Comment by bawolff
5 days ago
Isn't the solution to "fork" the community?
If the moderator is really that bad the new community takes over (yes its more complex than that, but broad strokes).
Its not that different then an open source project with bad maintainers.
Yes, but how will you get the word out? The moderator can delete all your promotion of the breakaway subreddit within their subreddit. How are you going to get eyeballs?
And the truly vindictive moderators will start spamming your new subreddit with e.g. child pornography, and then immediately reporting it to the admins. You had best have your own moderator team running 24/7 to cope with intentional sabotage coming from a person who lives their whole life on Reddit, and will stop at nothing to keep control of the little power that they have. You won't be able to pin this sabotage on the moderator, unless you're in their private Discord channel where they coordinate the attack, which you obviously won't be as you're an outsider. Then they will openly gloat about doing it, because they're on the Right Side Of History, and you are Nazis and deserve everything you get.
Reddit also has default subreddits, or rather had them, but they still hold significant first-mover advantage and enjoy network effects. There's a reason that /r/pics is full of insipid drivel, but there's not a more popular /r/pics2