I was a digg power user then transitioned to reddit when that all went to shit and my intended grift of making money through selling digg visibility disappeared.
I've run dozens of subreddits and still do although incredibly lazily like 99% of legacy reddit mods that have been in their positions for way too long.
I started the use of subreddits as hashtags via spamming /r/hailcorporate in response to every shill post on the site.
I even got a job in the game industry as an internet janitor too and have worked with EA, Ubi, Paradox, Sega and others. I firmly believe in that title for any online moderation and community management, all we do is keep things clean for everyone to enjoy an online space and ego in online moderation is a serious problem.
Ask me anything
Do mods actually get bought out by companies/superpacs?
Nope. They do give mods gifts and freebies in order to make friends and open communications though, build relationships with them and giving them a feeling of having the insider-scoop will make mod teams very interested in keeping you on their good side, they know that anything bad for the company might sour the relationship and damage the access they get. In some cases mods will get invited to demo-events for unreleased games, companies will fly them out for this.
Did you ever get flown anywhere?
Do you know anyone involved in modding political communities? I refuse to believe that the Kafkaesque scissoring of the definition of politics is anything short of intentional. The way that ‘politics’ is defined broadly to include protests and labour movements where political discussion is disallowed, but defined narrowly to only mean electoralism where political discussion is permitted is bizarre enough to be intentional.
Nope I just got offered free shit. I rejected it. I know a few mods that did though, EA likes to do it.
Chapo is actually the first political community I've moderated and I've actually steered away from the politics space more towards hobby spaces here. I don't know if I'd be good at a political space, I'd be very tempted to suppress the right. I agree with you on that front but I don't think it comes from moderators themselves, it comes from modteams teams replicating what they see in media already - tv and newspapers already treated it this way. Nobody has broken the mold that they set.
I think that's kind of encouraged here.
Sure but what right is there to suppress here? The only thing that needs modding are people with raging substance abuse problems and people with a personal grudge that have turned wreckers.
Yeah, I thought that, but every time I take a look at the modlog it seems like there's a small fire every hour or more.