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I think you underestimate the value of that free labor. Reddit isn't even profitable. Hiring mods for thousands of subreddits would cost them a ton of money, n

I think you underestimate the value of that free labor. Reddit isn't even profitable. Hiring mods for thousands of subreddits would cost them a ton of money, not only in wages but in the cost of finding and training those workers. Beyond that, the minute the mods are official employees of Reddit, Reddit is fully responsible for all the content on all those subs. Social media companies are already under a lot of scrutiny for the kinds of content they allow on their platform. I doubt they'd want to go there.

blibble 3y ago
if they takeover a few of the higher value subs the majority of moderators will likely fall into line
- jeltz 3y ago
  Why would they? I would expect them to rebel harder.
linuxftw 3y ago
I think you underestimate the ability of AI to literally solve this problem for almost nothing. The large subs can absolutely be automated moderation, if they're not already. Enough flags on a post? Just take it down, there will be 15 million new posts in an hour.
- 1270018080 3y ago
  We're in the "this is how blockchain can solve this" era of the AI bubble.
  - linuxftw 3y ago
    It seems to me a very trivial problem to classify a post as on topic or not with today's AI capabilities.
- jfghi 3y ago
  Even if this was feasible, how much would it cost and how long would it take to successfully roll out?
- skilled 3y ago
  Too easily gamed and not reliable. And if people find out you are using AI for modding, they will find a way to mess with it. A human has discernment. An AI is looking at cute colors at a wall but doesn’t actually know which one is red or blue.
  - tester457 3y ago
    If only there was a way to prevent prompt injection.
- whatyesaid 3y ago
  Well that means bots can take anything down unless you become really good at detecting bots. Not like it's hard for bots to get points you can do so with reposting and GPT for comments.
  - linuxftw 3y ago
    I'm sure they have metrics at this point on how often real humans take a particular action. If an account is reporting posts higher than some amount X, then shadow ban that account.
    - actionablefiber 3y ago
      Do you think users will continue to report posts if they see that reporting too often will cause them to be shadowbanned? Conversely if you are in the business of publishing spam to Reddit, wouldn’t it be useful if you could overwhelm the site with spam such that the people who care enough report all of the spam they see will get banned?
      - linuxftw 3y ago
        I think the vast majority of Reddit's userbase, normies, won't know the difference and won't care. It will literally be an invisible change.
        actionablefiber 3y ago
        Will it, though? For how much I see people here saying AI moderation can solve this, I frankly think AI tools are likely to be an order of magnitude better at playing offense than defense - producing huge volumes of AI-generated spam/marketing/offensive content that could fool an AI content moderation algorithm on the other side.
        linuxftw 3y ago
        The quality on the popular subs is the equivalent of spam to me, so I don't think most of their users would be able to tell the difference.
- gunchie 3y ago
  Reddit are already using AI for first-line moderation on their site-wide reports. It only reaches a human if there's an appeal.
- throw16180339 3y ago
  > Just take it down, there will be 15 million new posts in an hour. I'm a mod at a 150k+ user subreddit. AI can probably handle removing objectionable content, but I spend most of my time on other areas that are much less susceptible to automation. • Removing requests when there are recent similar posts. We've found that users disengage when the same requests are posted every week. • Hosting AMAs. An AI isn't going to know who we should invite or whether they'll be a good fit for our subreddit. • Detecting and banning people deceptively promoting their own products. This is incredibly common and often quite difficult.
  - linuxftw 3y ago
    I'm confident an AI can be utilized for 'remove duplicate content' type of operation. AMAs don't require a mod to participate, just the community. All mods really do is sticky a thread. People deceptively promoting their own products, others are free to down vote them and report the post.
    - throw16180339 3y ago
      Exact duplicates are already automatically removed by bots. We remove request posts that lack detail or when there have been several similar active posts within the year. This strikes a balance between allowing every post only once and swamping the subreddit with nearly identical requests. We removed about 75% of the posts reported for this category last month, the remaining 25% either didn't have previous similar requests or had enough to detail to stay up. Many cases are ambiguous and resolved by majority vote. AMAs don't happen spontaneously in major subs. As with everything else, there's a lot of admin work that goes on behind the scenes. We mostly invite people for AMAs; under 10% of this year's 10+ AMAs were requested by the participant. Someone has to email them, answer their questions, schedule a time, explain how to post, join them in a chat channel, etc. Deceptive promotion is rarely flagged on our sub. We got ~450 reports last month and none of them were for promotion. Promotion posts are quite rare; they're against our rules and most people don't even try. What we regularly see are comments from users recommending their own products. Some cases are obvious, e.g. new accounts frequently recommending a book without ratings that was released yesterday. Many are much harder to identify; we regularly search user profiles and the Internet to confirm an identity. One person we banned last year had been covertly recommending their book for months. It took numerous searches and several weeks to remove all their promotion comments.
thewataccount 3y ago
I support the blackouts but > Reddit isn't even profitable. Hiring mods for thousands of subreddits would cost them a ton of money, not only in wages but in the cost of finding and training those workers. They don't need to. Aww (36m), music(32m), videos(26m), futurology(18m), me_irl, and abrupt chaos are some of the biggest ones, if they seize just those 6 then they've reclaimed most of the r/popular anyway.
- wvenable 3y ago
  The assumption is that those communities would just go back to normal if they were seized by Reddit. I'm not sure that's a good assumption.
  - thewataccount 3y ago
    r/aww is literally just cute animals. Most of the others are just memes/reposts of their respective topic. There's plenty of mods from subreddits that didn't go dark and have 20m+, reddit can just put them in charge. I highly doubt the specific mods matter that much on these "fluff" subreddits. Subreddits like r/apple I could see it mattering a lot more, but most of the top ones aren't exactly complex topics.
    - wvenable 3y ago
      > r/aww is literally just cute animals. There is a social contract and moderator effort to make that happen. When that contract is broken and moderators are stretched thin, how long is that subreddit still going to be just cute animals?
      - thewataccount 3y ago
        I appreciate the current mod's efforts. And I completely agree with you on 95%+ of subs. But I think there's enough active, and willing mods who already manage several large subreddits (10m+) capable of managing the half a dozen or so subs that I mentioned. And I'm only talking about 6 subs, not even 10's of subs. I just don't think theres enough ambiguity/complexity with moderating those in regards to choosing what content is or isn't appropriate for that sub. But either way I truly hope we can get old reddit back, api, third party clients, and all :(
mike-cardwell 3y ago
Just use Chat-GPT. The future of moderation. What could go wrong?
- frankreyes 3y ago
  Skynet.gif
frankreyes 3y ago
Section 230. Reddit is in the fence
muttantt 3y ago
AI will replace the mods.
- rurp 3y ago
  Ah yes, because LLMs are so reliable at understanding nuance and social context.
  - Quikinterp 3y ago
    Human reddit moderators already can't do that from my experience
- speedgoose 3y ago
  I don’t know why you are downvoted. Reddit did annonce to some moderators that AI moderation was coming this year and I heard that some already have access for testing. I also heard that it works pretty well to automate many actions, though it still requires some humans.
- moskie 3y ago
  AI will replace the users, too.
jd24 3y ago
there was a stat "92 of the most 500 popular subreddits are moderated by the same 5 people"; unpaid people at that i think they can afford to replace the mods. it'll likely be their last resort though
- simlevesque 3y ago
  Let me know if my math is wrong: it means that 5 people are on the moderation team of 18.4 subs. The 500 top subs often have mod teams from 20 to 50 people. Bringing up that stat doesn't seem really relevant.
  - jd24 3y ago
    I'm saying it probably doesn't take much man power to moderate these subreddits as you might think. Bring in a team of 5-10 full time workers would probably be enough, tbh.
    - jeltz 3y ago
      And then what about all of the rest of Reddit? Let it become unmoderated hell?
johannes1234321 3y ago
Paying .kids for the large subreddits won't cost that much. However doing that makes the company directly liable for all things. Right now they can at least try the legal argument "we just provide infrastructure and oh we didn't know what was uploaded there" as soon as they moderate themselves that blind eye strategy can't work at all. (Right now they can at least try it)
- paulmd 3y ago
  No it doesn’t. Do you think Facebook mods are unpaid? User content is the safety line, not whether the platform pays moderators.
donmcronald 3y ago
> Beyond that, the minute the mods are official employees of Reddit, Reddit is fully responsible for all the content on all those subs. Social media companies are already under a lot of scrutiny for the kinds of content they allow on their platform. I doubt they'd want to go there. Oh. Wow. I never thought about that. Does anyone know if section 230 of the DMCA shields Reddit from liability as-is? >Reddit isn't even profitable. Hiring mods for thousands of subreddits would cost them a ton of money, not only in wages but in the cost of finding and training those workers. And it would be a policy nightmare. Right now, most sub-reddits are flexible in terms of what they'll tolerate. At best I think they could have a single moderation policy applied across all sub-reddits they pay to moderate. Would that work?
- CryptoBanker 3y ago
  That would work for implementation. No chance a single policy would work for users
- timdev2 3y ago
  > Does anyone know if section 230 of the DMCA shields Reddit from liability as-is? It does. (And 230 isn't part of the DMCA, it's the only surviving bit of the CDA).
majormajor 3y ago
> Beyond that, the minute the mods are official employees of Reddit, Reddit is fully responsible for all the content on all those subs. Social media companies are already under a lot of scrutiny for the kinds of content they allow on their platform. I doubt they'd want to go there. I don't think this is true at all. Twitter employs (employed? https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/outsourced-content-moderators-lose-twitter-jobs-in-musks-latest-round-of-cuts https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/outsourced-content-mode... ) paid moderators. Facebook does ( https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebook-content-moderator-interviews-trauma-working-conditions-arizona https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebo... ). Plenty of other forum sites have owner-operator mods. "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider." (47 U.S.C. § 230(c)(1)). That explicitly applies to providers and doesn't say they aren't allowed to moderate at all.
- titusjohnson 3y ago
  > "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider." (47 U.S.C. § 230(c)(1)) While Reddit started as a link aggregator, the vast majority of useful content on the site is not external links. It is content generated for reddit, on reddit.
  - majormajor 3y ago
    It's content generated by users, and it's the source of the content that matters, not the source of the moderation. There's no generally accepted interpretation of 230 that restricts site owners from moderating user comments. https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230 https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230 "Section 230 allows for web operators, large and small, to moderate user speech and content as they see fit." See again the FB/Twitter examples I linked - those sites are also full of content generated for them, on them. Here's a couple cases drawing the difference: https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230/cases/anthony-v-yahoo-inc https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230/cases/anthony-v-yahoo-inc - Yahoo isn't protected against fraud claims by 230 for creating fake dating profiles, because they did it themselves BUT https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230/cases/universal-communications-systems-inc-v-lycos-inc https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230/cases/universal-communicat... - Lycos is protected against defamation claims on their own message boards
bdw5204 3y ago
I don't see how they'd have difficulties replacing the mods. Even if it's hard to find replacements within the Reddit community there are lots of blue checks on Twitter who'd probably be thrilled to take over Reddit moderation and might even pay Reddit for the privilege.
- TigeriusKirk 3y ago
  Users could very easily make any sub effectively unmoddable if replacements are brought in. It wouldn't even take very many people.
ht85 3y ago
Looking forward to watch reddit corporate approved mods trying to deal with the platform. Lmao
asah 3y ago
+1 - I've been a mod on a large sub, and it's serious business.
majani 3y ago
Surely they can outsource mods from poor countries to do a half decent job for just a few hundred dollars a month
jordiburgos 3y ago
Isn't Reddit already responsible of all the content they have in the platform?

blibble 3y ago

if they takeover a few of the higher value subs the majority of moderators will likely fall into line

jeltz 3y ago
Why would they? I would expect them to rebel harder.

linuxftw 3y ago

I think you underestimate the ability of AI to literally solve this problem for almost nothing. The large subs can absolutely be automated moderation, if they're not already. Enough flags on a post? Just take it down, there will be 15 million new posts in an hour.

1270018080 3y ago
We're in the "this is how blockchain can solve this" era of the AI bubble.
- linuxftw 3y ago
  It seems to me a very trivial problem to classify a post as on topic or not with today's AI capabilities.
jfghi 3y ago
Even if this was feasible, how much would it cost and how long would it take to successfully roll out?
skilled 3y ago
Too easily gamed and not reliable. And if people find out you are using AI for modding, they will find a way to mess with it. A human has discernment. An AI is looking at cute colors at a wall but doesn’t actually know which one is red or blue.
- tester457 3y ago
  If only there was a way to prevent prompt injection.
whatyesaid 3y ago
Well that means bots can take anything down unless you become really good at detecting bots. Not like it's hard for bots to get points you can do so with reposting and GPT for comments.
- linuxftw 3y ago
  I'm sure they have metrics at this point on how often real humans take a particular action. If an account is reporting posts higher than some amount X, then shadow ban that account.
  - actionablefiber 3y ago
    Do you think users will continue to report posts if they see that reporting too often will cause them to be shadowbanned? Conversely if you are in the business of publishing spam to Reddit, wouldn’t it be useful if you could overwhelm the site with spam such that the people who care enough report all of the spam they see will get banned?
    - linuxftw 3y ago
      I think the vast majority of Reddit's userbase, normies, won't know the difference and won't care. It will literally be an invisible change.
      - actionablefiber 3y ago
        Will it, though? For how much I see people here saying AI moderation can solve this, I frankly think AI tools are likely to be an order of magnitude better at playing offense than defense - producing huge volumes of AI-generated spam/marketing/offensive content that could fool an AI content moderation algorithm on the other side.
        linuxftw 3y ago
        The quality on the popular subs is the equivalent of spam to me, so I don't think most of their users would be able to tell the difference.
gunchie 3y ago
Reddit are already using AI for first-line moderation on their site-wide reports. It only reaches a human if there's an appeal.
throw16180339 3y ago
> Just take it down, there will be 15 million new posts in an hour. I'm a mod at a 150k+ user subreddit. AI can probably handle removing objectionable content, but I spend most of my time on other areas that are much less susceptible to automation. • Removing requests when there are recent similar posts. We've found that users disengage when the same requests are posted every week. • Hosting AMAs. An AI isn't going to know who we should invite or whether they'll be a good fit for our subreddit. • Detecting and banning people deceptively promoting their own products. This is incredibly common and often quite difficult.
- linuxftw 3y ago
  I'm confident an AI can be utilized for 'remove duplicate content' type of operation. AMAs don't require a mod to participate, just the community. All mods really do is sticky a thread. People deceptively promoting their own products, others are free to down vote them and report the post.
  - throw16180339 3y ago
    Exact duplicates are already automatically removed by bots. We remove request posts that lack detail or when there have been several similar active posts within the year. This strikes a balance between allowing every post only once and swamping the subreddit with nearly identical requests. We removed about 75% of the posts reported for this category last month, the remaining 25% either didn't have previous similar requests or had enough to detail to stay up. Many cases are ambiguous and resolved by majority vote. AMAs don't happen spontaneously in major subs. As with everything else, there's a lot of admin work that goes on behind the scenes. We mostly invite people for AMAs; under 10% of this year's 10+ AMAs were requested by the participant. Someone has to email them, answer their questions, schedule a time, explain how to post, join them in a chat channel, etc. Deceptive promotion is rarely flagged on our sub. We got ~450 reports last month and none of them were for promotion. Promotion posts are quite rare; they're against our rules and most people don't even try. What we regularly see are comments from users recommending their own products. Some cases are obvious, e.g. new accounts frequently recommending a book without ratings that was released yesterday. Many are much harder to identify; we regularly search user profiles and the Internet to confirm an identity. One person we banned last year had been covertly recommending their book for months. It took numerous searches and several weeks to remove all their promotion comments.

thewataccount 3y ago

I support the blackouts but > Reddit isn't even profitable. Hiring mods for thousands of subreddits would cost them a ton of money, not only in wages but in the cost of finding and training those workers. They don't need to. Aww (36m), music(32m), videos(26m), futurology(18m), me_irl, and abrupt chaos are some of the biggest ones, if they seize just those 6 then they've reclaimed most of the r/popular anyway.

wvenable 3y ago
The assumption is that those communities would just go back to normal if they were seized by Reddit. I'm not sure that's a good assumption.
- thewataccount 3y ago
  r/aww is literally just cute animals. Most of the others are just memes/reposts of their respective topic. There's plenty of mods from subreddits that didn't go dark and have 20m+, reddit can just put them in charge. I highly doubt the specific mods matter that much on these "fluff" subreddits. Subreddits like r/apple I could see it mattering a lot more, but most of the top ones aren't exactly complex topics.
  - wvenable 3y ago
    > r/aww is literally just cute animals. There is a social contract and moderator effort to make that happen. When that contract is broken and moderators are stretched thin, how long is that subreddit still going to be just cute animals?
    - thewataccount 3y ago
      I appreciate the current mod's efforts. And I completely agree with you on 95%+ of subs. But I think there's enough active, and willing mods who already manage several large subreddits (10m+) capable of managing the half a dozen or so subs that I mentioned. And I'm only talking about 6 subs, not even 10's of subs. I just don't think theres enough ambiguity/complexity with moderating those in regards to choosing what content is or isn't appropriate for that sub. But either way I truly hope we can get old reddit back, api, third party clients, and all :(

mike-cardwell 3y ago

Just use Chat-GPT. The future of moderation. What could go wrong?

frankreyes 3y ago
Skynet.gif

frankreyes 3y ago

Section 230. Reddit is in the fence

muttantt 3y ago

AI will replace the mods.

rurp 3y ago
Ah yes, because LLMs are so reliable at understanding nuance and social context.
- Quikinterp 3y ago
  Human reddit moderators already can't do that from my experience
speedgoose 3y ago
I don’t know why you are downvoted. Reddit did annonce to some moderators that AI moderation was coming this year and I heard that some already have access for testing. I also heard that it works pretty well to automate many actions, though it still requires some humans.
moskie 3y ago
AI will replace the users, too.

jd24 3y ago

there was a stat "92 of the most 500 popular subreddits are moderated by the same 5 people"; unpaid people at that i think they can afford to replace the mods. it'll likely be their last resort though

simlevesque 3y ago
Let me know if my math is wrong: it means that 5 people are on the moderation team of 18.4 subs. The 500 top subs often have mod teams from 20 to 50 people. Bringing up that stat doesn't seem really relevant.
- jd24 3y ago
  I'm saying it probably doesn't take much man power to moderate these subreddits as you might think. Bring in a team of 5-10 full time workers would probably be enough, tbh.
  - jeltz 3y ago
    And then what about all of the rest of Reddit? Let it become unmoderated hell?

johannes1234321 3y ago

Paying .kids for the large subreddits won't cost that much. However doing that makes the company directly liable for all things. Right now they can at least try the legal argument "we just provide infrastructure and oh we didn't know what was uploaded there" as soon as they moderate themselves that blind eye strategy can't work at all. (Right now they can at least try it)

paulmd 3y ago
No it doesn’t. Do you think Facebook mods are unpaid? User content is the safety line, not whether the platform pays moderators.

donmcronald 3y ago

> Beyond that, the minute the mods are official employees of Reddit, Reddit is fully responsible for all the content on all those subs. Social media companies are already under a lot of scrutiny for the kinds of content they allow on their platform. I doubt they'd want to go there. Oh. Wow. I never thought about that. Does anyone know if section 230 of the DMCA shields Reddit from liability as-is? >Reddit isn't even profitable. Hiring mods for thousands of subreddits would cost them a ton of money, not only in wages but in the cost of finding and training those workers. And it would be a policy nightmare. Right now, most sub-reddits are flexible in terms of what they'll tolerate. At best I think they could have a single moderation policy applied across all sub-reddits they pay to moderate. Would that work?

CryptoBanker 3y ago
That would work for implementation. No chance a single policy would work for users
timdev2 3y ago
> Does anyone know if section 230 of the DMCA shields Reddit from liability as-is? It does. (And 230 isn't part of the DMCA, it's the only surviving bit of the CDA).

majormajor 3y ago

> Beyond that, the minute the mods are official employees of Reddit, Reddit is fully responsible for all the content on all those subs. Social media companies are already under a lot of scrutiny for the kinds of content they allow on their platform. I doubt they'd want to go there. I don't think this is true at all. Twitter employs (employed? https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/outsourced-content-moderators-lose-twitter-jobs-in-musks-latest-round-of-cuts https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/outsourced-content-mode... ) paid moderators. Facebook does ( https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebook-content-moderator-interviews-trauma-working-conditions-arizona https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebo... ). Plenty of other forum sites have owner-operator mods. "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider." (47 U.S.C. § 230(c)(1)). That explicitly applies to providers and doesn't say they aren't allowed to moderate at all.

titusjohnson 3y ago
> "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider." (47 U.S.C. § 230(c)(1)) While Reddit started as a link aggregator, the vast majority of useful content on the site is not external links. It is content generated for reddit, on reddit.
- majormajor 3y ago
  It's content generated by users, and it's the source of the content that matters, not the source of the moderation. There's no generally accepted interpretation of 230 that restricts site owners from moderating user comments. https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230 https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230 "Section 230 allows for web operators, large and small, to moderate user speech and content as they see fit." See again the FB/Twitter examples I linked - those sites are also full of content generated for them, on them. Here's a couple cases drawing the difference: https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230/cases/anthony-v-yahoo-inc https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230/cases/anthony-v-yahoo-inc - Yahoo isn't protected against fraud claims by 230 for creating fake dating profiles, because they did it themselves BUT https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230/cases/universal-communications-systems-inc-v-lycos-inc https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230/cases/universal-communicat... - Lycos is protected against defamation claims on their own message boards

bdw5204 3y ago

I don't see how they'd have difficulties replacing the mods. Even if it's hard to find replacements within the Reddit community there are lots of blue checks on Twitter who'd probably be thrilled to take over Reddit moderation and might even pay Reddit for the privilege.

TigeriusKirk 3y ago
Users could very easily make any sub effectively unmoddable if replacements are brought in. It wouldn't even take very many people.

ht85 3y ago

Looking forward to watch reddit corporate approved mods trying to deal with the platform. Lmao

asah 3y ago

+1 - I've been a mod on a large sub, and it's serious business.

majani 3y ago

Surely they can outsource mods from poor countries to do a half decent job for just a few hundred dollars a month

jordiburgos 3y ago

Isn't Reddit already responsible of all the content they have in the platform?