Hey r/Apple!
aaronp613 here. I’ve been a moderator here for close to 5 years, but some of you might recognize my name from the Apple Event threads posted here over the past few years.
As of yesterday, I have joined MacRumors as a contributing researcher which leaves me in a bit of a pickle as to what I should do as far as my moderator status on this subreddit.
I’ll admit, ever since the API changes and strike, I have not really moderated this subreddit (or really any subreddit) that much, but as mentioned above, I still handle the Apple Event megathreads each time as I love experiencing the Apple Events with all of you.
So now the question is, what do I do?
Obviously, I should not be handling any day to day moderation going forward as I beleive that every news blog that follows our guidelines should have an equal and fair chance of being posted on our forum without the appearance of any potential bias from the moderation team.
When I brought this up to some of the other r/apple moderators, 2 possible solutions we thought of were these:
Option 1: Only continue posting Apple event threads and moderate the comments on those threads (leaving the news posting to another moderator).
Option 2: Option 1 but I also continue to post news links during the event for each topic. Accusations of bias can be avoided as we always post whichever news blog posts first, so the timestamps would speak for themselves.
So I want to hear your thoughts on the matter, because at the end of the day we are a community.
I feel like “leave ASAP” is an overreaction, like in r/Shortcuts the moderators still build Shortcuts themselves along with participating in the discussion thread but without the mod flair while also using the mod flair if they’ve to take a disciplinary action including stating a rule in the comments.
The decision should be based upon if it’s taking up your time between a paid job and voluntary work unless you’re or being forced to abuse your position or power.