GENEVA — Ending a four-decade search for the lower bound of Lord Acton's dictum, physicists at CERN announced Tuesday that they had isolated the smallest quantity of power still capable of corrupting absolutely: moderator privileges over a 50-member subreddit devoted to the care of snake plants.
“We expected corruption to fall off as power approached zero, and it simply doesn't,” said Dr. Helene Strauss, the study's lead author, adding that the curve was “completely flat from Caesar to here.” “We gave a 34-year-old accountant the ability to remove posts about snake plants. Within four minutes he had added a rule against low-effort posts. Within an hour he was referring to himself as ‘we.’”
According to the paper, researchers spent six years trying to find a smaller sample. A man granted moderator status over an 11-member subreddit for a defunct Minecraft server had banned three of the members by the end of his first day. A woman permitted only to pin a single comment used it to pin a reminder that pinning was at her discretion.
The team's final subject, who was given no powers whatsoever and merely told he was “kind of in charge” of a group chat, began issuing warnings within the hour.
“The rules are clearly posted in the sidebar,” said Gregory Maddox, the snake-plant moderator, who asked reporters to keep their questions on topic. “If you can't be bothered to read Rule 7 before asking whether your plant is dying, I don't know what to tell you. Removed.”
Physicists said the findings raised troubling questions about whether power could ever be reduced to a safe level, noting that the only uncorrupted subject in the study was a moderator who had forgotten his password in 2017.
At press time, the r/science thread discussing the results had been locked for getting off topic.
