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It's often struck me as odd how some moderators can be modding 50+ sometimes even high as 100+ subreddits. Why so many? I doubt they can be reasonably expected

by e2le 3y ago

It's often struck me as odd how some moderators can be modding 50+ sometimes even high as 100+ subreddits. Why so many? I doubt they can be reasonably expected to moderate all of them. Shouldn't there be a limit?

tho2i3ui3o4234 3y ago
[flagged]
CSMastermind 3y ago
I moderated a few decently popular subreddits for a while (a couple hundred posts a day, nothing crazy). I will say that most moderation work on Reddit can be done independently of a particular sub and scales okay across subreddits. Like the additional effort of moderating 100 subreddits vs 1 would be nowhere near 100x. It would probably be closer to like 5x the amount of work. And there are benefits to moderating many subreddits. Most moderation is keeping your automod filters up to date to stop the never-ending onslaught of porn bots, crypto scammers, and obvious fake accounts looking to farm karma. Everyday I'd scan through both the stuff the filters caught and the stuff they didn't and tweak the automod settings to be better, then most of the time I'd copy paste those settings across subs. The other hard part of being a mod is communicating with the other mods. Like I would only be online moderating one hour out of the day and so all communication with async with anonymous strangers. This again benefits from having mods span many subreddits because you can quickly get to know the other moderators in similar spaces and you all pass information around to each other. For subs that require user verification this again is a better user experience if you moderate several similar subs because users can verify with you once and be approved across many subs. The communities actually tend to do a pretty good job of moderating themselves via reporting and downvoting so even if there's only one mod on a subreddit they act way more like an appeals process than an initial judge of fate, most content moderation is actually outsourced to the community as a whole with the mods only responsible for curating a space free of obvious spam and acting as an appeals process for people who have content on the borderline.
- 101011 3y ago
  Very interesting perspective, thanks for sharing. What are your thoughts on a mechanism to oust existing mods? Is there any path you'd be willing to see? Or a lesser of two evils? E.g. mods being able to kick each other out with some plurality vs community members holding that power at some high voting threshold
  - CSMastermind 3y ago
    I'd be fine with some kind of election mechanism built into subreddits settings that could be turned on to allow community member to vote on mods. With that said consider a subreddit for a podcast or youtube channel where the host/channel might legitimately want to have total control over moderation and I don't think it'd be appropriate to remove them. Also consider that the vast majority of subreddits are moderated by volunteers who are only doing it because no one else will. You'd probably get more milage out of a way to force community members to take turns serving as moderators than you would having a mechanism to remove existing mods. When someone says Reddit moderator you're thinking of /r/news or /r/funny not the person running the sub for their favorite book or local sports team or interest group. There are way more of those moderators and you almost need to handle the two use cases differently. For the truly top subreddits I think Reddit should be employing people directly or indirectly to do the moderation. At the very least they should be compensating those people and reviewing their performance. Reddit should also make better mod tools and do way more to help with moderation. It's offensively bad what they offer today. If Reddit actually gave a damn they would force every software engineer at the company to spend 2 weeks as the moderator of a subreddit once a year and I guarantee this problem would be solved quickly. I also think some semblance of moderator hierarchy would be extremely helpful. Have some sort of mod council that oversees all of Ask* subreddits and another for sports subreddits and another for NSFW subreddits. Those content domains will all have similar needs and having someone looking at the bigger picture across individual subs would be very helpful.
    - stcroixx 3y ago
      The host of a podcast having total control of a community seems like the perfect example of illegitimate control. I'd assume they'd remove any critical discussion to the point it would devolve into their own personal website where all it's good for is promoting the product. Users with anything critical to say would be banned, posts removed. That's about as anti user as it gets.
unclekev 3y ago
Power mods are a real problem on Reddit. It's the same group of people who strong-armed a lot of smaller subreddits into participating in this 'protest'. The end result of this protest looks like it's going to be that Reddit is going to remove a lot of the mods that the community has despised for years. It would seem this mod pity party is backfiring in the most spectacular way possible.
- 101011 3y ago
  I don't think that's true. r/nba, a top 10 active subreddit at the time of going private, put it to a public vote where the overwhelming majority of the community voted to suspend indefinitely. This was during the NBA finals, mind you. Hard to put that sort of result on a small group of mods.
  - unclekev 3y ago
    > put it to a public vote Those votes were brigaded by people pushing the blackout, they are not representative of the overall community. The average user of Reddit completely ignored/scrolled past those polls because "whats this doing in the NBA sub" I find it hard to have any faith in those polls considering one of the subs that I mod that has ~3500 members got just over 4800 votes on the poll. The other sub I mod with 1300 members got 800 votes (which averages 10 posts per week from a core regular group of users) I do not believe for a second that a sub with less than 100 'active' monthly members had more than 60% of the total lifetime population of that sub come online all of a sudden and vote in the communities best interest. Then on the other side of it, you've got subs with millions of members that had 20k responses. The average user did not (and does not) care. Now that those subs have been re-polled without being flooded by protesters, it's a overwhelming "No, leave us out of this"
    - fzeroracer 3y ago
      So you're a mod. Who's to say you personally did not brigade or tilt the poll in the other direction? I'm curious what makes you immune to random calls of conspiracy and corruption. It's especially ironic since you claim most mods are scum and corrupt, so I'm curious if you think you somehow are not. Now if you have actual evidence of brigading then by all means. Post it. Post those 're-done' polls.
laserbeam 3y ago
I don't think it matters. As long as the members of a community have no problem with X being a mod, X should probably remain a mod for that community. If the community eventually hates X, X should be removable. Reddit was the best place for self governed forums. I don't think arbitrary limits for how much one can mod would affect the quality of the site in the slightest.

by e2le 3y ago

tho2i3ui3o4234 3y ago

[flagged]

CSMastermind 3y ago

I moderated a few decently popular subreddits for a while (a couple hundred posts a day, nothing crazy). I will say that most moderation work on Reddit can be done independently of a particular sub and scales okay across subreddits. Like the additional effort of moderating 100 subreddits vs 1 would be nowhere near 100x. It would probably be closer to like 5x the amount of work. And there are benefits to moderating many subreddits. Most moderation is keeping your automod filters up to date to stop the never-ending onslaught of porn bots, crypto scammers, and obvious fake accounts looking to farm karma. Everyday I'd scan through both the stuff the filters caught and the stuff they didn't and tweak the automod settings to be better, then most of the time I'd copy paste those settings across subs. The other hard part of being a mod is communicating with the other mods. Like I would only be online moderating one hour out of the day and so all communication with async with anonymous strangers. This again benefits from having mods span many subreddits because you can quickly get to know the other moderators in similar spaces and you all pass information around to each other. For subs that require user verification this again is a better user experience if you moderate several similar subs because users can verify with you once and be approved across many subs. The communities actually tend to do a pretty good job of moderating themselves via reporting and downvoting so even if there's only one mod on a subreddit they act way more like an appeals process than an initial judge of fate, most content moderation is actually outsourced to the community as a whole with the mods only responsible for curating a space free of obvious spam and acting as an appeals process for people who have content on the borderline.

101011 3y ago
Very interesting perspective, thanks for sharing. What are your thoughts on a mechanism to oust existing mods? Is there any path you'd be willing to see? Or a lesser of two evils? E.g. mods being able to kick each other out with some plurality vs community members holding that power at some high voting threshold
- CSMastermind 3y ago
  I'd be fine with some kind of election mechanism built into subreddits settings that could be turned on to allow community member to vote on mods. With that said consider a subreddit for a podcast or youtube channel where the host/channel might legitimately want to have total control over moderation and I don't think it'd be appropriate to remove them. Also consider that the vast majority of subreddits are moderated by volunteers who are only doing it because no one else will. You'd probably get more milage out of a way to force community members to take turns serving as moderators than you would having a mechanism to remove existing mods. When someone says Reddit moderator you're thinking of /r/news or /r/funny not the person running the sub for their favorite book or local sports team or interest group. There are way more of those moderators and you almost need to handle the two use cases differently. For the truly top subreddits I think Reddit should be employing people directly or indirectly to do the moderation. At the very least they should be compensating those people and reviewing their performance. Reddit should also make better mod tools and do way more to help with moderation. It's offensively bad what they offer today. If Reddit actually gave a damn they would force every software engineer at the company to spend 2 weeks as the moderator of a subreddit once a year and I guarantee this problem would be solved quickly. I also think some semblance of moderator hierarchy would be extremely helpful. Have some sort of mod council that oversees all of Ask* subreddits and another for sports subreddits and another for NSFW subreddits. Those content domains will all have similar needs and having someone looking at the bigger picture across individual subs would be very helpful.
  - stcroixx 3y ago
    The host of a podcast having total control of a community seems like the perfect example of illegitimate control. I'd assume they'd remove any critical discussion to the point it would devolve into their own personal website where all it's good for is promoting the product. Users with anything critical to say would be banned, posts removed. That's about as anti user as it gets.

unclekev 3y ago

Power mods are a real problem on Reddit. It's the same group of people who strong-armed a lot of smaller subreddits into participating in this 'protest'. The end result of this protest looks like it's going to be that Reddit is going to remove a lot of the mods that the community has despised for years. It would seem this mod pity party is backfiring in the most spectacular way possible.

101011 3y ago
I don't think that's true. r/nba, a top 10 active subreddit at the time of going private, put it to a public vote where the overwhelming majority of the community voted to suspend indefinitely. This was during the NBA finals, mind you. Hard to put that sort of result on a small group of mods.
- unclekev 3y ago
  > put it to a public vote Those votes were brigaded by people pushing the blackout, they are not representative of the overall community. The average user of Reddit completely ignored/scrolled past those polls because "whats this doing in the NBA sub" I find it hard to have any faith in those polls considering one of the subs that I mod that has ~3500 members got just over 4800 votes on the poll. The other sub I mod with 1300 members got 800 votes (which averages 10 posts per week from a core regular group of users) I do not believe for a second that a sub with less than 100 'active' monthly members had more than 60% of the total lifetime population of that sub come online all of a sudden and vote in the communities best interest. Then on the other side of it, you've got subs with millions of members that had 20k responses. The average user did not (and does not) care. Now that those subs have been re-polled without being flooded by protesters, it's a overwhelming "No, leave us out of this"
  - fzeroracer 3y ago
    So you're a mod. Who's to say you personally did not brigade or tilt the poll in the other direction? I'm curious what makes you immune to random calls of conspiracy and corruption. It's especially ironic since you claim most mods are scum and corrupt, so I'm curious if you think you somehow are not. Now if you have actual evidence of brigading then by all means. Post it. Post those 're-done' polls.

laserbeam 3y ago

I don't think it matters. As long as the members of a community have no problem with X being a mod, X should probably remain a mod for that community. If the community eventually hates X, X should be removable. Reddit was the best place for self governed forums. I don't think arbitrary limits for how much one can mod would affect the quality of the site in the slightest.