I think it has turned into teams of people that are being paid. Once spokesman, and a group of people that follow their instructions. You can clearly see when a new idea or theme is being pushed, or hushed. If it was only one person there would be a 5-8 hour sleep window where you could post against the grain and have a quick conversation about it. I have not seen that window in quite a while.

I have moderator abilities on a bunch of subreddits on reddit, i believe a little over 50. The vast majority are just me playing around with making subreddits based on particular ideas, but never actually doing anything with them. only about 3-4 are active to any substantial level - and i barely do anything on those because there doesn't seem to be much need for moderation of them. I've had a few people message me requesting ownership of a subreddit or two, and probably 50% of the time I hand them over - the other times it was just someone or other being a dumbass.

In all honesty, the ones that are active and have other moderators, I only remain in the top-mod spot as a safety check, just in case someone does something really bad and the community gets pissed I can revert it and boot whoever it was. On one of those active subs, my mod position is mostly just honorary and not substantive.

So while i do "moderate" a ton of subreddits, I'm probably not the sort of powermod you're talking about. I just wanted to share that just because the list of subreddits an account is a mod of may be long does not necessarily imply anything overtly nefarious. Even those who do moderate tons of large subreddits may not neccesarily be corrupt or have nefarious intentions. With a sub that active, you kind of have to have a large team to handle all of the reports and cleaning of the spam filter from what I understand. It makes some sense to invite people who have demonstrated effectiveness at handling that sort of thing in other busy subs, so the workload can be distributed and everyone kind of pitches in when they can.

That said, I do suspect that some of the people who mod tons of active subreddits are very likely doing shady things, especially those who moderate default subreddits. Corruption is definitely prevalent in those. I've interacted with a few mods of very large subreddits who have serious personality issues, and should not be in those positions at all.

They always claim that most of the subs require no work....so why mod them? I think voat has a limit of 10 subverses that someone can mod...not sure if there's a hard limit on "default" subverses though.

Makes you think they might be getting paid.

Depends on the size and nature of the subreddits they mod. Somebody might actively participate in a ton of small, niche subreddits. I don't see anything wrong with somebody modding 100 subreddits that each only have a few submissions per-day.

It's not weird, it's straight up arrogant bullshit. Check this post out http://www.reddit.com/r/conspiracy/comments/373rr2/this_week_i_was_banned_from_400_subreddits_in_a/

Or just check out these pictures. It's mindblowing how such powermods can be so childish and arrogant http://imgur.com/a/cRJRk

Isn't there a way to claim inactive subverses though?

consolidation at the top means a uniform control trickling down towards the bottom. Its no different than the mainstream being owned by only 6 companies. Reddit is officially the mainstream now - its even being referenced by them repeatedly. What do you expect? freedom of speech and expression when theres so many people watching?

Could you imagine what would happen if a group the size of reddit was allowed to form its own opinion? The only time they did that was with SOPA - and shortly after reddit locked down vis a vis its moderation system.

There's powermods on Voat???

Very, especially if they are busy subs. Monitoring all of those must have to be a full time job.

The number of subs a user can mod should be limited.

I say 5 per user is a good number.

There is no way we have mods that mod a hundred subreddits just to scan for anything that might go against corporations interests for profit. Move along citizen, nothing to see here.

Everyone knows they're paid shills.

Lol, they're not payed by anyone. I mod a quite active sub where mods are required for pretty much every post and even my job is quite limited. You could easily mod 100 quiet subs if you use the Toolbox plugin. Hell, maybe even without it.

Just power hungry nobodies with the foresight of how big reddit would become.