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Ask HN: Why do we need moderators at all?
Apologies for the title, it's the closest short question to the long one I'm about to ask.
I understand that every message board needs some kind of content filter, both for ToS/legal reasons as well as for community norms. However, one question I have not been able to get out of my head, as Reddit loses favor and federated clones gain favor, is this: for what reason does a given community have only one set of moderators?
For those of you who use Reddit frequently, imagine this: you subscribe to a large subreddit about a topic that interests you. You enjoy memes about the subject, but other users do not, and it has become a subreddit rule that no memes can be posted. Not happy with that reality, you go to the moderation tab and see the default moderator group at the top of the list. You hit unsubscribe. Now, everything posted to that subreddit is visible to you, with no evidence of moderator activity. You go back to the subreddit and see a bunch of politically-charged comments you don't like. You return to the moderator group list, scroll down, and find a very minimalist group that says they only remove politically-charged comments. You hit subscribe. You now have the feed you want for the topic you want without needing to create a separate subreddit or motivate a huge userbase.
If users provide the content, then moderators provide the filter. They curate. So why, in all conventional models, do we only allow one set of curators? Doesn't the digital nature of the content make this entirely unnecessary? Is it even a technical challenge to provide a different view into the same slice of nested content?
The big problem I've had with the federated Reddit-likes is that, while your userbases can merge, and you can join your list of communities with other instances' lists, you can't ever merge communities. You will either end up with a bunch of fractured communities on the same topic, or one instance (or one community) will eat the others and become its own centralized location for the content you're looking for, with the same moderation problems. You haven't at all escaped the problems people have with Reddit as a platform, you've just moved them somewhere else.
If moderation (or, rather curation) was simply a filter on an existing dataset of content, there would be much less of an issue with merging communities. You could actually merge the programming board of one federation with another board. Maybe your instance mods hold all federated posts & comments for review, maybe they allow them by default, it doesn't matter because if you don't like how it's done, you can find another group doing it.
Is there any real reason why we only allow one singular set of curators to control a dataset of content created by users? What purpose does the marriage serve? Would it bother a community if there were more than one view of the content they create? Is it a technical challenge? Or is it just the way it always has been?
- jprd 3y agoWithout @dang there would be chaos.
- legrande 3y agoStarting to think his account is shared by a small team of people. He has to sleep like all of us, you know? And when you have his pattern-of-life documented on HN, you can discern when he sleeps, but his account is active 24/7 so there has to be a team.
- dang 3y agoNo, we don't do that - it wouldn't feel right.
- fnovd 3y agoOf course. The question in the title isn't exactly the one I was trying to ask, but it is close. In my mind there is a difference between content moderation, which enforces the ToS and removes illegal content, and curation, which is more about community preference. Clearly there are some things that dang needs to remove for legal reasons. And the same goes for Reddit, some things just can't be hosted. But when it comes to curation, which is the subjective judgment that a post or comment is either fit or not fit to be posted, do we need a singular moderator (or group of moderators) to enforce this? Is there any real issue with allowing multiple sets of curators for the same dataset? If we're trying to escape the fiefdoms of Reddit, I think we also need to escape the "law" that moderator teams and communities must be one to one.
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