On 18 March 2008, Manchester changed forever. Or, well, the online depiction of the city did, when Reddit user XboxAhoy founded r/Manchester. Since then, the forum has grown from a one-man band to what’s arguably the biggest digital town square for discussing all things Manchester.
It has nearly half a million members and a quarter of a million weekly visitors, posting over 700 messages a day. Tomorrow, Greater Manchester mayoral candidate Bev Craig will be doing an “ask me anything” (AMA, in the lingua franca of the forum) session there. It hosts everything: gripes about local YouTubers, news updates on murder cases, recommendations for the best place to get a manicure and other very specific requests (“San Marzano tomatoes in Manchester?”)
Theoretically, with great power comes great responsibility. But despite the forum’s popularity and influence, Ahoy never took much credit or attempted to exercise power over his creation. A team of moderators, referred to as mods, have been managing the forum’s conversations for the last decade or so. These volunteers are the thin line between School-of-Athens esque discourse and a wild west of at-best irrelevant and at-worst offensive screeds.
Moderating Manchester’s digital stream-of-consciousness has presumably always been a mammoth task. It seems likely that, as the years have passed, it’s become a far more substantial job than what moderators initially signed up for all those years ago.
Because, Reddit isn’t a static entity. A brief primer for those who are enviably offline: Reddit is a network of forums on different topics (or “subreddits”) that has existed since 2005. For much of its first decade and beyond, it was associated with the men’s rights movement. If you thought about Reddit, you might have thought of women-loathing incels (involuntarily celibates) and those on the nerdier end of the spectrum. But in recent years, it’s seen a renaissance — since Musk took over then-Twitter, now X, and other social media in general has become either unusable or more broadly perceived as harmful, Reddit’s popularity has boomed. In 2024, it overtook X as the fifth most popular social media platform in the UK, according to Ofcom.
And sitting above this growing hubbub are the mods.
Hello, Jack here, the writer of today's piece.
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