Hi. I moderate a subreddit you probably haven't heard of, with only a bit over 200k subscribers and ~1M-ish pageviews/day.
I can tell you right now that reddit provides virtually no useful tools to moderators -- we have to turn to browser extensions to get even basic functionality like "remove this comment and its children" or ability to issue a ban while looking at the offending post/comment -- and that for a large or growing subreddit, moderating is essentially an unpaid full-time job.
So when people inevitably point to /r/askhistorians or similar as examples of "good" subreddits, please keep in mind that you are not seeing something reddit itself nurtured or helped or provided tools to do -- you are seeing something that succeeded in spite of the way reddit is built and run.
I can tell you right now that reddit provides virtually no useful tools to moderators -- we have to turn to browser extensions to get even basic functionality like "remove this comment and its children" or ability to issue a ban while looking at the offending post/comment -- and that for a large or growing subreddit, moderating is essentially an unpaid full-time job.
So when people inevitably point to /r/askhistorians or similar as examples of "good" subreddits, please keep in mind that you are not seeing something reddit itself nurtured or helped or provided tools to do -- you are seeing something that succeeded in spite of the way reddit is built and run.