I don't even remember when I was myself banned. It's a very 'shaped' subreddit, and not just on the Israel-Palestine conflict.
https://www.the-sun.com/news/4460492/ghislaine-maxwell-reddi...
But the power moderators and their anonymity are certainly a huge legitimacy problem. There are subreddits that are more important in shaping opinions than the New York Times or Washington Post, and the people controlling discussion in them are anonymous.
It's hard to underestimate how enormous a problem this is.
Leaving Epstein aside:
Born in France and raised in Oxford, Maxwell is the daughter of British media proprietor Robert Maxwell and French-born researcher of the Holocaust, Elisabeth Maxwell.
I suspect u/Maxellhill had password control by Ghislaine and a degree of personal use, but the bulk of the links and constant presence was maintained by PA's.Other global media empires have their footprint across reddit in early super accounts.
I like the idea of changing out moderation to a subscription system where you can 'subscribe' to specific moderators and moderators you dont like you can ignore. Ignored mod changes do not get propogated to your view. Default moderators can remain a popularity contest but at least this provides a release valve for all the completely unchecked corruption that happens in these mod teams and lets people fix the problem on an individual and eventually group basis.
This would allow people to control who controls what they see rather than have moderators just materialize in these positions and be all-powerful for all time as they rot from corruption.
There isn't anywhere else where anonymous entities control discussion with this kind of influence, and it's leading, as we see with /r/worldnews, with /r/politics, etc., to large-scale political manipulation and manipulation of national sentiments.
The effect they've achieved is probably greater than what has been achieved with LLMs etcetera.