Really old veteran to this subreddit and stopped coming here for almost a year. What has this place become?

This has been brought up before and 8 months before that

I don't really approve the way the moderators "approve" things, I don't like the way they enforce it either.

In my eyes, what appears to be the active moderator "enforcing the rules" is how they just remove a few toxic comments in a thread and get on with it. The moderator doesn't actually do anything about the toxicity until it escalates and spreads into multiple threads. Even at that point, the moderator gives a "warning" and the ban comes after another few flame wars.

That perspective might've been exaggerated, but sadly, not that much. An example that actually happened on the subreddit:

So a few months back, we had a toxic user. Do you know what happened when there was conflict across multiple threads? The moderator just removed the comments and said: "If you have a problem, keep it to DMs," and that didn't stop the toxicity. I looked at the moderation log and the moderator even approved half of his insults. When it started to escalate, the moderator never took any action against the user, it wasn't until he was insulting authority until another moderator decided to ban the user.
And what happened after? The moderator says "I've always been in favor of taking action," but he enabled the toxic behavior to carry on for months with little action and only then decided to take administrative action when the toxicity escalated even further into slander and hate speech.

And when we got the moderator opinion poll results? He was PRAISED for being a really great and responsible moderator who moderates fairly and 'enforces the rules.'

Forward a few months after that, there was another conflict when a user started hate threads against another user. What happened was that user got into numeral flame wars with other users and what does that moderator do? The same thread lock with the comment, "Keep it to DMs," it wasn't until the user made 4 more threads within the same day until the moderator gave him a 1 day ban. I believe it to be justified but it was delayed, except I had a problem with it. That user was the only one punished in the flame war, despite the comments of the other users calling each other a "bitchass" and telling him to "fuck off," were not banned, or even warned for their contribution to the flame war. You could say the other users were not banned because they opposed the original aggressor, even when their comments were just as disrespectful and inconsiderate as the original aggressor.

/r/PhantomForces Thread Parent