> A bad actor mod of a popular subreddit can persist for years, visibly, without people managing either to oust the mod, or to take down the sub's influence.
This happens because the regular users have no power. I remember seeing some article that said a small number of mods control most of the popular subreddits. Many of them put their own bias into the system by banning users, banning sources, deleting content based on ideology, shadow banning, etc.
The other issue is as these mods linger for a while, they drive away or ban everyone who might disagree with them. So then the “community” ends up not actually disagreeing with the authoritarian mod. Reddit ends up not being resilient because it doesn’t want to be. Everyone else, is gone.
When the mods of major subs are also mods for over a hundred other subs, you have to doubt how much actual moderating they are actually doing in their holier-than-thou positions.
It's also why expressing certain views is effectively forbidden across most of the site. These moderators have far too much control over the conversation.
I don’t know if you can still see them without an account but even a few years ago this was well-known and you could verify it yourself by looking at the moderator list of almost any default subreddit; we’re talking about less than a few hundred users. There was no limit to how many subreddits you could moderate for most of Reddit’s history so in the early days a few users created as many subreddits as they could. A bunch of these moderators effectively shut down Reddit over changes to the API a couple of years ago. Steve Huffman compared the system to a landed gentry:
> “If you’re a politician or a business owner, you are accountable to your constituents. So a politician needs to be elected, and a business owner can be fired by its shareholders,” he said.
> “And I think, on Reddit, the analogy is closer to the landed gentry: The people who get there first get to stay there and pass it down to their descendants, and that is not democratic.”
It appears the original post they are discussing was removed. Seems like Reddit banned the original user who collected this data and deleted their posts.
Another discussion about this:
“Six powermods control 118 of the top 500 subreddits”
Ghislaine Maxwell was maybe one of these powerful mods. But it is another contested conspiracy theory.
Evidence pasted:
The Name “Maxwellhill”
The username directly references “Maxwell,” which is not a common surname. Ghislaine Maxwell grew up at Headington Hill Hall, which was nicknamed “Maxwell Hill” after her father, Robert Maxwell, bought it. This isn’t a vague reference it’s oddly specific and personal. It’s like someone using “EpsteinIsland” as a username and claiming it’s just coincidence.
Posting Activity Stopped the Day of Her Arrest (actually 2 days before, when she began wrapping her phone in aluminum)
u/maxwellhill posted almost every day for 14 years and was one of Reddit’s most active users. Then, with no warning, all posting stopped after June 30, 2020. Ghislaine Maxwell was arrested on July 2, 2020. The timing is exact. This wasn’t a slow fade or gradual disinterest. It looks like someone was physically unable to post.
Gaps in Posting Line Up with Real-Life Events
There were other suspicious posting gaps during major events in Maxwell’s life. Notably, during her mother’s death in 2013 and during the 2011 Kleiner Perkins party, where she was confirmed to be present by former Reddit CEO Ellen Pao. That party shows Reddit leadership at the time was at least aware of her.
Moderator of Massive Subreddits
The account was a lead mod of r/worldnews, r/technology, r/politics, r/science, r/europe, r/upliftingnews, r/celebrities, and more. These are major subs that help shape Reddit’s front page and influence global discourse. Whoever had access to this account had immense control. Even after years of inactivity, Reddit auto added the account back as a moderator in 2024. That suggests the system still treats it like an active, important account.
The Content
Maxwellhill posted repeatedly about age of consent laws, often citing obscure countries. They also posted articles defending the legality of child exploitation material and criticized what they called “overzealous” child protection laws. These aren’t normal discussion points for the average Redditor. It reads like someone obsessed with legal gray areas surrounding child abuse.
Auto Deletion and Censorship
Mentions of “u/maxwellhill” have been automatically removed from comments in multiple subs. The Daily Dot reported on suspicious deletion behavior tied to the account. Posts about this user “vanished mysteriously,” raising real concerns about censorship. Who or what is protecting the account?
No Denial from the Account
If u/maxwellhill is just some random power user, where are they? Why haven’t they logged in to say anything? No posts, no comments, no denials. Nothing for five years. After 14 years of near daily activity, complete silence in the face of serious allegations is suspicious on its own.
The poster also uses many British expressions in their writing, and listed British foods as their favorite foods in one post.
Mods of r/WorldNews which is infamously compromised by paid agents demanded her posts be deleted from other subreddits.
The name matches Maxwell’s family estate. The account vanishes the day she’s arrested. It posted about topics deeply aligned with her known behavior. It held mod control over huge parts of Reddit. It still does. And yet it hasn’t said a word in five years. If this isn’t her, it’s someone with eerily similar patterns, priorities, and timing.
It's best if you reserve the term "conspiracy theory" for grand conspiracy theories, which require secret coordination on implausible scales.
The theory here is merely that an influential socialite (what Maxwell was regularly described as before her arrest) was a reddit addict powermod, that some people running reddit were aware of her identity - not necessarily knowing anything about Maxwell's wider social network or the activities she was convicted of.
Nothing here is especially implausible. It may or may not be correct, but it's not a grand conspiracy theory, just a theory of everyday shady non-public coordination. It's no more a conspiracy theory than it it's a conspiracy theory that some people in your town sell drugs (yes, they do, and technically they have to engage in "criminal conspiracy" to do so, but we don't call people conspiracy theorists for believing it happens).
Funny that you should mention a Reddit-originated conspiracy theory on an article about how Reddit is deteriorating as a source of information. I found this blog post: https://coagulopath.com/ghislaine-maxwell-does-not-have-a-se... which appears to conclusively refute the main evidence above, but I haven't independently verified. If you have stronger evidence than what appears to be copy-pasted AI output, I will re-evaluate.
Your link actually don't touch upon what I found most compelling: That /u/maxwellhill stopped positing two days before her arrest and haven't posted again since then.
> If this was true, it would be the strongest piece of evidence so far.
> But it’s not.
> I’m sorry to tell you this, but /u/maxwellhill did post after the 2nd of July. Just not in public. He continued to perform moderator duties, interact with staff members, and answer private messages. Here’s a conversation between /u/hasharin and /u/maxwellhill that happened on the 9th.
> Additionally, here’s evidence that /u/maxwellhill made a post inside a private subreddit, nine days after the “Tr45son” one.
> This seems pretty bad for the theory. With Ghislaine Maxwell in jail awaiting charges, /u/maxwellhill is casually swapping PMs with reddit moderators and spitballing around policy ideas. How could they be the same person?
That's from the link.
I stopped posting to Reddit in December 2015 and haven't been back since. David Bowie died a few days later 10 January 2016. Am I David Bowie?
I've gotta wonder how often this happens in the general case: a prolific user and mod of large subreddits stops posting abruptly without notice. How many users are as active as maxwellhill was with similar seniority? Maybe a few thousand? In a given year, how many of them abandon Reddit suddenly? It seems like some scraping and basic analytics could yield an answer, and then we'd know the posterior.
Don't know if maxwellhill was ghislaine, but whoever he was, I think some big life event caused him to leave, and that it wasn't voluntary.
Thanks. It wasn’t AI btw. I found this interesting comment analyzing the article you shared https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=29898523 (it’s also curious that your article speculates about Maxwell’s innocence in taking part in abusing children herself but that’s not directly relevant)
I apologize for accusing you of pasting AI output; I still would have preferred that you edited it down to a more manageable length.
The probability calculation apparently assumes that Ghislaine Maxwell has a Reddit account. Reddit had only about a million users in 2006. There were about a billion people with Internet access in 2006, so the chances of a given Internet user being on Reddit in 2006 are about 1 in 1000.
Regarding stylometry, I agree that the account reads as British (and the user admits that he's worked in the UK during an AMA) but it also reads to me as male, and not in a way that seems affected.
It seems to me that the whole argument basically hinges on /u/hasharin's screenshots being faked. I agree it wouldn't be hard to perfectly counterfeit Reddit screenshots, but it still seems more likely that they're real to me.
Overall I would give maybe 1 in 4 odds on it being true. Fortunately nothing of importance (to me) hinges on finding out the truth about this :)
No surprised that Reddit moderators are pedophiles, that's pretty obvious just by using it for a horrible site. Run by a bunch of sickos, the owner, spez even had an underage pedo lite sub for years.
This happens because the regular users have no power. I remember seeing some article that said a small number of mods control most of the popular subreddits. Many of them put their own bias into the system by banning users, banning sources, deleting content based on ideology, shadow banning, etc.
The other issue is as these mods linger for a while, they drive away or ban everyone who might disagree with them. So then the “community” ends up not actually disagreeing with the authoritarian mod. Reddit ends up not being resilient because it doesn’t want to be. Everyone else, is gone.