95 upvotes, 2 direct replies (showing 2)
View submission: The history of the /r/xkcd kerfuffle.
I 100% agree with your point that IP owners should not automatically get a say in the moderators of related subs. Imagine if people at Mojang (hypothetically, i'm sure they would never actually do this) demanded exclusive moderation rights to r/minecraft, and began censoring any negative feedback or related games. There is too much potential for abuse in a system like this.
Unfortunately I can't see any good system for dealing with problems like the one that has arisen here. As you say, voting is open to rigging, and if it had to take place in the subreddit, there would very likely be backlash by the moderators on anyone who participated in it. If it had to take part outside of the subreddit, it would be massively under-represented by the people who should have the say in the matter (the actual subscribers). Perhaps a petition system run by the admins that causes an un-deletable (by the mods anyway) thread to be posted in the subreddit and possibly stickied. After this the community would need to discuss and vote on the proposed moderation changes, but there is still the risk of commenters being banned by the mods from the rest of the subreddit.
Comment by [deleted] at 09/02/2014 at 04:25 UTC
51 upvotes, 3 direct replies
I would imagine Showtime would have loved it if they could have moderated /r/Dexter for the last few seasons.
Comment by sparr at 07/03/2014 at 00:45 UTC
3 upvotes, 1 direct replies
The Freenode IRC network has a simple solution to this. #minecraft goes to the official representatives of the creators/rightsholders of minecraft, and ##minecraft goes to whichever community members want to run it [and get there first].
Reddit could very easily do this. /r/xkcd could be whoever Randall approves of, and /r/unofficialxkcd or /r/xkcdsomethingelse (like r/xkcdcomic) could be for anyone else to run.