Reddit CEO wants ‘democratic system’ for voting out moderators

Reddit CEO and co-founder Steve Huffman wants to change the policy surrounding moderators so that regular users can also vote out a moderator of a subreddit. The policy change is in response to recent protests from thousands of subreddits.

Huffman states in one interview with NBC News that moderators, just like politicians and business people, must be accountable to their supporters. “Politicians must be elected and businessmen can be fired by shareholders.” In view of that comparison, Reddit would not be democratic enough and would be too dependent on who is the first to take charge of a subreddit.

Under the new policy, moderators should be held accountable for their actions; According to Huffman, if there are protests, like the thousands of subreddits that went black this month, they must be representative of what the members of a subreddit think. He claims that the recent protests were originally representative of a general sentiment, but that this has diminished significantly. According to Huffman, moderators who are still participating in the protest surrounding the payment system for the Reddit API for third parties are increasingly less likely to represent the opinions of all users.

Reddit is making some concessions to keep third-party mod tools available for free, but Huffman’s statement suggests that some of the moderators on the platform exert too much “power” over communities and that the protest is not representative of users of the individual subreddits. “I think most protests are stopped independently from the relevant subreddits; that will sort itself out.” According to internal memos, Reddit appears to be hardly affected by the protests in terms of turnover and is apparently waiting quietly.

In the meantime, eighty percent of the five thousand largest subreddits are said to be online again. The large-scale protest was only supposed to last two days and is ‘officially’ over. On the other hand, there are still plenty of subreddits that are still set to private based on the decision of the relevant moderators.

Based on current rules Moderators can be removed from their positions in four ways. Mods can resign themselves or be removed by another moderator. In addition, a moderator is stripped of his rights by Reddit if the person is inactive on the platform for too long or if he does not adhere to the various relevant user and moderator terms.