> I've had my fair share of terrible moderators on Reddit
Welcome to the internet, the same thing could be said about every web forum since the 90s.
> There's not much to do aside from start a rival subreddit
Yes, that's the system working as intended. You don't have any right to the subreddit any more than the people who got there first. There have been many successful offshoot subreddits that go on to eclipse their predecessors in size if the new subreddit is actually better.
I'm less interested in bad moderators per se, as much as I am more concerned about "permanently owning a major, important name on Reddit".
On IRC, if the channel goes dead, the channel name is back up for grabs. This means that the admins can kick everyone out of a room and "Reset the ownership" of a name, if necessary. (Ex: #Ubuntu suffers from a glitch and gets taken over by griefers. Admins come in, kick everyone off, and gives official #Ubuntu devs control of the channel again).
Reddit can ban redditors who are poor behaving (even moderators). But the name of the channel remains in their control. The subreddit name can be lost forever. I don't think its a good system of name management.
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USENET was way more ad-hoc. The alt.* distribution lists were fully unmoderated and fully ad-hoc from what I remember. I don't think it was even possible to ban anyone, and as such, a lot of those alt.* channels became filled with spam, porn, and other unfavorable material.
The comp.* moderated lists were done better. I don't fully recall the administrative structure. But I know it wasn't done like how Reddit did things.
Reddit's decisions can be discussed in light of its competitors. Be it Discord (today), or USENET / IRC (from the past).
> The subreddit name can be lost forever. I don't think its a good system of name management.
This is mistaken. Subreddits without active moderators get replaced with a landing page that instructs interested parties to put in an application to take over.
Welcome to the internet, the same thing could be said about every web forum since the 90s.
> There's not much to do aside from start a rival subreddit
Yes, that's the system working as intended. You don't have any right to the subreddit any more than the people who got there first. There have been many successful offshoot subreddits that go on to eclipse their predecessors in size if the new subreddit is actually better.