I don't know, in my experience, Reddit is much more rife with low-quality posting and bandwagoning than moderator abuse. It happens on rare occasions, but most accusations of moderator abuse I've seen have turned out to be nothing more than some first-world anarchists trying to stick it to the man and a bunch of other people bandwagoning on. Meanwhile, most subreddits with more than 10k posters are just awful because it's so hard for moderators to actually moderate the community (see, for example, all the true* subreddits that have sprung up just to create less popular versions of popular subs).
I read a few subreddits that might be considered outsiders. I get the impression that Reddit is slowly being subverted. Subverted by the sort of people that might have a strong voice on Tumblr and Twitter. Slowly censoring anything that's undesirable to their world view.
Being "subverted" by a different community would be the best possible outcome for reddit. It's a proud soapbox for white supremacists and misogynists to virulently spread hatred under the guise of "free speech". If this "community", seemingly comprised entirely of self-entitled white men in their 20s, were scattered to the winds tomorrow, the world would be a better place.
I was banned from r/history a few months ago. The moderator was attempting to humiliate me and added flair to my comments. I turned flair off. Then the moderator abused the stylesheets to hardcode flair that I couldn't turn off...
That's against reddit's own rules, and the admins claim they will ban moderators from reddit sitewide for that.
I went to the admins, they made him turn it off... and 1 minute later I was banned.
The admins never banned him.
Mod abuse occurs all the time. There's just nothing to be done about it, and there's no point in whining so you never much hear of it.
