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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

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.

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.