I hope that the mod-user relationship will be healthier here. (Bias, I was a reddit moderator.)
Some reddit mods were crap, this is true. Powermods and sub collectors were real. They did shit up a few communities.
But these people were a very small proportion of all moderators. Most moderators I met were chill, and just wanted to chip in to their respective communities to give back, in a way. Volunteering for internet janitor duty, because no matter how much people use the term as an insult it turns out public spaces need janitors - or they get filled with shit, trash, graffiti (and not the cool kind either, mostly badly drawn swastikas). It’s not a position that should be glorified, or anything, because that’s weird, but I hope that some semblance of basic respect can be maintained here on Lemmy - both ways, meaning no powermods but also no defaulting to assuming mods suck.
Isn’t the way it works now also a debate winner? The blocked user can reply to you and you won’t even know, so you can’t refute whatever they’ve said (and if you’ve blocked them there’s decent odds it isn’t good).