12 ms·

Relationship Advice lead-ish mod here. We were one of the subs "called out" as being controlled by Gallowboob with the original post and subsequent reposts. We

Relationship Advice lead-ish mod here. We were one of the subs "called out" as being controlled by Gallowboob with the original post and subsequent reposts. We (buu700 and I) added Gallowboob some years back largely to have insight into how other teams modded their subs at a time when we were growing quickly and needed to know what to do to keep up. While useful in meeting that goal, we quickly realized it was pretty meaningless for /r/relationship_advice because of the nature of the questions we were getting. The only sub like ours is /r/relationships, and we each differentiated from each other by having different rules and content creation controls. As best as we know, Gallowboob enjoys the place and is pretty decent at modding, so we're pretty happy to have him. Most mods burn out quickly because of how dark the questions get as well as because of how meaninglessly violent people become when their posts are modded. --- Separate comment on an item in the story: > Allam believes his time on the site has made him a more “paranoid” person and led him to develop “borderline PTSD.” Moderating Reddit's larger subreddits is absolutely capable of resulting in PTSD-like symptoms. I've been dealing with some on and off after a post some years ago where somebody who requested advice followed through with the best course of action only to find that his wife killed their kids soon after. And Reddit has absolutely no support system for things like this.

waterside81 6y ago
As a mod - how much time do you commit to this? Are you just sitting there reading comments all day? I'm fascinated by this whole mods thing especially since it's volunteer (!!) work - which strikes me as insane.
dvtrn 6y ago
And Reddit has absolutely no support system for things like this. My immediate thinking involves referring affected parties to professionals and specialists who deal with this sort of thing, but in your opinion-what should Reddit (the company) be doing?
- commandlinefan 6y ago
  If anything Reddit (the company) should be working to limit the influence of a single "power" user like this particular moderator, not make it easier for him to control the site.
  - dvtrn 6y ago
    That's fair, I was more speaking to the question of moderators affected by PTSD. I don't necessarily disagree with what you've said here, but it doesn't quite answer my question, or are you suggesting Reddit Admins limiting mods ability to be mods is a solution to this particular problem? I guess I'm having some trouble unpacking your suggestion, can you help me gain some clarity on what you're saying?
- headsupernova 6y ago
  paying for the councelling of the moderators.
doublesCs 6y ago
> Most mods burn out quickly because of how dark the questions get Care to give us some examples?
- severine 6y ago
  Maybe sorted by controversial? https://old.reddit.com/r/relationship_advice/controversial/?sort=controversial&t=all https://old.reddit.com/r/relationship_advice/controversial/?...
  - doublesCs 6y ago
    You don't know if that's what he's referring to. In fact, I expected that the best examples got modded out.
    - eganist 6y ago
      The "̶b̶e̶s̶t̶"̶ most representative examples often involve egregious cases of abuse against parties either without consent or without a capacity to consent.
haunter 6y ago
>how meaninglessly violent people become when their posts are modded Maybe if mods were more transparent across all the subs. Most people get angry when someone removes their post and yet they see it reposted and approved hours or even minutes later (Gallowboob is infamous for that but regular users do it too)
- Someone1234 6y ago
  > Maybe if mods were more transparent across all the subs. Don't get me started. Particularly "muting" posts with auto-moderator (silently hiding them for others without notification/warning/explanation). It was originally created for spam control but is regularly abused for generic moderation. It needs more controls placed on it. To give a recent example, I wrote a long reply in /r/fitness's daily discussion but it was muted because it contained an offhand remark about COVID-19 (vis-a-vis getting hold of fitness equipment right now). Why are they muting all comments that contain "COVID?" Who even knows, but the /way/ it was done was pretty irksome and resulted in wasted effort on my part for a comment that violated zero published rules or etiquette. /r/politics has a huge dictionary of phases and idioms that result in auto muting. None of which are defined in their rules.
  - teddyh 6y ago
    > /r/politics has a huge dictionary of phases and idioms that result in auto muting. None of which are defined in their rules. This is true here on HN too. One such word that I’ve seen to cause comments get auto-killed is “m∗sturbation” (censored for obvious reasons), and I am sure there are others.
    - syshum 6y ago
      Plenty of people complain about overmoderation here on HN as well... I am one of those people
      - ativzzz 6y ago
        I firmly believe that the only way an online forum, particularly an anonymous one with free signups can remain relatively civil is very heavy handed moderation. This is not a free speech zone (it's a privately owned space), and the only way to prevent bad actors is to be very liberal in applying heavy moderation. If a few "medium" actors get banned by accident, that's the price to pay for the rest of us getting to enjoy discussing tech without dealing with a toxic cesspool.
ptsdthrowaway33 6y ago
As someone who was mentally and physically abused as a child, I'm so sick of people on the internet saying they have PTSD from mean comments that they can ignore and escape from. You cannot escape abuse from someone that is supposed to be protecting you in childhood. You cannot escape from the trauma of war when you sign up or are conscripted to be a soldier. You cannot escape the horror of death being an EMT. Seeing actual horrific death, watching ones you love die, or having someone that is supposed to care for you destroy you cause trauma. A stranger saying, "you're a piece of shit," is not fucking traumatic to anyone but an immature child or a weakling.
- filleduchaos 6y ago
  Unfortunately (or fortunately, as the case may be) PTSD and trauma in general are not yours to define or gatekeep.
- snazz 6y ago
  This is a little more serious than "you're a piece of shit", no? > I've been dealing with some on and off after a post some years ago where somebody who requested advice followed through with the best course of action only to find that his wife killed their kids soon after.
- elliekelly 6y ago
  Calling someone with PTSD “weak” is exactly how society brushed aside soldiers and child abuse survivors with PTSD for decades.
  - Supermancho 6y ago
    > I'm so sick of people on the internet saying they have PTSD > Calling someone with PTSD “weak” That's a nonsequitor derail. The post you are responding to is about faux self-diagnosis.
    - magicalist 6y ago
      > That's a nonsequitor derail. The post you are responding to is about faux self-diagnosis. "weakling" is right there at the end and the GP is going on about a strawman not mentioned by the OP anyways, as several of the child comments point out.
ramphastidae 6y ago
Why do you free work for a for-profit social network, especially if you say yourself that the work negatively impacts your mental health and that the community you are moderating is toxic? What are you getting out of this?
- friendlybus 6y ago
  It used to be that the mods ran little fiefdoms that they advertised things to buy in some subreddit's feed. Those micro business success stories seem far less common in the past few years. I don't know why you would anymore.
- Spivak 6y ago
  Because the continued existence and quality of the subreddit brings value to them. It’s no different than volunteering. The fact that Reddit is for-profit doesn’t really enter into the equation. I don’t get it for relationship subreddits because it’s so mentally exhausting but for fandoms and niche communities the experience is super cool.
  - dvtrn 6y ago
    It’s no different than volunteering. It's certainly volunteering in the synonymous sense of 'doing something for nothing because you can' but I feel this statement-left in the vacuous state of its own brevity-comes loaded with an unsaid implication that "volunteering" on Reddit is no different than "volunteering" in one's local community and I'm not sure it's that simple.
    - toyg 6y ago
      A lot of volunteer groups meet in for-profit places like cafes, and use for-profit ISPs and for-profit email providers or IM operators to talk to each other. An online forum is basically the same thing: a way to communicate.
      - dvtrn 6y ago
        Meeting together, talking about %thing%? Okay that's fair, I don't disagree that there are similarities. It does feel just as limited of a definition of 'volunteering' if taking the grandparent comment at face value.
twic 6y ago
If Gallowboob and friends are just helpful innocent people, why were were the calling-out comments, dozens upon dozens of them, deleted, and the people posting them banned? If you're helpfully, innocently, looking after dozens of top subs, and people mention that and wonder what's going on, you don't censor them, you have flipping AMA about it!
- BeetleB 6y ago
  I looked at some of the deleted comments, and if I were a mod, I would delete them as well.
  - valuearb 6y ago
    I looked at some of the deleted comments, and there was no reason except hubris to delete them.
- eganist 6y ago
  > If Gallowboob and friends are just helpful innocent people, why were were the calling-out comments, dozens upon dozens of them, deleted, and the people posting them banned? Because personal witchhunts are against Reddit's rules as a form of targeted harassment, and mods are de-modded by Reddit for not enforcing Reddit's rules -- or worse, subreddits that consistently see significant Anti-Evil Ops (effectively Reddit's on-payroll God-Mods) action may be quarantined.
jseliger 6y ago
I more or less quit Reddit when I realized what kinds of traits moderation tends to select for: https://jakeseliger.com/2015/03/16/the-moderator-problem-how-reddit-and-related-news-sites-decline https://jakeseliger.com/2015/03/16/the-moderator-problem-how.... Perhaps you're an exception, or the exception, and, based on Reddit's growth, it seems that my preferences are minority ones.
starpilot 6y ago
Why is that subreddit so similar to Jerry Springer? How did it become so trashy?
- scollet 6y ago
  You shouldn't be seeking relationship advice from random strangers or a reality show in the first place. Given that no one is a verified counselor the sub is largely redundant at best, knowingly harmful at worse. It is rife with low-effort karma farming, and toxicity, among the defaults.
  - eganist 6y ago
    Largely true with two caveats. 1. We're trying to keep the subreddit as accessible as possible to people with nowhere else to turn. This is 𝐇ard. 2. There's at least one verified crisis counselor who frequently comments - u/ebbie45. We've verified their credentials.
    - scollet 6y ago
      I stand corrected.
- eganist 6y ago
  drama-farming. We're still figuring out how to deal with it short of a figurative nuke.
lobotryas 6y ago
Why should reddit offer you any support? You volunteered; no one forced you.
SlowRobotAhead 6y ago
> Moderating Reddit's larger subreddits is absolutely capable of resulting in PTSD-like symptoms There was a moderator of the gaming subs that killed himself fairly recently. He said largely the same thing that modding was not healthy - but he continued to do it. Why do you think that is? I suspect it was because he had control over something and found that too appealing to let go of. That’s not really a soldier’s dilemma of duty and responsibility. So that anecdote aside, I’ve worked with a special forces vet that actually has PTSD. Respectfully, if you think moderating an online forum is any sort of analog even to be “PTSD-like” you are either mistaken or have a far more gruesome task than I think possible.
- eganist 6y ago
  > Why do you think that is? I suspect it was because he had control over something and found that too appealing to let go of. That’s not really a soldier’s dilemma of duty and responsibility. Speaking solely on behalf of myself: we see a notable volume of fantasy and fetish posts as well as legitimate pleas for help that veer into extremely disturbing territory. The result is a situation where mods may well find themselves feeling substantially troubled with extended exposure. I'm not about to impose that on someone else, and as a result of inevitable scope creep from the sub gaining readers, we've now got to sustain an environment that people use as either a first- or last-resort option while at the same time turning away significant populations of people (a subset of followers from influencers such as https://twitter.com/redditships/ https://twitter.com/redditships/) who appear to relish creating drama from people calling for help. Great example: https://twitter.com/eganist/status/1263534755045412870 https://twitter.com/eganist/status/1263534755045412870 When staying imposes a burden on myself but leaving heightens the risk that people may be harmed, it's a lose-lose, and the trauma arises from this. I'd show you some of the stuff we've had to mod out, but it's too dark for Hackernews.
- AgentME 6y ago
  > but he continued to do it. Why do you think that is? I suspect it was because he had control over something and found that too appealing to let go of. Why do people volunteer on anything online, like open source projects even? Sometimes people like a thing, want to keep it good, and feel that it's less likely to happen without them. Leaving is condemning the thing to possibly get worse and decay through less contribution, and interrupts their social connections formed through it and their established routine that gives the satisfaction of contributing. It's not something easily abandoned after investing years in.

waterside81 6y ago

As a mod - how much time do you commit to this? Are you just sitting there reading comments all day? I'm fascinated by this whole mods thing especially since it's volunteer (!!) work - which strikes me as insane.

dvtrn 6y ago

And Reddit has absolutely no support system for things like this. My immediate thinking involves referring affected parties to professionals and specialists who deal with this sort of thing, but in your opinion-what should Reddit (the company) be doing?

commandlinefan 6y ago
If anything Reddit (the company) should be working to limit the influence of a single "power" user like this particular moderator, not make it easier for him to control the site.
- dvtrn 6y ago
  That's fair, I was more speaking to the question of moderators affected by PTSD. I don't necessarily disagree with what you've said here, but it doesn't quite answer my question, or are you suggesting Reddit Admins limiting mods ability to be mods is a solution to this particular problem? I guess I'm having some trouble unpacking your suggestion, can you help me gain some clarity on what you're saying?
headsupernova 6y ago
paying for the councelling of the moderators.

doublesCs 6y ago

> Most mods burn out quickly because of how dark the questions get Care to give us some examples?

severine 6y ago
Maybe sorted by controversial? https://old.reddit.com/r/relationship_advice/controversial/?sort=controversial&t=all https://old.reddit.com/r/relationship_advice/controversial/?...
- doublesCs 6y ago
  You don't know if that's what he's referring to. In fact, I expected that the best examples got modded out.
  - eganist 6y ago
    The "̶b̶e̶s̶t̶"̶ most representative examples often involve egregious cases of abuse against parties either without consent or without a capacity to consent.

haunter 6y ago

>how meaninglessly violent people become when their posts are modded Maybe if mods were more transparent across all the subs. Most people get angry when someone removes their post and yet they see it reposted and approved hours or even minutes later (Gallowboob is infamous for that but regular users do it too)

Someone1234 6y ago
> Maybe if mods were more transparent across all the subs. Don't get me started. Particularly "muting" posts with auto-moderator (silently hiding them for others without notification/warning/explanation). It was originally created for spam control but is regularly abused for generic moderation. It needs more controls placed on it. To give a recent example, I wrote a long reply in /r/fitness's daily discussion but it was muted because it contained an offhand remark about COVID-19 (vis-a-vis getting hold of fitness equipment right now). Why are they muting all comments that contain "COVID?" Who even knows, but the /way/ it was done was pretty irksome and resulted in wasted effort on my part for a comment that violated zero published rules or etiquette. /r/politics has a huge dictionary of phases and idioms that result in auto muting. None of which are defined in their rules.
- teddyh 6y ago
  > /r/politics has a huge dictionary of phases and idioms that result in auto muting. None of which are defined in their rules. This is true here on HN too. One such word that I’ve seen to cause comments get auto-killed is “m∗sturbation” (censored for obvious reasons), and I am sure there are others.
  - syshum 6y ago
    Plenty of people complain about overmoderation here on HN as well... I am one of those people
    - ativzzz 6y ago
      I firmly believe that the only way an online forum, particularly an anonymous one with free signups can remain relatively civil is very heavy handed moderation. This is not a free speech zone (it's a privately owned space), and the only way to prevent bad actors is to be very liberal in applying heavy moderation. If a few "medium" actors get banned by accident, that's the price to pay for the rest of us getting to enjoy discussing tech without dealing with a toxic cesspool.

ptsdthrowaway33 6y ago

As someone who was mentally and physically abused as a child, I'm so sick of people on the internet saying they have PTSD from mean comments that they can ignore and escape from. You cannot escape abuse from someone that is supposed to be protecting you in childhood. You cannot escape from the trauma of war when you sign up or are conscripted to be a soldier. You cannot escape the horror of death being an EMT. Seeing actual horrific death, watching ones you love die, or having someone that is supposed to care for you destroy you cause trauma. A stranger saying, "you're a piece of shit," is not fucking traumatic to anyone but an immature child or a weakling.

filleduchaos 6y ago
Unfortunately (or fortunately, as the case may be) PTSD and trauma in general are not yours to define or gatekeep.
snazz 6y ago
This is a little more serious than "you're a piece of shit", no? > I've been dealing with some on and off after a post some years ago where somebody who requested advice followed through with the best course of action only to find that his wife killed their kids soon after.
elliekelly 6y ago
Calling someone with PTSD “weak” is exactly how society brushed aside soldiers and child abuse survivors with PTSD for decades.
- Supermancho 6y ago
  > I'm so sick of people on the internet saying they have PTSD > Calling someone with PTSD “weak” That's a nonsequitor derail. The post you are responding to is about faux self-diagnosis.
  - magicalist 6y ago
    > That's a nonsequitor derail. The post you are responding to is about faux self-diagnosis. "weakling" is right there at the end and the GP is going on about a strawman not mentioned by the OP anyways, as several of the child comments point out.

ramphastidae 6y ago

Why do you free work for a for-profit social network, especially if you say yourself that the work negatively impacts your mental health and that the community you are moderating is toxic? What are you getting out of this?

friendlybus 6y ago
It used to be that the mods ran little fiefdoms that they advertised things to buy in some subreddit's feed. Those micro business success stories seem far less common in the past few years. I don't know why you would anymore.
Spivak 6y ago
Because the continued existence and quality of the subreddit brings value to them. It’s no different than volunteering. The fact that Reddit is for-profit doesn’t really enter into the equation. I don’t get it for relationship subreddits because it’s so mentally exhausting but for fandoms and niche communities the experience is super cool.
- dvtrn 6y ago
  It’s no different than volunteering. It's certainly volunteering in the synonymous sense of 'doing something for nothing because you can' but I feel this statement-left in the vacuous state of its own brevity-comes loaded with an unsaid implication that "volunteering" on Reddit is no different than "volunteering" in one's local community and I'm not sure it's that simple.
  - toyg 6y ago
    A lot of volunteer groups meet in for-profit places like cafes, and use for-profit ISPs and for-profit email providers or IM operators to talk to each other. An online forum is basically the same thing: a way to communicate.
    - dvtrn 6y ago
      Meeting together, talking about %thing%? Okay that's fair, I don't disagree that there are similarities. It does feel just as limited of a definition of 'volunteering' if taking the grandparent comment at face value.

twic 6y ago

If Gallowboob and friends are just helpful innocent people, why were were the calling-out comments, dozens upon dozens of them, deleted, and the people posting them banned? If you're helpfully, innocently, looking after dozens of top subs, and people mention that and wonder what's going on, you don't censor them, you have flipping AMA about it!

BeetleB 6y ago
I looked at some of the deleted comments, and if I were a mod, I would delete them as well.
- valuearb 6y ago
  I looked at some of the deleted comments, and there was no reason except hubris to delete them.
eganist 6y ago
> If Gallowboob and friends are just helpful innocent people, why were were the calling-out comments, dozens upon dozens of them, deleted, and the people posting them banned? Because personal witchhunts are against Reddit's rules as a form of targeted harassment, and mods are de-modded by Reddit for not enforcing Reddit's rules -- or worse, subreddits that consistently see significant Anti-Evil Ops (effectively Reddit's on-payroll God-Mods) action may be quarantined.

jseliger 6y ago

I more or less quit Reddit when I realized what kinds of traits moderation tends to select for: https://jakeseliger.com/2015/03/16/the-moderator-problem-how-reddit-and-related-news-sites-decline https://jakeseliger.com/2015/03/16/the-moderator-problem-how.... Perhaps you're an exception, or the exception, and, based on Reddit's growth, it seems that my preferences are minority ones.

starpilot 6y ago

Why is that subreddit so similar to Jerry Springer? How did it become so trashy?

scollet 6y ago
You shouldn't be seeking relationship advice from random strangers or a reality show in the first place. Given that no one is a verified counselor the sub is largely redundant at best, knowingly harmful at worse. It is rife with low-effort karma farming, and toxicity, among the defaults.
- eganist 6y ago
  Largely true with two caveats. 1. We're trying to keep the subreddit as accessible as possible to people with nowhere else to turn. This is 𝐇ard. 2. There's at least one verified crisis counselor who frequently comments - u/ebbie45. We've verified their credentials.
  - scollet 6y ago
    I stand corrected.
eganist 6y ago
drama-farming. We're still figuring out how to deal with it short of a figurative nuke.

lobotryas 6y ago

Why should reddit offer you any support? You volunteered; no one forced you.

SlowRobotAhead 6y ago

> Moderating Reddit's larger subreddits is absolutely capable of resulting in PTSD-like symptoms There was a moderator of the gaming subs that killed himself fairly recently. He said largely the same thing that modding was not healthy - but he continued to do it. Why do you think that is? I suspect it was because he had control over something and found that too appealing to let go of. That’s not really a soldier’s dilemma of duty and responsibility. So that anecdote aside, I’ve worked with a special forces vet that actually has PTSD. Respectfully, if you think moderating an online forum is any sort of analog even to be “PTSD-like” you are either mistaken or have a far more gruesome task than I think possible.

eganist 6y ago
> Why do you think that is? I suspect it was because he had control over something and found that too appealing to let go of. That’s not really a soldier’s dilemma of duty and responsibility. Speaking solely on behalf of myself: we see a notable volume of fantasy and fetish posts as well as legitimate pleas for help that veer into extremely disturbing territory. The result is a situation where mods may well find themselves feeling substantially troubled with extended exposure. I'm not about to impose that on someone else, and as a result of inevitable scope creep from the sub gaining readers, we've now got to sustain an environment that people use as either a first- or last-resort option while at the same time turning away significant populations of people (a subset of followers from influencers such as https://twitter.com/redditships/ https://twitter.com/redditships/) who appear to relish creating drama from people calling for help. Great example: https://twitter.com/eganist/status/1263534755045412870 https://twitter.com/eganist/status/1263534755045412870 When staying imposes a burden on myself but leaving heightens the risk that people may be harmed, it's a lose-lose, and the trauma arises from this. I'd show you some of the stuff we've had to mod out, but it's too dark for Hackernews.
AgentME 6y ago
> but he continued to do it. Why do you think that is? I suspect it was because he had control over something and found that too appealing to let go of. Why do people volunteer on anything online, like open source projects even? Sometimes people like a thing, want to keep it good, and feel that it's less likely to happen without them. Leaving is condemning the thing to possibly get worse and decay through less contribution, and interrupts their social connections formed through it and their established routine that gives the satisfaction of contributing. It's not something easily abandoned after investing years in.