[eggbrain]

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]

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

[eggbrain]

Your top three points ring true (in a nutshell, people won't change their default filters), but the same could be said in general about participation in a community -- e.g. the people that struggle against the moderators in a community are usually not the ones passively viewing content, but more the power-users -- those who heavily comment, post, etc.

The power-users also (in my mind) determine the community -- if they feel restricted by not being able to post (as the parent link talks about) from heavy-handed moderation, they'd also most likely be the ones willing to change their filters.

> 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 [...]

To be fair, at the most unfiltered level, I was still imagining the content would still be "filtered" to cater towards the site-wide rules, and nothing else.

[cmh89]

Not allowing moderators to hide behind a share mod account would be helpful so you can actually see what mod is handing out bans.

[faeriechangling]

I doubt this would help, I think it would just dramatically increase moderator harassment but it wouldn't actually increase accountability more than a little because even if you know which mod is banning users doesn't mean you can remove them (other than through harassing them into submission).

I also don't see it as necessary or the fundamental issue behind a lack of moderation accountability. The problem with moderation accountability is that Reddit moderation is based strictly on seniority, there's really no effective way for users to protest bad moderation other than moving to another sub, and that's not really that realistic when the badly moderated subreddit has a better and more discoverable name. Admins will also rarely remove active moderators.

[swayvil]

Ya but everybody up/down votes. So we'd base the filtering on that.

[faeriechangling]

Reddit uses the actual users as the main filtering mechanism (upvotes/downvotes, spam button, report button) and this most of the time works better for most communities.

I think it's very questionable if giving moderators the power to soft-censor is a good idea, because it will cause moderators to censor posts they probably wouldn't have censored before, and moderator influence is inherently less democratic than user influence. Reddit Enhancement Suite has long implemented various filtering mechanisms for users though so users DO have some capability to censor things themselves if they have the know-how, but it's not like these mechanisms are built into say the official reddit app which is the main way reddit is overwhelmingly used.

[eggbrain]

> "...Reddit uses the actual users as the main filtering mechanism (upvotes/downvotes, spam button, report button) and this most of the time works better for most communities."

I might be alone in this, but for me upvotes/downvotes/reports have become increasingly less useful as Reddit has gotten larger and larger. It's great up until a point in communities (during which time a user-base acts in good faith), and then at some point a report becomes a "mega-dislike", people click "spam" for links that are doing "better" than what they submitted, etc etc.

I've tried to stick to smaller communities to combat this, but they also can suffer from things like "drive-by" brigades from larger communities (e.g. when a post unexpectedly reaches /r/all).

> "...Reddit Enhancement Suite has long implemented various filtering mechanisms for users though so users DO have some capability to censor things themselves if they have the know-how, but it's not like these mechanisms are built into say the official reddit app which is the main way reddit is overwhelmingly used."

RES is indeed great -- although like you said it's a pity it isn't built into the site natively.

[swayvil]

If the participants in the sub did their own filtering (which they would of course) then you could subscribe to each other. And subscribe by proxy.

The emergent intelligence of the filtering could become quite large.