I moderated r/twoxchromosomes (among other subs) daily for almost six years. I stopped moderating at the start of this year in part because I could feel reddit admins were fighting against me more than they were helping me. That’s not really important except to give some background for this post.

I facilitated Adopt-an-Admin for TwoX while I was a moderator. I was the primary point of contact for admins in the program. I helped get them onboarded and started moderating. I addressed the majority of their questions. After a couple rounds of it, I started to feel the same way a lot of admin adopters feel - that I was being used as a free (for reddit) training program to teach reddit employees how reddit works. But given the recent threats by reddit admins, I’m seeing Adopt-an-Admin in a very different light.

I brought admins into protected moderator spaces and showed them stuff that ordinary subreddit members would never see. I shared processes with them and showed them how to moderate our subreddit. While I rarely gave them much more than I would any other brand new moderator (which is neither full permissions nor full visibility into discussion spaces), that’s stuff that is shared to maybe 70 people ever, for a subreddit with 13 million members.

What I naively thought I was doing was giving reddit admins a perspective on some of the challenges we face with the moderation tools we had. What I was also doing was giving them the tools and processes they would need to dump the moderation team and more easily spin up replacements, whether that’s another group of volunteers or reddit’s paid moderators in AEO. In one round, reddit admins asked us to keep on an adoptee, which we thankfully declined.

If your subreddit participated in Adopt-an-Admin, I strongly encourage you to take inventory of exactly what you gave them access to, and make any necessary changes to cut off that access and change those processes. Ask yourself some of these questions:

• Did you revoke all of their moderator permissions?
• Did you revoke all of their access to backroom subs, slack channels, discord servers?
• Did you show them your custom mod tools or give them code?
• Did you give them access to any code repos?
• Did you share any documentation that you created through experience in moderation?

Given that reddit admins are now executing on threats to rip and replace whole moderation teams, you should consider taking steps to make that as much of a challenge for them as possible. Give them no headstart. Force them to learn the same lessons you did.

I would also discourage anyone from participating in future iterations of Adopt-an-Admin. Whatever the goals were of that program, they didn’t take away from it the value of the work volunteers put into moderation. Even if they aren’t using it to harvest your work as moderators, they definitely aren’t using it to help you.