this post was submitted on 25 Dec 2023
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Every platform should have some mechanism to remove troublesome moderators.
The whole point of the Reddit-style was that subreddits could be controlled by moderators and prevented from slipping into the same old tired town square-esque mess that arrives with popularity. I guarantee a mechanism to remove moderators would result in niche communities that get a surge in popularity winding up with the original moderators ousted because all the newcomers don't understand the community.
If you don't like how a community is run, you can start your own for completely free. That's how this works, you shouldn't be able to commandeer a community from the people who started it. If there's a truly problematic moderator, the new community will grow quickly.
The issue is that a community on any platform is made by the average users, not the moderators. If you splinter a community into three competing communities, you will probably severely damage its integrity as a whole. It's similar to the issue that some Discord servers have, where they tell people to take discussion from the main channel into different channels. More often than not, this kills the discussion because few people actually move to a different channel, with most opting to drop the discussion entirely.
A few people shouldn't have complete ownership over something that exists because the people under them make it so.
At the end of the day, it is the moderators who maintain and control the community. They control what users even see, so it's not fair to say a community is made by the average user, the average user is completely silent. I would rather competing communities over every community being at the whim of the masses. The masses are easy to misguide.