Rachel Sanchez11 said:Let's look at this situation.
An attack on a subforum should really be an attack on the moderator. But that shouldn't be the case here. hollowtrucker77 is actually one of the best mods we have on this site, even if I didn't think so when he first showed up. I guess I just didn't give him a full hundred days to prove himself, but man, he’s actually surprised me.
Secondly, the fact is that some weird hierarchy has taken over the forum lately; things have gotten way more heavy-handed (someone like the Administrator or whatever).
Thirdly, people are constantly complaining on the FBI section, and it’s become this standard routine where every single complaint gets brushed off as some "unserious attempt" to overthrow the mod—attempts that never work anyway, and almost none of these complaints ever lead to anything positive. Just a heads-up: hollowtrucker77 really tries to separate the wheat from the chaff, but he isn't getting any support from the higher-ups. His job is to moderate serious complaints, not to act as the final judge in them. And that’s what he does—he keeps the thread open, cleans out the spam and the parasites, but nobody from the people who are *supposed* to respond to the complaint shows up, so there's just silence for days.
Then, the people starting these threads lose their minds because they feel like nobody gives a damn about them—which, let's be honest, is true 😁—so they start going absolutely nuclear in every language possible. Then come the warnings, the points, the bans, and it turns out the user actually deserved the ban in the first place.
Fourthly, once, an admin called my constructive argument "acting like someone's lawyer" just because I was defending a certain right, and then she shut the whole thread down. I sent her a private message asking for an apology since I didn't consider myself anyone's lawyer. She didn't reply. And when I actually complimented her, saying it was nice to finally have an admin who actually responds to DMs, she shot back that she had better things to do than answer a PM where I was being all dramatic about wanting an apology. This tells you everything you need to know: this esteemed admin has much more important things to do than deal with your nonsense. She has the power, she uses it, and she never questions her own calls because, frankly, we aren't worth her time to sit and rethink things.
So, I've confirmed my suspicions, and I'll tell you guys again, though I've said it plenty of times already.
Reddit is privately owned and, honestly, it’s technically maintained pretty poorly. Since it’s private property, the owner can basically do whatever they want. Because of that, users don't have much ground to stand on when complaining about moderators and how they behave, because every single one of them was chosen by the owner to represent his interests and protect his property. When you look at it that way, every complaint is just a waste of breath.
So, that’s how it stands. Next time you feel the urge to complain, just remember that the moderators are working for free (well, maybe not for free—I actually started a thread about that on the psychology board once) and remember that the forum hasn't been running well for years. Seriously, call up any hosting service and ask what it would cost to host a forum like this. You’ll quickly realize the owner couldn't care less about the site, and if he doesn't care about the site, he doesn't care about the users. And if he doesn't care about the users, then the moderators are just his extended arm—they get the same "don't care" impulse from him, and so they don't care about you either. It always stinks from the top down.
You can choose to accept this reality, stay true to yourself, and be who you are despite it all. Or, you can spend hours here arguing in a losing battle. Because at the end of the day, this is a private forum...
You guys are just numbers. You are nothing more than unique clicks that the owner displays to advertisers. The only thing that makes you "unique" is the statistic: "we have x0,000 unique clicks every day." When you stop clicking, someone else will take your place. And that other person won't be any different from you, even if you're clicking based on some deep philosophy about topics that need to radically change the world, while that other guy is just some random teenager opening threads like: "I've never done it..."
And both you and he are just tiny clicks, one of thousands of others that make up the "strength" of this forum.
That’s why we shouldn't abolish the FBI section. It serves its purpose. It channels the dissatisfied people so they can be ignored. That is its function. Its job isn't to resolve a potential complaint. Maybe we should just rename it: "Wishes and Futile Complaints." Description: Complain all you want, and get banned...
😁
I'm signing off on everything except for what's said about hollowtrucker77. He is the perfect, textbook example of what happens when you pay someone to moderate a site like Reddit. It’s that pure sense of superiority, you know? Now maybe people finally understand politicians and why everyone is always shocked by how arrogant they act. Just look at this—you give someone a tiny bit of virtual power and suddenly they're looking down on you like you're dirt, talking down to you like, "Oh, you won't do this to me, you won't do that to me..." Well, yeah I will!😁
His entire existence is just handing out bans to anyone who dares to complain.
Or he just writes, "Mod doesn't want to answer and there's nothing I can do here," and then locks the thread...😂
Or that legendary line: "As a mod, I'm deciding whether or not I feel like answering, I don't have to if I don't want to"... what a joke...
I mean, any smart person would probably wonder, then, what is the subforum even for??
But hey, logical questions aren't exactly welcome around here.
Or it's the classic, "I'm not going to engage at that level."
That's usually what people say when they've got absolutely nothing else to say, which, let's face it, is almost always the case.
The point is, sure, people complain, and some of them are totally right, but those 100% valid complaints are never gonna fly because, my god, once you give a person even a shred of authority, you see their true colors.
I remember cases on the Politics board where a certain mod used to protest against censorship back when he was just a regular user, and then two days later—boom—he's a mod and now he's censoring everything left and right, worse than the Soviet Union! He just locks threads for no reason at all, mostly just to pull the attention back to himself because every smart person in a debate ignores him. So, he takes his revenge like that.
You try complaining here, and you'll probably just end up getting banned for being "rude."