Comment by goodSteveramos
1 year ago
Do you think the moderator account u/Maxwellhill on r/worldnews belonged to Ghislaine Maxwell? (The one that hasn’t posted since her arrest in 2019)
https://www.the-sun.com/news/4460492/ghislaine-maxwell-reddi...
1 year ago
Do you think the moderator account u/Maxwellhill on r/worldnews belonged to Ghislaine Maxwell? (The one that hasn’t posted since her arrest in 2019)
https://www.the-sun.com/news/4460492/ghislaine-maxwell-reddi...
It's absolutely possible.
But the power moderators and their anonymity are certainly a huge legitimacy problem. There are subreddits that are more important in shaping opinions than the New York Times or Washington Post, and the people controlling discussion in them are anonymous.
It's hard to underestimate how enormous a problem this is.
I don't think the problem is the anonymity, but the complete lack of accountability. They don't need to be "unmasked" they need to be replaced when their moderation, which has long since turned into editorializtion, isn't serving the needs of readers.
I like the idea of changing out moderation to a subscription system where you can 'subscribe' to specific moderators and moderators you dont like you can ignore. Ignored mod changes do not get propogated to your view. Default moderators can remain a popularity contest but at least this provides a release valve for all the completely unchecked corruption that happens in these mod teams and lets people fix the problem on an individual and eventually group basis.
This would allow people to control who controls what they see rather than have moderators just materialize in these positions and be all-powerful for all time as they rot from corruption.
That's an idea close to my ideal solution, and had that been solution from the beginning there might have been no need for unmasking of the moderators, but you cannot have the present situation where anonymous people have the power they currently have, or where they remain unexposed.
There isn't anywhere else where anonymous entities control discussion with this kind of influence, and it's leading, as we see with /r/worldnews, with /r/politics, etc., to large-scale political manipulation and manipulation of national sentiments.
The effect they've achieved is probably greater than what has been achieved with LLMs etcetera.
Early reddit ramped up quickly for many reasons, not the least for a number of early "super" moderators pushing links to a breadth of media publications.
Leaving Epstein aside:
I suspect u/Maxellhill had password control by Ghislaine and a degree of personal use, but the bulk of the links and constant presence was maintained by PA's.
Other global media empires have their footprint across reddit in early super accounts.