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I say this with the best of intentions so bear with me, but I think most of the disdain towards moderators on Reddit came from locking threads due to "excessive trolling" or "y'all can't behave" etc. It was so visible and immediately shut down conversation which was frustrating for average users. In my opinion excessive trolling isn't a reason to shut a thread. The only things that would really need to be shut down would be things that are straight up illegal. Obviously people saying offensive things or trolling is an issue but, again in my opinion, that's what the whole upvote downvote system is for, and moderators can step in for things that are blatantly out of line.
I don't approve of comments that try to make fun of the userbase while removing their ability to respond, to be clear. But here is the alternative perspective as to why threads would be locked:
When I moderated r/polls, we would occasionally lock threads because we literally couldn't keep up. If it was a topic that particularly drew out the bigots in force, they would pile in faster than we could ban them. A thread like this could get over a thousand comments if it was one of the top ones that day. The solutions were then either:
This was on a sub of about 200,000 users, with 5-8 mods. There are subreddits with many times this amount of subscribers, so I can only imagine they might have an even lower threshold for locking.
It's a necessary "evil", if you can even call it that. Sure, you could go make your own sub or whatever where people have free reign over the stuff they post in the comments. With proper size you would realize relatively quickly what a fun idea that would be if you were responsible for it.
I know this will be a controversial opinion but I just don't see this being a big deal. Those comments inevitably get downvoted and kicked to the bottom of the list, and if you expand a comment that's -10 karma you probably know what you're getting into. I created and modded a sub that now has over 2mil subs and never once have I locked a thread (granted, it's one that's non political but we got our fair share of weirdly bigoted comments)
Allowing bigots a platform leaves the possibility that they band together, upvote each other, and normalize their opinions on your community gradually until people stop questioning it.
Add on to that the fact the OP on reddit directly receives each comment on their post as a notification by default.
Yes, another thing I don't ever want to see here: normalization of bigotry & fascism.
On Twitter, I saw one of the chuds saying "You're judging all Nazis as assholes!"
Why yes I judge all Nazis as assholes! Fuck normalizing fascism. KILL IT WITH FIRE, MODS!
But couldn't that have come from the few moderators that did actually suck?