Breaking Down Barriers: Starting today, all Subscribers to r/madlads are now members of the Landed Gentry.

As you are no doubt aware, reddit has eliminated user choice and made it harder for visually impaired users and others to use reddit. Third party apps like Apollo and Boost have shut down for good.

In the last few weeks, words have gone back and forth. Reddit’s CEO, Spez, aka Steve Huffman gave a disastrous AMA and a couple of subsequent interviews in which his contempt for moderators and for reddit at large came through very clearly. Spez doesn’t even seem to like reddit any more.

In an interview with NBC News, he referred to as the “Landed Gentry”. As you can imagine, a group of democratically-minded individuals, such as your r/madlads mod team, were insulted by this comment and got right to thinking how they could prove otherwise.

Spez later revealed an exciting new idea for a system where users will be able to vote moderators out of their positions and install new ones. This type of pure democracy on a site like reddit is bound to be wildly successful and incorruptible. But, there’s only one problem: At the pace it takes reddit to develop new mod tools and systems, it’ll be years before such a system is ready. That clearly will not do in a society built on instant gratification.

That is why the r/madlads mod team would like to announce that starting today we are bringing pure democracy to the subreddit: All users are now mods, and as such, are part of the “Landed Gentry”. Welcome to the club. ​ Full Rundown of Moderator Permissions:

• !lock - As top level comment, will lock comments on any post.
• !lock - Reply to any comment to lock it.
• !unlock - Reply to any comment to unlock the locked comment above it.
• !remove - If reply to a comment, will remove comment. If reply to a post, will remove post.
• !restore - Comment anywhere to approve any of your removed or locked comments.
• !restore u/USERNAME - Comment anywhere to approve any removed or locked comments for u/USERNAME.
• !sticky - Sticky the post in the bottom slot.
• !ban u/USERNAME - Ban a user for 1 day. Careful: forgetting the username will ban you.
• !leaderboard - Get the top 5 most active mods.
• !mod log - Get the full mod log.
• how to ban users - Any user whose comment or post is downvoted to -11 will be temp banned.
• how to unlock comments - Vote the stickied comment on each post to +10 to unlock comments or vote a post past 300.

The rest of the work is simply not fun, boring, unpaid, thankless, redundant, soul-crushing, endless, tedious, laborious, tiresome, never-ending, difficult-to-accomplish-with-reddits-primitive-mod-tools-and-without-third-party-apps-bots-and-tools work, and we’ll take care of all of that for you Reddit has paid lip service to their moderator-users for years, perpetually insisting that communication and mod tools would quickly improve after a stumble like this one. We’re cutting all of that out and bringing power directly to the people so that we can show the brilliance of Spez’s idea today, rather than waiting years for reddit to develop it. Have fun with yourselves and Happy Moderating!