Where Power Users Come From

Reddit's creators did a piss-poor job of explaining what karma does. They did this, I think, because if it was fundamentally obvious that it did nothing they feared it wouldn't incentivize the proles. And, as Reddit's model is based on the power of link aggregation, the "game" everyone wants to play serves Reddit better if they favor link karma over comment karma.

There's nothing that anyone can see about a Reddit user easily beyond their name and their scores. So, names and scores become the coin of the realm - assuming you care about the game. As the majority of Redditors don't understand just how easily the game is played, and as they've been on for a few months and have yet to crack 10k comment karma, and as the more time they spend on Reddit the less human and proud of themselves they feel, they naturally presume that anyone who "Reddits better than they do" is

1) a neckbeard loser

2) a cheater.

Combine that with the fact that Reddit's culture is such that if you "reddit well" and don't moderate something, you aren't doing your "civic duty." So now the neckbeard losers and cheaters are rigging the game. Obviously they're here to keep citizens down. Obviously they're committing all sorts of fraudulent malfeasance in order to have such high scores. And obviously, since their name is on the right hand side every time you click on comments, they have "power."

What makes it even worse is that the responsibilities and abilities of moderators is poorly understood by the rank and file and rarely explained by the staff. So the godlike powers of moderators are presumed extant by the average user, to the point where they get pissed off if you don't use your nonexistent powers to improve their user experience.

Into that gap jump a whole bunch of people who really just want the website to be cooler, but the website gives them exactly zero tools to accomplish it. So what do they do?

1) they collude.

2) they write up blacklists.

3) they gather in private subreddits where the proles can't watch them.

4) They become much closer to other moderators than they do to the people whose content they moderate.

5) Moderators end up going full Stanford Prison Experiment where the imaginary line between "moderator" and "user" is enough to excuse dehumanizing, disrespectful behavior, which exudes from the very pores of the majority of the moderator class.

In short, Reddit's code makes no provision for power users, but Reddit's functionality requires power users, so Reddit conjures power users from the aether.

"Reddit has no power users" was true until No Pics Day. After that, the plebe/prole divide on Reddit became stark.

I'll bring this up again - your entire SFWPorn network is deliberately hostile to the average user. You excuse this by saying "well become a moderator." But what about people who just want to submit pictures? Your solution is "enforce the rules so that you can bend the rules." In effect, you're saying "become a power user."

I don't think you thought of it that way, and I think that's why we've come to blows over it so much. There are lots of people on the earth who are not uncomfortable with authority. I'm not one of them. I strenuously dislike having to say "mother may I" before I do anything, and I deeply resent having the ruling be subject to arbitrary whim. Nonetheless, that structure - "dance for the moderators such that they may grant you a boon" - is the backbone of Reddit.

And it pisses a lot of people off.

Reddit users hate moderators for the same reason they hate movie studios, they hate record labels, they hate cable companies. Moderators don't give anything - they take. Theirs is a reductive contribution - the best thing they can do is separate the wheat from the chaff. The problem is that there is no USDA guide to delineate "wheat" from "chaff" and on the Internet, someone is going to have a different opinion from you always. Combine that with a website where the most fundamental thing you can do is "vote" and it stinks of tyranny. It stinks to high heaven.

The guys who understand the system? Power users.

The guys who run afoul of the system? Rank and file.

et voila. Instant hatred.

If you really wanna see how bad it is, go start a new Reddit account. Don't tell anyone who you are. Using only the information presented to you in what is readily obvious from your front page, submit a link. Now message a mod to get it out of the spam filter that you're invariably in. Now wait for them to release it. Now watch it die anyway because the Nights of the New hate everyone. Now wait a day and watch the very post that you submitted 24 hours ago jump up to 3000 points in /r/pics because ALL_CAPS_UNDERSCORE_OBSCENITY with eleventy million points just sailed right through the very gauntlet you don't even understand yet.

You'd hate syncretic, too. You'd hate all of them.

Now imagine if you knew that four of the top 20 accounts on there were group accounts.

Reddit didn't used to have power users, yet it persisted in hating them. As a result, Reddit conjured power users to hate… and they are worse than anything Reddit could have imagined.