Awkward the turtle ( 1000 sub reddit mod) banned and begging to get unbanned.
2y 11mon ago by lemmy.world/u/Evono in reddit
Couldn't have happened to a nicer fella... AwkwardTheTurtle famous power mod known to steal peoples posts, ban them and re-upload them.
I'm sorry, I do not feel bad. lol
Even power users do not like him one bit
I never ran across that account but it blows me away that this article is two years old. In a way I hope that the account gets unbanned. I am not sure that kind of personality should have any reason to discover the Lemmyverse. Let it stay Reddit's problem.
If you're moderating 1,000 forums, are you really moderating anything?
I've been on mod teams with him and some other powermods. They don't do shit, just have new mods do all the work as they and their friends set up 'org charts' according to which they run their subs.
That is an objectively sad life. Imagine people asking what you did with your life and your answer is "I had imaginary power on a now-defunct internet site doing unpaid work day in and day out. I spent hours upon hours of my life creating charts that only apply in this digital universe to make myself feel important while people who scrolled my page for five minutes a day on the subway were out doing things in the real world".
this. I know many power mods, they just bring in new mods and replace you if you aren't active.
Or just replace you even if you're active and stand up against them being assholes to the community.
Could be if each gets like 1 new comment/post per week
That would still be an enormous task for a single person. Let's pretend they really only had to deal with not more than a single post from each sub every week:
1,000 comments/posts per week = ca. 142 per day. If that mod takes as little as two minutes to read and properly reply to each of those, that would amount to a daily 4-5 hours of unpaid work in their spare time.
Turtle was active on Reddit about 16 HOURS a day so it was certainly possible. Of course they didn't actually do much of anything in those subs, they just collected them.
16 hours?! Ouch. But judging by some other comments in this thread, that mod didn't actually properly moderate either way =P
Trust me, there are plenty of mods who do that. Reddit relies on addiction for free labor.
Why would they need to reply to every post? I think most of them would take maybe 10 seconds to validate.
they were a moderator of some of the most popular subreddits, so it was definitely more than that
lol if there is one mod on reddit I am glad to see banned it is this one
Hah, this is just so pathetic to read.
I don't use the term "terminally online" often, but this is exactly the time to use it. Imagine being this desperate to cling onto your power over an internet forum, not even for the sake of the community, but for the ego-driven lust for wanting control over others on something as menial as Reddit.
Must be a shock to realize all this was in his head, and he was basically just a pawn to spez and everyone else at the top.
And not even a real internet forum with some connection to the world, like a forum for engineers or something, but just these generic cat video style forums that don't really add huge value to anyone's life. Your entire existence is to fill the 30-second void for people standing in elevators.
You nailed it.
"I haven't even done anything in 6 months" is a really funny statement to make as mod. Apparently they never considered just... not being a mod for a place they don't care about?
tbh with him being a mod in so many subs i wonder how he never got fired for being inactive or how no one thought what human can mod 100+ subs and sleep eat get groceries and still have time to adequately moderate their sub on top of being a well known power mod hated by everyone who knows about them just what are the people who run these subs like what is going on in their heads when adding moderators
I've been learning from reading through mod posts from the small(ish) subreddits I'm a part of that a TON of mods are inactive, and asking admin to remove that mod went nowhere, big surprise.
Also mods that care mostly about their particular subreddit and interest do a great job there, but might not be on the rest of reddit enough to know what's going on. In one of the subreddits turtle modded, they saw that they'd been banned from reddit but didn't know anything about turtle the inactive-for-years mod or any context.
Cause many of these "power mods" worked together to consolidate power.
Their entire identity revolved around reddit. They devoted their entire life to the site. With that level of commitment you find the time.
Even if you spent 20 hours a day on the site, every day, there's no way to have meaningful interactions with 1000 communities.
Clearly what they're committed to is collecting subreddit. Collecting them like baseball cards: Looking at them, smiling, and then stuffing them in a box, never to be looked at again.
I even can't imagine doing that without being compensated. It just seems so far past the extreme.
How do you know that there's only one person working the account? When you're a reddit moderator, it's anonymous (same on Wikipedia). For all we know, all the power mods are working at a PR firm somewhere. Spreading misinformation could be their full-time job. Controlling the flow of information on Reddit and Wikipedia could be worth more than Reddit's actual profit.
There are conspiracy theories on the Internet that Google and Facebook were created to centralize control of the Internet in a few large corporations, who then would be able to control what information people see. You also have to think bigger than government. Who has more influence? The President? Or the CEO of Blackrock and other large hedge funds, who control all the voting shares in pretty much every public corporation?
For example, if you control the mainstream media and big tech, you can make an issue seem like a huge problem by overhyping it everywhere. You can cover up real problems by never mentioning them at all. The CEO of Google is NOT elected. A couple of hedge fund managers get to pick the CEO of Google.
Conspiracy theory it is. What has happened to the internet is much more easily explained by capitalism. This is what capitalism does.
I bet that you don't need to follow that conspiracy theory very far before you find someone spouting the old classical antisemitic bullshit.
On every conspiracy theory forum, there's at least one person posting antisemitic stuff. It's a standard trick to discredit them. I.e., person A posts a true conspiracy theory X. Person B posts the same conspiracy theory and also something antisemtic. Does that automatically mean X is wrong?
https://www.vice.com/en/article/kwpqmn/is-the-pr-industry-buying-influence-over-wikipedia
They're probably smart enough to not get caught nowadays.
Actually, the government did just call up Twitter and tell them to censor things. That's the whole point of the Matt Taibbi Twitter Files stories. But you also have other non-government groups policing the Internet, calling up Twitter/Facebook/Google/etc and demanding censorship.
Hahaha awkwardtheturtle is a horrible online bully, now they're begging for their fake internet power back, brilliant.
Honestly, if they use their current rage to join the protests with all the firepower they can muster, then it's a win-win-win.
rip bozo.
No more powermods. Burn reddit down.
The reason was not right, they should have been removed from power ages ago, but at least this collateral damage is a tiny bit of justice served at the end.
Ye mods on reddit ( and on lemmy ) should be at most Moderating 5 maybe 10 subs INCLUDING ALTS.
With lemmy, if someone is squatting a bunch of forums and moderating them, you can always start your own lemmy instance and start your own forum with the same title.
Glad to see that some good has come out of this nonsense.
That's how much reddit cares about you even if you did the job of tons and tons of paid employees.
Also: if you haven't interacted with a sub in 6 months should you still be a mod?
But..... his shiny! Won't you think of his shiny?!
Let's not be too hard on him. Being mod over 1000+ is a mental illness that reddit forced us to put up with.
Most recently they falsely accused someone of posting AI art https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/zxse22/rart_mod_accuses_artist_of_using_ai_and_when/
This person is a huge problem and has been for years: https://www.dailydot.com/debug/reddit-campaign-against-moderator-awkwardtheturtle/
We're watching the public service that is the information superhighway be born and be killed in only a few generations.
Wait... The moderator was amazing turtle? I didn't see who made the message on the original post. Is there a source of this?
I've been on Reddit 24/7, yet I've missed all of this, though I can see why (sub drama is not my thing).
That's a big oof...
I really don't want to see the worst of reddit on this site. Turts put wayyy too much of their time into reddit and made it way too much of their sense of self worth. That being said the insane shit he had to put up with from people would drive anyone to a dark place. Shit there are even other users who redditors assume are a Turt alt that are getting harassed. If you have any vested interest in this topic at all, you are exactly as much of the problem as Turtle. Let reddit burn along with all your hate for the former mods and move the fuck on.
I even have no idea who this guy is lol
In a dictatorship there is a common theme of purges, and the most effective ones are the ones done randomly with no reason, giving everyone else the suspicion that they could be next, even if they haven't done anything wrong.
I sense lack of backbone
People have been petitioning for turtle to be removed from modding for years. There's a person with a similar username that had to turn of notifications from all the hate they'd get every time this mod did another stupid thing
It's sad that power mods like Turtle have made many people think that all mods are like him.
The mods for the sub of a popular game I play are getting shit on for protesting against Reddit by people who think the mods merely want power. No power mod has ever put thousands of hours into creating free helper apps or maintaining a game wiki.
Have some karma turtle shit. You abuse, you get abused by a bigger fish. Always have been.
How do you even mod 1000 subs? That sounds like a damn hassle and a half.
Theres a few of them... and a lot of them are the admins golden children like gallowboob or hes called.
Lol be here, they wouldn't last a day here they can't cope with being a normal user and a community with back bone
Well, here's to being glad I am not that. (:
By not doing anything on most of them, he just said he didn't do anything in SLPT in 6 months, that's a lot of inactivity
I hope they stay banned
I thought he was moderator of a 1000 subscriber sub, not moderator of 1000 subs. That's a different story.
I read somewhere that less than 50 people moderate like 80% of reddit. Awkward's time should have long since passed if they're taking on moderation in over 1000 subs, but things like SLPT -which gets a not-insignifigant amount of traffic- has gone longer than 6 months without Awkward opening it. This also goes to show another complaint redditors have where mods are inactive as FUCK, and don't get removed but Admin team pulling OT to bump them off now!
People need to check moderators' profiles on Lemmy - some people are trying to do the same here. If the person moderates more than 10-ish subs it's better to create a new community before theirs catch on.
You make me feel a little self conscious about creating communities now lol. I have several I had planned to make because they're so niche but now I'm afraid everyone's gonna think I'm some power hungry mod. Truth is I've been a mod for things before and I hated it, I just want to talk about shit I like with other people.
I think there's a few things. Firstly, it depends on whether you have a mod team. Asking for more mods is an antidote to power mods. The best mod teams consist of 5-6 people. It also depends on whether you're ok to let some of those communities go eventually - one person shouldn't have the final say on 100 communities. Finally, it depends on whether you have 10 communities or 100. 10 is "enthusiastic", 100 is "uhhhhhh".
If you want more communities than you can manage, go around and start asking for mods, either in adjacent subs or on reddit. Once a community is set up and you feel you have a good team, pare down a bit. Subs are more successful with more mods at first anyway - there are more people to create content and promote the community.
Reddit mods really do think that they are gonna have special treatment because they are doing unpaid work. They won't. It's time to realise Reddit will not relent, abandoning ship is the only way of going forward.
Wow. Watching reddit melt down has been amazing. I really don't even care but the popcorn has been so tasty. This news is a caramel coated popcorn ball all by itself.
Wasn't there controversy around Awkward the Turtle awhile ago anyway?
Pls document more details here in case they get deleted/removed from reddit
I moderated a couple decently popular subreddits and got a decent chunk of internet points, and even to me the concept of whining this much about losing a reddit account is fucking hilarious
My question is who took those screenshots. I don't know the context, but if this is some sort of weird ass grass-touching PR stunt that would be next-level gross.
good that this happened even tho it happened when its entirely possible that reddit wont be around for much longer also i wonder if he will try coming here has he learned a pretty important lesson or could he be nothing more than a numb skull with a power boner
It's a woman I believe. Atleast the user is spouting a lot of misandrist bullshit.
W?
if you did mean "who" he was / is one of the super mods of reddit literarily modding close to a thousand subs.
Oh turtle, you pathetic bastard...
Awkward is a liability with the IPO, hope that jackass doesn't get unbanned.
Probably you should, I wouldn't want such... person.... crawling around here.
Good riddance. I love turtles and have two red eared sliders long before I joined reddit 10 years back. Just hated making my username based on turtles because of this mod.
They are bullshitting
All they did was keep in line comments and posts with their own personal taste instead of reddits TOS
they deserves the suspension and i hope he stays suspended
#turtleisoverparty
Ahh beautiful. They care enough to become a moderator and then don't do a damn thing for over 6 months, by their own accounting.