Hey r/Apple!
aaronp613 here. I’ve been a moderator here for close to 5 years, but some of you might recognize my name from the Apple Event threads posted here over the past few years.
As of yesterday, I have joined MacRumors as a contributing researcher which leaves me in a bit of a pickle as to what I should do as far as my moderator status on this subreddit.
I’ll admit, ever since the API changes and strike, I have not really moderated this subreddit (or really any subreddit) that much, but as mentioned above, I still handle the Apple Event megathreads each time as I love experiencing the Apple Events with all of you.
So now the question is, what do I do?
Obviously, I should not be handling any day to day moderation going forward as I beleive that every news blog that follows our guidelines should have an equal and fair chance of being posted on our forum without the appearance of any potential bias from the moderation team.
When I brought this up to some of the other r/apple moderators, 2 possible solutions we thought of were these:
Option 1: Only continue posting Apple event threads and moderate the comments on those threads (leaving the news posting to another moderator).
Option 2: Option 1 but I also continue to post news links during the event for each topic. Accusations of bias can be avoided as we always post whichever news blog posts first, so the timestamps would speak for themselves.
So I want to hear your thoughts on the matter, because at the end of the day we are a community.
Option 3. Stop moderating altogether.
The conflict of interest is mostly hypothetical on Reddit.
It could become very real at MacRumors.
I am not a lawyer or even very educated, nor am I your lawyer or your barely educated internet stranger.