Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by faeriechangling 1229 days ago
Author has no clue what they're talking about and it shows. Moderators are under absolutely no obligation to enforce Reddits anti-spam policy and I am aware of zero instances of a moderator being removed or warned for failure to remove spam.

Now moderators ARE held accountable for some things, they can't just turn a blind eye to global rules like no child pornography without being removed, and in general they're expected to keep their communities under control. If their community in particular starts harassing other communities either on or off of Reddit, or it brings Public disrepute to reddit in some way (/r/jailbait), generally the admins will get involved. However the admins don't care if you don't remove spam for your own subreddit for a very simple reason - it only affects users ON YOUR SUBREDDIT so why would they care or be involved? The commonality between all the cases I just mentioned is you're causing trouble OUTSIDE your community and causing Reddit as a whole problems, THAT'S when the admins get involved. They are like the federal government of reddit they're not supposed to care about internal affairs of states they're supposed to care about inter-state affairs and international affairs.

Another important thing to realise about reddit is most of the moderation isn't done by moderators or admins, there are way too few of them to moderate effectively. The author is correct about one thing - were those Reddit's only moderation tools even with automation scaling moderation would be impossible, but they're not the only moderation tools Reddit has. Most moderation is done through the influence of users soft-censoring posts through downvoting and reporting posts to draw the attention to the mods. Something the author didn't even write about or seem to think about is the fact the mod probably only looked at his post BECAUSE a user reported it.

In general though, Reddit at a global admin level has long blocked users for self-promotion and they even have a writeup about it. I have seen countless users, even ones generally well received by communities banned for self-promotion, even ones whose posts I kept promoting after the original posters account got banned because I liked their posts so much (and I know how to not get banned for spamming on Reddit), because one mans useful post is another man's spam and to be fair you have to just ban all self-promoters. Reddit has writeup about this: https://www.reddit.com/wiki/selfpromotion/

FTA: "But my article is not the type of spam these rules are meant to exclude" FT rules: "We're not making a judgement on your quality, just your behavior on reddit." "10% or less of your posting and conversation should link to your own content"

So I would say if anything, the scalability problem Reddit has is that authors like the OP can't read the fucking rules, break rules, get banned, and cry about it while citing a misinformed view of how Reddit moderation works which isn't surprising given he didn't even bother to read the rules before publishing this crap.

1 comments

P.S. The way you can self promote while staying within the rules is to sincerely become an active member of each community after which a small amount of posts can be part of your own content. This also deters cross posting your own content across several subs at the same time which tends to annoy people who see your content repeatedly. If you do this, you can still end up in hot water because people reflexively hate self-promotion, but you're a lot lot less likely to get banned. The thing is that people with no investment in the communities they're posting their content into will not do this, which is precisely the point, Reddit wants the regulars of that community to post content not drive-by self promoters. This overall ensures quality in a fair way. It doesn't work that well, Reddit has been astroturfed for eons, but it works somewhat.

The rules of reddit apply globally in communities large and small, a moderator might like you and not ban you and maybe users on a certain community like you and don't report you, but if you break the rules of reddit yeah it's fair for you to get banned at any time by anybody with the power to do so with them citing that rule.