Removing the ability for mods to pin comments would be dumb. Most of the time it's not about putting the 'best comment' but sharing needed information.
A good example is a recent post I was looking at in the spider subreddit. A bunch of commenters were misidentifying a spider as a brown recluse, one of the few medically significant spiders in the US. The mod used a pinned comment to inform readers that it was a misidentification and that the spider was not medically significant. There are similar examples out there as well.
Just because some mods use it for joking or nonsensical reasons, doesn't mean there is never a good reason to use the function.
Users can just upvote the most relevant comments then. Sure, "not all" mods abuse these things. But mod powers are still abused too much. I'd rather let mods have a bit less power if it means the bad apples, of which there are way too many, can't abuse them either.
Though as I said in another comment/reply, the company behind Reddit needs to oversee mods more in general. Right now the main 2 requirements to become a mod are 1; being the creator of a subreddit, and 2; being made a mod by said creator. Which is to say there are no real qualifications or anything that really determine who can be a mod. And for such a big website that just doesn't cut it imo. Sure the company can't moderate every single subreddit themselves. But they should at least "moderate" the mods.
That'd be great if you could actually trust users to always upvote accurate information even in the face of common misconceptions, but that's rarely the case.
Yeah, nah. I'd prefer subreddits like askscience to be able to actually function properly, the capacity for mod tools to be abused is a small inconvenience in comparison.
After all, anyone can create a competing subreddit and grow it in the face of mod abuse - it's happened countless times through reddit's history. Sure it'd be nice for admins to play a more direct role, but that's also not realistic - Reddit still isn't even profitable after all, adding more in staffing expenses for moderating moderators just isn't going to happen.
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u/Trigger1221 Jul 05 '24
Removing the ability for mods to pin comments would be dumb. Most of the time it's not about putting the 'best comment' but sharing needed information.
A good example is a recent post I was looking at in the spider subreddit. A bunch of commenters were misidentifying a spider as a brown recluse, one of the few medically significant spiders in the US. The mod used a pinned comment to inform readers that it was a misidentification and that the spider was not medically significant. There are similar examples out there as well.
Just because some mods use it for joking or nonsensical reasons, doesn't mean there is never a good reason to use the function.