I Have Had This Personally Happen to Me on r/onguardforthee

I was head mod of a national sub for 2 years so I’ll offer their perspective.
Big subreddits are constantly attacked by clever ways to self promote. Your trust was broken so many times you were forced into cynicism. Your rules need to be simple and treat everyone equally. You don’t want to make too many judgment calls because they’re always controversial. You don’t want to spend that much time moderating because you’re not getting paid. You don’t have a way to increase your headcount because people who can mod are a precious resource. You have to maintain cohesion within moderation team because you’ll end up squabbling rather than gardening.
But there are also mods that are just scared of losing power.
- Yeah, i had this happen all the time when i modded a small subreddit dedicated to a specific dog breed. People would get pissed when we removed a self-promoting link since they usually turned into someone hawking some pet food or toy. Then they would get pissed at us, so we would have to ban them. Or someone would start picking fights in the comments, and then get mad when we would give them a 30 day timeout. It was a sub dedicated to people sharing pictures and asking questions about their little dogs, but holy shit would people come out of the woodwork to be shitty.
- woah woah woah this is the internet, we don't do nuance here
  /uj thanks for mentioning the self promotion thing. That's a really good point.
  
  I still mod a fairly large ADHD sub there and the vast majority of my mod actions for the last several years has been battling people trying to gather ideas for apps or promoting apps. It's really gross. It's a support sub.