Here’s a github issue for it, with some other threads linked. @[email protected] and I are both very sympathetic to the idea, because there’s been so many of these cases where a top mod will wreck or subvert an entire subreddit.

Hierarchical moderation is definitely a weak-point that I replicated here for only one reason: I’ve never seen a system of democratic moderation work in practice. You could hold “elections”, but then who approves the voters, and makes sure they’re legitimate, and not double or triple voting? Now you have to institute a reputation system for the voters. How often do you hold these elections, and what initiates them? Who decides when elections are to be held? How do you circumvent people from “faking” reputation scores, or double voting ( creating many accounts, faking content and upvoting themselves, etc ). How do you prevent someone putting forward 3 of their alt accounts for modship, and voting themselves in?

And then doing all of that is somewhat overkill, and only seen as necessary because of reddit’s obsession with subscriber count, even if 99% of those subscribers are inactive. It takes two seconds for people to subscribe to an alternate, and these alternates sometimes explode in activity within a few weeks. I’ve changed the sorting and emphasis for communities away from subscriber count, and towards active users / month, to mitigate that inertia here a bit.

Also a lot of reddit’s issues wouldn’t be replicated on a server like this where the admins actually participate for the health of their server. If a mod goes rogue, and the community dislikes that, we can just boot them and appoint a different one. If a server creator / admin like myself goes rogue, people can just start their own server. Reddit does not give you that choice.

Again I’m not completely against it, I just have yet to see any system of democratic moderation work on forums or online communities anywhere, and that’s likely an unavoidable consequence of internet anonymity.