I don’t approve of comments that try to make fun of the userbase while removing their ability to respond, to be clear. But here is the alternative perspective as to why threads would be locked:
When I moderated r/polls, we would occasionally lock threads because we literally couldn’t keep up. If it was a topic that particularly drew out the bigots in force, they would pile in faster than we could ban them. A thread like this could get over a thousand comments if it was one of the top ones that day. The solutions were then either:
Allow bigotry to fester in the thread for extended periods of time
Have one or more moderators camp on the thread in real time trawling through new comments, perhaps for hours on end
Lock the thread
This was on a sub of about 200,000 users, with 5-8 mods. There are subreddits with many times this amount of subscribers, so I can only imagine they might have an even lower threshold for locking.
I don’t approve of comments that try to make fun of the userbase while removing their ability to respond, to be clear. But here is the alternative perspective as to why threads would be locked:
When I moderated r/polls, we would occasionally lock threads because we literally couldn’t keep up. If it was a topic that particularly drew out the bigots in force, they would pile in faster than we could ban them. A thread like this could get over a thousand comments if it was one of the top ones that day. The solutions were then either:
This was on a sub of about 200,000 users, with 5-8 mods. There are subreddits with many times this amount of subscribers, so I can only imagine they might have an even lower threshold for locking.