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I recently activated my account on there and went to the forum for my country. It was already taken over by moderators. Then I looked at the mod and he took all

• p2detar 7mo ago
  The absolutely broken moderator system of Reddit made me leave it forever after being a regular user for more than a decade. The “god-king” thing simply doesn’t work.
  • _cenw 7mo ago
    And even if it does, the mods don't have real control to moderate communities either, so you get the worst of both worlds. I don't go to most queer reddit communities anymore because a lot of them have bots that downvote trans-positive posts, even if the community is specifically meant to be inclusive. There's nothing to couple active participation to voting weight or anything of that kind and voting is not considered "brigading" by reddit if the coordination happens off-site (at least not in a way that'd lead to any enforcement action). It's makes a great propaganda machine though, given humans have a tendency to measure their own opinions on social clues.
    • gzread 7mo ago
      I still haven't been able to figure out how to make an account without it being immediately shadowbanned or normalbanned. Tried again the other day, it was something in between where logged-out users could see it was banned but I couldn't.
      • mschuster91 7mo ago
        You need to ditch and replace all your devices and acquire a new phone number. I'm serious. Virtually all large websites these days employ a lot of fingerprinting and persistence technologies. And yes, ditch them. Even well over a decade ago, Wikipedia of all places already employed IP address matching to link sockpuppet accounts. You must be extremely careful of never using any device that was associated with your old accounts on the same network as the devices associated with your new account. And that includes devices only seen by association.
        • kevin_thibedeau 7mo ago
          Just don't use apps. Then the only association is a discardable cookie and IP.
          • code_duck 7mo ago
            There’s also browser fingerprinting
        • happyopossum 7mo ago
          > and acquire a new phone number > Wikipedia of all places already employed IP address matching to link sockpuppet accounts That’s… well, that’s just not how tcp/ip works. Your phone number has nothing to do with your device IP…
          • beachy 7mo ago
            It does when your phone number is used for 2fa in a session running on tcp/ip
          • mschuster91 7mo ago
            Phone numbers are available to many apps if they target older SDK versions and serve as an additional unique identifier.
        • gzread 7mo ago
  • alex1138 7mo ago
    [flagged]
    • koolala 7mo ago
      I don't think the problem was spam content it was hate content. Hate can be organic
      • nichos 7mo ago
        Who decides what "hate" is though? Does it switch with every administration? Free speech, including "hate speech" should be allowed, as long as it doesn't violate the law (calls to violence, etc)
        • pwndByDeath 7mo ago
          I agree that free speech is free speech, the private org that runs the platform has a veto, the assumption that these platforms are the equivilant of stepping into the street to stand on a box is a not realistic. Even HN is only quasi-free speech, there are rules that will get one censored. If you love freedom, there are mailing lists and other platforms but they arnt as high on dopamine and the audience gets a little bit more sketch.
          • throwaway27448 7mo ago
            Even the US never had free speech—there was always stuff you could/can say to get you gagged by the courts or thrown in prison. Your freedoms always stop at impacting other people. Somehow we jut gave business owners more freedoms than we gave everyone else....
            • pwndByDeath 7mo ago
              I guess I don't have a problem with a social media site blocking speech, we don't have to use them, if they are too draconian, nobody will. But IRL it gets harder if ISPs get involved. I'm more interested in democratized platforms with privacy baked in, if you want free speech you might have to at least give the orgs you depend on for access plausible deniability
  • leptons 7mo ago
    Same here. The power-tripping of mods ruins reddit. Most don't care about the community as much as they care about exercising their absolute power over users.
• guerrilla 7mo ago
  Yes. Subforums should elect mods democratically.
  • Gud 7mo ago
    Why? Genuinely curious. I am a big proponent of (direct) democracy in general.
    • mavhc 7mo ago
      Internet is way behind on democracy. In general everyone likes democracy until they're in charge, then they realise they're the best person to be in charge and the idiots who vote don't have a clue, and should probably be banned if not beheaded for speaking out of turn. You'd have to weight votes by some kind of participation metric to solve the problem of very little authentication of the voters
  • johannes1234321 7mo ago
    As long as sub forums can be created easily, users may pick their sub forum and thus indirectly moderator. In this setup having users elect the moderator leads to cases where small groups create their special interest group and then some trolls challenge the moderator. Their may be some oversight on the large sub forum, but not all.
    • gzread 7mo ago
      Necessary for this is that subforums can't have unique names. If a bad mod can squat all the words like "computers", "programming", "coding", newcomers aren't going to know the best subforum is called "RealProgNoBadMod"
      • johannes1234321 7mo ago
        Yes, the "important" ones need some special attention. If "democracy" where anybody can create arbitrary amount of accounts is however questionable. The vast majority of sub forums however are more targeted and smaller to begin with.
• vintermann 7mo ago
  Your country wouldn't be Norway by any chance? I remember that on Reddit there was one powermod who was dead-set on owning every Nowegian-language forum, and every name that could potentially be a base for people trying to escape him.
  • Razengan 7mo ago
    wow, is there more on this? Also, honestly, with AI/LLMs now, do we even need human moderators anywhere anymore
    • mrweasel 7mo ago
      You need both. LLMs can, I think, do the bulk of removing posts that break community guidelines, but you need moderators to define and adjust the guidelines. Most would also like to have a human to escalate a dispute to. Google is famous for having almost solely automated support, at it absolutely sucks at doing almost anything. AI only moderation would go the same way.
      • 9rx 7mo ago
        > but you need moderators to define and adjust the guidelines The comments above you are suggesting that global guidelines are unnecessary. Instead, they suggest you don't need moderation at all when LLMs now give us the technology to filter out the stuff individual users don't want to see based own their own personal policies. I am sure you can come up with reasons to dispute that, but "you need moderators to do the thing you say is no longer necessary" doesn't add to the discussion.
• basisword 7mo ago
  >> I recently activated my account on there and went to the forum for my country. It was already taken over by moderators. Then I looked at the mod and he took all real estate that is already available on Reddit that is related to said country. Are you sure? My understanding is that accounts were only allowed to create two communities.
  • gzread 7mo ago
    On Reddit? It's horribly intransparent but there seems to be a special class of people to whom the normal rules don't apply. That limit wouldn't stop you creating more communities with more accounts anyway.
• reactordev 7mo ago
  This is why moderation choice should be based on metrics, not first cone first served.
• randerson 7mo ago
  A well moderated forum (like HN) is great. I don't have time for the signal-to-noise ratio of X. IMHO Reddit would be better if it had AI moderators that strictly follow a sub's policies. Users could read the policies upfront before deciding whether to join. new subs could start with some neutral default policy, and users could then propose changes to the policy and democratically vote on those changes.
  • taikahessu 7mo ago
    > users could then propose changes to the policy and democratically vote on those changes. Which, in fact, would open up the same rat race with determining which accounts are real and so forth. Not disagreeing with you, just circling around this same problem. Feels like the world still isn't ready yet.
    • Rebelgecko 7mo ago
      If the policies are public, there's a lot more transparency. eg my city of millions of people has a subreddit. The head mod bans people for criticizing a certain dog breed. This "policy" is pretty opaque, but if the AI enforced subreddit rules say "thou shalt not mention the dog's breed when commenting on articles about someone being mauled to death", more people would be familiar with the rule (and perhaps there would be more organized discussion). I was on a subreddit for a while that voted on rules and had a rotating dictator to facilitate them. It worked decently well, although it never got to the point where the sub was brigaded. This was also pre-LLM so moderation was still a big time sink and the sub eventually fizzled out
      • TheCleric 7mo ago
        That’s because certain dog breeds aren’t more likely to maul and saying otherwise is ignorant fear mongering.
        • Rebelgecko 7mo ago
          Then the subreddit can codify that by having a policy that ignorance is a bannable offence!
• jayd16 7mo ago
  Has any popular site tried an approach where you dynamically select your mods as more of a content filter than global moderation? Most places can hide posts and block users at the user level, so why not select which mods can do that for you?
  • DougN7 7mo ago
    How do you make sure each human gets only one vote?
    • jayd16 7mo ago
      It's not a vote. You select your own set filters/ mod lists
  • deleted 7mo ago
    [deleted]
  • dredmorbius 7mo ago
    Kind of? On Google+, it was possible to individually block specific profiles. This meant that the blocker wouldn't see the blockee's posts and the blockee wouldn't see the blockers, which is pretty much expected behaviour. But on third-party threads, if a blocker/blockee were both commenting, others could see their comments but they'd be mutually invisible. As the platform matured and the number of such blocks increased, this reached a point where that platform behaviour became common enough that it was frequently commented on. If the thread host isn't sufficiently diligent in their own moderation (effectively each post author is moderator of that thread), it's also possible for such discussions to devolve quickly. I guess Usenet would be another case where individual killfiles were often applied. This isn't quite the same as your proposal, but it does raise the challenge that if there are multiple moderation regimes occurring, there is no canonical view of a discussion, leading both the potential confusion over what has or hasn't been said, and potential derailment (or similar behaviours) if a sufficiently disruptive participant is not universally blocked. The canonical flamefest after all is often just two profiles / participants responding endlessly. Diaspora* is similar to G+, except that on third-party threads the blocks don't work, so that if A blocks B but C does not block B, then A and B will see one anothers' comments on C's posts / threads. This ... can be frustrating. Oh, and the post-author-as-moderator model also somewhat resembles what you'd suggested, in that you could choose to participate on a particular profile's posts given that profile's moderation practices. I found that there were several people who did an excellent job of this, and who were quite affective, in effect, salon hosts, which was how I saw the G+ moderation model over time. This differs from what you suggest in that every participant on those threads had the same moderation experience, but it was possible to choose moderation practices based on which profiles' threads you chose to participate on. And I'd definitely avoid poorly-moderated hosts.
• Contax 7mo ago
  I've always thought than on Reddit (or Digg, or Lemmy or others) common words, brands, names... should be broad "topics" or categories that nobody can claim (first come, first served). You should be able to add a sub/community under a topic, but just like everyone else, and then users interested in said topic could add and exclude different subs to taste.
  • recursivecaveat 7mo ago
    I always thought it would be interesting to separate the post-side and the read-side in such a manner. You'd post to #programming, and then the reader would subscribe to #programming/user_xyz to pick up the moderation feed with xyz as the god-mod. This solves the bootstrapping problem where new subs have nothing to read. Unfortunately it's hard to do persistent standards keeping that way. If xyz has a no-memes policy do you ban all posts from everyone who ever posts one to the global tag, or do you individually inspect every post?
  • creamyhorror 7mo ago
    100%. I'm building a discussion system with this approach, so that no one forum/community can claim a topic exclusively.
• napolux 7mo ago
  Same for italian forums. I don't believe bot and spam are to be blamed fully. It was just a copy of reddit. How useful?
• pndy 7mo ago
  It's either some personal unquenched thirst for power or he thought that new digg will be as popular as these ~20 years ago, and that he'll be able to control content submitted and get paid for "promoting" it. I've seen something similar over the last ~17 years: a bunch of same terminally online accounts uploading content from our local media outlets on country-related subs and local digg-like sites - both active and long defunct for 10 years now. Some of those users even appeared on mastodon and bsky. The social link aggregators were created for people to share their favorite links, places from the Internet so others could see these and have fun, expand their knowledge and so on. For me it was the cherry on top of the web2.0 period where everything was fresh, beta and innocent. That lasted for a while up until other people, entities figured out that such sites can be used to promote their content, insert ads. The next stage was and remains till today opinion control by "curating" the content and/or reactions in discussions - still done by humans but more prevalent presence of convincing bots. Reddit itself lost its impartial and independent status a while ago. Big subs related to media franchises or big corporations are heavily controlled to the point it's impossible to submit content that's critical. It's all happy world seen by pink glasses, or as some say toxic positivity. There are still niche places where moderation is limited but as I said last time, from my own experiences: such subs were targeted by bad actors who by submitting forbidden content tried to impose lockouts so later they could take these in their control. hn isn't free of some of these issues either. while discussions still remain on good levels (tho degradation to reddit levels already happens), there's no control over content: there are accounts who do nothing but upload links every few minutes, hours. I'm not sure if it's possible to have link aggregators or multi-thematic forums that could be free of such... issues. The similar problem with establishing "real estates" happened on lemmy when some part of userbase decided to abandon reddit due to controversial changes.
  • bigbadfeline 7mo ago
    An outstanding summary of the most important trends on the web, yes, it's being turned into a one-way propaganda-pushing machine much like the mass media before it. AI and bot-farms made that transformation cheap and ubiquitous, the profit motive, aka bribery, takes care of the rest. I don't think it's an unsolvable problem although new legislation is continuously being considered in order to make the solution harder. Still, not impossible.