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It seems to me like the main purpose of moderation is to make sure posts conform to the theme of the subreddit... to keep things on topic. Almost everything els

by md224 6y ago

It seems to me like the main purpose of moderation is to make sure posts conform to the theme of the subreddit... to keep things on topic. Almost everything else can be taken care of by the downvotes of the community members. A subreddit is like a community where every citizen has a gun. They can police themselves by downvoting each other... the only thing mods need to do is make sure the theme of the community stays on track. I'm the sole mod of a subreddit with over 600k subscribers and I basically do nothing. My case is admittedly special because the subreddit is a weird kind of "game" with very specific, well-defined rules about how to reply to posts (and a bot that deletes replies that violate this rule), but in general I feel like people don't have enough faith in the ability of a community to handle itself. Occasionally I've had to ban people who are spamming /new with disturbing content, and I did end up setting some useful automoderator rules, but otherwise I find that the community runs itself. I've gotten a few messages from people over the years saying they're unsubscribing because they wanted me to take a more involved role in moderating the content posted to the subreddit, removing posts they thought were "low quality". That's fair, but I don't think it should be up to me what counts as "low quality"... I'm just one person. The beauty of a community is watching it develop organically from the actions of thousands of people, not molding it into some shape you happen to prefer. It's like an organism, and it has a mechanism to achieve homeostasis: upvotes and downvotes.

xigency 6y ago
AskOuija? I appreciate your take on moderation. I think what happened on WorldPolitics with IAmanAnonymousCoward shows that at least a small bit of work is needed to keep things on topic, but overall I think free speech and self-moderation is better. What seems unacceptable for moderators to do, which seems to happen a lot, is banning users from multiple subreddits due to comments or behavior in a different subreddit. That's really a power trip and it sounds like something that a lot of moderators on 'the list' have done.
SL61 6y ago
This was my experience on a couple of subreddits which were a bit smaller than yours. One of the subreddits even covered a topic that often gets a lot of drama and high-strung people. But outside of the occasional obvious troll, the communities managed themselves. “Low-quality” posts like memes were effectively disallowed by the community itself, i.e. they would always be downvoted - but if they became popular, so be it. We never got abusive modmail, no one was ever mad at us. If two users started arguing, we’d stay out unless there were actual threats or slurs, which only happened a few times. I do think the situation is different for subreddits that aren’t really “communities” such as /r/pics or a meme subreddit, where most traffic comes from the front page. But the same general philosophy probably still applies to some extent.

by md224 6y ago

xigency 6y ago

AskOuija? I appreciate your take on moderation. I think what happened on WorldPolitics with IAmanAnonymousCoward shows that at least a small bit of work is needed to keep things on topic, but overall I think free speech and self-moderation is better. What seems unacceptable for moderators to do, which seems to happen a lot, is banning users from multiple subreddits due to comments or behavior in a different subreddit. That's really a power trip and it sounds like something that a lot of moderators on 'the list' have done.

SL61 6y ago

This was my experience on a couple of subreddits which were a bit smaller than yours. One of the subreddits even covered a topic that often gets a lot of drama and high-strung people. But outside of the occasional obvious troll, the communities managed themselves. “Low-quality” posts like memes were effectively disallowed by the community itself, i.e. they would always be downvoted - but if they became popular, so be it. We never got abusive modmail, no one was ever mad at us. If two users started arguing, we’d stay out unless there were actual threats or slurs, which only happened a few times. I do think the situation is different for subreddits that aren’t really “communities” such as /r/pics or a meme subreddit, where most traffic comes from the front page. But the same general philosophy probably still applies to some extent.