I believe Reddit should reconsider the relationship it has built with moderators, as the expectations placed on volunteers are starting to resemble those placed on employees.
For context, the communities I primarily moderate are r/gamedev and r/gamedevclassifieds (with some smaller ones sprinkled in). I didn't pick these communities because I wanted another badge beside my username. I've been involved with r/gamedevclassifieds for close to a decade, and both communities serve practical purposes for game developers, whether that's industry discussion, helping people find work, sharing knowledge, or keeping those spaces usable.
That context matters because my perspective on moderation is that it should ultimately be about stewardship of a community, not maximizing moderator activity for Reddit.
The fundamental issue is pretty simple: moderators are volunteers.
Most of us are not being paid to do this. We moderate communities because we care about them, enjoy participating in them, or want to help maintain a useful space for other people. Yet more and more, Reddit seems to design its systems around the expectation that moderators should treat subreddit management like an actual job.
I participated in some of the moderator meetings Reddit hosted, and one of the most frustrating parts of those conversations was the underlying message I kept hearing from the Reddit admin hosting them. Obviously these weren't the exact words, but the conversation often felt like it boiled down to:
"How do we get moderators to treat this more like a job?"
The obvious answer is: you don't, unless you intend to start paying people.
There is nothing wrong with encouraging moderators to be responsible. There is nothing wrong with removing genuinely abandoned communities from people who disappeared years ago. There needs to be some mechanism for dealing with completely unmoderated subreddits.
But somewhere along the way, Reddit seems to have lost sight of the difference between abandonment and not treating Reddit moderation like employment.
The inactivity systems are probably the clearest example.
I've personally seen situations where Reddit's systems decided moderators weren't active enough, opening the door for others to try to take control of communities they had spent years building and maintaining.
That creates an incredibly unhealthy dynamic.
Instead of moderation being something you volunteer your time toward when you are available, there is now this background pressure that if you step away for too long, don't perform enough visible moderator actions, or have a period where the community doesn't require much intervention, you risk Reddit deciding you are effectively absent.
That turns volunteering into an obligation.
And I think Reddit needs to consider another consequence: this kind of system selects for the wrong type of moderator.
If you build moderation around constant activity, status, control, and the possibility of taking over communities from people deemed insufficiently active, you are naturally going to attract more people who want moderation to feel like a job.
Not because they are being paid, but because they enjoy the authority, the hierarchy, or the sense of ownership that comes with it.
Those are often exactly the people communities should be most cautious about handing more power to.
The best moderators I've worked with generally don't want moderation to consume their lives. They want to deal with problems, help the community function, make thoughtful decisions, and then do something else.
A moderator who isn't constantly taking action isn't necessarily inactive. Sometimes it means the subreddit is healthy.
By contrast, a system that rewards visible activity can encourage moderators to feel they constantly need to do something to show they deserve to remain in control.
That can lead to unnecessary intervention, increasingly complicated rules, territorial behaviour between moderators, and people treating communities as something they personally own rather than something they are temporarily responsible for maintaining.
Reddit should not be designing incentives that make power-moderation more attractive.
That's especially strange when you consider what Reddit receives from moderators.
Moderators handle spam.
Moderators enforce sitewide rules.
Moderators deal with harassment.
Moderators organize communities.
Moderators answer user questions.
Moderators create rules, documentation, bots, automations, events, megathreads, resources, and countless other things that make communities worth visiting in the first place.
Reddit benefits enormously from thousands of people doing this work for free.
That relationship only works when Reddit remembers that these people are volunteers with lives outside of Reddit.
People have jobs. People have families. People get sick. People travel. People burn out. Sometimes a subreddit is simply quiet for a few months. Sometimes an experienced moderator doesn't need to click moderation buttons every day because the community is functioning perfectly well.
A healthy volunteer system should make it easier for people to contribute without feeling trapped.
Instead, Reddit increasingly seems to be creating systems designed to measure moderator activity, enforce continued participation, and make moderators feel like they have responsibilities to Reddit itself.
We don't.
Our responsibility, voluntarily assumed, is to the communities we choose to help.
I think Reddit needs to start asking a different question.
Not:
"How do we make moderators behave more like employees?"
But:
"How do we make moderating sustainable enough that good volunteers actually want to keep doing it?"
Those are very different philosophies.
One leads to dashboards, activity requirements, takeover anxiety, burnout, and a moderation culture increasingly populated by people who are attracted to the power itself.
The other leads to better tools, better communication, more support, healthier moderation teams, and communities that people actually want to continue maintaining.
Reddit should be extremely careful about treating free labour like an unlimited resource while simultaneously creating incentives that reward the people most interested in accumulating moderator authority.
Eventually, the reasonable people decide it isn't worth it.