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I am a freshman moderator of /r/portland. I had thought working as a moderator would be a great way to help grow the subreddit's base. Offer more useful real w

I am a freshman moderator of /r/portland. I had thought working as a moderator would be a great way to help grow the subreddit's base. Offer more useful real world interaction points and basically have a big impact on Portland. Instead what I've found is that 99% of the time the moderators are dealing with bad actors and that has to be the primary focus to keep the sub from falling apart. It isn't just dealing with trolls or stepping into stopping out of control discussions. It is actively performing anti-ban-evasion against people who are targeting the sub for disruption and then going after moderators that get in the way of these attempts. There is at least one active case number with the Portland Police Department of a person that has both attempted to doxx our moderators and has gone to the home of a moderator and vandalized property repeatedly. In this example, the person will not stop and creates new accounts every day. While there are things Reddit can be doing to help, (such as improving tools to counter ban-evasion,) I think this problem is bigger than Reddit and focuses on lack of enforcement for digital actions that would qualify as genuine crimes of harassment if translated into the physical realm.

ryandvm 6y ago
Hacker News suffers from the same problem. We have folks like dang (God bless him) manually dealing with assholes. Seems like we could solve these problems with technology, but here we are two decades into the 21st century and we still have humans cleaning the pools. I'd be interested to know if actual forum moderators think that we could solve the bad actor problem with algorithms...
- bredren 6y ago
  As I was typing this, I was thinking about moderation of HN and but was cautious to comment on meta. Speaking generally, without real-world consequences for violating community TOS on a service there are no teeth in tracking bad actors, banning them, etc. For a long time, I loathed Facebook's real-name policy. However, to some extent I suspect the amount of identity validation and attribution of comments to actions does have a limiting impact on casual trolling and harassment on that service.
  - staycoolboy 6y ago
    I would like to hear what LinkedIn moderators deal with. I wonder if it is easier/harder/same as Facebook or Reddit. There might be some interesting data here supporting real-name policies. I don't say anything on LinkedIn because I'm scared anything I say can and will be used against me when job hunting. Also: thanks for modding /r/portland. I love PDX. Just wish it was sunnier: it would be the perfect city.
  - TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
    Facebook's real name policy is a complete failure. And professional PR, "influencing", and astroturfing are endemic, especially on political groups. It seems to be trivial for bad actors to hack/farm unused accounts and impersonate people almost at will. Meanwhile nation state-level and/or corporate bad actors have the resources to bypass or subvert the id validation and create fake identities and accounts at industrial scale. I don't think real ID is a solution. Not even if it's linked to some kind of robust physical key - which is obviously going to have privacy implications anyway. AI or automated searching for troll-like activity, most likely followed by manual oversight, is more likely to be successful. But there's the lingering question of whether FB is really interested in pursuing this with any effectiveness or enthusiasm. Given FB's resources and its lack of success to date, the answer seems to be "no."
  - paganel 6y ago
    Don't think the real-name policy helps that much, to be honest. Just in the last couple of days of me commenting on FB I've been called a "retard" (sorry for the word, but that's what the lady used to describe me) and a "troll" (presumably Russian), this latter description accompanied by said commenter saying how I only write down dumb stuff which shows that I don't think before writing (but not saying where and especially why he thought I was wrong in my statements). Compared to all that commenting almost anonymously on HN seems like a breeze of fresh air. Of course in the many years I have been commenting in here there have been ups and downs (a couple of very down points for me were the reactions after the Boston marathon and the endless banana references after the Fukushima disaster), but other than that when one is told that he/she is wrong the person saying it usually comes with his/her own reasons which helps move the conversation forward.
- botolo 6y ago
  This was my same thought. We should understand the size of the problem and whether technology can help. If tech can’t help moderating, maybe tech can help in other ways. For example, establishing an anonymous unique internet ID that allows you to be online: if you get three strikes, your ID is suspended and you can’t spend time online for the duration of the suspension. Of course the system should be built so that you can’t bypass the one person-one ID and so that it’s completely anonymous. Also, the ID should not be transferable.
  - soylentcola 6y ago
    I can't think of a world where I would trust such a system (or trust anyone to create/run such a system). Is this just for websites? Or does it encompass all use of the Internet? At least as far as websites or individual platforms go, this is exactly what accounts, moderation, and "banning" already attempt to do. We've seen how difficult and expensive this is to scale when your site gets as big as Facebook or Reddit. I can't fathom a sufficiently "benevolent dictator" that I would trust to act as a gatekeeper for the entire Internet at large.
    - e2le 6y ago
      Perhaps a potential solution is POW based registration, registration is slow and CPU heavy. I don't think it's likely there is going to be a perfect solution to this and might be that it's better to slow down bad users and make it expensive to ban evade.
      - ChainOfFools 6y ago
        This will just end up promoting the interests of already wealthy bad actors, and fomenting user cartelification behind a screen of anonymity. See also: Bitcoin
      - Zaak 6y ago
        That's a very interesting idea, though it wouldn't significantly affect people with vast resources such as botnet owners, corporations, and governments. It would certainly slow down the garden-variety troll, however the determined troll would just keep a core burning to create a steady stream of sock puppet accounts.
- snazz 6y ago
  Thankfully the HN moderators are paid employees--I can't imagine doing that kind of work for free.
  - tptacek 6y ago
    Dan has better things to be doing than this; he runs the entire site. It's not like individually dealing with jerks is meant as his whole job.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- staycoolboy 6y ago
  Hello, bad actor here. I only use Hacker News and Reddit. And I always manage to get banned every few months, so I guess I'm a "bad actor". Usually I start off OK. I can rank up 1000 points on HN or 20k karma on Reddit quickly because some of the discussions are interesting and non-inflammatory and I have interesting things to say. But then some topics veer into domains that make me angry (hello politics), or I find a comment inappropriate or unfair, or mod behavior hypocritical. And I share that in a post that gets flagged or downvoted, and I get banned. It is hard to detect because I think anyone has potential to become a bad actor in the eyes of a mod. There is no such thing as an unbiased mod. They will rub some people the wrong way with their comments or actions. Some personality type's are just not compatible with what mods want to see in their well-tended gardens. I've never stalked or hounded anyone, and I've disagreed with dang's assessment of my posts once or twice, (FYI DanG is a paid mod, not a volunteer, which is probably why he's so calm about it, even though he get's riled too: read the New Yorker article about him) but this appears to be a problem techies cannot solve. Why do I say this? Because it's been going on since the 80's with Usenet. Almost 40 years of trolls, and tech hasn't solved it, but it has created some systems that have worked to keep the weeds out of the gardens. But gardens still need weeding.
  - jlg23 6y ago
    > But then some topics veer into domains that make me angry (hello politics), or I find a comment inappropriate or unfair, or mod behavior hypocritical. And I share that in a post that gets flagged or downvoted, and I get banned. Kurt Tucholsky gave great advice on how to write a letter to a government agency that is applicable to all potentially heated discussions: * write letter. * put letter in drawer. * wait three days. don't look at letter in drawer, write a new letter and send that one.
    - staycoolboy 6y ago
      Hey, that's a great idea! Instead of getting warned or banned, a user is placed in a timeout box where all of their posts get a three day lag and remain editable, and when the user logs in, they must re-read their posts before proceeding to the site. Kind of an 'in-your-face' reminder not to be a troll. It wouldn't stop the insane trolls, but maybe it would give the borderline trolls time to think.
- oarsinsync 6y ago
  Google, Facebook and Twitter are all trying moderation by algorithm. See regular posts on this very forum about algorithms running amok, banning people without clear reasons, and accounts only becoming reinstated by being famous enough to get enough traction to get a human to review your false positive.
- valuearb 6y ago
  The problem is the “assholes” never get told they are assholes, just mysteriously rate limited for some offense never explained to them, such as having an unpopular opinion. That sense of powerlessness doesn’t mitigate things, it sometimes escalates them.
- 3pt14159 6y ago
  This problem is really easy to solve. Make your forum invite-only and have a ban on a user revoke the ability of the person that invited you to invite new users. Do not make the links between who invited whom public. It's for moderation only. You can still have throwaway accounts for commenting on things and the overall community will be increasingly more civil.
  - SlowRobotAhead 6y ago
    The fact that so many people have the need for throwaway counts entirely disputes the concept that this problem is easy to solve. The upvote/downvote system is designed to reinforce echo chambers and create a chilling effect for your “real” opinion if you know it doesn’t agree with the hive. That system is already trying to solve the problem and instead creating a different one. All you can do with an invite system is to make sure the echo chamber is even more structured. That “those people” aren’t even allowed to join. Hello country club.
    - hundchenkatze 6y ago
      In this system you could still have throwaways, but the throwaway has to be invited/created from another account. This way you can create as many throwaways as needed but if you behave badly with your throwaway and it gets banned, then your main account is prevented from inviting new users and creating throwaways. Trolls could create new, primary, accounts but someone would still need to invite them back in. I definitely don't think that this would eliminate them, but it could potentially slow them down.
      - 3pt14159 6y ago
        And because the moderators have the tree of invites it's pretty easy to determine which branches are yielding troll accounts and prune further up if necessary.
  - ohazi 6y ago
    > Make your forum invite-only > You can still have throwaway accounts How can both of these things be simultaneously true?
- shuntress 6y ago
  To beleaguer your "cleaning the pools" analogy: It is not as simple as just cleaning the pool of grime brought in through normal use. The shit-peddlers outside the building are constantly convincing pool-goers to join a shit-peddling pyramid scheme so that they bring boxes of shit in to the pool. And besides that, some people just want to trash the pool for their own enjoyment.
vsareto 6y ago
Sadly, I think you guys are at the intersection of wielding influence and being a target, but not really having any opsec/personal security (or at least you didn't think you'd need it when you took the job). Idk if GallowBoob tied his identity to that nickname himself at any point, but there's only so much reddit can do if he did.
- SlowRobotAhead 6y ago
  Aside from the likely fact that “his” account is run by multiple people considering it’s his actual job to repost on Reddit... he definitely “outed” himself for news articles. He enjoys the fame and not the consequence.
twic 6y ago
This is a really interesting insight, thanks. There are roughly two views on moderators. Moderators think that moderators are the thin green line protecting the ordinary users from a handful of bad actors, letting them live in blissful ignorance of the awful things that are happening. Ordinary users think the that moderators are power-mad bullies who ban and delete as they see fit, with no accountability. Both of these things can be true at once! This reminds me a lot of the situation with the police, who are to an extent the moderators of the big room [1]. 90% of a policeman's time is spent dealing with a small number of really nasty people. 90% of a member of the public's interaction with the police is a policeman exceeding their authority, not being interested in helping with a problem, etc [2]. If you spend 90% of your time dealing with really awful people, you will get messed up. You will develop an itchy trigger finger. Most of the time - most of your time - that's appropriate. But when you're dealing with someone who's not awful, you will get it wrong. [1] http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/B/Big-Room.html http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/B/Big-Room.html [2] Maybe that's not true of you. Maybe that's not true in general where you live. It is true in general where i live.
- bredren 6y ago
  You're welcome. > Both of these things can be true at once! I've been on both sides of this. Last year, /r/portland began using the word 'criddler' to describe people in various states of meth-addiction and bicycle thievery. The word was beginning to be used very often to disparage many different types of people. The moderators made a decision to ban it, and the community backlash was supreme. I let the mods have it as well. After a few months, I came to terms with the label of 'criddler' and realized how it would come up in my mind as a form of negative judgement on a person that was not healthy for me. I realized their decision was a good one, and I described this turn around in my nomination thread running for moderator. Your description of the situation with the police is apt and I have thought similarly many times. Most people have no idea what day-to-day police work is. If it was possible to see the challenge of dealing with keeping the peace there would likely be more compassion for people when mistakes are made or there's anger about moderator decisions that affect the community.
  - friendlybus 6y ago
RyJones 6y ago
I used to mod /r/answers. It took over my life, in a bad way. There is (or was) next to no support from paid staff on serious problems.
buboard 6y ago
Why do you keep the post?
- bredren 6y ago
  I've only just begun and I don't walk away from challenging circumstances quickly. The senior moderators are faster and better than me, so my actual workload is relatively light. I believe Reddit will grow in its influence and that tools can and will be developed to improve the situation for community moderators.
sova 6y ago
There is no way to get unbanned on Reddit, even if your first post is innocuously misplaced, there is simply no mechanism to get unbanned. So what do you suggest people do?
- tptacek 6y ago
  Not stalk and harass moderators.
  - sova 6y ago
    How will this result in an unban? Nobody ever gets unbanned. What you said is emblematic of the problem.
    - tptacek 6y ago
      If you believe stalking and harassing moderators is a valid response to anything moderators do, you shouldn't be unbanned.
      - sova 6y ago
        Not at all what I said, I asked how will passively sitting by result in an unban? You are simply confirming the fact that there is no way to get unbanned, even if the moderators made a mistake, or if the person wants to actively participate. Reddit basically says if you get banned you must make a new account if you want to participate in that board still. So it's natural people make lots of accounts. Is there a mechanism to get unbanned? I'll ask you again.
        tptacek 6y ago
        Stalking and harassing moderators won't get you unbanned; instead, it confirms that there should be no place for you anywhere on Reddit.
        maest 6y ago
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
unclebucknasty 6y ago
>this problem is bigger than Reddit and focuses on lack of enforcement for digital actions that would qualify as genuine crimes of harassment if translated into the physical realm. Part of the problem is that online communities rely on the fallacy that, because most people are good, such communities can thrive with some reasonable amount of guidance. But it only takes a relative few people acting in bad faith to cause great damage. As such, I've long considered that the online world amplifies the sociopaths, bad actors, and worst among us to an untenable level, giving them outsized power and voice. I think it's driving our "real" society and culture in a negative direction to a degree that people vastly underappreciate. Layer on top of that adversarial nations that actively use our online communities to divide and propagandize, and there's a very real question of whether we're better off without these communities. More succinctly, many of the largest platforms that enable online communities seem consistently unable or unwilling to rein them in. And when you look at experiences like those you convey, it's little wonder. Attempts to moderate bad actors will invariably add to the problem, as they devolve the discourse further and generally seek to be heard, else burn the place down.
- TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
  You make a good point. All online posts are equal, and that's a terrible thing because on popular sites a shouty bad actor looks just as credible as a real expert - especially if the former relies on dogwhistle rhetoric, deliberate confusion, and superficial point-scoring, and the latter is trying to respond with facts and reason. Good moderation can keep out bad actors and promote an adult and civil tone, but it's insanely time-consuming and expensive. There really needs to be a new legal concept - something like poisoning of free speech. It's one thing to have unpopular and unusual opinions and to argue them, but another to set out to knowingly and deliberately subvert and poison communities with calibrated lies and aggression. There is no upside to the latter, and the face-to-face equivalent would usually have consequences. Free speech advocates online seem to believe that online communities are somehow magically strong enough to handle these threats automatically - but in reality they can be more fragile than face to face communities. Some formal appreciation of that might not be a bad thing.
  - 6y ago
MR4D 6y ago
Thanks for sharing. Kinda sux, especially for all the work moderators do (and thanks to dang for the hard work on HN!) Free speech is hard. Really hard. Allowing communities to express themselves in person (aka pre-internet) was much easier, because there was a cost to appear in person (time, society's perceptions, etc). With the internet, truly anonymous speech has flourished, and much of it really is a waste of time or even damaging. I hope as a society that we will be able to figure out this conundrum without eliminating free speech. I think that just like credit cards accept some bad debts, we have to be able to accept some bad actors in speech - the trick is limiting it without killing free speech. To me, communities like reddit, HN, FB, twitter, etc are all huge experiments in free speech and how to manage that problem. Hopefully it turns out right - I don't want the future to look like East Germany.
tracer4201 6y ago
I’m baffled what could motivate someone to get so worked up or angry as to go find strangers from the internet in real life and I’m sorry that’s happening.
ping_pong 6y ago
As a side question: As a moderator, you basically create the tone and feel of a subreddit. If a subreddit is successful, it's because of the moderators. When reddit goes public, moderators get nothing. The employees of reddit will become defacto IPO millionaires, but moderators who create the success of the site, get nothing. Has anything been discussed along these lines about how unfair this is?
- thejynxed 6y ago
  Some mods have already openly discussed taking their subs entirely private and invite only in the event of an IPO. Reddit gets no ad revenue from private subs.
echelon 6y ago
What in the world is wrong with people? Why do people expend so much effort doing these things? It'd be awesome if we had anonymous reputation scores, like PGP or something, that other people could vouch for. Make bad actors pay to build up good reputation, then burn it down when they misbehave. I really want a system like that to help filter the deluge of comments anyway. Though there's a danger of forming a filter bubble, I want to see commentary that is vouched for by those I respect. Not just on Twitter, but everywhere. As a protocol or data exchange format.
- jldugger 6y ago
  > It'd be awesome if we had anonymous reputation scores, like PGP or something, that other people could vouch for. Make bad actors pay to build up good reputation, then burn it down when they misbehave. The whuffie concept relies on strong online identities. Without that, declaring bankruptcy is too easy and allows malicious actors to simultaneously harm others and boost their own scores rep with bots.
jldugger 6y ago
> performing anti-ban-evasion Honestly, this is something Metafilter did pretty well: the five dollar account fee makes a ton of abuse tactics more costly to deploy, while simultaneously funding efforts to combat it. It would go a long ways I think to at least allow mods to restrict subreddits to read-only for unpaid accounts.
- koheripbal 6y ago
  100% agree. Metafilter has other major flaws that prevent if from having a meaningful community size, but the barrier to entry is a crucial mechanic that keeps out bad actors and mentally juvenile people.
notatoad 6y ago
>While there are things Reddit can be doing to help one thing reddit could be doing to help is to stop relying on community moderators for so much. volunteer community moderators shouldn't be dealing with people abusing the reddit platform, that should be the job of reddit's staff. Instead of just building tools, reddit should be actively involved in the enforcement of platform rules to handle these cases, and leave the community moderators to focus on creating and maintaining their communities - ensuring content fits the theme of the subreddit, people are communicating with each other in a tone that fits the intended tone of the subreddit, etc. Reddit needs people like gallowboob who are willing to do the drudgery of sifting through all the platform abusers, but from an end-user perspective it's easy to see somebody moderating 80% of the big subreddits as a problem, because it's not clear whether a moderator is actually influencing the community or just sifting through obvious abuse.
- thejynxed 6y ago
  Nobody needs a karma-whoring, reposting, content thieving, paid shill like gallowboob anywhere. He's probably the worst example you could have chosen.
munificent 6y ago
I think one of the major failures of social businesses on the Internet is that their business need for massive user growth forces them to upend basics of social interaction that we have taken for granted in the real world for eons. If you create a new subreddit, anyone can show up and participate. Good actor or bad. Can you imagine if you threw a physical party and let every single stranger in the world literally walk in your front door, wander around their house, and do what they want? You'd be a honeypot for thieves and vandals. On the Internet, they don't take your physical stuff, but they harm the online equivalent: your information and attention. Every popular online forum is likewise a honeypot for scammers, shady advertisers, griefers, and other malcontents. Why wouldn't it be? The typical suggested option is massive policing, but that's really hard in a world a bad actor can don a near-perfect disguise (create a new account) in an instant. I would love to see sites like Reddit and Twitter adopt a model closer to real-world social interactions: something like a web of trust where you need to be invited to participate in a space and where there is some level of vouching for you. But those kinds of businesses don't scale well so we almost never see them. Another option would be to force something like real identities. The reason a bar can get away with just a couple of bouncers is because a bad actor can't as easily escape the consequences of their actions by shedding their identity. But, of course, requiring real identity gets in the way of good actors who use anonymity for good reasons (generally avoiding other bad actors). It's a hard problem, but it makes me sad that almost every business just ends up doing "let everyone in and accept that there's going to be shitbags all over the place fucking it up for everyone".
bondolo 6y ago
Yikes. I am the moderator of r/Metric among other medium sized reddit subs. It turns out there are people who really hate the Metric system and see it as part of a globalist conspiracy. All of the behaviour you describe is familiar, though thankfully hasn't risen to the level where police needed to be involved. Our worst offender has thankfully recently focused on Brexit and left us alone. I totally agree that lack of response to ban-evasion has been a problem. Even Wikipedia does better than Reddit at managing user bans. The amount of damage that bad actors can do on reddit is disappointing. It also doesn't seem to be getting any better. In the 9 years I have been modding the same problems are still present. The poweruser situation is also frustrating. The reddit moderation system and the ranking of moderation power by seniority really encourages cabals. It has been tough to resist on some of the subs I moderate for them being taken over by power users. You invite one mod to help with spam or problem users and all of a sudden you have 5 more mods, all of who moderate dozens of subs. Slowly the power users move towards top mod position and they never bring in fresh mods, only other power users. They will also try to remove any existing top mods to entrench their control. The system is killing the democratic nature of reddit by concentrating moderation into a narrow group. Given reddits position that moderators effectively own the community it makes it very difficult to resist this kind of takeover. My advice: never invite anybody who is already modding more than 100K users in other subs to be a mod on your sub.
FriendlyNormie 6y ago
You sound like a proud tyrant gloating about his high position in the hierarchy, whereas he sounds very upset about something very bad you and your ilk did. In a healthy world where might makes right and sheer unbridled ambition is rewarded with success, that “troll” would be able to kill all of you and usurp your role as moderator.
httpsterio 6y ago
I know what you're talking about. I was also a mod myself on /r/Suomi (Finland) and quit after a rather serious incident. Other mods and users on far-right subs started to compile a list of European subreddit moderators whom they deemed 'SJWs' and tried to gather as much personal information on everyone. Someone from that group leaked the documents to us and it was quite alarming. The scale, effort and hate that went into those documents was the most surprising thing. Anyways, when our main mod got approached on the street and asked if he was /u/nickname on reddit and he replied yes, he got stabbed. That was the day I quit.
- exo-pla-net 6y ago
  Horrifying. Is there a news story on the stabbing?
- FilterSweep 6y ago
  I’m sorry you and your friend dealt with that. It’s not just geo subs that have this problem. A friend of mine who mods a number of comedy subs (of all things) showed me his mod mail that appeared to indicate systematic brigading from far right discord servers. They post extremist content in a bid to get the sub banned, and if it fails, they escalate harassment campaigns on the moderators
- CogentHedgehog 6y ago
  This is the best argument I've seen for making it publicly anonymous which moderator took a specific action and maintaining a large pool of moderators. Bad actors can harass a community as a whole (and they do) but it's much harder for them to target specific moderators. The flipside is that moderators have to hold each other accountable for impartial enforcement of the rules.
meteor333 6y ago
We are solving these problems at - https://district.so https://district.so. Dealing with trolls can be draining and it's a plague for a good community. We working on solving that. @bredren Would you want to lead /Portland District?
- exo-pla-net 6y ago
  You don't describe your product or service on the site. As such, this is spam for a vague mailing list.
bulldoa 6y ago
Does min account history + min karma to comment enforcement helps?
ravenstine 6y ago
It's way too easy for bad actors to create throwaway accounts on Reddit. If I remember correctly, there's no captcha and no email confirmation required. I suspect a large swath of Reddit activity is bots and paid political actors.
- koheripbal 6y ago
  Reddit allows bots because if it weren't for the product placement, the site would fall into obscurity.
joshuamorton 6y ago
I can second this type of experience. When I (more actively) moderated the subreddit for my university, there were a few repeat offenders who took most of our time, and one who went out of his way to try and dox and threaten me specifically (which wasn't hard since I ran the account under my real name), and who I finally dealt with by involving the police. Politically motivated reddit people are, or at least can be, scary.
dgzl 6y ago
One of my posts to r/Portland was incorrectly removed with the excuse "not related to Portland." in reality it was related however the post was contentious and I was prevented from re-posting. The moderator didn't even pretend to acknowledge a genuine rule that was broken, just simply told me not to post it. After I complained I was muted from contacting the mods. Not to blame you but this is the kind of BS that makes me uninterested in the Reddit community, and uninterested in Portland in general, rife with cancel culture.
- bluntfang 6y ago
  >cancel culture The only people I see using this phrase in the way you're using it are people who have consistently behaved in such a way to be "canceled" from multiple social groups after being asked to modify their behavior that adheres to a low bar of social norms and etiquette. Do you fall into this category?
  - dgzl 6y ago
    No.
    - bluntfang 6y ago
      Do you mind sharing the screenshots of the conversation with the /r/portland mod team as well as the article you tried to post? And if you haven't been cancelled from different social groups in portland, how do you know about how rife the cancel culture is? Can you explain a little bit about how it has affected people you know?
      - dgzl 6y ago
        I'm not sure what benefit sharing the screenshots would have, I'm not trying to out the mod or get vengeance. The video I posted was about a Lake Oswego woman going nuts and verbally abusing some local PD who were handling the situation with elegance. My title was something like "this is why I don't trust when people senselessly dog on the police." It was removed because there wasn't anything specific to Portland or surrending area (not true but ok). I told the mod I would just repost with the title "this is why I don't trust when Portlanders senselessly dog on local police" and was told not to post. No rules broken, just intimidation and censorship. I don't subscribe to the progressive/liberal/left/socialist ideology and I'm genuinely afraid to publicly share that fact in Portland. There are many people in PDX who will violently attack you if they catch wind of that fact. This isn't a secret. It's also not a secret that Oregon outside of PDX and Eugene are generally Red communities. For instance, look at the protests in Portland last year. The counter-protesters were far more disruptive and violent than the visiting protesters, but the typical Portlander wouldn't see it that way. In my own discussions with them, they see Trump supporters et. al. As being fascist and as causing violence simply by existing, thus justifying their pre-emptive violence.
DanCarvajal 6y ago
/r/portland is definitely a challenging place to moderate. Frankly I've never seen a local city sub quite like that one.
koheripbal 6y ago
> stepping into stopping out of control discussions. I mean, if your goal is to "control" conversations, yeah, that's going to be a lot of work. What's the point of that anyway?
- xsmasher 6y ago
  Maintaining a high signal-to-noise ratio so that the platform continues to be useful and interesting.
Anon4Now 6y ago
> freshman moderator of /r/portland You poor soul. I stopped visiting that sub a few years ago. There was a pervasive negativity about it that was just depressing. I hope it's gotten better. > [...] the Portland Police Department BTW, it's Portland Police Bureau (PPB). Calling it PPD will get you labeled a transplant. ;-)
stevewillows 6y ago
are you actually banning people or using automod to automatically remove their posts? There's no benefit to banning the bad folks, since, like your guy, they just create a new account. author: name: [baddude1, baddude2] action: remove action_reason: "Troll / Spammer" In my subs, this one condition does the most work. I also filter off low karma and new accounts to prevent spammers, trolls, etc.
CogentHedgehog 6y ago
I became a mod for one of the larger subreddit communities (10M+ subscribers) for similar reasons: I enjoyed the community and wanted to help out. Same platform, but the experience couldn't be more different: we spend almost all our time dealing with "shallow" problems at a high scale. For us that means flamewars, brigading and (usually political) astroturfing, and to a lesser extent commercial spam. We don't even remotely have time to go looking for deeper problems such as ban evasion, because the volume is so high. We know it's probably happening but it's almost impossible to police because it disappears against the everyday noise. One thing that I think helps us a lot is heavy use of automoderator rules and the spam filter to remove the most obvious problems automatically. I think smaller and more local communities breed a very different class of problems than big ones -- it's much more personal for the participants, and their retaliation is more personal as well. Also, a single abusive user can do so much more damage in a small community because they don't just blend into the background noise. One constant though is that we do see some really troubling things as well.
billme 6y ago
Experienced same problems with aggressive individuals or groups trying to engineer or buy there way into digital properties. Found the whole experience very odd, since while I had no interest in making a deal, the amount of effort they were putting forth made no sense to me. Luckily, after they realized I would not agree, get tricked, etc — they moved on.
gowld 6y ago
Vandalism is wrong. "Doxxing" public figures who try to anonymously control public discourse is not.
jimbob45 6y ago
4chan seems to have a superior system wherein there are a small number of mods who take recommendations from a large, churning group of janitors. These janitors can only suggest bans and must follow a template for each of their ban recommendations. However, the janitors can delete posts/images at will (reversible by mods). Thus, the system is both evenly-applied (most of the time) and highly scalable.
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
sizzle 6y ago
Hello fellow Oregonian, have you tried shadowbanning this/these disruptive individuals? How do you catch repeat offenders beginning a VPN? Browser fingerprinting? (Anyone else know?)
sizzle 6y ago
Hello fellow Oregonian, have you tried shadowbanning this/these disruptive individuals? How do you catch repeat offenders beginning a VPN? Browser fingerprinting? (Anyone else know?) Thanks for keeping r/Portland such a fun place to hang around in, really enjoy the creative community/people who post there!
dntbnmpls 6y ago
> I had thought working as a moderator would be a great way to help grow the subreddit's base. You became a moderator because you have an agenda to push. Nobody wastes that much time modding a sub without an agenda. And your fellow mods allowed you to be mod because you share their ideology. This is the case for most subs and it's why subs tend towards ideological/propaganda shitholes. > In this example, the person will not stop and creates new accounts every day. You could always turn the sub private. But you won't because you want to use the sub to push an agenda. Right? > While there are things Reddit can be doing to help, (such as improving tools to counter ban-evasion,) I think this problem is bigger than Reddit Actually what reddit should be doing is declawing mods like you and going back to being a user centered platform. Like it used to be when reddit was fun and interesting. > and focuses on lack of enforcement for digital actions that would qualify as genuine crimes of harassment if translated into the physical realm. If there are genuine crimes in your sub, then call the cops. Simple. For every shitty user, there is a shitty mod. As a matter of fact, it is shitty users that tend to become mods. You have a really easy solution to all your problems - privatize the sub. Make it invite only. For every complaint you listed, there is a solution provided by reddit - private subs.
Mandatum 6y ago
Shut your subreddit down and detail your actions. Use a tool that doesn't put your moderators in danger. A subreddit isn't worth your safety. There are online places where they use a third-party to verify identity. It may not have the most adoption, but at least you're not putting yourselves at risk.
sumnobody 6y ago
I would take an aggressive stance againsnt these assholes that are vandalizing someone's property. It's petty, immature, and crosses a line. Physical mentorship is the only way to get through to pieces of shit like that.

ryandvm 6y ago

Hacker News suffers from the same problem. We have folks like dang (God bless him) manually dealing with assholes. Seems like we could solve these problems with technology, but here we are two decades into the 21st century and we still have humans cleaning the pools. I'd be interested to know if actual forum moderators think that we could solve the bad actor problem with algorithms...

bredren 6y ago
As I was typing this, I was thinking about moderation of HN and but was cautious to comment on meta. Speaking generally, without real-world consequences for violating community TOS on a service there are no teeth in tracking bad actors, banning them, etc. For a long time, I loathed Facebook's real-name policy. However, to some extent I suspect the amount of identity validation and attribution of comments to actions does have a limiting impact on casual trolling and harassment on that service.
- staycoolboy 6y ago
  I would like to hear what LinkedIn moderators deal with. I wonder if it is easier/harder/same as Facebook or Reddit. There might be some interesting data here supporting real-name policies. I don't say anything on LinkedIn because I'm scared anything I say can and will be used against me when job hunting. Also: thanks for modding /r/portland. I love PDX. Just wish it was sunnier: it would be the perfect city.
- TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
  Facebook's real name policy is a complete failure. And professional PR, "influencing", and astroturfing are endemic, especially on political groups. It seems to be trivial for bad actors to hack/farm unused accounts and impersonate people almost at will. Meanwhile nation state-level and/or corporate bad actors have the resources to bypass or subvert the id validation and create fake identities and accounts at industrial scale. I don't think real ID is a solution. Not even if it's linked to some kind of robust physical key - which is obviously going to have privacy implications anyway. AI or automated searching for troll-like activity, most likely followed by manual oversight, is more likely to be successful. But there's the lingering question of whether FB is really interested in pursuing this with any effectiveness or enthusiasm. Given FB's resources and its lack of success to date, the answer seems to be "no."
- paganel 6y ago
  Don't think the real-name policy helps that much, to be honest. Just in the last couple of days of me commenting on FB I've been called a "retard" (sorry for the word, but that's what the lady used to describe me) and a "troll" (presumably Russian), this latter description accompanied by said commenter saying how I only write down dumb stuff which shows that I don't think before writing (but not saying where and especially why he thought I was wrong in my statements). Compared to all that commenting almost anonymously on HN seems like a breeze of fresh air. Of course in the many years I have been commenting in here there have been ups and downs (a couple of very down points for me were the reactions after the Boston marathon and the endless banana references after the Fukushima disaster), but other than that when one is told that he/she is wrong the person saying it usually comes with his/her own reasons which helps move the conversation forward.
botolo 6y ago
This was my same thought. We should understand the size of the problem and whether technology can help. If tech can’t help moderating, maybe tech can help in other ways. For example, establishing an anonymous unique internet ID that allows you to be online: if you get three strikes, your ID is suspended and you can’t spend time online for the duration of the suspension. Of course the system should be built so that you can’t bypass the one person-one ID and so that it’s completely anonymous. Also, the ID should not be transferable.
- soylentcola 6y ago
  I can't think of a world where I would trust such a system (or trust anyone to create/run such a system). Is this just for websites? Or does it encompass all use of the Internet? At least as far as websites or individual platforms go, this is exactly what accounts, moderation, and "banning" already attempt to do. We've seen how difficult and expensive this is to scale when your site gets as big as Facebook or Reddit. I can't fathom a sufficiently "benevolent dictator" that I would trust to act as a gatekeeper for the entire Internet at large.
  - e2le 6y ago
    Perhaps a potential solution is POW based registration, registration is slow and CPU heavy. I don't think it's likely there is going to be a perfect solution to this and might be that it's better to slow down bad users and make it expensive to ban evade.
    - ChainOfFools 6y ago
      This will just end up promoting the interests of already wealthy bad actors, and fomenting user cartelification behind a screen of anonymity. See also: Bitcoin
    - Zaak 6y ago
      That's a very interesting idea, though it wouldn't significantly affect people with vast resources such as botnet owners, corporations, and governments. It would certainly slow down the garden-variety troll, however the determined troll would just keep a core burning to create a steady stream of sock puppet accounts.
snazz 6y ago
Thankfully the HN moderators are paid employees--I can't imagine doing that kind of work for free.
- tptacek 6y ago
  Dan has better things to be doing than this; he runs the entire site. It's not like individually dealing with jerks is meant as his whole job.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
staycoolboy 6y ago
Hello, bad actor here. I only use Hacker News and Reddit. And I always manage to get banned every few months, so I guess I'm a "bad actor". Usually I start off OK. I can rank up 1000 points on HN or 20k karma on Reddit quickly because some of the discussions are interesting and non-inflammatory and I have interesting things to say. But then some topics veer into domains that make me angry (hello politics), or I find a comment inappropriate or unfair, or mod behavior hypocritical. And I share that in a post that gets flagged or downvoted, and I get banned. It is hard to detect because I think anyone has potential to become a bad actor in the eyes of a mod. There is no such thing as an unbiased mod. They will rub some people the wrong way with their comments or actions. Some personality type's are just not compatible with what mods want to see in their well-tended gardens. I've never stalked or hounded anyone, and I've disagreed with dang's assessment of my posts once or twice, (FYI DanG is a paid mod, not a volunteer, which is probably why he's so calm about it, even though he get's riled too: read the New Yorker article about him) but this appears to be a problem techies cannot solve. Why do I say this? Because it's been going on since the 80's with Usenet. Almost 40 years of trolls, and tech hasn't solved it, but it has created some systems that have worked to keep the weeds out of the gardens. But gardens still need weeding.
- jlg23 6y ago
  > But then some topics veer into domains that make me angry (hello politics), or I find a comment inappropriate or unfair, or mod behavior hypocritical. And I share that in a post that gets flagged or downvoted, and I get banned. Kurt Tucholsky gave great advice on how to write a letter to a government agency that is applicable to all potentially heated discussions: * write letter. * put letter in drawer. * wait three days. don't look at letter in drawer, write a new letter and send that one.
  - staycoolboy 6y ago
    Hey, that's a great idea! Instead of getting warned or banned, a user is placed in a timeout box where all of their posts get a three day lag and remain editable, and when the user logs in, they must re-read their posts before proceeding to the site. Kind of an 'in-your-face' reminder not to be a troll. It wouldn't stop the insane trolls, but maybe it would give the borderline trolls time to think.
oarsinsync 6y ago
Google, Facebook and Twitter are all trying moderation by algorithm. See regular posts on this very forum about algorithms running amok, banning people without clear reasons, and accounts only becoming reinstated by being famous enough to get enough traction to get a human to review your false positive.
valuearb 6y ago
The problem is the “assholes” never get told they are assholes, just mysteriously rate limited for some offense never explained to them, such as having an unpopular opinion. That sense of powerlessness doesn’t mitigate things, it sometimes escalates them.
3pt14159 6y ago
This problem is really easy to solve. Make your forum invite-only and have a ban on a user revoke the ability of the person that invited you to invite new users. Do not make the links between who invited whom public. It's for moderation only. You can still have throwaway accounts for commenting on things and the overall community will be increasingly more civil.
- SlowRobotAhead 6y ago
  The fact that so many people have the need for throwaway counts entirely disputes the concept that this problem is easy to solve. The upvote/downvote system is designed to reinforce echo chambers and create a chilling effect for your “real” opinion if you know it doesn’t agree with the hive. That system is already trying to solve the problem and instead creating a different one. All you can do with an invite system is to make sure the echo chamber is even more structured. That “those people” aren’t even allowed to join. Hello country club.
  - hundchenkatze 6y ago
    In this system you could still have throwaways, but the throwaway has to be invited/created from another account. This way you can create as many throwaways as needed but if you behave badly with your throwaway and it gets banned, then your main account is prevented from inviting new users and creating throwaways. Trolls could create new, primary, accounts but someone would still need to invite them back in. I definitely don't think that this would eliminate them, but it could potentially slow them down.
    - 3pt14159 6y ago
      And because the moderators have the tree of invites it's pretty easy to determine which branches are yielding troll accounts and prune further up if necessary.
- ohazi 6y ago
  > Make your forum invite-only > You can still have throwaway accounts How can both of these things be simultaneously true?
shuntress 6y ago
To beleaguer your "cleaning the pools" analogy: It is not as simple as just cleaning the pool of grime brought in through normal use. The shit-peddlers outside the building are constantly convincing pool-goers to join a shit-peddling pyramid scheme so that they bring boxes of shit in to the pool. And besides that, some people just want to trash the pool for their own enjoyment.

vsareto 6y ago

Sadly, I think you guys are at the intersection of wielding influence and being a target, but not really having any opsec/personal security (or at least you didn't think you'd need it when you took the job). Idk if GallowBoob tied his identity to that nickname himself at any point, but there's only so much reddit can do if he did.

SlowRobotAhead 6y ago
Aside from the likely fact that “his” account is run by multiple people considering it’s his actual job to repost on Reddit... he definitely “outed” himself for news articles. He enjoys the fame and not the consequence.

twic 6y ago

This is a really interesting insight, thanks. There are roughly two views on moderators. Moderators think that moderators are the thin green line protecting the ordinary users from a handful of bad actors, letting them live in blissful ignorance of the awful things that are happening. Ordinary users think the that moderators are power-mad bullies who ban and delete as they see fit, with no accountability. Both of these things can be true at once! This reminds me a lot of the situation with the police, who are to an extent the moderators of the big room [1]. 90% of a policeman's time is spent dealing with a small number of really nasty people. 90% of a member of the public's interaction with the police is a policeman exceeding their authority, not being interested in helping with a problem, etc [2]. If you spend 90% of your time dealing with really awful people, you will get messed up. You will develop an itchy trigger finger. Most of the time - most of your time - that's appropriate. But when you're dealing with someone who's not awful, you will get it wrong. [1] http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/B/Big-Room.html http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/B/Big-Room.html [2] Maybe that's not true of you. Maybe that's not true in general where you live. It is true in general where i live.

bredren 6y ago
You're welcome. > Both of these things can be true at once! I've been on both sides of this. Last year, /r/portland began using the word 'criddler' to describe people in various states of meth-addiction and bicycle thievery. The word was beginning to be used very often to disparage many different types of people. The moderators made a decision to ban it, and the community backlash was supreme. I let the mods have it as well. After a few months, I came to terms with the label of 'criddler' and realized how it would come up in my mind as a form of negative judgement on a person that was not healthy for me. I realized their decision was a good one, and I described this turn around in my nomination thread running for moderator. Your description of the situation with the police is apt and I have thought similarly many times. Most people have no idea what day-to-day police work is. If it was possible to see the challenge of dealing with keeping the peace there would likely be more compassion for people when mistakes are made or there's anger about moderator decisions that affect the community.
- friendlybus 6y ago

RyJones 6y ago

I used to mod /r/answers. It took over my life, in a bad way. There is (or was) next to no support from paid staff on serious problems.

buboard 6y ago

Why do you keep the post?

bredren 6y ago
I've only just begun and I don't walk away from challenging circumstances quickly. The senior moderators are faster and better than me, so my actual workload is relatively light. I believe Reddit will grow in its influence and that tools can and will be developed to improve the situation for community moderators.

sova 6y ago

There is no way to get unbanned on Reddit, even if your first post is innocuously misplaced, there is simply no mechanism to get unbanned. So what do you suggest people do?

tptacek 6y ago
Not stalk and harass moderators.
- sova 6y ago
  How will this result in an unban? Nobody ever gets unbanned. What you said is emblematic of the problem.
  - tptacek 6y ago
    If you believe stalking and harassing moderators is a valid response to anything moderators do, you shouldn't be unbanned.
    - sova 6y ago
      Not at all what I said, I asked how will passively sitting by result in an unban? You are simply confirming the fact that there is no way to get unbanned, even if the moderators made a mistake, or if the person wants to actively participate. Reddit basically says if you get banned you must make a new account if you want to participate in that board still. So it's natural people make lots of accounts. Is there a mechanism to get unbanned? I'll ask you again.
      - tptacek 6y ago
        Stalking and harassing moderators won't get you unbanned; instead, it confirms that there should be no place for you anywhere on Reddit.
        maest 6y ago

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

unclebucknasty 6y ago

>this problem is bigger than Reddit and focuses on lack of enforcement for digital actions that would qualify as genuine crimes of harassment if translated into the physical realm. Part of the problem is that online communities rely on the fallacy that, because most people are good, such communities can thrive with some reasonable amount of guidance. But it only takes a relative few people acting in bad faith to cause great damage. As such, I've long considered that the online world amplifies the sociopaths, bad actors, and worst among us to an untenable level, giving them outsized power and voice. I think it's driving our "real" society and culture in a negative direction to a degree that people vastly underappreciate. Layer on top of that adversarial nations that actively use our online communities to divide and propagandize, and there's a very real question of whether we're better off without these communities. More succinctly, many of the largest platforms that enable online communities seem consistently unable or unwilling to rein them in. And when you look at experiences like those you convey, it's little wonder. Attempts to moderate bad actors will invariably add to the problem, as they devolve the discourse further and generally seek to be heard, else burn the place down.

TheOtherHobbes 6y ago
You make a good point. All online posts are equal, and that's a terrible thing because on popular sites a shouty bad actor looks just as credible as a real expert - especially if the former relies on dogwhistle rhetoric, deliberate confusion, and superficial point-scoring, and the latter is trying to respond with facts and reason. Good moderation can keep out bad actors and promote an adult and civil tone, but it's insanely time-consuming and expensive. There really needs to be a new legal concept - something like poisoning of free speech. It's one thing to have unpopular and unusual opinions and to argue them, but another to set out to knowingly and deliberately subvert and poison communities with calibrated lies and aggression. There is no upside to the latter, and the face-to-face equivalent would usually have consequences. Free speech advocates online seem to believe that online communities are somehow magically strong enough to handle these threats automatically - but in reality they can be more fragile than face to face communities. Some formal appreciation of that might not be a bad thing.
- 6y ago

MR4D 6y ago

Thanks for sharing. Kinda sux, especially for all the work moderators do (and thanks to dang for the hard work on HN!) Free speech is hard. Really hard. Allowing communities to express themselves in person (aka pre-internet) was much easier, because there was a cost to appear in person (time, society's perceptions, etc). With the internet, truly anonymous speech has flourished, and much of it really is a waste of time or even damaging. I hope as a society that we will be able to figure out this conundrum without eliminating free speech. I think that just like credit cards accept some bad debts, we have to be able to accept some bad actors in speech - the trick is limiting it without killing free speech. To me, communities like reddit, HN, FB, twitter, etc are all huge experiments in free speech and how to manage that problem. Hopefully it turns out right - I don't want the future to look like East Germany.

tracer4201 6y ago

I’m baffled what could motivate someone to get so worked up or angry as to go find strangers from the internet in real life and I’m sorry that’s happening.

ping_pong 6y ago

As a side question: As a moderator, you basically create the tone and feel of a subreddit. If a subreddit is successful, it's because of the moderators. When reddit goes public, moderators get nothing. The employees of reddit will become defacto IPO millionaires, but moderators who create the success of the site, get nothing. Has anything been discussed along these lines about how unfair this is?

thejynxed 6y ago
Some mods have already openly discussed taking their subs entirely private and invite only in the event of an IPO. Reddit gets no ad revenue from private subs.

echelon 6y ago

What in the world is wrong with people? Why do people expend so much effort doing these things? It'd be awesome if we had anonymous reputation scores, like PGP or something, that other people could vouch for. Make bad actors pay to build up good reputation, then burn it down when they misbehave. I really want a system like that to help filter the deluge of comments anyway. Though there's a danger of forming a filter bubble, I want to see commentary that is vouched for by those I respect. Not just on Twitter, but everywhere. As a protocol or data exchange format.

jldugger 6y ago
> It'd be awesome if we had anonymous reputation scores, like PGP or something, that other people could vouch for. Make bad actors pay to build up good reputation, then burn it down when they misbehave. The whuffie concept relies on strong online identities. Without that, declaring bankruptcy is too easy and allows malicious actors to simultaneously harm others and boost their own scores rep with bots.

jldugger 6y ago

> performing anti-ban-evasion Honestly, this is something Metafilter did pretty well: the five dollar account fee makes a ton of abuse tactics more costly to deploy, while simultaneously funding efforts to combat it. It would go a long ways I think to at least allow mods to restrict subreddits to read-only for unpaid accounts.

koheripbal 6y ago
100% agree. Metafilter has other major flaws that prevent if from having a meaningful community size, but the barrier to entry is a crucial mechanic that keeps out bad actors and mentally juvenile people.

notatoad 6y ago

>While there are things Reddit can be doing to help one thing reddit could be doing to help is to stop relying on community moderators for so much. volunteer community moderators shouldn't be dealing with people abusing the reddit platform, that should be the job of reddit's staff. Instead of just building tools, reddit should be actively involved in the enforcement of platform rules to handle these cases, and leave the community moderators to focus on creating and maintaining their communities - ensuring content fits the theme of the subreddit, people are communicating with each other in a tone that fits the intended tone of the subreddit, etc. Reddit needs people like gallowboob who are willing to do the drudgery of sifting through all the platform abusers, but from an end-user perspective it's easy to see somebody moderating 80% of the big subreddits as a problem, because it's not clear whether a moderator is actually influencing the community or just sifting through obvious abuse.

thejynxed 6y ago
Nobody needs a karma-whoring, reposting, content thieving, paid shill like gallowboob anywhere. He's probably the worst example you could have chosen.

munificent 6y ago

I think one of the major failures of social businesses on the Internet is that their business need for massive user growth forces them to upend basics of social interaction that we have taken for granted in the real world for eons. If you create a new subreddit, anyone can show up and participate. Good actor or bad. Can you imagine if you threw a physical party and let every single stranger in the world literally walk in your front door, wander around their house, and do what they want? You'd be a honeypot for thieves and vandals. On the Internet, they don't take your physical stuff, but they harm the online equivalent: your information and attention. Every popular online forum is likewise a honeypot for scammers, shady advertisers, griefers, and other malcontents. Why wouldn't it be? The typical suggested option is massive policing, but that's really hard in a world a bad actor can don a near-perfect disguise (create a new account) in an instant. I would love to see sites like Reddit and Twitter adopt a model closer to real-world social interactions: something like a web of trust where you need to be invited to participate in a space and where there is some level of vouching for you. But those kinds of businesses don't scale well so we almost never see them. Another option would be to force something like real identities. The reason a bar can get away with just a couple of bouncers is because a bad actor can't as easily escape the consequences of their actions by shedding their identity. But, of course, requiring real identity gets in the way of good actors who use anonymity for good reasons (generally avoiding other bad actors). It's a hard problem, but it makes me sad that almost every business just ends up doing "let everyone in and accept that there's going to be shitbags all over the place fucking it up for everyone".

bondolo 6y ago

Yikes. I am the moderator of r/Metric among other medium sized reddit subs. It turns out there are people who really hate the Metric system and see it as part of a globalist conspiracy. All of the behaviour you describe is familiar, though thankfully hasn't risen to the level where police needed to be involved. Our worst offender has thankfully recently focused on Brexit and left us alone. I totally agree that lack of response to ban-evasion has been a problem. Even Wikipedia does better than Reddit at managing user bans. The amount of damage that bad actors can do on reddit is disappointing. It also doesn't seem to be getting any better. In the 9 years I have been modding the same problems are still present. The poweruser situation is also frustrating. The reddit moderation system and the ranking of moderation power by seniority really encourages cabals. It has been tough to resist on some of the subs I moderate for them being taken over by power users. You invite one mod to help with spam or problem users and all of a sudden you have 5 more mods, all of who moderate dozens of subs. Slowly the power users move towards top mod position and they never bring in fresh mods, only other power users. They will also try to remove any existing top mods to entrench their control. The system is killing the democratic nature of reddit by concentrating moderation into a narrow group. Given reddits position that moderators effectively own the community it makes it very difficult to resist this kind of takeover. My advice: never invite anybody who is already modding more than 100K users in other subs to be a mod on your sub.

FriendlyNormie 6y ago

You sound like a proud tyrant gloating about his high position in the hierarchy, whereas he sounds very upset about something very bad you and your ilk did. In a healthy world where might makes right and sheer unbridled ambition is rewarded with success, that “troll” would be able to kill all of you and usurp your role as moderator.

httpsterio 6y ago

I know what you're talking about. I was also a mod myself on /r/Suomi (Finland) and quit after a rather serious incident. Other mods and users on far-right subs started to compile a list of European subreddit moderators whom they deemed 'SJWs' and tried to gather as much personal information on everyone. Someone from that group leaked the documents to us and it was quite alarming. The scale, effort and hate that went into those documents was the most surprising thing. Anyways, when our main mod got approached on the street and asked if he was /u/nickname on reddit and he replied yes, he got stabbed. That was the day I quit.

exo-pla-net 6y ago
Horrifying. Is there a news story on the stabbing?
FilterSweep 6y ago
I’m sorry you and your friend dealt with that. It’s not just geo subs that have this problem. A friend of mine who mods a number of comedy subs (of all things) showed me his mod mail that appeared to indicate systematic brigading from far right discord servers. They post extremist content in a bid to get the sub banned, and if it fails, they escalate harassment campaigns on the moderators
CogentHedgehog 6y ago
This is the best argument I've seen for making it publicly anonymous which moderator took a specific action and maintaining a large pool of moderators. Bad actors can harass a community as a whole (and they do) but it's much harder for them to target specific moderators. The flipside is that moderators have to hold each other accountable for impartial enforcement of the rules.

meteor333 6y ago

We are solving these problems at - https://district.so https://district.so. Dealing with trolls can be draining and it's a plague for a good community. We working on solving that. @bredren Would you want to lead /Portland District?

exo-pla-net 6y ago
You don't describe your product or service on the site. As such, this is spam for a vague mailing list.

bulldoa 6y ago

Does min account history + min karma to comment enforcement helps?

ravenstine 6y ago

It's way too easy for bad actors to create throwaway accounts on Reddit. If I remember correctly, there's no captcha and no email confirmation required. I suspect a large swath of Reddit activity is bots and paid political actors.

koheripbal 6y ago
Reddit allows bots because if it weren't for the product placement, the site would fall into obscurity.

joshuamorton 6y ago

I can second this type of experience. When I (more actively) moderated the subreddit for my university, there were a few repeat offenders who took most of our time, and one who went out of his way to try and dox and threaten me specifically (which wasn't hard since I ran the account under my real name), and who I finally dealt with by involving the police. Politically motivated reddit people are, or at least can be, scary.

dgzl 6y ago

One of my posts to r/Portland was incorrectly removed with the excuse "not related to Portland." in reality it was related however the post was contentious and I was prevented from re-posting. The moderator didn't even pretend to acknowledge a genuine rule that was broken, just simply told me not to post it. After I complained I was muted from contacting the mods. Not to blame you but this is the kind of BS that makes me uninterested in the Reddit community, and uninterested in Portland in general, rife with cancel culture.

bluntfang 6y ago
>cancel culture The only people I see using this phrase in the way you're using it are people who have consistently behaved in such a way to be "canceled" from multiple social groups after being asked to modify their behavior that adheres to a low bar of social norms and etiquette. Do you fall into this category?
- dgzl 6y ago
  No.
  - bluntfang 6y ago
    Do you mind sharing the screenshots of the conversation with the /r/portland mod team as well as the article you tried to post? And if you haven't been cancelled from different social groups in portland, how do you know about how rife the cancel culture is? Can you explain a little bit about how it has affected people you know?
    - dgzl 6y ago
      I'm not sure what benefit sharing the screenshots would have, I'm not trying to out the mod or get vengeance. The video I posted was about a Lake Oswego woman going nuts and verbally abusing some local PD who were handling the situation with elegance. My title was something like "this is why I don't trust when people senselessly dog on the police." It was removed because there wasn't anything specific to Portland or surrending area (not true but ok). I told the mod I would just repost with the title "this is why I don't trust when Portlanders senselessly dog on local police" and was told not to post. No rules broken, just intimidation and censorship. I don't subscribe to the progressive/liberal/left/socialist ideology and I'm genuinely afraid to publicly share that fact in Portland. There are many people in PDX who will violently attack you if they catch wind of that fact. This isn't a secret. It's also not a secret that Oregon outside of PDX and Eugene are generally Red communities. For instance, look at the protests in Portland last year. The counter-protesters were far more disruptive and violent than the visiting protesters, but the typical Portlander wouldn't see it that way. In my own discussions with them, they see Trump supporters et. al. As being fascist and as causing violence simply by existing, thus justifying their pre-emptive violence.

DanCarvajal 6y ago

/r/portland is definitely a challenging place to moderate. Frankly I've never seen a local city sub quite like that one.

koheripbal 6y ago

> stepping into stopping out of control discussions. I mean, if your goal is to "control" conversations, yeah, that's going to be a lot of work. What's the point of that anyway?

xsmasher 6y ago
Maintaining a high signal-to-noise ratio so that the platform continues to be useful and interesting.

Anon4Now 6y ago

> freshman moderator of /r/portland You poor soul. I stopped visiting that sub a few years ago. There was a pervasive negativity about it that was just depressing. I hope it's gotten better. > [...] the Portland Police Department BTW, it's Portland Police Bureau (PPB). Calling it PPD will get you labeled a transplant. ;-)

stevewillows 6y ago

are you actually banning people or using automod to automatically remove their posts? There's no benefit to banning the bad folks, since, like your guy, they just create a new account. author: name: [baddude1, baddude2] action: remove action_reason: "Troll / Spammer" In my subs, this one condition does the most work. I also filter off low karma and new accounts to prevent spammers, trolls, etc.

CogentHedgehog 6y ago

I became a mod for one of the larger subreddit communities (10M+ subscribers) for similar reasons: I enjoyed the community and wanted to help out. Same platform, but the experience couldn't be more different: we spend almost all our time dealing with "shallow" problems at a high scale. For us that means flamewars, brigading and (usually political) astroturfing, and to a lesser extent commercial spam. We don't even remotely have time to go looking for deeper problems such as ban evasion, because the volume is so high. We know it's probably happening but it's almost impossible to police because it disappears against the everyday noise. One thing that I think helps us a lot is heavy use of automoderator rules and the spam filter to remove the most obvious problems automatically. I think smaller and more local communities breed a very different class of problems than big ones -- it's much more personal for the participants, and their retaliation is more personal as well. Also, a single abusive user can do so much more damage in a small community because they don't just blend into the background noise. One constant though is that we do see some really troubling things as well.

billme 6y ago

Experienced same problems with aggressive individuals or groups trying to engineer or buy there way into digital properties. Found the whole experience very odd, since while I had no interest in making a deal, the amount of effort they were putting forth made no sense to me. Luckily, after they realized I would not agree, get tricked, etc — they moved on.

gowld 6y ago

Vandalism is wrong. "Doxxing" public figures who try to anonymously control public discourse is not.

jimbob45 6y ago

4chan seems to have a superior system wherein there are a small number of mods who take recommendations from a large, churning group of janitors. These janitors can only suggest bans and must follow a template for each of their ban recommendations. However, the janitors can delete posts/images at will (reversible by mods). Thus, the system is both evenly-applied (most of the time) and highly scalable.

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]

sizzle 6y ago

Hello fellow Oregonian, have you tried shadowbanning this/these disruptive individuals? How do you catch repeat offenders beginning a VPN? Browser fingerprinting? (Anyone else know?)

sizzle 6y ago

Hello fellow Oregonian, have you tried shadowbanning this/these disruptive individuals? How do you catch repeat offenders beginning a VPN? Browser fingerprinting? (Anyone else know?) Thanks for keeping r/Portland such a fun place to hang around in, really enjoy the creative community/people who post there!

dntbnmpls 6y ago

> I had thought working as a moderator would be a great way to help grow the subreddit's base. You became a moderator because you have an agenda to push. Nobody wastes that much time modding a sub without an agenda. And your fellow mods allowed you to be mod because you share their ideology. This is the case for most subs and it's why subs tend towards ideological/propaganda shitholes. > In this example, the person will not stop and creates new accounts every day. You could always turn the sub private. But you won't because you want to use the sub to push an agenda. Right? > While there are things Reddit can be doing to help, (such as improving tools to counter ban-evasion,) I think this problem is bigger than Reddit Actually what reddit should be doing is declawing mods like you and going back to being a user centered platform. Like it used to be when reddit was fun and interesting. > and focuses on lack of enforcement for digital actions that would qualify as genuine crimes of harassment if translated into the physical realm. If there are genuine crimes in your sub, then call the cops. Simple. For every shitty user, there is a shitty mod. As a matter of fact, it is shitty users that tend to become mods. You have a really easy solution to all your problems - privatize the sub. Make it invite only. For every complaint you listed, there is a solution provided by reddit - private subs.

Mandatum 6y ago

Shut your subreddit down and detail your actions. Use a tool that doesn't put your moderators in danger. A subreddit isn't worth your safety. There are online places where they use a third-party to verify identity. It may not have the most adoption, but at least you're not putting yourselves at risk.

sumnobody 6y ago

I would take an aggressive stance againsnt these assholes that are vandalizing someone's property. It's petty, immature, and crosses a line. Physical mentorship is the only way to get through to pieces of shit like that.