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I'm not at all against moderation. I'm against the idea that subs that don't moderate out memes and jokes and images are somehow "bad" and should be removed. Th
by tensor 10y ago
I'm not at all against moderation. I'm against the idea that subs that don't moderate out memes and jokes and images are somehow "bad" and should be removed. There have been more than one hostile takeovers of more popular subs, driven by the idea that these subs need to change. To me, this behaviour is wrong, these people should be making new subs instead.
In short, we should stop saying that "low quality content subs" are a problem. They really are not. The problem is instead a lack of well moderated subs, and/or a lack of promoting these or inability to discover them.
- Karunamon 10y agoEchoing this 100%. People clearly enjoy memes, cat pictures, and so forth, or else they wouldn't wind up with thousands of imaginary internet points (and sites making nontrivial amounts of money off this exact content, like the cheezburger network) on a daily basis. Those that want their heavily moderated spaces have them within easy reach, those that want their low effort internet junk food, likewise. So what's the problem, again? It sounds like the system is working mostly as designed.
- ikeboy 10y ago>inability to discover them. As long as this is true, what's wrong with taking over a sub, if that's what the people want? Making a new sub requires getting everyone to change. You might as well ask those who wanted the old sub behavior to make their own sub. There's no inherently right decision as to what the default should be, and in particular that decision isn't "just do what the original mods/creators want".
- rndgermandude 10y agoHonest question: How do you (or whoever is doing the takeover) know "what people want"? After all we are talking about subreddits that somehow got popular with what they were doing... So why does a popular subreddit have to change and why do the people who made the subreddit into the popular thing it was have to find a new place instead of whoever has a problem with how things are done making their own and new place?
- ikeboy 10y agoWell, democracy answers this by asking people directly. So one way to do it is poll the sub's members. Or, you could see whether the stuff that gets deleted was highly voted before it was deleted. If people don't like certain content, it won't get voted up. I'm not sure which cases of hostile takeovers they're referring to, so I don't know what happened there, but presumably they either had a mod on their side, or got an admin to step in. The mod's behavior must have been pretty bad if an admin intervened.
- newjersey 10y agoA subreddit is not a democracy. As a moderator, I can do mostly whatever I please and you're welcome to stay or start your own subreddit. I don't understand why you'd say that if an admin did something then the mod's behavior must have been pretty bad. Define bad? Bad for reddit's public image? Bad for monetization?
- anc84 10y agoIf you pull the "the majority decides" card then there is no decision necessary. Each subreddit is defined by the majority of its users. Simple as that.
- fineIllregister 10y agoNot necessarily. The algorithms that do the sorting might be biased toward certain content (for instance, if it highly values quickly upvoted content, it would be biased toward short memes and against long-form articles). Reddit voting isn't just a straight majority vote.
- coldtea 10y ago>As long as this is true, what's wrong with taking over a sub, if that's what the people want? Making a new sub requires getting everyone to change. If what you're about to do after taking over was actually "what the people want" then you wouldn't have to take over.
- ikeboy 10y agoWell there's no direct way for users to overthrow mods by majority vote. You need to take over by appealing to mods or admins.
- intended 10y agoIronically - The lack of sub discovery is directly related to the development of auto mod. If you remember when r/trees broke out of r/weed, people found out about the new sub because there was no auto mod bot which went and removed key words.
- unethical_ban 10y agoThere should be no such thing as a default sub for new accounts. Users should pick what they want when they sign up.
- throwaway40483 10y agoI think you should be careful with this claim. This is what got Twitter into trouble.
- basch 10y agono way. /r/all is terrible the defaults are important because they let people use the site before they decide they want to sign up
- unethical_ban 10y agoI think defaults are necessary when someone is not logged in. When an account is created, suggestions are given based on interest, such as it is with meetup.com - News, politics, sports, local, tech, animals, humor, etc. are recommended in their own categories, and people sub as desired.
- basch 10y agoI HATE it when I sign up for a newsreading service and the first thing it asks me is to pick topics I like. I just want to try out the product / interface. Don't road block me with some set of tiles and vague "business, technology, fashion, music" screen. Reddit has it right that a new account should have some baseline. Their discovery tools however are not intuitive, if you can even call them tools.
- unethical_ban 10y agoThe designation of a sub as a default on reddit dooms it to be trashy and political, and reddit admins would never come out and say "avoid these awful communities, go find your local reddits!". So it goes.
- ywecur 10y agoWouldn't adding a "Funny" button next to the upvote button fix this? Steam has done so in their review sections.
- stcredzero 10y agoI'm not at all against moderation. I'm against the idea that subs that don't moderate out memes and jokes and images are somehow "bad" and should be removed. Obnoxious moderation is just as big a problem on reddit as the aforementioned.