Pretty much every news story about the Reddit situation that also touches on migration to other services throws out “power user” as distinct from “mods” as though it’s an established term with a clear definition.
As far as I’m concerned, it’s not. And a search on the term shows wildly different definitions, from X amount of karma, to users whose posts are upvoted simply by virtue of their user name, to people who actually post instead of lurking or commenting.
If after a decade on Reddit I don’t understand the term, I can’t imagine what it means to the layperson and thus fail to see the utility of the term in news stories. I can’t fix journalists using the term, but it would be nice to at least learn what others understand it to mean.
Power users to me are people who don’t use the default settings/apps. Could be add ons, could be third party apps.
That’s still a big range in tech savviness, but it generally separates out people who are willing to troubleshoot, put up with a bit of wonkiness in their experience, and in general care more about how the powers that be operate the site/software/whatever.
I think I’d rather define it as tailoring their experience closely to their preferences. For example, if the defaults happen to align with my preferences, I use the defaults. I don’t just use tweaks for the sake of it, I only use them if I like them better than the defaults. Granted, that’s often the case but there are also many cases where it’s not or the benefit isn’t very large.