posted so the mods would never get reports and ban him unless they happened to be right there when he did it. He also had dozens of accounts and kept buying more. By the time the admin would show up to ban any of his accounts he'd stopped using them for days and was through several new accounts since. It really didn't take me long to write a bot to identify his posts with 100% accuracy (except for some archive bots that some people had that copied his posts), but they couldn't do a thing to stop him

3. Pushshift was both the bane of our existence and the biggest tool I used. Bots obviously used it to find old posts to karma farm off of. We used it to track abusers in detail, notify other subs when we saw something up, etc. Without the ability to see deleted posts and comments we would have missed quite a bit. It was really the one tool that made moderating effective.

4. The horrendous block tool. Which essentially boils down to 'I want the last word and I'm going to shut this discussion down entirely, even though I'm not a mod in this sub and have no business having that kind of control over a public discussion'. The best part was users who'd block someone, wait a bit, unblock, because you have to wait to reblock, then after that time passed, make another sniping comment and then immediately reblock. The old blocking method wasn't perfect, but the new one was a mess. Someone blocking you meant that if a third party entered an on-going discussion, replied to you to discuss something, you couldn't reply to them because the thread was downstream of someone who had blocked you.

This kind of behaviour just demonstrates a site that really doesn't give a crap about its users or the community they try to build and participate in.