Comment Re:Pao Wants "Safe Spaces" for Shills and Ideologu (Score 1) 385
The mods have nothing to lose by fucking up you site if you mess with them. They can move to a new site tomorrow.
Maybe if being a mod was a payed job you could tell them what to do.
If being a mod was a paid job, most likely the mods would not be trusted much, just like the (paid) admins are not right now. The only way communities like Reddit work is when the users don't see the people in charge as having a profit motive which overrides all sense of ethics and decency. This is why open-source software is usually trusted so much more than commercial software to not have malware embedded and to respect its users (with some exceptions of course, but these, like Gnome3, usually stem from philosophical disagreements, not suspicion that someone is screwing the users over for profit). No one but a fool trusts Adobe or various other commercial software providers to not include bloated spyware in their software to somehow make money on users (after charging them first for the product itself), but not many people distrust GIMP and think it's doing the same. They may disagree on some technical aspects of the software and its UI, but because software like this is made by a community of mostly volunteers and not a single for-profit corporation, it has a level of trust which commercial providers simply will never earn.
For a more relevant example, just look at this site: we even have a word for many "stories" posted here: "Slashvertisements". No one really trusts the leadership here any more, because it's obviously been hijacked by for-profit corporate interests, namely Dice Inc. Reddit appears to be going the same direction.