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All this in the wake of: https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/gitwbo/pointing_out_how_much_power_few_people_have_gets/ https://www.reddit.com/r/

All this in the wake of: https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/gitwbo/pointing_out_how_much_power_few_people_have_gets/ https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/gitwbo/p... https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/gjedc1/urootintootin_putin_exposes_moderator_monopoly_of/ https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/gjedc1/uroo... https://www.reddit.com/r/ThatsInsane/comments/gifi24/92_of_the_top_500_subs_are_controlled_by_the_same/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf https://www.reddit.com/r/ThatsInsane/comments/gifi24/92_of_t... In reddit parlance: "tfw internet points becomes more of a real thing, also <something something political>"

morgancmartin 6y ago
I have long held the position that the role of subreddit moderator should be elected by their respective communities rather than handed over to the first person to grab the namespace. There's no reason this position couldn't be determined in real time either. If a moderator does something against the wishes of the majority of the subreddit members it should be possible for the community to immediately replace the moderator. Blockchain's propensity for governance makes all of this feasible but I highly doubt reddit will ever implement anything of the sort. Political and monetary incentives are already too deeply entrenched from the top down to ever allow the power balances to shift to something truly meritocratic.
- cslarson 6y ago
  To accomplish this the community needs a sybil-resistant way to vote. This was a main, even primary, feature of community points in my opinion, and i hope experimentation in this regard can lead to a new relationship between mods and the communities they serve.
- yreg 6y ago
  How do you decide who gets to vote? Anyone who subscribes to the sub?
  - morgancmartin 6y ago
    Well that would be a start but I think it's pretty obvious you would want to base subscribers' voting power on duration of subscription, community involvement/contribution, their standing in the community and so on. This way you would avoid other communities subbing solely to influence the outcome of an election. I think it would be pretty neat to include metadata in the calculation of the voting power metric as well. Such as how each subscriber votes in relation to other subscribers and assign a higher score to those who vote inline with the community. The goal being to optimize for those subscribers who embody the spirit of the community. Of course that brings up issues of echo chambers but other kinds of metadata could be factored in to offset that too. I would have to think on it for a while to come up with something I felt was as meritocratic as possible.
    - nucleardog 6y ago
      The problem with a lot of that is "low effort" versus "high effort" content. I've seen a lot of great subs and communities take a pretty dramatic shift when the influx of new users is too great. It's basically the "eternal september" problem -- when the new users start to overwhelm the old users, they're no longer able to be effectively inducted into the community and the community makes a hard shift, usually to lower effort content as the quicker it can be consumed, the quicker it can be upvoted or otherwise appreciated (and usually it's quicker and more accessible to create than truly valuable content). Or more straightforward--any community which experiences significant growth will eventually devolve into memes. The one mitigating factor can be moderation (e.g., Hacker News). But if the mods can be replaced as well, then there's nothing holding it back.
- ergl 6y ago
  I'm personally longing for transparent moderation logs (like lobste.rs does) coupled with user-elected moderators. AFAIK this was one of the defining features of Aether (https://getaether.net/docs/faq/voting_and_elections/ https://getaether.net/docs/faq/voting_and_elections/) but it's still in development.
  - morgancmartin 6y ago
    I hadn't considered the transparent moderation logs before but that's a great idea, so props to lobste.rs for that. Not sure that I've seen Aether before either, I'll have to check it out sometime.
- FriendlyNormie 6y ago
  Stop perpetuating the hallucination that reddit isn’t completely controlled from the top, you imbecile.
ve55 6y ago
The craziest thing about this isn't just that so many people are controlling the literal news feeds to millions of others, but that they can do so while being anonymous, were not chosen or elected in any reasonable way, have zero accountability, and do not even have a public record of what they delete and censor
- brodouevencode 6y ago
  At least with Facebook and Twitter the editorializing is driven by their corporate culture and profit. With the Reddit mod system that water is way more muddied.
- SlowRobotAhead 6y ago
  It’s much worse than that. It’s not many people, it’s a very small number that “run” Reddit. 92 of the top 500 subs are controlled by 5 people. [0] Yesterday this post was locked, and so many of the comments were removed by mods with no self-aware irony at all - I just checked and saw very few [REMOVED] posts, I think they removed the evidence they removed them - crazy. Check ceddit. Two mods, Cyxie and AwkwardTheTurtle moderate 1196 subreddits. They have more control over content on reddit than Sinclair Media has over news stations. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/fko21a/92_out_of_the_top_500_subreddits_on_reddit_are/ https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/fko21a/9...
  - intended 6y ago
    This is almost certainly a storm in a teacup. I saw this and went to check - in the few subs i confirmed, they are not top mods. Top mods have the actual power, to assume that they are setting the agenda for every sub by being the 14th mod out of 28, or the 9th and so on is impossible, given how fractious moderating teams can be. Drama is leaking into HN without anyone doing a sanity check on the claims.
    - jshevek 6y ago
      >Drama is leaking into HN This is the most important comment on this page. The reasons for this are varied, but it's pretty obvious that cultural changes have occurred on HN during this pandemic.
mundo 6y ago
This seems a) completely irrelevant to the topic, and b) almost completely irrelevant, full stop. Why is anyone supposed to care that a mod on /r/EarthPorn is also a mod on /r/Movies? Is /u/Cyxie pushing a sinister political agenda by selectively moderating which /r/DadJokes I can see? If I'm missing something, it would help if you or someone else could take the implicit and make it explicit. Spell out for me what this ominous warning is warning me about. This user was trying to gin up an outrage campaign over something (which looks to me to be) pretty obviously benign. And since the outrage campaign called out five specific users, and he persisted in it after being told off, he was banned for harassment. None of this seems unusual. And the only connection I see to the current thread is "Reddit moderation is controversial, so putting currency in to the mix will also be controversial."
- mundo 6y ago
  Downvoters, I wasn't being snarky, this is a genuine question. This whole subthread is baffling to me. I read through the thread[0] from yesterday as well, and I see a lot of people who seem to intuitively assume this is really bad, but no explanation as to why. 0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23173018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23173018

morgancmartin 6y ago

I have long held the position that the role of subreddit moderator should be elected by their respective communities rather than handed over to the first person to grab the namespace. There's no reason this position couldn't be determined in real time either. If a moderator does something against the wishes of the majority of the subreddit members it should be possible for the community to immediately replace the moderator. Blockchain's propensity for governance makes all of this feasible but I highly doubt reddit will ever implement anything of the sort. Political and monetary incentives are already too deeply entrenched from the top down to ever allow the power balances to shift to something truly meritocratic.

cslarson 6y ago
To accomplish this the community needs a sybil-resistant way to vote. This was a main, even primary, feature of community points in my opinion, and i hope experimentation in this regard can lead to a new relationship between mods and the communities they serve.
yreg 6y ago
How do you decide who gets to vote? Anyone who subscribes to the sub?
- morgancmartin 6y ago
  Well that would be a start but I think it's pretty obvious you would want to base subscribers' voting power on duration of subscription, community involvement/contribution, their standing in the community and so on. This way you would avoid other communities subbing solely to influence the outcome of an election. I think it would be pretty neat to include metadata in the calculation of the voting power metric as well. Such as how each subscriber votes in relation to other subscribers and assign a higher score to those who vote inline with the community. The goal being to optimize for those subscribers who embody the spirit of the community. Of course that brings up issues of echo chambers but other kinds of metadata could be factored in to offset that too. I would have to think on it for a while to come up with something I felt was as meritocratic as possible.
  - nucleardog 6y ago
    The problem with a lot of that is "low effort" versus "high effort" content. I've seen a lot of great subs and communities take a pretty dramatic shift when the influx of new users is too great. It's basically the "eternal september" problem -- when the new users start to overwhelm the old users, they're no longer able to be effectively inducted into the community and the community makes a hard shift, usually to lower effort content as the quicker it can be consumed, the quicker it can be upvoted or otherwise appreciated (and usually it's quicker and more accessible to create than truly valuable content). Or more straightforward--any community which experiences significant growth will eventually devolve into memes. The one mitigating factor can be moderation (e.g., Hacker News). But if the mods can be replaced as well, then there's nothing holding it back.
ergl 6y ago
I'm personally longing for transparent moderation logs (like lobste.rs does) coupled with user-elected moderators. AFAIK this was one of the defining features of Aether (https://getaether.net/docs/faq/voting_and_elections/ https://getaether.net/docs/faq/voting_and_elections/) but it's still in development.
- morgancmartin 6y ago
  I hadn't considered the transparent moderation logs before but that's a great idea, so props to lobste.rs for that. Not sure that I've seen Aether before either, I'll have to check it out sometime.
FriendlyNormie 6y ago
Stop perpetuating the hallucination that reddit isn’t completely controlled from the top, you imbecile.

ve55 6y ago

The craziest thing about this isn't just that so many people are controlling the literal news feeds to millions of others, but that they can do so while being anonymous, were not chosen or elected in any reasonable way, have zero accountability, and do not even have a public record of what they delete and censor

brodouevencode 6y ago
At least with Facebook and Twitter the editorializing is driven by their corporate culture and profit. With the Reddit mod system that water is way more muddied.
SlowRobotAhead 6y ago
It’s much worse than that. It’s not many people, it’s a very small number that “run” Reddit. 92 of the top 500 subs are controlled by 5 people. [0] Yesterday this post was locked, and so many of the comments were removed by mods with no self-aware irony at all - I just checked and saw very few [REMOVED] posts, I think they removed the evidence they removed them - crazy. Check ceddit. Two mods, Cyxie and AwkwardTheTurtle moderate 1196 subreddits. They have more control over content on reddit than Sinclair Media has over news stations. [0] https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/fko21a/92_out_of_the_top_500_subreddits_on_reddit_are/ https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/fko21a/9...
- intended 6y ago
  This is almost certainly a storm in a teacup. I saw this and went to check - in the few subs i confirmed, they are not top mods. Top mods have the actual power, to assume that they are setting the agenda for every sub by being the 14th mod out of 28, or the 9th and so on is impossible, given how fractious moderating teams can be. Drama is leaking into HN without anyone doing a sanity check on the claims.
  - jshevek 6y ago
    >Drama is leaking into HN This is the most important comment on this page. The reasons for this are varied, but it's pretty obvious that cultural changes have occurred on HN during this pandemic.

mundo 6y ago

This seems a) completely irrelevant to the topic, and b) almost completely irrelevant, full stop. Why is anyone supposed to care that a mod on /r/EarthPorn is also a mod on /r/Movies? Is /u/Cyxie pushing a sinister political agenda by selectively moderating which /r/DadJokes I can see? If I'm missing something, it would help if you or someone else could take the implicit and make it explicit. Spell out for me what this ominous warning is warning me about. This user was trying to gin up an outrage campaign over something (which looks to me to be) pretty obviously benign. And since the outrage campaign called out five specific users, and he persisted in it after being told off, he was banned for harassment. None of this seems unusual. And the only connection I see to the current thread is "Reddit moderation is controversial, so putting currency in to the mix will also be controversial."

mundo 6y ago
Downvoters, I wasn't being snarky, this is a genuine question. This whole subthread is baffling to me. I read through the thread[0] from yesterday as well, and I see a lot of people who seem to intuitively assume this is really bad, but no explanation as to why. 0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23173018 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23173018