17 ms·

Reddit mods and scaling problems in social control

75 points by dblack12705 4y ago

airstrike 4y ago
Reddit mods are arguably the worst part of reddit. It's so refreshing to come to HN and see (community- and mod-powered) moderation done right
- keneda7 4y ago
  I would totally agree. So many of them just seem to be on a power trip and moderate based on their mood. Its sad because its really killed reddit for a lot of people.
  - dageshi 4y ago
    My guess is, being a mod means you see patterns and you know when something is going to descend into a shitstorm because you've seen similar comments descent into a shitstorm before. So eventually mods kill comments not because they particularly dislike them but because they can't be bothered with dealing with the inevitable shit to come.
    - ilyt 4y ago
      Right but at that point you're not doing your job and should leave. And also some mods think it's their job to delete stuff that was self-moderated by downvotes anyway which is just silly in the first place.
      - dageshi 4y ago
        It's not a job. It's a hobby at best. The people who do it don't have to care about your free speech, nobody has to care about your free speech other than the government.
        johnnyanmac 4y ago
        They treat it like a job. Regardless, I think when you tire of something that's not critical to your livelihood you should step down. But if that happened, powermods wouldn't be a thing. >The people who do it don't have to care about your free speech No, but I don't have to care about the bog swamp of discourse you moderate just because "we have 1 million subs". Well great, everyone is angry and nuance is talked down. I don't want that to be the place. But if keeping your mod power is more important than, well, moderating your community, you reap what you sow.
- DennisP 4y ago
  It varies by sub, and by the purpose of the sub. Some are terrible, some are quite good. For example, the mods of r/askhistorians are so strict that in most threads the majority of the comments are deleted. But they apply the rules consistently, and keep the sub tightly focused on questions answered by professional historians, in detail, with sources. If you have a historical question you'd like answered, it's an amazing resource.
  - corbulo 4y ago
    AskHistorians is a great resource until you watch how topics in your area of expertise are answered and the kind of diversion from wide consensus that is tolerated with scant sourcing. It basically mirrors whats been happening to academia. As long as you can source a peer review on gay dogs in parks you'll be taken as credible. I remember seeing posts there talking about how Ancient Sparta was never exceptional and actually lost most battles. As someone who has read all the primary source material on the Spartans...thats total crap.
  - johnnyanmac 4y ago
    I'd argue lately that most are terrible and a few are good. AskHistorians does that because they employ literl hundreds of mods. It's not a scalable solution.
- commandlinefan 4y ago
  > Reddit mods are arguably the worst part of reddit No, the actual administrators (the ones that work there are). They're the ones that can actually ban entire subreddits and entire users. I had my account permanently suspended for upvoting vaccine hesitancy. That wasn't done by a reddit moderator.
  - ChickenNugger 4y ago
    The de facto policy that men and white people as a group aren't covered by their anti-harassment policy also comes directly from the employees, not the mods.
saos 4y ago
[flagged]
par 4y ago
Similar problems exist with mods on facebook pages.
- timbit42 4y ago
  ..and FB groups.
smoldesu 4y ago
FWIW, promoting a bunch of your content (even if original) is seen as anti-participatory in some communities. Even HN recommends against it in the guidelines. While we're at it, at HN's scale you see the same polarization of engagement in /new. Simply posting original quality doesn't warrant engagement. Reddit gives you a myriad of subreddit case studies to blow-up, but I think this is less of a scaling problem and more the split culture between communities.
- epolanski 4y ago
  > Simply posting original quality doesn't warrant engagement. Timing and luck is essential in any upvote/downvote community.
nickdothutton 4y ago
I had a similar experience. Posting some original personal blog, on-topic, long-form, and not commercial in any way, was classed immediately as spam. Concluded that closed user groups were the way to go.
- azmodeus 4y ago
  Most social media doesn't like links off-site. Posting the blog post as a Reddit post works better.
jedberg 4y ago
I think the author doesn't understand that reddit mods don't work for reddit. In their discussion with the mods they mention "site-wide rules" which makes me think they don't understand that the mods of each reddit make their own rules. On that sub, their rules don't allow people who mostly post links to their own site. It's up to you if agree with their rule, but those are the rules they have chosen. The common response is "if you don't like the rules make your own subreddit". Unfortunately that doesn't scale very well, especially if you're trying to replace a popular subreddit. Of course the simple workaround here is that OP shouldn't be posting their own content anyway. The should send it to a friend who can post it if they think it's interesting. Posting your own content if you aren't already an engaged member of the community is like walking into a room and shouting "hey everyone I have something you might like!". That's why there is leniency for active members of a subreddit to post their own things. For people who are saying "thankfully HN is different!", it really isn't. It's basically the same as a subreddit run by the mods here. I personally like the way the mods run things here, which is why I participate here more. But at the end of the day it's just a different set of humans with a different set of rules (and a little bit more control since they can do things on the server that reddit mods can't). And on this "subreddit" they allow people to post their own content if it's relevant, similar to a lot of other subreddits that aren't /r/moviedetails.
- operatingthetan 4y ago
  >For people who are saying "thankfully HN is different!", it really isn't. Yes it is. HN's moderation is run by HN. The rules are applied consistently because there are are no third party mods or rules. People know what to expect and that builds community better. You don't have to wonder if some edgelord mod is going to get home from school and delete your post based on their mood.
  - favaq 4y ago
    That's not correct. Users can "moderate" by flagging comments, which hides them. dang rarely undoes a flag.
    - 4y ago
operatingthetan 4y ago
The problem with reddit mods is that it's like the cops: the people least suited to the job are the ones who are most attracted to it. We end up with subs that effectively have no rules except the random whims of the mods and reddit themselves don't care at all. The comments on reddit reflect this perfectly because it's become more toxic over time, a haven for people interested in the casual abuse of others.
- drewrv 4y ago
  I'd say one difference between reddit mods and the police is that the stakes are really low on reddit. Arguing or getting upset about mod decisions gives off strong "fight with the bouncer" vibes. Even if you're right, there's no way to "win". The best course of action is to just quietly move on.
  - kneebonian 4y ago
    And as any divorce lawyer can tell you the less the stakes are the more petty, vindictive, spiteful and hateful everyone involved gets.
    - ChickenNugger 4y ago
      "Academic politics are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small." and various versions: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/08/18/acad-politics/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/08/18/acad-politics/
moritonal 4y ago
Totally agree with the math here. If you look at Discord servers you see how they have to break down into authoritarianism as mods have less and less time to deal with each issue.
- dblack12705 4y ago
  If you have any quantitative data on that, even anecdotal, I’d be very interested! I’m curious to see if my 300,000 number holds up
minimaxir 4y ago
Reddit's decade-old rule that you shouldn't submit more than 10% of your own content is one of the weirdest artifacts of that era, especially since every social media company would kill for good original content.
- kd0amg 4y ago
  What percent of own-content submissions are good original content though?
  - ilyt 4y ago
    What percent of non-own content is ? This rule basically says "just submit a bunch of vaguely related crap and shove some of your stuff in-between so nobody can complain". And for those that really want to promote, do that under some alt-account then go "Hi!, author here, ...." on your main for extra engagement
- johnnyanmac 4y ago
  despite the loud complaints, many people on reddit don't really care abut original content. They want what is funny or big news or otherwise garners an extreme reaction. And when you can't find those, reposting the surefire hits works just as well.
knolan 4y ago
Interestingly enough there’s been some mod drama over on /r/AskScienceFiction today. This is a sub where people ask questions and get in universe responses. It’s very nerdy and can be fun. It also can attract a certain type of poster who can be lacking in say, self awareness and take it too seriously. The new Harry Potter game is generating a lot of posts and a particular mod who has personal reasons to dislike JK Rowling added an auto mod post to the top of each post related to Harry Potter spoiling the game story. They’re unrepentant about it and their responses show what a lack of self awareness in moderation can do. Probably the worst case I’ve seen in a while. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskScienceFiction/comments/10wstqa/subreddit_business_the_recent_automod_spoiler/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskScienceFiction/comments/10wstqa/...
- mike_d 4y ago
  [flagged]
  - uuhdigsuendifhe 4y ago
    What duty? Could you elaborate a little? I certainly have no conviction or choose to impose it upon others to hate the same thng I hate.
  - knolan 4y ago
    Except they didn’t just stop there. They used their platform to actively hurt those capable of separating the art from the artist. I’ve no interest in the Harry Potter series. I’ve never read or watched any of it and I’ve a negative opinion of JKR’s hateful opinions. I don’t feel the need to punch down. As a moderator who has agreed to apply the rules of a community for the betterment of that community to decide that those rules don’t apply to them is simply not good enough.
  - Sunspark 4y ago
    Sorry, but no. Hogwart's Legacy the game is simply part of the franchise. It does not promote any sort of political speech. People attacking it are attacking it because they have an issue with the person, not the franchise in which JKR doesn't actually exist. My perception of JKR is that she was simply a person with a personal opinion, and then it became a holy war against her because certain individuals became enraged that they are not loved and accepted by her and the world at large. They attacked her, which made her defensive and feel more set that there is a problem here. I am sure that if she had been left alone there would have been many opportunities for dialogue, but that can't happen now. For what it's worth, I do understand her perspective. She grew up as a female, with a fully female body. It's hard for her to wrap her head around it that someone at age 30 or whatever age can just pop some hormones and request to be a woman. They've never had the fear of walking down the street alone at night, never had the fear of being raped or being the victim of violence, never experienced nonstop discrimination and objectification, never had an ever-present focus over reproductive biology, etc. All this self-defeating noise attacking JKR just makes people less understanding because they only see 1 side making all the noise.
seydor 4y ago
It's not a scaling problem , it s a "reddit likes free labor" problem. They aren't going to give up on the small group of self-important idiots who named themselves mods 15 years ago and still havent quit, because they can't find new ones. No sane person will do such work for free in 2023 Trying to reason on the behavior of the mods is like arguing with the weather
- cmh89 4y ago
  It's a little bit of A and a little bit of B. I first started using reddit slightly before the great Digg exodus. Back then all the subreddits were relatively small and a lot of them were great. It's reasonable to me that someone who was passionate about a hobby like hiking or bicycling, or even video games would want to volunteer their time to nurture a community they enjoy. Now, there are very few 'mainstream' subreddits that are a reasonable size. You have to be in to a niche of a niche to find a good community. No reasonable person would volunteer their time or get enjoyment enough to wade through anonymous accounts yelling at each other on /r/politics or /r/pics. So you end up with a bunch of people who are willing to trade their time to feel like they have control over other people, and naturally they abuse it. reddit is a shell of its former self and having professional moderators with clear and accountable rules would be a major step forward. reddit has always shirked accountability though in the pursuit of profit, so I don't really see it happening outside of a change in the law.
- BitwiseFool 4y ago
  We know some power-users are paid to promote things by advertising agencies and other special interest groups. We know some PACs are active in trying to shape public opinion on Reddit. I wouldn't be surprised at all if some of the moderators, especially the "powermods", are earning a living based on payments by some of these groups.
  - slfnflctd 4y ago
    That is a popular opinion amongst redditors, and I find it a bit conspiracy-theory-ish. Shills doing anything potentially impactful are often easy to spot and tend to be called out on it or ignored. I expect there is some quid pro quo going on, but "earning a living" seems like a stretch (with maybe some very rare temporary exceptions in burgeoning frontiers). More plausible is that there are lobbyists or employees of think tanks who use reddit as one small part of their overall efforts. There are likely a ton of failed attempts to make something go viral, with the occasional lucky success. I can't see the time investment usually being worth it for anyone actually looking at results. Of course, for those with money to burn who are too lazy for followup, someone they employ could be making money as a 'reddit influencer', but I just don't see them accomplishing much. Throughout the history of post-agricultural civilization, there have been dead weight positions eagerly filled by those more interested in easy money than taking pride in their work. It's like a lottery for the ethically challenged, and what they do is ultimately of very little importance to the rest of us.
iamdbtoo 4y ago
I think one point the author is missing (or maybe I missed it in my reading) is that large subreddits are mostly about consumption and that's what makes them less fun as a community. People post to r/pics for the chance their image, or a comment on the image, garners huge amounts of upvotes for clout on the site. In addition to volume, another reason they don't want people to submit their links is because users don't want the competition to be corrupted by corporate marketing departments.
i_like_apis 4y ago
I find Reddit mods are particularly power crazy. Most of them seem to be doing it for power rather than for love of the content of their sub. There is so much personal bias and posts removed for personal reasons, or just to flex. I’m not speculating on the reason, but it’s definitely like that.
- sebstefan 4y ago
  But if you pause for a minute, can you think of a place on the internet where there isn't a systemic problem with mods being power crazy? Genuine question!
  - seydor 4y ago
    yes, many. Subreddits are sticky and it s almost impossible for someone to start competing with the medium-to-big ones , because the 'obvious' names are taken . This is especially true for countries / cities / brand names. As long as the mods are not completely crazy, there is only one word for 'politics' or 'europe', and users will not go to a new sub just because the mods are better. If they were individual internet forums, people would just leave instead. Reddit acts as big single-sign-on that heavily biases users towards its existing subreddits. The fact that reddit admins still allow a small group of people to moderate hundreds of subreddits for decade+ is proof of that. If they cared, they would mandatorily recycle them
  - ChickenNugger 4y ago
    4chan? I'm not sure they do anything but remove child porn based on the fact that I've never seen it there, thankfully. Maybe Gab or communities.win? I don't use those two enough to know. Twitter post musk? But even there I've seen people complain. It's a shame because reddit used to literally advertise being a free speech platform.
    - sebstefan 4y ago
      Oddly enough the only one I could think of as well was 4chan.
  - 4y ago
pictur 4y ago
[flagged]
- dageshi 4y ago
  It's easy to understand, it'll take hours of your day on a big sub, many subs regularly advertise for mods, but most people aren't interested in the extra work.
  - pictur 4y ago
    I think you have problems understanding what is written. I'm not asking why they can't catch up. I don't understand why an unqualified group of people is empowered.
    - dageshi 4y ago
      Because reddit wouldn't exist without them. Likely no forum like reddit could exist without them.
eggbrain 4y ago
Would it be potentially viable to make moderators more like filterers (e.g. like filter lists in Ublock Origin)? You could "subscribe" to a moderator if you like the way they filter content, and if you "unsubscribed" from all moderators you'd get as much of an "unfiltered" view as possible. Bad moderators, over time, would get less and less subscriptions to their filtering of content, and would have to adapt, or be fine with less "power" over the content they moderate.
- sebstefan 4y ago
  I don't think it would work - Most people never touch which ublock filter they use, so moderators probably wouldn't care too much about maintaining a decent behavior - People would have no idea what mod to pick and just pick the first few top ones, resulting in even more centralization, these people would have insane monetization options - You also have the problem that if a top mod "retires", the combination of extreme centralization + a large portion of users who can't be arsed to go into the settings would mean that a fair portion of the userbase would durably get unmodded content - I believe that reddit doesn't want their users to be able to "turn off" moderation, even just for themselves, which you would be able to do by removing all filters. Think of people posting child porn, etc. I'd have just gone for an appeal system. Your ban message has an "appeal" button inviting you to make a post on /r/banned, once you've posted reddit notifies a certain number of recently active users at random, send them a DM telling them they've been selected for drama duty, and give them a special upvote/downvote for your post in /r/banned or something. The results determine if your ban gets overturned. With some thought put for edge cases (what if nobody gave a crap, do you get another chance, ...) but, hopefully, it's kept simple. You track how many overturns per ban the average mod gets, single out the outliers, and allow the community of the /r/banned sub to give these mods the boot or not
  - cmh89 4y ago
    Not allowing moderators to hide behind a share mod account would be helpful so you can actually see what mod is handing out bans.
    - 4y ago
faeriechangling 4y ago
Author has no clue what they're talking about and it shows. Moderators are under absolutely no obligation to enforce Reddits anti-spam policy and I am aware of zero instances of a moderator being removed or warned for failure to remove spam. Now moderators ARE held accountable for some things, they can't just turn a blind eye to global rules like no child pornography without being removed, and in general they're expected to keep their communities under control. If their community in particular starts harassing other communities either on or off of Reddit, or it brings Public disrepute to reddit in some way (/r/jailbait), generally the admins will get involved. However the admins don't care if you don't remove spam for your own subreddit for a very simple reason - it only affects users ON YOUR SUBREDDIT so why would they care or be involved? The commonality between all the cases I just mentioned is you're causing trouble OUTSIDE your community and causing Reddit as a whole problems, THAT'S when the admins get involved. They are like the federal government of reddit they're not supposed to care about internal affairs of states they're supposed to care about inter-state affairs and international affairs. Another important thing to realise about reddit is most of the moderation isn't done by moderators or admins, there are way too few of them to moderate effectively. The author is correct about one thing - were those Reddit's only moderation tools even with automation scaling moderation would be impossible, but they're not the only moderation tools Reddit has. Most moderation is done through the influence of users soft-censoring posts through downvoting and reporting posts to draw the attention to the mods. Something the author didn't even write about or seem to think about is the fact the mod probably only looked at his post BECAUSE a user reported it. In general though, Reddit at a global admin level has long blocked users for self-promotion and they even have a writeup about it. I have seen countless users, even ones generally well received by communities banned for self-promotion, even ones whose posts I kept promoting after the original posters account got banned because I liked their posts so much (and I know how to not get banned for spamming on Reddit), because one mans useful post is another man's spam and to be fair you have to just ban all self-promoters. Reddit has writeup about this: https://www.reddit.com/wiki/selfpromotion/ https://www.reddit.com/wiki/selfpromotion/ FTA: "But my article is not the type of spam these rules are meant to exclude" FT rules: "We're not making a judgement on your quality, just your behavior on reddit." "10% or less of your posting and conversation should link to your own content" So I would say if anything, the scalability problem Reddit has is that authors like the OP can't read the fucking rules, break rules, get banned, and cry about it while citing a misinformed view of how Reddit moderation works which isn't surprising given he didn't even bother to read the rules before publishing this crap.
college_physics 4y ago
What is the alternative? Operating a discourse forum is high maintenance and low visibility. Facebook/Linkedin? Horrible platforms in practically all possible ways. The fediverse has some ideas about a Reddit alternative (Lemmy) but much less mature than mastodon at this point and ofcourse yet to be seen how moderation will fare if user numbers start rising. Like so many aspects of the current tech landscape, its largely a case of TINA, there is no alternative, even though the deficiencies are glaring.
- johnnyanmac 4y ago
  TBH, something similar to hacker news but taken to an extreme. Give actual value to an account and make detriments revoke those priveledges. You need a minimum karma here to downvote, so take that and add more priveledges. even up to being light moderator or being able to have higher weighting in votes for comments. reward good behavior and quickly remove it if the tides turn. You need some self moderation in oder to keep a healthy community, this encourages and rewards regulars. This can also guard against "Eternal September" if a regular's vote mattered more than some newcomer.
abetusk 4y ago
People are focusing on the Reddit mod narrative but if you go down in the article further, there's some interesting ideas. The author talks about Dunbar's number [0] and does a speculative approximation, saying that good faith communities are about the maximum size of the "friends-of-friends" and some of "friends-of-friends-of-friend" graph. That is, say you trust your friends to have good faith discussion (around 150 of them) and you trust your friends of friends to have good faith discussions (150^2) and maybe some portion of your friends of friends of friends (now we're at 150^2.5), then the community size is about 300k. The data size is small and anecdotal but the idea is pretty interesting, at least to me. It at least tries to answer what the critical online community size is where good faith discussions break down, "scaling issues" start to creep in and at what point online communities change. A lot of folks here on HN talk about things like how to social media at scale (for example, Shirky's "Three Things to Accept [about online communities]" [1] has been no doubt featured on HN before). I also wonder if this ties into the "1000 true fans" idea somehow. Whatever the community size is where scaling issues crop up, this leads to practical advice on which communities to focus on if you want to engage in a meaningful way, promote your work, or find a niche community for a business idea, say. That is, look for communities whose size is large enough to be impactful but small enough so that it hasn't gone through the scaling phase transition. This number is most likely in the range of 20k to 300k, maybe with an upper bound of 3M. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20131130191257/http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html https://web.archive.org/web/20131130191257/http://www.shirky...
- dblack12705 4y ago
  Thank you! The Reddit mod thing was really just supposed to be a catalyst for some of the ideas I had about group size limits, not really the point of the article. Though I WAS a little annoyed by the mods lol. Edit: rereading your comment this is a very good summary of my article and maybe I should have put something like this up front to stave off the inevitable focus on Reddit mods…
- johnnyanmac 4y ago
  >look for communities whose size is large enough to be impactful but small enough so that it hasn't gone through the scaling phase transition. This number is most likely in the range of 20k to 300k, maybe with an upper bound of 3M. The issue is like Earth in the solar system; way too small of a "goldilocks" zone and in the days of the modern internet it seems almost impossible to hit it. Reddit is undoubtedly too big, but look for any other competitor and the discourse can barely even hit the 10k mark, where you're browsing maybe once a week hoping someone made a post or left a comment in a post. And any modern aternative that does hit that mark (discord, tiktok, Vine back in the day) will quickly balloon past that 300k range. Your only solace seems to be seeking older communities that have stood the test of time. Even 4chan these days seems to have cooled down outside of the larger, more infamous groups.
axegon_ 4y ago
Ok, hear me out: I am a mod of two very large subs. The larger one and the one were I am mostly active is HUGE. To give you an idea how large, there are anywhere between 7 and 15000 comments per day and in terms of active moderators, it's somewhere between 5 and 6(the others pop in and out for 5-6 actions a day). First things first, beyond the reddit TOS, ultimately the moderators have the final word on what stays and what goes. And as such, some subs are moderated great, while others are a complete shithole. I.e. my country's sub is moderated by 3 far-right extremists. And I do mean that: Some months ago a police officer shot at an illegal migrant and a mod commented with "The only crime here is the cop only shot once and didn't kill him". Someone was kind enough to translate the text into English and message reddit and he got suspended. Which, as reddit goes, suspension is not permanent and he will be back. And how have they been getting away with stuff like that for 12-13 years is beyond me. But more on the sub I moderate: With this much traffic and this much content, we need to have a very tight set of rules and we need to enforce them. Some of those rules include, no speculation, rumors or "I heard that", not to mention obvious propaganda and spam. All of which, believe it or not, are horrible on reddit and the platform gives mods little to no tools to fight it. Hence the reason why I've made several bots that work around the clock to ease our pain. Now I have no idea how the subs in question in the article are moderated or what are their rules. But from my experience, there are users that do exactly what the mods replied with. We have several users that use the platform and the sub to self-promote their youtube channels or websites. And we have had huge arguments with them about it. One notable example is a woman who is sort of an official, who went full Karen on us. We came to an agreement that we would let her post under the condition that her posts are strictly relevant to the sub. Next day, she posts a 30 minute video, and in our chat someone posts a message saying: "Uugh, u/<redacted for privacy> posted another video. Does someone have the patience to watch through an annoying 30+ minute video". Now picture this happening in a sub with hundreds of daily submissions: forget about the fact that we are volunteers, even if this was our full time job, it's not humanly possible to go through all that. So if indeed, the author has been posting their own content, looking from my perspective, I can sympathies with the mods. Now is it a bit extreme to ban someone for it? Yeah, totally. Of course you should first try to reason with the author and set some boundaries. The fact of the matter is, moderators play a huge role in how active and alive a sub is. And for the sub I moderate, believe me, we go to great lengths to make sure it stays active and alive. Apart from being moderators, we constantly discuss the content and contribute ourselves. And at that scale it is understandable if some content slips through the cracks. Which is fine for the most part. We try to make sure this doesn't happen, so the bots I made include an NLP model(which, despite being the product of a weekend worth of coding, has been doing an awesome job of giving us a list of users to be bonked). And looking at the subs in question, they are tiny. If you are a user, which goes regularly and sees 5 frequent contributor, 3 of which use reddit for self-promotion, it's likely that you will bounce off. And moderators are well aware of that. As I said, banning seems extreme, and what we would have done is try and reason with the user first. Of course, if that fails to yield meaningful results, then...
rootusrootus 4y ago
Subreddits seem to alternate between power-tripping moderators who ban for little to no real reason (or even because you are a subscribed member of another subreddit they don't like), and completely open season subreddits with no moderation at all. HN is so much better, because we self-police more effectively, and because dang is even tempered while still being thorough.
swayvil 4y ago
I think that the concept of the moderator is fundamentally deranged. Moderators are limited, egoistic, normal people. I don't want them telling me how to speak If the conversation needs policing, let the individual conversationalists do it for themselves. Some kind of propagating peer rating system is something I'd like to see. Ie : I manually rate peer X. And peer Y is rated by how peer X rated peer Y, weighted by how I rated peer X, and so on. Is there someplace where alternative forum-management-methods are experimented with?
baby 4y ago
I already knew where this was going. Reddit has been unusable for me as a contributor for a long time, I'd say 9/10 when I post something on an arbitrary subreddit my post tends to get deleted. It really is infuriating, either you didn't comply to one of their many rules (and every subreddit has different rules), or you used a keyword that triggered moderation, or you posted in the "wrong" subreddit (I wish they would just repost for you in that subreddit then), etc. At this point I've pretty much stopped posting, because I already know it'll be a nightmare to get a post approved (and even more so if you're on the app, which makes it really hard to retry posting if you get your post deleted due to forgetting about one of the subreddit rule). Another bad thing is that, if you find that a subreddit community is toxicaly moderated (hurr r/sanfrancisco) then you don't have much choice but to leave completely. It's often way too hard to compete with an established subreddit, or to have your voice heard if you want to complain about the moderation or promote an alternative. Subreddit takeovers are truly a thing of the past due to the dilution of them all. If I had to guess why there's such a problem, I would say: when you're moderating a subreddit you get tons of people who are here just because your subreddit was crossposted somewhere else, or suggested in their feeds. Very few people are on your subreddit because they visited the direct URL. So nobody cares about your rules, or your culture, etc. A subreddit really became like a normal category to sort posts on Reddit.
- tastysandwich 4y ago
  [dead]
- johnnyanmac 4y ago
  >when you're moderating a subreddit you get tons of people who are here just because your subreddit was crossposted somewhere else, or suggested in their feeds. that's called the front page, and you're right. when a post hits the front page (reddit.com, not your specific sub) you get flooded with low quality users who don't see a sub, but a post. it's why you may see the same trend of responses across a myriad of topics, because they are coming from the front page and carry their own axes to grind.
ilyt 4y ago
Oh, look, mods clique acting as gestapo again, how unsurprising. I got banned on one subreddit for saying "what you said is a lie, here are 2 separate sources on the truth", cited under breaking "personal attacks" rule...
_madmax_ 4y ago
For every useful post reddit allows a ton of shit posts, humblebrags and double standards are everywhere, it's a dirty echo chamber ran by former IRC ops. They also logs your chats in clear text.
motohagiography 4y ago
A waiting period before posting or commenting, and then making a few decisive and prominent examples of corrections before they get out of hand likely goes a long way to preserving the cooperation of participants at making the forum enjoyable. I was just going on in another thread about how curation and moderation are like a cooperate/defect equillibrium or game theory, where the job is to promote cooperators in the mission of creating a quality vibe and isolating or filtering defectors from it - as opposed to measuring individual posts against a set of rules. It may be a deeper idea, as it's less about about enforcing rules and more about rewarding strategies. There was an HN moderator post about how he indexed on the effect of someone's posts, which seems like an immensely efficient way to leverage forum participants' revealed behaviors. Downvotes are a coarse measure, but a flame war starting thread is visually obvious and detecting them scales really well because you can see and even measure sentiment in responses. Flame wars are also costly to the people in them, which makes them an honest and high value signal of the quality of the discussion a comment produces, because they have to spend time and effort to vent spleens, where downvotes are much lower information. I remember thinking it was a very elegant technique. This strategies-and-effect driven approach is different from those Nudge Unit types because the goal is measured by producing a quality of something shared, instead of say, misleading people in service of driving a metric. (they think automatically signing you up for things you have to cancel is wise virtuous, but using lotteries that people actually willingly play are somehow unethical. Behavioral economists are just touts with airs, imo.) We know that complex rules yield poor behaviors and reward arbitrage and defection. Simple rules reduce to being aribitrary, and really, rules generally just produce more rules. Guidelines and public examples (positive and negative) make people self moderate, which itself has shown to scale pretty well (e.g. HN). The Dunbar reference in the article made me think that the best moderation probably doesn't scale much past that. But beyond the Dunbar number, perhaps it's more accurate to say that a forum is no longer a mere thing, but becomes a culture. The thing that doesn't scale is, a forum you can moderate with rules, a community you can moderate with standards, but when a community graduates to a sub-culture, it's likely that this higher level managing its strategies is the way to maintain its equillibrium.
modshatereality 4y ago
I'll go back to reddit when the mods are banned. Free thought is a bug not a feature on new.reddit.com
yellowapple 4y ago
My perspective on moderators is identical to my perspective on cops, politicians, and anyone else in positions of power: power corrupts. The larger the community you control, the greater the power, and the greater the corruption.
danbmil99 4y ago
"It is estimated that Hacker News attracts more than 3 million views per day and greater than 300,000 daily users." There's that number again...
swayvil 4y ago
Consider the vague line between "free speech zone" and "dictated speech zone". It isn't like the dictatorships advertise the fact. And even ostensibly "free" zones tend to have that charming "voting" system, where too much deviation from the popular view means censorship. So you could be in the middle of a conversation, thinking it's a free exchange of opinions, when it's actually an insidious patchwork of censorship and manipulation.
MayoOnPoutine 4y ago
I'm a Reddit moderator of a medium-sized sub. We're talking more than 100k, but less than 300k. The amount of bullshit we need to filter out is tremendous. There's constant spam every day, and it's hard to catch all of it. We allow self promotions of original content, but only once per account and per topic, otherwise the whole sub turns into a spammy, boring mess. Automoderator helps, but Reddit does not. All of our content is in a different language and Reddit either ignores most spam or overreacts on a report and bans a user who was using local lingo to perform a joke. There is no in-between. The seniority of anyone's account doesn't mean a thing to Reddit. A simple botched GoogleTranslate-like action on a comment can get you banned fully from the platform, even as a moderator. Do we delete discussions? Yes, yes we do, when the situation calls for it. You don't get to cause a ruckus or ad-hoc insult people. You also don't get to spread rumors, obvious disinformation and pseudo-science. Save it for FB. You also don't get to threaten anyone or claim person X is of lower value due to their nationality, creed or religion. If there is too much content related to one topic, we'll delete your post and ask you to join the already submitted one. If we sense that your tone is causing a flame war, we'll nuke the whole thread. It's called moderation, not free speech. Banning is a last resort. If you feel we've wronged you, you can always send us a polite message explaining what's up. If you feel we suck, there's always the option to create a different subreddit. Why do I do this? I normally wouldn't, but this subreddit is very important to me because it's one of the last few places left to freely discuss about the politics and daily life of a certain geographical region we live in. Homegrown forums are no longer easily visible on Google, cost money to host and have a worse interface. Facebook groups can't fill the void because people's full names are visible. So, in spite of the government crackdown on dissenting opinions, we somehow thrive under anonymity. Do people curse us? Hell yes, some do. In fact, people from HN on here are somehow managing to act holier than thou and paint us as power hungry basement dwellers. Fun. I'll let you know, I would rather not deal with your shit and would rather do something else, but for now it's my moral duty to stick to what I'm doing and put in all the effort I can to ensure a safe, free zone for discussion. But at some point, most moderators will leave. We can get banned just as easily as our users, there is little to no protection awarded to us, people hate us for deleting their content and then they try and dox or attack us. And now you get what you asked for: fully automated moderation. A poorly made translation layer pushing content to an ML trained dataset indicating whether something is hate speech or a threat, overseen by underpaid 3rd world workers who will eject you from the whole platform at their leisure.

75 points by dblack12705 4y ago

Reddit mods are arguably the worst part of reddit. It's so refreshing to come to HN and see (community- and mod-powered) moderation done right

keneda7 4y ago
I would totally agree. So many of them just seem to be on a power trip and moderate based on their mood. Its sad because its really killed reddit for a lot of people.
- dageshi 4y ago
  My guess is, being a mod means you see patterns and you know when something is going to descend into a shitstorm because you've seen similar comments descent into a shitstorm before. So eventually mods kill comments not because they particularly dislike them but because they can't be bothered with dealing with the inevitable shit to come.
  - ilyt 4y ago
    Right but at that point you're not doing your job and should leave. And also some mods think it's their job to delete stuff that was self-moderated by downvotes anyway which is just silly in the first place.
    - dageshi 4y ago
      It's not a job. It's a hobby at best. The people who do it don't have to care about your free speech, nobody has to care about your free speech other than the government.
      - johnnyanmac 4y ago
        They treat it like a job. Regardless, I think when you tire of something that's not critical to your livelihood you should step down. But if that happened, powermods wouldn't be a thing. >The people who do it don't have to care about your free speech No, but I don't have to care about the bog swamp of discourse you moderate just because "we have 1 million subs". Well great, everyone is angry and nuance is talked down. I don't want that to be the place. But if keeping your mod power is more important than, well, moderating your community, you reap what you sow.
DennisP 4y ago
It varies by sub, and by the purpose of the sub. Some are terrible, some are quite good. For example, the mods of r/askhistorians are so strict that in most threads the majority of the comments are deleted. But they apply the rules consistently, and keep the sub tightly focused on questions answered by professional historians, in detail, with sources. If you have a historical question you'd like answered, it's an amazing resource.
- corbulo 4y ago
  AskHistorians is a great resource until you watch how topics in your area of expertise are answered and the kind of diversion from wide consensus that is tolerated with scant sourcing. It basically mirrors whats been happening to academia. As long as you can source a peer review on gay dogs in parks you'll be taken as credible. I remember seeing posts there talking about how Ancient Sparta was never exceptional and actually lost most battles. As someone who has read all the primary source material on the Spartans...thats total crap.
- johnnyanmac 4y ago
  I'd argue lately that most are terrible and a few are good. AskHistorians does that because they employ literl hundreds of mods. It's not a scalable solution.
commandlinefan 4y ago
> Reddit mods are arguably the worst part of reddit No, the actual administrators (the ones that work there are). They're the ones that can actually ban entire subreddits and entire users. I had my account permanently suspended for upvoting vaccine hesitancy. That wasn't done by a reddit moderator.
- ChickenNugger 4y ago
  The de facto policy that men and white people as a group aren't covered by their anti-harassment policy also comes directly from the employees, not the mods.

saos 4y ago

[flagged]

par 4y ago

Similar problems exist with mods on facebook pages.

timbit42 4y ago
..and FB groups.

smoldesu 4y ago

FWIW, promoting a bunch of your content (even if original) is seen as anti-participatory in some communities. Even HN recommends against it in the guidelines. While we're at it, at HN's scale you see the same polarization of engagement in /new. Simply posting original quality doesn't warrant engagement. Reddit gives you a myriad of subreddit case studies to blow-up, but I think this is less of a scaling problem and more the split culture between communities.

epolanski 4y ago
> Simply posting original quality doesn't warrant engagement. Timing and luck is essential in any upvote/downvote community.

nickdothutton 4y ago

I had a similar experience. Posting some original personal blog, on-topic, long-form, and not commercial in any way, was classed immediately as spam. Concluded that closed user groups were the way to go.

azmodeus 4y ago
Most social media doesn't like links off-site. Posting the blog post as a Reddit post works better.

jedberg 4y ago

I think the author doesn't understand that reddit mods don't work for reddit. In their discussion with the mods they mention "site-wide rules" which makes me think they don't understand that the mods of each reddit make their own rules. On that sub, their rules don't allow people who mostly post links to their own site. It's up to you if agree with their rule, but those are the rules they have chosen. The common response is "if you don't like the rules make your own subreddit". Unfortunately that doesn't scale very well, especially if you're trying to replace a popular subreddit. Of course the simple workaround here is that OP shouldn't be posting their own content anyway. The should send it to a friend who can post it if they think it's interesting. Posting your own content if you aren't already an engaged member of the community is like walking into a room and shouting "hey everyone I have something you might like!". That's why there is leniency for active members of a subreddit to post their own things. For people who are saying "thankfully HN is different!", it really isn't. It's basically the same as a subreddit run by the mods here. I personally like the way the mods run things here, which is why I participate here more. But at the end of the day it's just a different set of humans with a different set of rules (and a little bit more control since they can do things on the server that reddit mods can't). And on this "subreddit" they allow people to post their own content if it's relevant, similar to a lot of other subreddits that aren't /r/moviedetails.

operatingthetan 4y ago
>For people who are saying "thankfully HN is different!", it really isn't. Yes it is. HN's moderation is run by HN. The rules are applied consistently because there are are no third party mods or rules. People know what to expect and that builds community better. You don't have to wonder if some edgelord mod is going to get home from school and delete your post based on their mood.
- favaq 4y ago
  That's not correct. Users can "moderate" by flagging comments, which hides them. dang rarely undoes a flag.
  - 4y ago

operatingthetan 4y ago

The problem with reddit mods is that it's like the cops: the people least suited to the job are the ones who are most attracted to it. We end up with subs that effectively have no rules except the random whims of the mods and reddit themselves don't care at all. The comments on reddit reflect this perfectly because it's become more toxic over time, a haven for people interested in the casual abuse of others.

drewrv 4y ago
I'd say one difference between reddit mods and the police is that the stakes are really low on reddit. Arguing or getting upset about mod decisions gives off strong "fight with the bouncer" vibes. Even if you're right, there's no way to "win". The best course of action is to just quietly move on.
- kneebonian 4y ago
  And as any divorce lawyer can tell you the less the stakes are the more petty, vindictive, spiteful and hateful everyone involved gets.
  - ChickenNugger 4y ago
    "Academic politics are so vicious precisely because the stakes are so small." and various versions: https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/08/18/acad-politics/ https://quoteinvestigator.com/2013/08/18/acad-politics/

moritonal 4y ago

Totally agree with the math here. If you look at Discord servers you see how they have to break down into authoritarianism as mods have less and less time to deal with each issue.

dblack12705 4y ago
If you have any quantitative data on that, even anecdotal, I’d be very interested! I’m curious to see if my 300,000 number holds up

minimaxir 4y ago

Reddit's decade-old rule that you shouldn't submit more than 10% of your own content is one of the weirdest artifacts of that era, especially since every social media company would kill for good original content.

kd0amg 4y ago
What percent of own-content submissions are good original content though?
- ilyt 4y ago
  What percent of non-own content is ? This rule basically says "just submit a bunch of vaguely related crap and shove some of your stuff in-between so nobody can complain". And for those that really want to promote, do that under some alt-account then go "Hi!, author here, ...." on your main for extra engagement
johnnyanmac 4y ago
despite the loud complaints, many people on reddit don't really care abut original content. They want what is funny or big news or otherwise garners an extreme reaction. And when you can't find those, reposting the surefire hits works just as well.

knolan 4y ago

Interestingly enough there’s been some mod drama over on /r/AskScienceFiction today. This is a sub where people ask questions and get in universe responses. It’s very nerdy and can be fun. It also can attract a certain type of poster who can be lacking in say, self awareness and take it too seriously. The new Harry Potter game is generating a lot of posts and a particular mod who has personal reasons to dislike JK Rowling added an auto mod post to the top of each post related to Harry Potter spoiling the game story. They’re unrepentant about it and their responses show what a lack of self awareness in moderation can do. Probably the worst case I’ve seen in a while. https://www.reddit.com/r/AskScienceFiction/comments/10wstqa/subreddit_business_the_recent_automod_spoiler/ https://www.reddit.com/r/AskScienceFiction/comments/10wstqa/...

mike_d 4y ago
[flagged]
- uuhdigsuendifhe 4y ago
  What duty? Could you elaborate a little? I certainly have no conviction or choose to impose it upon others to hate the same thng I hate.
- knolan 4y ago
  Except they didn’t just stop there. They used their platform to actively hurt those capable of separating the art from the artist. I’ve no interest in the Harry Potter series. I’ve never read or watched any of it and I’ve a negative opinion of JKR’s hateful opinions. I don’t feel the need to punch down. As a moderator who has agreed to apply the rules of a community for the betterment of that community to decide that those rules don’t apply to them is simply not good enough.
- Sunspark 4y ago
  Sorry, but no. Hogwart's Legacy the game is simply part of the franchise. It does not promote any sort of political speech. People attacking it are attacking it because they have an issue with the person, not the franchise in which JKR doesn't actually exist. My perception of JKR is that she was simply a person with a personal opinion, and then it became a holy war against her because certain individuals became enraged that they are not loved and accepted by her and the world at large. They attacked her, which made her defensive and feel more set that there is a problem here. I am sure that if she had been left alone there would have been many opportunities for dialogue, but that can't happen now. For what it's worth, I do understand her perspective. She grew up as a female, with a fully female body. It's hard for her to wrap her head around it that someone at age 30 or whatever age can just pop some hormones and request to be a woman. They've never had the fear of walking down the street alone at night, never had the fear of being raped or being the victim of violence, never experienced nonstop discrimination and objectification, never had an ever-present focus over reproductive biology, etc. All this self-defeating noise attacking JKR just makes people less understanding because they only see 1 side making all the noise.

seydor 4y ago

It's not a scaling problem , it s a "reddit likes free labor" problem. They aren't going to give up on the small group of self-important idiots who named themselves mods 15 years ago and still havent quit, because they can't find new ones. No sane person will do such work for free in 2023 Trying to reason on the behavior of the mods is like arguing with the weather

cmh89 4y ago
It's a little bit of A and a little bit of B. I first started using reddit slightly before the great Digg exodus. Back then all the subreddits were relatively small and a lot of them were great. It's reasonable to me that someone who was passionate about a hobby like hiking or bicycling, or even video games would want to volunteer their time to nurture a community they enjoy. Now, there are very few 'mainstream' subreddits that are a reasonable size. You have to be in to a niche of a niche to find a good community. No reasonable person would volunteer their time or get enjoyment enough to wade through anonymous accounts yelling at each other on /r/politics or /r/pics. So you end up with a bunch of people who are willing to trade their time to feel like they have control over other people, and naturally they abuse it. reddit is a shell of its former self and having professional moderators with clear and accountable rules would be a major step forward. reddit has always shirked accountability though in the pursuit of profit, so I don't really see it happening outside of a change in the law.
BitwiseFool 4y ago
We know some power-users are paid to promote things by advertising agencies and other special interest groups. We know some PACs are active in trying to shape public opinion on Reddit. I wouldn't be surprised at all if some of the moderators, especially the "powermods", are earning a living based on payments by some of these groups.
- slfnflctd 4y ago
  That is a popular opinion amongst redditors, and I find it a bit conspiracy-theory-ish. Shills doing anything potentially impactful are often easy to spot and tend to be called out on it or ignored. I expect there is some quid pro quo going on, but "earning a living" seems like a stretch (with maybe some very rare temporary exceptions in burgeoning frontiers). More plausible is that there are lobbyists or employees of think tanks who use reddit as one small part of their overall efforts. There are likely a ton of failed attempts to make something go viral, with the occasional lucky success. I can't see the time investment usually being worth it for anyone actually looking at results. Of course, for those with money to burn who are too lazy for followup, someone they employ could be making money as a 'reddit influencer', but I just don't see them accomplishing much. Throughout the history of post-agricultural civilization, there have been dead weight positions eagerly filled by those more interested in easy money than taking pride in their work. It's like a lottery for the ethically challenged, and what they do is ultimately of very little importance to the rest of us.

iamdbtoo 4y ago

I think one point the author is missing (or maybe I missed it in my reading) is that large subreddits are mostly about consumption and that's what makes them less fun as a community. People post to r/pics for the chance their image, or a comment on the image, garners huge amounts of upvotes for clout on the site. In addition to volume, another reason they don't want people to submit their links is because users don't want the competition to be corrupted by corporate marketing departments.

i_like_apis 4y ago

I find Reddit mods are particularly power crazy. Most of them seem to be doing it for power rather than for love of the content of their sub. There is so much personal bias and posts removed for personal reasons, or just to flex. I’m not speculating on the reason, but it’s definitely like that.

sebstefan 4y ago
But if you pause for a minute, can you think of a place on the internet where there isn't a systemic problem with mods being power crazy? Genuine question!
- seydor 4y ago
  yes, many. Subreddits are sticky and it s almost impossible for someone to start competing with the medium-to-big ones , because the 'obvious' names are taken . This is especially true for countries / cities / brand names. As long as the mods are not completely crazy, there is only one word for 'politics' or 'europe', and users will not go to a new sub just because the mods are better. If they were individual internet forums, people would just leave instead. Reddit acts as big single-sign-on that heavily biases users towards its existing subreddits. The fact that reddit admins still allow a small group of people to moderate hundreds of subreddits for decade+ is proof of that. If they cared, they would mandatorily recycle them
- ChickenNugger 4y ago
  4chan? I'm not sure they do anything but remove child porn based on the fact that I've never seen it there, thankfully. Maybe Gab or communities.win? I don't use those two enough to know. Twitter post musk? But even there I've seen people complain. It's a shame because reddit used to literally advertise being a free speech platform.
  - sebstefan 4y ago
    Oddly enough the only one I could think of as well was 4chan.
- 4y ago

pictur 4y ago

[flagged]

dageshi 4y ago
It's easy to understand, it'll take hours of your day on a big sub, many subs regularly advertise for mods, but most people aren't interested in the extra work.
- pictur 4y ago
  I think you have problems understanding what is written. I'm not asking why they can't catch up. I don't understand why an unqualified group of people is empowered.
  - dageshi 4y ago
    Because reddit wouldn't exist without them. Likely no forum like reddit could exist without them.

eggbrain 4y ago

Would it be potentially viable to make moderators more like filterers (e.g. like filter lists in Ublock Origin)? You could "subscribe" to a moderator if you like the way they filter content, and if you "unsubscribed" from all moderators you'd get as much of an "unfiltered" view as possible. Bad moderators, over time, would get less and less subscriptions to their filtering of content, and would have to adapt, or be fine with less "power" over the content they moderate.

sebstefan 4y ago
I don't think it would work - Most people never touch which ublock filter they use, so moderators probably wouldn't care too much about maintaining a decent behavior - People would have no idea what mod to pick and just pick the first few top ones, resulting in even more centralization, these people would have insane monetization options - You also have the problem that if a top mod "retires", the combination of extreme centralization + a large portion of users who can't be arsed to go into the settings would mean that a fair portion of the userbase would durably get unmodded content - I believe that reddit doesn't want their users to be able to "turn off" moderation, even just for themselves, which you would be able to do by removing all filters. Think of people posting child porn, etc. I'd have just gone for an appeal system. Your ban message has an "appeal" button inviting you to make a post on /r/banned, once you've posted reddit notifies a certain number of recently active users at random, send them a DM telling them they've been selected for drama duty, and give them a special upvote/downvote for your post in /r/banned or something. The results determine if your ban gets overturned. With some thought put for edge cases (what if nobody gave a crap, do you get another chance, ...) but, hopefully, it's kept simple. You track how many overturns per ban the average mod gets, single out the outliers, and allow the community of the /r/banned sub to give these mods the boot or not
- cmh89 4y ago
  Not allowing moderators to hide behind a share mod account would be helpful so you can actually see what mod is handing out bans.
  - 4y ago

faeriechangling 4y ago

Author has no clue what they're talking about and it shows. Moderators are under absolutely no obligation to enforce Reddits anti-spam policy and I am aware of zero instances of a moderator being removed or warned for failure to remove spam. Now moderators ARE held accountable for some things, they can't just turn a blind eye to global rules like no child pornography without being removed, and in general they're expected to keep their communities under control. If their community in particular starts harassing other communities either on or off of Reddit, or it brings Public disrepute to reddit in some way (/r/jailbait), generally the admins will get involved. However the admins don't care if you don't remove spam for your own subreddit for a very simple reason - it only affects users ON YOUR SUBREDDIT so why would they care or be involved? The commonality between all the cases I just mentioned is you're causing trouble OUTSIDE your community and causing Reddit as a whole problems, THAT'S when the admins get involved. They are like the federal government of reddit they're not supposed to care about internal affairs of states they're supposed to care about inter-state affairs and international affairs. Another important thing to realise about reddit is most of the moderation isn't done by moderators or admins, there are way too few of them to moderate effectively. The author is correct about one thing - were those Reddit's only moderation tools even with automation scaling moderation would be impossible, but they're not the only moderation tools Reddit has. Most moderation is done through the influence of users soft-censoring posts through downvoting and reporting posts to draw the attention to the mods. Something the author didn't even write about or seem to think about is the fact the mod probably only looked at his post BECAUSE a user reported it. In general though, Reddit at a global admin level has long blocked users for self-promotion and they even have a writeup about it. I have seen countless users, even ones generally well received by communities banned for self-promotion, even ones whose posts I kept promoting after the original posters account got banned because I liked their posts so much (and I know how to not get banned for spamming on Reddit), because one mans useful post is another man's spam and to be fair you have to just ban all self-promoters. Reddit has writeup about this: https://www.reddit.com/wiki/selfpromotion/ https://www.reddit.com/wiki/selfpromotion/ FTA: "But my article is not the type of spam these rules are meant to exclude" FT rules: "We're not making a judgement on your quality, just your behavior on reddit." "10% or less of your posting and conversation should link to your own content" So I would say if anything, the scalability problem Reddit has is that authors like the OP can't read the fucking rules, break rules, get banned, and cry about it while citing a misinformed view of how Reddit moderation works which isn't surprising given he didn't even bother to read the rules before publishing this crap.

college_physics 4y ago

What is the alternative? Operating a discourse forum is high maintenance and low visibility. Facebook/Linkedin? Horrible platforms in practically all possible ways. The fediverse has some ideas about a Reddit alternative (Lemmy) but much less mature than mastodon at this point and ofcourse yet to be seen how moderation will fare if user numbers start rising. Like so many aspects of the current tech landscape, its largely a case of TINA, there is no alternative, even though the deficiencies are glaring.

johnnyanmac 4y ago
TBH, something similar to hacker news but taken to an extreme. Give actual value to an account and make detriments revoke those priveledges. You need a minimum karma here to downvote, so take that and add more priveledges. even up to being light moderator or being able to have higher weighting in votes for comments. reward good behavior and quickly remove it if the tides turn. You need some self moderation in oder to keep a healthy community, this encourages and rewards regulars. This can also guard against "Eternal September" if a regular's vote mattered more than some newcomer.

abetusk 4y ago

People are focusing on the Reddit mod narrative but if you go down in the article further, there's some interesting ideas. The author talks about Dunbar's number [0] and does a speculative approximation, saying that good faith communities are about the maximum size of the "friends-of-friends" and some of "friends-of-friends-of-friend" graph. That is, say you trust your friends to have good faith discussion (around 150 of them) and you trust your friends of friends to have good faith discussions (150^2) and maybe some portion of your friends of friends of friends (now we're at 150^2.5), then the community size is about 300k. The data size is small and anecdotal but the idea is pretty interesting, at least to me. It at least tries to answer what the critical online community size is where good faith discussions break down, "scaling issues" start to creep in and at what point online communities change. A lot of folks here on HN talk about things like how to social media at scale (for example, Shirky's "Three Things to Accept [about online communities]" [1] has been no doubt featured on HN before). I also wonder if this ties into the "1000 true fans" idea somehow. Whatever the community size is where scaling issues crop up, this leads to practical advice on which communities to focus on if you want to engage in a meaningful way, promote your work, or find a niche community for a business idea, say. That is, look for communities whose size is large enough to be impactful but small enough so that it hasn't gone through the scaling phase transition. This number is most likely in the range of 20k to 300k, maybe with an upper bound of 3M. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number [1] https://web.archive.org/web/20131130191257/http://www.shirky.com/writings/group_enemy.html https://web.archive.org/web/20131130191257/http://www.shirky...

dblack12705 4y ago
Thank you! The Reddit mod thing was really just supposed to be a catalyst for some of the ideas I had about group size limits, not really the point of the article. Though I WAS a little annoyed by the mods lol. Edit: rereading your comment this is a very good summary of my article and maybe I should have put something like this up front to stave off the inevitable focus on Reddit mods…
johnnyanmac 4y ago
>look for communities whose size is large enough to be impactful but small enough so that it hasn't gone through the scaling phase transition. This number is most likely in the range of 20k to 300k, maybe with an upper bound of 3M. The issue is like Earth in the solar system; way too small of a "goldilocks" zone and in the days of the modern internet it seems almost impossible to hit it. Reddit is undoubtedly too big, but look for any other competitor and the discourse can barely even hit the 10k mark, where you're browsing maybe once a week hoping someone made a post or left a comment in a post. And any modern aternative that does hit that mark (discord, tiktok, Vine back in the day) will quickly balloon past that 300k range. Your only solace seems to be seeking older communities that have stood the test of time. Even 4chan these days seems to have cooled down outside of the larger, more infamous groups.

axegon_ 4y ago

Ok, hear me out: I am a mod of two very large subs. The larger one and the one were I am mostly active is HUGE. To give you an idea how large, there are anywhere between 7 and 15000 comments per day and in terms of active moderators, it's somewhere between 5 and 6(the others pop in and out for 5-6 actions a day). First things first, beyond the reddit TOS, ultimately the moderators have the final word on what stays and what goes. And as such, some subs are moderated great, while others are a complete shithole. I.e. my country's sub is moderated by 3 far-right extremists. And I do mean that: Some months ago a police officer shot at an illegal migrant and a mod commented with "The only crime here is the cop only shot once and didn't kill him". Someone was kind enough to translate the text into English and message reddit and he got suspended. Which, as reddit goes, suspension is not permanent and he will be back. And how have they been getting away with stuff like that for 12-13 years is beyond me. But more on the sub I moderate: With this much traffic and this much content, we need to have a very tight set of rules and we need to enforce them. Some of those rules include, no speculation, rumors or "I heard that", not to mention obvious propaganda and spam. All of which, believe it or not, are horrible on reddit and the platform gives mods little to no tools to fight it. Hence the reason why I've made several bots that work around the clock to ease our pain. Now I have no idea how the subs in question in the article are moderated or what are their rules. But from my experience, there are users that do exactly what the mods replied with. We have several users that use the platform and the sub to self-promote their youtube channels or websites. And we have had huge arguments with them about it. One notable example is a woman who is sort of an official, who went full Karen on us. We came to an agreement that we would let her post under the condition that her posts are strictly relevant to the sub. Next day, she posts a 30 minute video, and in our chat someone posts a message saying: "Uugh, u/<redacted for privacy> posted another video. Does someone have the patience to watch through an annoying 30+ minute video". Now picture this happening in a sub with hundreds of daily submissions: forget about the fact that we are volunteers, even if this was our full time job, it's not humanly possible to go through all that. So if indeed, the author has been posting their own content, looking from my perspective, I can sympathies with the mods. Now is it a bit extreme to ban someone for it? Yeah, totally. Of course you should first try to reason with the author and set some boundaries. The fact of the matter is, moderators play a huge role in how active and alive a sub is. And for the sub I moderate, believe me, we go to great lengths to make sure it stays active and alive. Apart from being moderators, we constantly discuss the content and contribute ourselves. And at that scale it is understandable if some content slips through the cracks. Which is fine for the most part. We try to make sure this doesn't happen, so the bots I made include an NLP model(which, despite being the product of a weekend worth of coding, has been doing an awesome job of giving us a list of users to be bonked). And looking at the subs in question, they are tiny. If you are a user, which goes regularly and sees 5 frequent contributor, 3 of which use reddit for self-promotion, it's likely that you will bounce off. And moderators are well aware of that. As I said, banning seems extreme, and what we would have done is try and reason with the user first. Of course, if that fails to yield meaningful results, then...

rootusrootus 4y ago

Subreddits seem to alternate between power-tripping moderators who ban for little to no real reason (or even because you are a subscribed member of another subreddit they don't like), and completely open season subreddits with no moderation at all. HN is so much better, because we self-police more effectively, and because dang is even tempered while still being thorough.

swayvil 4y ago

I think that the concept of the moderator is fundamentally deranged. Moderators are limited, egoistic, normal people. I don't want them telling me how to speak If the conversation needs policing, let the individual conversationalists do it for themselves. Some kind of propagating peer rating system is something I'd like to see. Ie : I manually rate peer X. And peer Y is rated by how peer X rated peer Y, weighted by how I rated peer X, and so on. Is there someplace where alternative forum-management-methods are experimented with?

baby 4y ago

I already knew where this was going. Reddit has been unusable for me as a contributor for a long time, I'd say 9/10 when I post something on an arbitrary subreddit my post tends to get deleted. It really is infuriating, either you didn't comply to one of their many rules (and every subreddit has different rules), or you used a keyword that triggered moderation, or you posted in the "wrong" subreddit (I wish they would just repost for you in that subreddit then), etc. At this point I've pretty much stopped posting, because I already know it'll be a nightmare to get a post approved (and even more so if you're on the app, which makes it really hard to retry posting if you get your post deleted due to forgetting about one of the subreddit rule). Another bad thing is that, if you find that a subreddit community is toxicaly moderated (hurr r/sanfrancisco) then you don't have much choice but to leave completely. It's often way too hard to compete with an established subreddit, or to have your voice heard if you want to complain about the moderation or promote an alternative. Subreddit takeovers are truly a thing of the past due to the dilution of them all. If I had to guess why there's such a problem, I would say: when you're moderating a subreddit you get tons of people who are here just because your subreddit was crossposted somewhere else, or suggested in their feeds. Very few people are on your subreddit because they visited the direct URL. So nobody cares about your rules, or your culture, etc. A subreddit really became like a normal category to sort posts on Reddit.

tastysandwich 4y ago
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johnnyanmac 4y ago
>when you're moderating a subreddit you get tons of people who are here just because your subreddit was crossposted somewhere else, or suggested in their feeds. that's called the front page, and you're right. when a post hits the front page (reddit.com, not your specific sub) you get flooded with low quality users who don't see a sub, but a post. it's why you may see the same trend of responses across a myriad of topics, because they are coming from the front page and carry their own axes to grind.

ilyt 4y ago

Oh, look, mods clique acting as gestapo again, how unsurprising. I got banned on one subreddit for saying "what you said is a lie, here are 2 separate sources on the truth", cited under breaking "personal attacks" rule...

_madmax_ 4y ago

For every useful post reddit allows a ton of shit posts, humblebrags and double standards are everywhere, it's a dirty echo chamber ran by former IRC ops. They also logs your chats in clear text.

motohagiography 4y ago

A waiting period before posting or commenting, and then making a few decisive and prominent examples of corrections before they get out of hand likely goes a long way to preserving the cooperation of participants at making the forum enjoyable. I was just going on in another thread about how curation and moderation are like a cooperate/defect equillibrium or game theory, where the job is to promote cooperators in the mission of creating a quality vibe and isolating or filtering defectors from it - as opposed to measuring individual posts against a set of rules. It may be a deeper idea, as it's less about about enforcing rules and more about rewarding strategies. There was an HN moderator post about how he indexed on the effect of someone's posts, which seems like an immensely efficient way to leverage forum participants' revealed behaviors. Downvotes are a coarse measure, but a flame war starting thread is visually obvious and detecting them scales really well because you can see and even measure sentiment in responses. Flame wars are also costly to the people in them, which makes them an honest and high value signal of the quality of the discussion a comment produces, because they have to spend time and effort to vent spleens, where downvotes are much lower information. I remember thinking it was a very elegant technique. This strategies-and-effect driven approach is different from those Nudge Unit types because the goal is measured by producing a quality of something shared, instead of say, misleading people in service of driving a metric. (they think automatically signing you up for things you have to cancel is wise virtuous, but using lotteries that people actually willingly play are somehow unethical. Behavioral economists are just touts with airs, imo.) We know that complex rules yield poor behaviors and reward arbitrage and defection. Simple rules reduce to being aribitrary, and really, rules generally just produce more rules. Guidelines and public examples (positive and negative) make people self moderate, which itself has shown to scale pretty well (e.g. HN). The Dunbar reference in the article made me think that the best moderation probably doesn't scale much past that. But beyond the Dunbar number, perhaps it's more accurate to say that a forum is no longer a mere thing, but becomes a culture. The thing that doesn't scale is, a forum you can moderate with rules, a community you can moderate with standards, but when a community graduates to a sub-culture, it's likely that this higher level managing its strategies is the way to maintain its equillibrium.

modshatereality 4y ago

I'll go back to reddit when the mods are banned. Free thought is a bug not a feature on new.reddit.com

yellowapple 4y ago

My perspective on moderators is identical to my perspective on cops, politicians, and anyone else in positions of power: power corrupts. The larger the community you control, the greater the power, and the greater the corruption.

danbmil99 4y ago

"It is estimated that Hacker News attracts more than 3 million views per day and greater than 300,000 daily users." There's that number again...

swayvil 4y ago

Consider the vague line between "free speech zone" and "dictated speech zone". It isn't like the dictatorships advertise the fact. And even ostensibly "free" zones tend to have that charming "voting" system, where too much deviation from the popular view means censorship. So you could be in the middle of a conversation, thinking it's a free exchange of opinions, when it's actually an insidious patchwork of censorship and manipulation.

MayoOnPoutine 4y ago

I'm a Reddit moderator of a medium-sized sub. We're talking more than 100k, but less than 300k. The amount of bullshit we need to filter out is tremendous. There's constant spam every day, and it's hard to catch all of it. We allow self promotions of original content, but only once per account and per topic, otherwise the whole sub turns into a spammy, boring mess. Automoderator helps, but Reddit does not. All of our content is in a different language and Reddit either ignores most spam or overreacts on a report and bans a user who was using local lingo to perform a joke. There is no in-between. The seniority of anyone's account doesn't mean a thing to Reddit. A simple botched GoogleTranslate-like action on a comment can get you banned fully from the platform, even as a moderator. Do we delete discussions? Yes, yes we do, when the situation calls for it. You don't get to cause a ruckus or ad-hoc insult people. You also don't get to spread rumors, obvious disinformation and pseudo-science. Save it for FB. You also don't get to threaten anyone or claim person X is of lower value due to their nationality, creed or religion. If there is too much content related to one topic, we'll delete your post and ask you to join the already submitted one. If we sense that your tone is causing a flame war, we'll nuke the whole thread. It's called moderation, not free speech. Banning is a last resort. If you feel we've wronged you, you can always send us a polite message explaining what's up. If you feel we suck, there's always the option to create a different subreddit. Why do I do this? I normally wouldn't, but this subreddit is very important to me because it's one of the last few places left to freely discuss about the politics and daily life of a certain geographical region we live in. Homegrown forums are no longer easily visible on Google, cost money to host and have a worse interface. Facebook groups can't fill the void because people's full names are visible. So, in spite of the government crackdown on dissenting opinions, we somehow thrive under anonymity. Do people curse us? Hell yes, some do. In fact, people from HN on here are somehow managing to act holier than thou and paint us as power hungry basement dwellers. Fun. I'll let you know, I would rather not deal with your shit and would rather do something else, but for now it's my moral duty to stick to what I'm doing and put in all the effort I can to ensure a safe, free zone for discussion. But at some point, most moderators will leave. We can get banned just as easily as our users, there is little to no protection awarded to us, people hate us for deleting their content and then they try and dox or attack us. And now you get what you asked for: fully automated moderation. A poorly made translation layer pushing content to an ML trained dataset indicating whether something is hate speech or a threat, overseen by underpaid 3rd world workers who will eject you from the whole platform at their leisure.