[shmatt]

I never understand why Reddit is credited to the "free community based moderation" idea

Facebook does this at much larger scale (2B users active in FB Groups), with way more spam, and some FB groups are much larger than most big subreddits

Its not about Facebook or Reddit, its about people being so power hungry they do these things for free. When subreddits post about bringing in more mods, thousands apply, maybe 2 get in. If Reddit deems locked subreddits abandoned, there is already a system to give the abandoned subreddit to anyone else that wants it (within reason). Subreddits also split pretty often due to mod infighting

The last thing that bugs me is peoples claims the new mods (if chosen by reddit employees) wont be as high quality as the previous ones. No one has ever proven the current moderation teams are any good. The infighting is because some mods love adding arbitrary rules like "no relationship posts" in AITA. Does everyone agree with that? Is that a perfect rule? Why? A new moderation team could be just as good or just as bad as the previous one

[dobs]

Part of the complexity of moderating on Reddit vs. moderating on Facebook is Reddit's open-by-default nature and limited control provided to moderators.

For example: Optionally requiring a questionnaire before being able to post to a Facebook group significantly cuts down on spam. Reddit doesn't really have an equivalent. If a Reddit mod wants to implement similar? They could use the API to write something that blackholes new members' comments until they respond to an automated message. Not a great user experience and what happens if Reddit pricing changes now make that integration prohibitively expensive?

Some mods certainly power-trip but ultimately the role isn't a glamorous one: You're a volunteer customer success agent. Most of the work isn't hard or controversial, but at the scale of Reddit there's a _lot_ of it. The hardest part of recruiting new moderators is finding people who'll remain even minimally engaged. Replacing them certainly isn't impossible but the process of replacing proven-engaged moderators with newcomers that need to be vetted can be a ton of work in itself.

[Macha]

> The last thing that bugs me is peoples claims the new mods (if chosen by reddit employees) wont be as high quality as the previous ones. No one has ever proven the current moderation teams are any good.

There is some competition between subreddits for attention, and a bad mod team can cause a subreddit to lose that competition (including to subreddits on different subjects), so there is some amount of successful community building that must have happened.

Certainly Reddit's setup does incentivize name squatting, but there's been plenty of cases where the obvious name is run by a team so ineffective that it gets outcompeted (r/marijuana vs r/trees, r/lgbt vs r/ainbow, r/moddedmc vs r/feedthebeast are some examples). And plenty of communities get by with non-obvious names, like r/DestinyTheGame, r/Pathfinder_RPG, so it's not purely a name race.

[ilyt]

>There is some competition between subreddits for attention, and a bad mod team can cause a subreddit to lose that competition (including to subreddits on different subjects), so there is some amount of successful community building that must have happened.

Yeah but they need to be BAD. "Mediocre enough that users don't want to migrate elsewhere" (like /r/games) seems to be enough to keep it running and gaining subs just fine

[Macha]

r/games was once the upstart and had to gain enough users who wanted something more moderated/curated than r/gaming to get to its current position.

[ilyt]

And now sticky with mods declaring "well, we will not do anything about the situation" sits at 0 upvotes (in reddit speak: it got more downvotes and upvotes), with a bunch of well-upvoted comments about how sub should participate in the protest. They are completely detached from their userbase.

[GravityisaHoax]

I just read the sticky and those are some real stupid reasons to not blackout the sub, and instead just made a half-assed attempt to participate.

I've never visited r/games and now I'm glad I never have.

[patmorgan23]

Don't forget the epic story of the fall of r/worldpolitics and the rise of r/anime_titties as its replacement.

[dredmorbius]

So, um, storytime?

(I'm unfamiliar with this.)

[Macha]

r/worldpolitics gradually became overtaken by US politics since Reddit is so dominated by US users. This displeased international users, as r/politics was already US-centric politics, and so r/worldpolitics had been seen as a place to discuss rest of world politics.

The head mod did not agree, and after a couple of years of the sub being basically unmoderated and 90% US politics, and generating user complaints as a result, threw a tantrum and said anything goes, and posted a load of anime porn.

Since the subreddit named world politics was now full of anime porn, and a little inspired by the subreddit r/marijuanaenthusiasts (the subreddit about Botany, since r/trees was taken by the weed people), a bunch of users decided to create a subreddit called r/anime_titties for discussing non-US politics.

[dredmorbius]

Ah.

And yes, I'm familiar with /r/trees and /r/marijuanaenthusiasts, a couple of favourite examples.

[UncleSlacky]

Except on April 1st, of course.

[insickness]

> There is some competition between subreddits for attention

The existing sub-subreddits organically evolved from disputes between more primary subreddits about the type of content users wanted to see; e.g. r/atheism decides they don't want low-quality meme posts, so r/atheismmemes is created. If reddit were to simply remove the mods from thousands of subreddits, it could easily sour those communities.

[silisili]

This tracks exactly with what I've noticed.

r/fragrance for example decided to stay open, but the mods just would quit doing anything. That'll show us!

What happened: no spam. A few silly posts. A lot of good posts. A lot of people remarking how much better the sub is without mods. Mods returned, promising to 'consider community feedback' once they realized they lost control of the narrative.

[chongli]

That's only in the short term. Long term, we've seen what happens to unmoderated discussions: spam, (child) porn, violent/illegal images, and more. The worst humanity has to offer.

It's like taking your hands off the wheel when driving. A few seconds and you're probably okay. An hour? You're in a ditch!

[silisili]

Oh, I completely agree that some moderation is needed, make no mistake about that. Just agreeing mainly with the point that most modding on Reddit is a power play, not altruism.

[Goronmon]

Just agreeing mainly with the point that most modding on Reddit is a power play, not altruism.

Sure, but modding is something you don't need...until you absolutely do. Just takes one person who wants to spam porn/gore/etc to a subreddit/forum/etc and without a human able to ban/limit those actions, it's trivial to takeover a smaller community.

[dymk]

This is a very simplistic take about thousands of people who mod thousands of subs for, presumably, more reasons than you could possibly enumerate

[dredmorbius]

I suspect that Reddit's own automated systems catch a lot of that. There are strong indicators of that type of spam.

I moderate a few small, and mostly inactive, subs. They don't see a whole lot of activity.

On the odd moments I do drop into mod mode (a few times a year, if that), what I see is a fair bit of flagged spam ... and a lot of off-topic posts. One sub in particular seems to have had its topic (a software application of use to Google+ users saving data, which was last relevant on 1 April 2019) with an exam of some sort in India.

Topic drift, relevance drift, and lightweight content displacing substantive posts are far more likely without dedicated, mission-aware mods. AskScience and AskHistorians would be most especially subject to that, as well known examples. I can think of numerous others.

The other issue would be various forms of abuse and brigading, below the thresholds which Reddit's automated systems would detect. Unmoderated forums would far more likely become unpleasant places to participate.

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

I'm curious. Do you know of a class of "illegal images" that aren't also "child porn"? Or are you just listing this twice?

To be specific, I'm referring to in non-crazy western countries with something resembling freedom of speech, not PRC "Winnie the Pooh is banned" places.

[mvdtnz]

> The last thing that bugs me is peoples claims the new mods (if chosen by reddit employees) wont be as high quality as the previous ones. No one has ever proven the current moderation teams are any good.

In fact it is well known that current Reddit moderators are often very bad and contribute to the worst parts of Reddit culture. It has been discussed here, and on Reddit, how big of a problem current moderator practices are. Yet due to this protest we seem to have developed a collective amnesia and now we're all pretending that the current set of moderators are the heroes of the Reddit story. Baffling. Most of Reddit would be improved by a large-scale shake-up of moderators.

[a1369209993]

> and now we're all pretending that the current set of moderators are the heroes of the Reddit story.

It's like the British Empire, Soviet Union, and United States in World War II - it's not that they don't have a long and storied history of crimes against humanity (or the internet as the case may be) themselves; it's that their opponents are so despicable we're happy to see anyone picking a fight with them. If the moderators (respectively allies) want to call themselves the heroes of that story... well, in strictly relative terms they are.

[ttctciyf]

> current Reddit moderators are often very bad

Though I think a lot of the most notoriously awful moderation cliques (r/ukpolitics for example) have eschewed the blackout.

[guerrilla]

Or you're wrong and there's an actual reason that 90% of the subreddits went on strike such that any new mods wouldn't accept these conditions either. Like you really think people are so power hungry they'd sign up to do this for free while being restricted to using only one finger to do all of the work or something absurd like that? No, there are limits.

[mvdtnz]

> Like you really think people are so power hungry they'd sign up to do this for free while being restricted to using only one finger to do all of the work or something absurd like that?

Isn't that exactly what people have been doing for well over a decade?

[guerrilla]

No, third parties made tools for them (and some automated things themselves.) Now those tools are being taken away from them. They would basically have to pay to be mods to continue doing things the way they were being done. That's my understanding of the situation anyway.

[shmatt]

then resigning would have been the way to go. shutting off access to the knowledge base others contributed to is a power play

if you volunteer at a dog shelter, and find you don't agree with some of their practices anymore. do you stop volunteering? or do you just set all the dogs free

[guerrilla]

No, strikes have always been the way to effectively deal with these things. Setting the dogs free is not a strike. You can read up on how effective strikes have been executed ethically when critical care is involved; this isn't one of them though. It's naive to call it a "power play" though since literally every alternative by every actor involved is a "power play", just some are more effective than others.

[bamfly]

> The last thing that bugs me is peoples claims the new mods (if chosen by reddit employees) wont be as high quality as the previous ones.

Regardless of how high-quality the replacements might be under ideal conditions, I think it would be very surprising if average quality didn't suffer when trying to replace hundreds or thousands of them very quickly, versus the slower, incremental growth that resulted in the original bunch.

[basch]

I could make a huge list of what Reddit design gets wrong, or at least outdated or suboptimal. But the land grab for names turned into one of its biggest, fixable weaknesses.

Reddit should boot up another letter, /d/ or something, and give the communities numbers or hex identifiers, (which they already sort of do with the short urls) and make the names irrelevant. Communities can choose to port over and redirect. Over time, the ones that don’t fade to disappearing from all and eventually go private.

Tying name to community url makes discoverability of replacement communities shitty for new users. Politics is easy to understand. Whatever people come up with as a substitute word for a forked community, will be less clear. Of forked communities, maybe only trees and rainbow came up with a better name.

[blehn]

So there would be 200 communities called "Politics" that are differentiated only by url hashes? How is that make it any easier for users to discover or understand the communities? There are dozens of different brands of laundry detergent at the grocery store — it's much easier to communicate and discover "Tide", "Gain", "Ecos" than it is "Detergent#17", "Detergent#08", "Detergent#32"...

[basch]

You can make two Facebook groups with the same name, and Facebook seems to be managing ok

[dredmorbius]

There are some strong arguments to be made for disambiguating identifiers from semantics.

Hacker News is interesting in that it somewhat splits the difference. Post and comments are both represented by "itemID" (and there's no distinction between What Is a Post and What Is a Comment that can be made simply based on the contentID). For example, I'm currently replying to itemID 36329954.

But profile identifiers are semantically-sensible strings. In your case "blehn", in mine, "dredmorbius".

(There may well be, and all but certainly is, an internal userID or similar, but it's not exposed at least through the Web interface, I've not looked at the API in detail for this.)

This means, amongst other things, that it's possible to traverse all extant HN posts either sequentially (beginning with <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1>) or randomly (say, by generating a list and sorting it randomly, or by algorithmically calculating itemIDs without repetition).

Google+ did this for both posts and profile IDs, assigning each what appeared to be a hash, which was not sequential, and was sparsely filled. Profile names / labels could be reassigned independently of that identifier (with limits as to how frequently this was allowed), and multiple profiles with the same name were permitted, addressing the "John Smith" or "Maria Gonzalez" problems (commonly-occurring names where all but the first-arriving party must choose something different). It was not possible to trivially traverse the (large, hashed) namespace, though Google being Google these were itemised in some 50,000 or so sitemap files, a fact I exploited to some benefit.[1]

In the case of a discussion site in which forum identifiers are arbitrary but labels are semantic, issues such as discovery, relevance, and trust would be mediated by some other mechanism. Note that the extant Reddit practice already has numerous issues, e.g., /r/ClimateChange is a sub devoted to denialism (under the pretext of "rational" discussion and skepticism) whilst the scientific consensus is far better represented at /r/climate.[2]

What the intermediation of arbitrary identifiers vs. descriptive labels provides is defence against squatting or appropriation of high-value, high-salience identifiers by malevolent actors. If your label is independent of your description and reputation, it's less tractable as a means of disinformation or propaganda.

________________________________

Notes:

1. "Estimating G+ User Activity: 4-6 million active posters in January 2015 to date" <https://ello.co/dredmorbius/post/naya9wqdemiovuvwvoyquq>

2. And regards the present Reddit Blackout, I'll note that the denialist subreddit is available, the consensus subreddit is blacked out. Which raises interesting points about the challenges of adhering to moral principles in an immoral world. I also note that ClimateChange's long-standing moderator appears to have been inactive for the past 9 months, though they are still listed as chef moderator. It's possivle, though uncertain, that former characterisation of that sub may well have changed.

[scythe]

>/d/ or something

But not /d/, you don't want that implication.

[ndiddy]

I'm sure a lot of the Reddit users wouldn't mind

[pbae]

Reddit should allow shadow moderation teams to fork a subreddit--easily findable on the subreddit's page rather than through the grapevine about the alt's existence, which users can opt into--to address the issue of name squatting and overbearing moderation. If a critical mass of users vote with their feet, they can flip the subreddit. It would also let users be aware of what the issue in contention are and choose what they want to read, whereas currently the mod teams are pretty quick to squelch all dissent so that their captive audience isn't even aware of the drama.

[oska]

I've had thoughts along similar lines. My idea was that users should have the ability to select their favoured mod team from a range of teams. So all moderating the same namespace but swapping out different mod teams would give you a different view of the content in that namespace.

[fnord77]

"its about people being so power hungry they do these things for free."

Or they work for 3rd party groups who have an agenda they want to push

[NoMoreNicksLeft]

> No one has ever proven the current moderation teams are any good.

They evaluated themselves and found that they were actually excellent moderators.

[dredmorbius]

There are well over a million subreddits.

Even counting just large groups, there likely several thousand subreddits which have individually-specific focuses and moderation criteria. Reddit reports 100+ million active subreddits.[1]

The two problems with moving to an in-house, wage-labour moderation team are that this is expensive and wage labour at prices Reddit is likely willing to pay will not meet the standards of dedicated volunteer teams.

From various sources I've encountered over the years, human-based moderation peaks at somewhere between 500--1,000 items/day (multiple sources put a peak at about 700--800, though that's with very thin review). Reddit ... doesn't seem to offer stats on daily / monthly comment volume, though it claims ~60m DAU and 13 billion posts and comments overall. I'm going to SWAG[2] and assume roughly half of those have occurred in the past five years, which would mean that there are ... about 3,300 posts / comments day. Which seems low, so my SWAG's probably wrong. If 13 billion items are posted per year, then there are ~35 million items posted per day. That seems possibly high, though Facebook's claim is 5 billion items/day, so ... maybe? shrug

One criteria I've suggested for moderation elsewhere is based on prevalence, which is the number of times an item is viewed. Short version: prevalence follows a power-law distribution, and as the views threshold is raised, the number of items falls off drastically. With some tuning and adjustments (e.g., risk-rating comments to raise or lower estimated harms), it's possible for a finite moderation team to offer an SLA[3] that content with a given prevalence threshold will be reviewed. It's also possible to set holds such that content reaching that threshold is withheld from further visibility until it is reviewed (say, if some specific item starts taking off), which effectively throttles visibility of content and scales it to the limited moderation resource.

(I'm not aware of any UGC[1] service applying this model to moderation, but it is one which strongly suggests itself. It is effectively what a gate-kept editorial model applies, e.g., where an editor specifically reviews all incoming entries from a "slush pile"[5].)

Going back to my content numbers above, a 35 million items/day content stream and a moderation team capable of reviewing 500 items/day (roughly 1 minute per item on average) ... would requite a 70,000 member moderation team, which is likely prohibitive for Reddit.[6] A prevalence set such that 10% of all items require human review reduces that to 7,000, still likely high, and a 1% review which would still cover the overwhelming majority of all content presentations) a somewhat more tractable 700. From third party and my own sources there's a roughly inverse relationship between content items* and prevalence, such that increasing prevalence 10x reduces the number of individual content items by a factor of 10. For reference, looking at Hacker News historical front pages and votes and comments of the 1st and 30th ranked stories, we see about 6.3x more votes, and 3.8x more comments on the 1st-ranked story.[7] For Google+, a near-logrithmic scaling of number of communities vs. size was noted.[8]

________________________________

Notes:

1. As of January 2021: <https://www.redditinc.com/>

2. <https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Scientific_wild-ass_guess>

3. Service level agreement, basically a guaranteed minimum service level.

4. User-generated content.

5. <https://www.writersdigest.com/getting-published/what-is-the-...>

6. The somewhat better-capitalised Facebook is reported to have 7,500 moderators: <https://www.vice.com/en/article/xwk9zd/how-facebook-content-...>

7. Own data based on a crawl of all HN front page "past" listings from 2007-2-20 through 2023-6-13, with 178,642 stories.

8. Own data based on a crawl of all extant ~8.1 million Google+ Communities, data provided by Friends+Me creator. The data actually show far fewer large communities than a strictly log-log relation would suggest, for reasons that are unclear. See: <https://diaspora.glasswings.com/posts/ab6a5470f57001368d4002...>

[dredmorbius]

Interesting side note.

A discussion elsewhere had me looking at how much front-page HN activity is attributable to what number of profiles. Using my crawl data mentioned above:

  - 2 submitters with > 1,000 stories
  - 170 w/ >= 100
  - 2,812 w/ >= 10
  - 19,165 w/ >=2

That very nearly perfectly follows the rule I'd given above: reducing the items by a factor of ten (here: number of front-page posts) increases the submitters by about a factor of 10 (roughly: 2, 200, 2,000, 20,000).

Half of all HN front-page stories since 2007 were submitted by just 2,092 profiles, of 43,598 represented in all front-page stories. As of 2021, Whaly.io found 767,496 active profiles since 2005: <https://whaly.io/posts/hacker-news-2021-retrospective>. (Post or comment activity.)