[volkl48]

Long-time user of the site, although currently taking a break:

I'd strongly disagree with that. Mods do an immense amount of work on Reddit just to keep their subreddits remotely on topic and not filled with constant reposts and spam. Also, they're the ones who actually deal with most of those reports - they don't get handled by magic or admins in most cases.

Unmoderated/absentee mod subreddits are frequently overrun by spam nonsense or taken completely off topic.

> If people keep upvoting and enjoying the same stupid memes and jokes why do moderators feel like they need to step in and disrupt what the people find enjoyable?

Because then every subreddit becomes basically the same thing and you might as well just have a giant impossible to navigate pile of content that's at best vaguely related to what the place it was posted is supposed to be for.

A lot of users spend part of their time just scrolling their home page feed and part of their time looking at specific subreddits. When doing the former, they're (IMO) less inclined to vote on if it fits in the place it was posted or not, just on if they like it - they may not even notice what sub it was actually posted in.

But that can ruin the subreddit as a place for a specific type of content, which is the typically the reason they joined/followed that subreddit in the first place.

[evandale]

How much work does a mod of a city subreddit with 600k subscribers really do though? Is it really necessary to have rules in a city subreddit such as 1) no questions or 2) no posts about crime?

That's what I don't understand. The mods in my city subreddit love to claim they get a ton of alt-right posts and are constantly fighting spam but I've browsed new for years on it and it's _extremely_ rare I see content like that and I highly doubt the mods are acting so fast that they're seeing things I before I do with how often I sat on new auto-refreshing the page.

[stetrain]

It’s possible for automoderator tools to immediately hide all new posts, or posts matching certain criteria, pending moderator approval.

Just because you don’t see it in new doesn’t mean it wasn’t posted.

[ok123456]

Then what value are the moderators adding if what they do can be automated by a regex filter?

[rideontime]

Did you miss the "pending moderator approval" part of that?

[stetrain]

Do you think that all online moderation can be accomplished with a regex filter with no human review?

Even if it magically could, someone needs to maintain the regex.

[evandale]

This is what I'd like to know. Based on mod comments in r/Toronto I suspect their regex is literally "ends with ?" and they have to manually approve every question.

They invented work for themselves that doesn't even need to exist and can be solved with the voting system. Every rule change they've made seems to be in an effort to make themselves relevant and take on unnecessary work. This seems like a common theme with Reddit moderators - they give themselves more work to do that nobody is asking them to do in order to justify their existence.

[ok123456]

They seem to like to do it for free.

[volkl48]

City/place subreddits tend to turn into an endless sea of the same question if unmoderated:

"I'm coming to visit as a tourist/think of moving here - tell me everything interesting to do in the city, where to eat, and where to stay/live"

These tend to be better answered by a wiki section, or a once a month/year thread that all those are referred to - because 95% of them are pretty much all the same for the answers.

That can basically overwhelm all actual news/discussion about the city and most of the larger city subreddits ban/restrict those for a reason.

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There's certainly places with mods run amok harming the ability to have constructive discussions/discuss certain topics most would find worthwhile, but a problem with one city's subreddit isn't every city's subreddit.

A glance at Toronto (I don't normally follow it) suggests they don't allow questions because they have set up a separate subreddit specifically for questions - /r/askTO. (NYC also does this with /r/asknyc). Aside from the past two days, it seems like decent questions over there get a decent response rate, and there's ~180k members, so it's not as though they're being kicked off to oblivion.

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> I've browsed new for years on it and it's _extremely_ rare I see content like that and I highly doubt the mods are acting so fast that they're seeing things I before I do with how often I sat on new auto-refreshing the page.

I will note that it's likely that a lot of the crap is being caught by how they've set up automod (and so, never makes it even to "new"), but depending on what they're doing, that probably still requires a human to sift through the results for stuff that they actually want to allow/is caught up in the filtering rules by mistake.