the subs i was involved would add mods via the ‘who is the least offensive and the most popular’ criteria… which let to awful mods, because those folks were ones who had no idea how to mod and basically were like ‘if someone doesn’t like it, it’s bad’. which basically led to them not moderating on rules or principles, but purely on their own personal preferences.

it’s amazing how many communities were so great, and then immediately some new mod would come up and start banning all the previous users and posts they didn’t personally like. oh, and if the mod was friends with a abusive user? they had free reign or would grant them mod. sometimes it was so bad and egregious users would revolt, or other mods would have to remove the new mod. one sub I was on had a well-known rapist who was never banned because they had done the mods personal IRL favors, basically to secure their hunting ground and anytime a new victim posted about how this person drugged them, the mods would immediately remove it and cover it up and deny it, and then when another use posted the police report(s) that person was banned… this rapist user would also regularly go on rants about how men are all rapists and rape is terrible and try to report others for ‘rapey’ comments… and the rapist in question was a poly woman, so you had the whole ‘women can’t rape anyone’ ‘she’s so progressive, she can’t rape people’ nonsense come up and that was the ‘line’ one of the mods defending this person would claim.

reddit worked when mods kept apart from the users and didn’t have personal relationships with the users. but people are shitty and can’t help themselves. for all the good stuff that came from those subreddits, they all had dark sides full of shitty awful people who were using the community to exploit and abuse other people IRL.