[erellsworth]

I think you underestimate the value of that free labor.

Reddit isn't even profitable. Hiring mods for thousands of subreddits would cost them a ton of money, not only in wages but in the cost of finding and training those workers.

Beyond that, the minute the mods are official employees of Reddit, Reddit is fully responsible for all the content on all those subs. Social media companies are already under a lot of scrutiny for the kinds of content they allow on their platform. I doubt they'd want to go there.

[majormajor]

> Beyond that, the minute the mods are official employees of Reddit, Reddit is fully responsible for all the content on all those subs. Social media companies are already under a lot of scrutiny for the kinds of content they allow on their platform. I doubt they'd want to go there.

I don't think this is true at all. Twitter employs (employed? https://www.pbs.org/newshour/economy/outsourced-content-mode... ) paid moderators. Facebook does ( https://www.theverge.com/2019/2/25/18229714/cognizant-facebo... ). Plenty of other forum sites have owner-operator mods.

"No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider." (47 U.S.C. § 230(c)(1)).

That explicitly applies to providers and doesn't say they aren't allowed to moderate at all.

[titusjohnson]

> "No provider or user of an interactive computer service shall be treated as the publisher or speaker of any information provided by another information content provider." (47 U.S.C. § 230(c)(1))

While Reddit started as a link aggregator, the vast majority of useful content on the site is not external links. It is content generated for reddit, on reddit.

[majormajor]

It's content generated by users, and it's the source of the content that matters, not the source of the moderation.

There's no generally accepted interpretation of 230 that restricts site owners from moderating user comments. https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230 "Section 230 allows for web operators, large and small, to moderate user speech and content as they see fit." See again the FB/Twitter examples I linked - those sites are also full of content generated for them, on them.

Here's a couple cases drawing the difference:

https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230/cases/anthony-v-yahoo-inc - Yahoo isn't protected against fraud claims by 230 for creating fake dating profiles, because they did it themselves

BUT

https://www.eff.org/issues/cda230/cases/universal-communicat... - Lycos is protected against defamation claims on their own message boards

[paulmd]

People act like Facebook doesn’t pay their moderators or something. Paid moderation doesn’t make them liable for what users post.

People are coping super hard.

[jeltz]

Let's keep that kind of insulting language away from Hacker News.

[thewataccount]

I support the blackouts but

> Reddit isn't even profitable. Hiring mods for thousands of subreddits would cost them a ton of money, not only in wages but in the cost of finding and training those workers.

They don't need to. Aww (36m), music(32m), videos(26m), futurology(18m), me_irl, and abrupt chaos are some of the biggest ones, if they seize just those 6 then they've reclaimed most of the r/popular anyway.

[colonwqbang]

Reddit can't afford to pay the employees they already have out of the revenue they make. That's ostensibly the reason why they raised prices on the API in the first place. Losing all that free labour is absolutely the last thing they want at this juncture.

But even ignoring that, suppose all >15M subreddit suddenly get salaried mods. Don't you think the mods of e.g. a 13M subreddit would want a piece of the cake too, and would strike to get it? Or would they just wait around and keep working until their subreddit is also "siezed" by Reddit inc.

Is there any example of a community which successfully runs on mixed salaried/volunteer moderator labour in such a way?

[thewataccount]

> Reddit can't afford to pay the employees they already have out of the revenue they make, that's ostensibly the reason why they raised prices on the API in the first place.

I'm sure there'd be plenty of volunteers who already manage several of the big 20M+ subs that didn't go dark. We're only talking about 6 subs, and they aren't that complex.

> Don't you think the mods of e.g. a 13M subreddit would want a piece of the cake too, and would strike to get it?

They don't matter nearly as much. The top few are what make up the home page with a few others just sprinkled in. And again I highly doubt reddit would need to pay mods.

Again we're only talking about 6 subs. Not even double digits. There's already groups of subs that mod many, many large subreddits.

[colonwqbang]

You're assuming that if Reddit decides to "fire" all mods of the top subreddits, there would be dozens of (suitable) people happily waiting to take their place. I don't think that's remotely the case.

> The top few are what make up the home page with a few others just sprinkled in. And again I highly doubt reddit would need to pay mods.

Reddit wouldn't exactly be Reddit if you reduce it to only /r/aww and five of the other most mainstream subreddits. If that's what you think will happen... Well I don't exactly disagree with you, but Reddit would be a very different product at that point.

[lumenwrites]

If that happens, wouldn't the next obvious thought for the "rebelling" users be "spam and troll these subreddits as much as humanly posssible"?

And they'd be extra motivated too, since forcibly removing the mods would be seen as escalation of the conflict.

[paulmd]

But then they’d get banned and lose all that Reddit karma and their very important badges

And oops all the subs that aren’t total shit have min-karma requirements these days… hope you didn’t enjoy posting in those?

there just is this disconnect between the Redditors who imagine that all the users are behind them and the actual masses who will keep scrolling r/aww and mildlyinteresting and so on. If 5-10% of users want to self-immolate and be banned, that’s fine. People will get bored of the harassment campaign in a couple weeks, and the world will generally keep turning.

Mod labor is not irreplaceable either. The six people running 60 of the top 100 subs aren’t doing any personal work either, they’re just setting up scripts/etc. And at a lower level, there is an infinite supply of people willing to be petty tyrants for a modicum of personal power.

The users of the TikTok-Shaped Reddit that spez is trying to pivot to don’t care about any of this and in a year they will have stabilized around a new user base. And that won’t include a lot of the current powerusers/powermods and they clearly know that and it’s fine for them.

Probably only 10% of users even comment so if you’re that engaged you’re not the users they care about. And sure, those are the people posting content etc, but the Reddit calculation clearly is that they will be able to repost tiktok videos and memes onto the subs perfectly well without the users who want to leave. Which does include me, most likely.

Gallowboob alone is responsible for a large fraction of the top-scoring content on Reddit. The labor of reposting TikTok and tumblr onto a third platform is just not as valuable as aggrieved Redditors imagine. It can be replaced by a very small shell script, and that’s all you need to do, is to keep content flowing and there’ll be a large retention of users endlessly scrolling, that’s all it takes.

[thewataccount]

Content spam is way easier to manage especially automatically and I don't mean with LLMs, just current tools.

The only reason why it's working right now is because the mods in charge of these subs are upset, and a few mods can shutdown a 30m+ sub. I suspect the number of users on r/aww that care _that much_ to get their account banned for spam.

If it was just users being upset (which would be the case if reddit reclaims them) I just don't think there's enough upset people for there to be an impact like that.

[ribosometronome]

How have you come to that conclusion?

Just earlier this month Reddit started having issues with follower spam -- something that was specifically a problem because it bypassed volunteer mod control and Reddit was doing a shit job taking care of it. There were tons of threads about how to turn off those notifications.

Just yesterday Musk was lamenting about how bad the bot situation on Twitter has gotten recently.

And none of that even gets into keeping content on topic for a community, just straight up spam.

[wvenable]

The assumption is that those communities would just go back to normal if they were seized by Reddit. I'm not sure that's a good assumption.

[thewataccount]

r/aww is literally just cute animals. Most of the others are just memes/reposts of their respective topic.

There's plenty of mods from subreddits that didn't go dark and have 20m+, reddit can just put them in charge.

I highly doubt the specific mods matter that much on these "fluff" subreddits. Subreddits like r/apple I could see it mattering a lot more, but most of the top ones aren't exactly complex topics.

[wvenable]

> r/aww is literally just cute animals.

There is a social contract and moderator effort to make that happen. When that contract is broken and moderators are stretched thin, how long is that subreddit still going to be just cute animals?

[paulmd]

In six months the average front page-sub user won’t be aware there was ever a social contract broken. Look, cute puppies.

[gremlinsinc]

I'm betting all subreddits soon turn into /r/eyeblech (gore/death/dismemberment gifs). Not necessarily illegal, but definitely not what you're looking for when you go to /r/awww

[paulmd]

redditors really think they invented shitflooding lol

“Fact: there is NO DEFENSE against the digital ghillie suit!”

[thewataccount]

I appreciate the current mod's efforts.

And I completely agree with you on 95%+ of subs.

But I think there's enough active, and willing mods who already manage several large subreddits (10m+) capable of managing the half a dozen or so subs that I mentioned.

And I'm only talking about 6 subs, not even 10's of subs.

I just don't think theres enough ambiguity/complexity with moderating those in regards to choosing what content is or isn't appropriate for that sub.

But either way I truly hope we can get old reddit back, api, third party clients, and all :(

[SirSourdough]

If one of Reddits big goals in all this is to sell actually useful information on a broad variety of topics for training LLMs (I think they’ve basically said as much), then I’m not sure that only being able to prop up a few meme and cute animal subreddits is that much of a win.

It’s the long tail of niche subreddits where almost all the content that keeps Reddit at the top of SEO rankings and makes them interesting for training AI lives.

[max51]

can you name a single from r/aww ? Could you even tell if they reopened it with new mods? People are not that passionate about mods from a sub about cute animals.

Even in subs where people are very passionate about moderation, they just give up and forget about it very quickly because it's not worth it. r/Animemes/ still has orders of magnitude more visitors than the alternative people moved to after their big mod drama.

Extremely few people interacts with mods and care about them

[DSMan195276]

I suspect if Reddit starts replacing those mods outright you could see other mods leaving, it might work out for Reddit but it's a dangerous game. Also, which mods get removed, and would they be banned completely? The big subreddits have lots of mods, many who just help with small stuff and from my understanding do so over a lot of the large subreddits, so the actual details here of who stays, who's leaving what subreddits, etc. probably get murky pretty fast. (And that's besides the fact that the new mods would have little idea how things were currently run, unless some of the existing mods help them).

[jtode]

The selling point of Reddit, though, is not that r/popular is the greatest list of links ever created. The selling point is that you can tailor your links perfectly to your tastes, right? Good luck to them.

[634636346]

> futurology(18m),

I had no idea futurology was that big. I remember years ago when it used to be a singularity/life-extension/transhumanist subreddit, and then it got brigaded by climate change activists, to the point that most of the articles on the front page were about clean energy, rising sea levels, and recycling. Also a lot of doomer types actually bemoaning life extension outright, because of the usual nonsense about "where will we put ALL THE PEOPLE" and "Drump will live FOREVER." I stopped checking it out years ago, but it serves as a case study of how entryists co-opt and destroy online communities.

[predictabl3]

lol good luck getting to the singularity when food scarcity hits riot levels and the coasts are flooding. The future we get is the future we deserve, not the one we fantasize about.

[donmcronald]

> Beyond that, the minute the mods are official employees of Reddit, Reddit is fully responsible for all the content on all those subs. Social media companies are already under a lot of scrutiny for the kinds of content they allow on their platform. I doubt they'd want to go there.

Oh. Wow. I never thought about that. Does anyone know if section 230 of the DMCA shields Reddit from liability as-is?

>Reddit isn't even profitable. Hiring mods for thousands of subreddits would cost them a ton of money, not only in wages but in the cost of finding and training those workers.

And it would be a policy nightmare. Right now, most sub-reddits are flexible in terms of what they'll tolerate. At best I think they could have a single moderation policy applied across all sub-reddits they pay to moderate. Would that work?

[timdev2]

> Does anyone know if section 230 of the DMCA shields Reddit from liability as-is?

It does. (And 230 isn't part of the DMCA, it's the only surviving bit of the CDA).

[CryptoBanker]

That would work for implementation. No chance a single policy would work for users

[jd24]

there was a stat "92 of the most 500 popular subreddits are moderated by the same 5 people"; unpaid people at that

i think they can afford to replace the mods. it'll likely be their last resort though

[simlevesque]

Let me know if my math is wrong: it means that 5 people are on the moderation team of 18.4 subs. The 500 top subs often have mod teams from 20 to 50 people.

Bringing up that stat doesn't seem really relevant.

[jd24]

I'm saying it probably doesn't take much man power to moderate these subreddits as you might think. Bring in a team of 5-10 full time workers would probably be enough, tbh.

[jeltz]

And then what about all of the rest of Reddit? Let it become unmoderated hell?

[bdw5204]

I don't see how they'd have difficulties replacing the mods. Even if it's hard to find replacements within the Reddit community there are lots of blue checks on Twitter who'd probably be thrilled to take over Reddit moderation and might even pay Reddit for the privilege.

[TigeriusKirk]

Users could very easily make any sub effectively unmoddable if replacements are brought in. It wouldn't even take very many people.

[asah]

+1 - I've been a mod on a large sub, and it's serious business.

[majani]

Surely they can outsource mods from poor countries to do a half decent job for just a few hundred dollars a month

[ht85]

Looking forward to watch reddit corporate approved mods trying to deal with the platform. Lmao

[jordiburgos]

Isn't Reddit already responsible of all the content they have in the platform?

[blibble]

if they takeover a few of the higher value subs the majority of moderators will likely fall into line

[jeltz]

Why would they? I would expect them to rebel harder.

[frankreyes]

Section 230. Reddit is in the fence

[muttantt]

AI will replace the mods.

[rurp]

Ah yes, because LLMs are so reliable at understanding nuance and social context.

[Quikinterp]

Human reddit moderators already can't do that from my experience

[speedgoose]

I don’t know why you are downvoted. Reddit did annonce to some moderators that AI moderation was coming this year and I heard that some already have access for testing. I also heard that it works pretty well to automate many actions, though it still requires some humans.

[moskie]

AI will replace the users, too.

[mike-cardwell]

Just use Chat-GPT. The future of moderation. What could go wrong?

[frankreyes]

Skynet.gif

[johannes1234321]

Paying .kids for the large subreddits won't cost that much.

However doing that makes the company directly liable for all things. Right now they can at least try the legal argument "we just provide infrastructure and oh we didn't know what was uploaded there" as soon as they moderate themselves that blind eye strategy can't work at all. (Right now they can at least try it)

[paulmd]

No it doesn’t. Do you think Facebook mods are unpaid?

User content is the safety line, not whether the platform pays moderators.

[linuxftw]

I think you underestimate the ability of AI to literally solve this problem for almost nothing. The large subs can absolutely be automated moderation, if they're not already. Enough flags on a post? Just take it down, there will be 15 million new posts in an hour.

[skilled]

Too easily gamed and not reliable. And if people find out you are using AI for modding, they will find a way to mess with it.

A human has discernment. An AI is looking at cute colors at a wall but doesn’t actually know which one is red or blue.

[tester457]

If only there was a way to prevent prompt injection.

[throw16180339]

> Just take it down, there will be 15 million new posts in an hour.

I'm a mod at a 150k+ user subreddit. AI can probably handle removing objectionable content, but I spend most of my time on other areas that are much less susceptible to automation.

• Removing requests when there are recent similar posts. We've found that users disengage when the same requests are posted every week.

• Hosting AMAs. An AI isn't going to know who we should invite or whether they'll be a good fit for our subreddit.

• Detecting and banning people deceptively promoting their own products. This is incredibly common and often quite difficult.

[linuxftw]

I'm confident an AI can be utilized for 'remove duplicate content' type of operation.

AMAs don't require a mod to participate, just the community. All mods really do is sticky a thread.

People deceptively promoting their own products, others are free to down vote them and report the post.

[throw16180339]

Exact duplicates are already automatically removed by bots. We remove request posts that lack detail or when there have been several similar active posts within the year. This strikes a balance between allowing every post only once and swamping the subreddit with nearly identical requests. We removed about 75% of the posts reported for this category last month, the remaining 25% either didn't have previous similar requests or had enough to detail to stay up. Many cases are ambiguous and resolved by majority vote.

AMAs don't happen spontaneously in major subs. As with everything else, there's a lot of admin work that goes on behind the scenes. We mostly invite people for AMAs; under 10% of this year's 10+ AMAs were requested by the participant. Someone has to email them, answer their questions, schedule a time, explain how to post, join them in a chat channel, etc.

Deceptive promotion is rarely flagged on our sub. We got ~450 reports last month and none of them were for promotion. Promotion posts are quite rare; they're against our rules and most people don't even try. What we regularly see are comments from users recommending their own products. Some cases are obvious, e.g. new accounts frequently recommending a book without ratings that was released yesterday. Many are much harder to identify; we regularly search user profiles and the Internet to confirm an identity. One person we banned last year had been covertly recommending their book for months. It took numerous searches and several weeks to remove all their promotion comments.

[1270018080]

We're in the "this is how blockchain can solve this" era of the AI bubble.

[linuxftw]

It seems to me a very trivial problem to classify a post as on topic or not with today's AI capabilities.

[whatyesaid]

Well that means bots can take anything down unless you become really good at detecting bots. Not like it's hard for bots to get points you can do so with reposting and GPT for comments.

[linuxftw]

I'm sure they have metrics at this point on how often real humans take a particular action. If an account is reporting posts higher than some amount X, then shadow ban that account.

[actionablefiber]

Do you think users will continue to report posts if they see that reporting too often will cause them to be shadowbanned?

Conversely if you are in the business of publishing spam to Reddit, wouldn’t it be useful if you could overwhelm the site with spam such that the people who care enough report all of the spam they see will get banned?

[linuxftw]

I think the vast majority of Reddit's userbase, normies, won't know the difference and won't care. It will literally be an invisible change.

[actionablefiber]

Will it, though?

For how much I see people here saying AI moderation can solve this, I frankly think AI tools are likely to be an order of magnitude better at playing offense than defense - producing huge volumes of AI-generated spam/marketing/offensive content that could fool an AI content moderation algorithm on the other side.

[bentcorner]

I think you underestimate the ability of AI to literally solve this problem for almost nothing. The large subs can absolutely be botted, if they're not already. Enough flags on an account? Just take it down, there will be 15 million new accounts in an hour.

[jfghi]

Even if this was feasible, how much would it cost and how long would it take to successfully roll out?

[gunchie]

Reddit are already using AI for first-line moderation on their site-wide reports. It only reaches a human if there's an appeal.