[jnwatson]

I think Musk learned the hard way how hard it is to strike the right balance.

Anybody that thinks Reddit is fascist should spend 60 days moderating a popular sub. Your attitude might change.

This isn’t to say that there aren’t mods with power trips. Reddit has essentially outsourced their trust and safety department. It isn’t going to be perfect.

[mananaysiempre]

> Anybody that thinks Reddit is fascist should spend 60 days moderating a popular sub.

I have little in the way of opinions about Reddit, but this strikes me as the wrong approach on general grounds.

It might be true that anyone who spends time running a subreddit will change their mind about moderation. However, the only point of a subreddit is for people to talk to each other and to read what others are talking about; moderation is nothing but incidental overhead. That doesn’t mean it’s easy or unimportant, but it does mean that the burden is on the moderators to prove themselves reasonable to participants who don’t and shouldn’t have to, by default, understand their work going in.

There can be different approaches to that, and in some of them the participants will come to understand and care about how moderation works—I’m not saying that they shouldn’t. But I am saying that if they don’t see why they should but the moderators wanted them to, generally speaking it’s the moderators who failed.

There is no natural law that says that there’ll always be a way to succeed, though. Perhaps in some communities, in some political environments, etc. there just can’t be a good discussion forum. In such cases, maybe it really are the users who suck. But the fact remains that if users get annoyed about the moderation and leave, then the moderators have built a forum that’s wrong for those users.

(This is of course the standard argument against every instance of “the users just don’t understand how complex the backoffice is” ever. But this instance might look a bit unfamilliar because it doesn’t involve computers.)

[ryandrake]

I briefly modded an old phpBB forum (remember those?) and therefore have sympathy for mods. The job is thankless, and the amount of crap that you need to mod is unending. And this was for a tiny hobby forum, not the vast sewage of Reddit. I'm talking spam, flamewars, spam, harassment, nazis, spam, porn, spam, spam, bigotry, and spam. I can't imagine how hard it would be on a forum with a user base as giant and interconnected as Reddit.

The balance seems impossible. If your moderation is "light touch" the forum ends up like 4chan. If your moderation is heavy handed, you're a power-tripper control freak lording over your site. You can't win.

I don't know how dang does it here. He's some kind of wizard.

[prions]

How many times does the hard libertarian view on forums have to be debunked until people stop trying to pitch it as a serious solution?

Even 4chan has stronger moderation than what you advocate

[mananaysiempre]

Um, I don’t think I was advocating any particular level of moderation, was I? More like visibility into its processes amd motivations, and that providing those convincingly and to an appropriate extent is the moderators’ responsibility. Dang’s please-stop-this essays here come to mind, for example—even if not everybody can be dang and not every community would be moved by such essays.

(There are moderation practices that I disapprove of and are not coincidentally outright incompatible with the view I expressed. Like the advice to just ban the user if you dislike interacting with them or if they’re complaining about suppression—especially in a small community like that advice was targeted at, I know I’d be more or less unsalvageably bitter after witnessing this in practice, let alone being its target. But it’s still not the strength that upsets me in this hypothetical, it’s more the perceived arbitrariness. Which, if the moderator is not in fact being arbitrary, is again a communication problem, not a policy one.)

Moderation is overhead, but so is Postgres. Both are very useful solutions to real and difficult problems. Both still have to pay for themselves with some mix of user-visible shinies and keeping out of the way instead of grumbling about how difficult the problem is. The correct choice of that mix is highly situational and I don’t pretend to have the panacea in that respect.

[roqi]

> Um, I don’t think I was advocating any particular level of moderation, was I? More like visibility into its processes amd motivations, and that providing those convincingly and to an appropriate extent is the moderators’ responsibility.

If you are not advocating for a particular type of moderation then why are you all bothered about how any type of moderation is applied? What would be the point of your suggestion?

[ncallaway]

> This is of course the standard argument against every instance of “the users just don’t understand how complex the backoffice is” ever

Except in this case the ones in the “back office” are volunteers and not staff.

I’m amenable to your argument in most other contexts. But it strikes me as an awful argument to apply to volunteers.

In that context, if you don’t like it then you have to step up and do it yourself. If someone is doing work for free, you don’t get to complain about the quality. Instead, you pick up a broom and do the sweeping yourself.

Which isn’t to say that Reddit mods are beyond question or reproach, but if there’s a concern shared by all moderators, it strikes me as wrong to say “that’s a backoffice issue”. If you don’t like it, go back into the office.