Tell HN: Reddit Removes Multiple Moderator Teams of Large Subreddits

[MicropenisMike]

Reddit has removed the entire moderator teams for several communities, includes:

* /r/InterestingAsFuck (11.5 million subs)

* /r/MildlyInteresting (22.3 million subs)

* /r/TIHI (1.7 million subs)

Plus many others.

These were subreddits that held a community vote with tens of thousands of votes to decide what type of content to allow.

NSFW content won, with the implication that NSFW subreddits cannot be monetized.

These subreddits are now restricted and unmoderated, available for request to new moderators through /r/redditrequest.

[SheepHerdr]

Reddit's explanation (from an admin account, /u/ModCodeofConduct) is that 'encouraging the submission of sexually explicit (18+) content in previously safe-for-work spaces' counts as 'engaging in malicious conduct' that breaks the Moderator Code of Conduct.

https://twitter.com/aaronp613/status/1671298446974656514

To me it doesn't seem like they actually violated any Reddit policy or code of conduct, particularly because the NSFW content was properly labeled.

https://www.redditinc.com/policies/moderator-code-of-conduct

https://www.redditinc.com/policies/content-policy

The same admin account was also caught quietly flipping the NSFW subs back to SFW status. So this is clearly just about getting back that monetization.

https://www.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/14ebl7k/umodcodeo...

[KennyBlanken]

Given the mod team encouraged people to upload pictures of fruit and vegetables that were suggestive of butts and dicks and vulvas and such...

...no, it's clearly about someone at reddit raging out of control and grasping at straws to justify banhammering mods in a desperate attempt to save a ship that has split in two, is on fire, leaking radioactive waste, while sharks circle.

I've seen this happen on mailing lists and discussion boards where an admin/mod throws a major wobbly and just starts banning people like crazy for the slightest infractions to scare everyone else into "behaving." That's about when quietly someone who is respected pools together every email they can get their hands on and invites everyone to mailing list run elsewhere.

[Doxin]

See also: the way freenode went under. Some asshole seized power, and then nothing happened for a bit. Then staffers got replaced as they got too uppity. Then a bit later anyone mentioning libera.chat in official freenode channels got kicked. Then the mods of any channel mentioning libera.chat in the topic got replaced. And then there was no one left as everyone had moved over to libera.

[rho138]

Stares at r/worldpolitics like wtf

Edit: long live r/animetitties

[ironcrotch]

I quit Reddit but that subreddit is one that I truly miss and not sure if will be replaceable given the history how it started and it’s content

[riku_iki]

> So this is clearly just about getting back that monetization.

and back that normal experience of millions of readers of those subreddits.

[cyanydeez]

Which was earned via moderation and 3rd party apps

[riku_iki]

time will show if old mods and 3p apps are that critical, since both are removed now.

[ImPostingOnHN]

time already shew, since the subreddits exist as they are now

obviously taking what they built and saying "I built this" wouldn't show anything but spez's pettiness

[riku_iki]

reddit team's contribution in "building" is not smaller than those mods.

[davikr]

Moderators should have thought of all the people that can't live without their daily "fix" before interrupting their volunteer work for a few days, right.

[riku_iki]

moderator's of subs from above extended their activities past few days.

[evandale]

except the community voted for a new normal...

[riku_iki]

could you give a link?

[predictabl3]

No, no. If you purport to know what redditors supposedly want, you can read the OP and simply go to the listed subreddits and see the top posts for the votes/announcements.

edit: I mean let's be real, you've been panning for reddit for two weeks. You're concern trolling asking for links.

[Fatnino]

Send him a link to a butthole picture

[riku_iki]

I actually checked "interesting as f" subreddit, which I am also long time subscriber, and couldn't locate poll right away.

[ImPostingOnHN]

why?

[TpA3GvjQk5bq2fY]

The key point that you seem to be missing is that those millions of readers voted for the mods to take the action they are taking.

You're the minority and you're expecting to run the show. That's not how it works.

[riku_iki]

I couldn't find poll on interesting as f subreddit where millions of users voted for a porn on front page.

[8note]

The only real end to this is reddit taking ownership over moderation, and hiring paid moderators for all the subreddits, turning off user created subreddits.

Maybe it'll also mean turning off user generated content too, and only have admin made posts, the same as Digg did. They could hire the power-users to keep making the relevant posts.

People you don't have on contract are a liability

[KennyBlanken]

There's simply no way for that to be economically viable.

That's the whole point of reddit; for various reasons they convinced people to give them fuckloads of free labor.

Reddit brilliantly acted like "king" giving fiefdoms out to mods and pretending like it was "theirs." "Here, dear mod! Here is some internet land to rule mostly as you see fit."

Well...the king demanded a huge tithe, a good portion of the lords told the king his mother was a hamster and his father smelled like elderberries....and the king is now laying down the law and making it very clear who everything actually belongs to.

The problem is: without any lords, the king has no power, because he can't possibly administer all the fiefdoms himself...and right now, a lot of the peasants really fucking hate the king, and like the lords.

Right now spez is trying to scare mods straight and reward those who toe the line by redistributing fiefdoms to them.

[lrae]

> The only real end to this is reddit taking ownership over moderation, and hiring paid moderators for all the subreddits, turning off user created subreddits.

how so? there are more than enough moderators left who have no issue with reddit's current behaviour and will continue modding for free.

[everforward]

There probably are, but given the level of malicious compliance the user base has been exhibiting, how many of those mod applicants do you think intend to make another "pictures of John Oliver" rule? How do you separate the legit mods from people who just want to carry on the protest?

I guess they could audit submission history, but there's a chance of that blowing up as users decide the mods are shills. I've rarely seen Reddit as mad as when they decide someone is a shill, and the vitriol is likely to make the new mods' lives hard. Especially so if they're new mods, and aren't as used to people hurling insults and maybe death threats at them (I don't know how likely death threats are, but it seems like everyone with any online visibility gets them these days).

I'm sure they could eventually find mods, but I think there will be chaos in that process. I guess the question is whether they're willing to extend the current chaos to keep free moderation, or if they'd rather pony up some money to end it now.

Edit: added "free" in the last paragraph, last sentence between "keep" and "moderation"

[ImPostingOnHN]

there are more than enough sex offenders willing to step up and replace daycare employees, that doesn't mean it's a good idea

[gardnr]

They don't need users to generate content anymore. They have LLMs trained to strategically produce the best comments.

[over_bridge]

I wonder how long it would take to notice.

Shadowban all users. Respond to their comments and posts with AI generated responses only visible to the poster. Redditors famously don't want others to know their handle so they won't share it around. You could only tell from a signed out device reading something you commented in.

Flood the site with generated posts and 'engagement' that is all ad friendly. Turn the whole place into Weenie Hut Jr.

Do this pre IPO then bail forever.

[muzani]

Even when 90% of subs were down, I didn't notice much difference. I visited r/interestingAsFuck several times but it was candy. It's why I delete Reddit every now and then.

There's a lot of reposted content too. I tried to farm r/poetry to feed my LLM, but the top stuff are the same reposted poems and edgy anti-poetry. Reddit could just repost the same thing again and again.

[NikkiA]

> Flood the site with generated posts and 'engagement' that is all ad friendly. Turn the whole place into Weenie Hut Jr.

> Do this pre IPO then bail forever.

I wonder if that would constitute what the SEC calls "Internet fraud" at that point.

[freediverx]

I hope Reddit does exactly that, the better to accelerate it’s destruction.

[oidar]

Submissions are disabled as well... I can't remember what digg did wrong, but it wasn't worse than this.

[HWR_14]

IIRC, they changed the UX to version 4. It was unpopular.

[ivraatiems]

Update: At least for some subreddits, the mod teams have been reinstated (also with no communication or warning). See https://old.reddit.com/r/ModCoord/comments/14eq8ip/the_entir...

[refurb]

In 10 years we'll be talking about Reddit like we talk about MySpace today.

[TheLoafOfBread]

Actually it feels more like Tumblr.

* Tumblr was living from NSFW content and when they banned NSFW content Tumblr basically ceased to exist.

* Reddit is living from free moderation and when they banned 3rd party tools for moderation, because Reddit ones sucks, they might be going in same direction as Tumblr.

[solardev]

Um... maybe this proves your point... but what is Tumblr? Is it some sort of image hosting site like Flickr or Imgur?

[ryanbrunner]

An alternate universe twitter is probably a better comparison. Content largely tends to be images or video but can be text posts as well. It started off much less "federated" where you were running your own "blog" on Tumblr that had it's own styling, but it's become increasingly centralized.

"Reblogs" are a bigger feature on Tumblr than twitter generally and the reply / threading structure is pretty unique, which has a tendency to create a lot of blogs that are essentially 100% reblogging other content.

[nucleative]

Pretty much. With blackjack and hookers...

[freediverx]

Make that two years.

[irthomasthomas]

Weird that r/programming is still down, when it's run by reddit staff.[0]

[0] https://web.archive.org/web/20230612074029/https://old.reddi...

[dredmorbius]

As I've posted to HN elsewhere, my four-digit-membership ten-year-old personal bloggish-subreddit to which Reddit admins had previously pledged would not be reassigned to another moderator ... has received a ModCodeOfConduct notice.

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36434885>

[unstatusthequo]

Would be great if the new mods sandbagged the mod approval process and then took it private again. That would be enormously amusing.

[sershe]

I'm going to offer a perhaps contrarian opinion - I am with reddit here, and I think removing community mods is a great idea, especially the vocal mods. I think vast majority of online mods that are active - i.e. if you don't consider those that care minimally and just remove outright spam and bad conduct, and by definition would not be part of the "protest", are the worst of their communities and should be removed even in normal times.

In Russian there's a saying that can be translated as "doorman (or consiege/bouncer) syndrome", where an otherwise pitiful person (a doorman controlling access to some venue, more common in Soviet union even for e.g. dorms) has a little bit of local power and discretion and uses it in at best arbitrary, and at worst actively malicious and power-trippy way, because they can. That's your average /vocal/ internet moderator.

A good example from Reddit is recent /r/comicbooks case where any mention of Rippaverse comics were being removed and users banned because one of the mods disagrees with the author's right-libertarian politics. It's even worse in Facebook groups where I've seen mods remove users for no reason, including someone who happened to create/join the mod team on the first major city-wide board-gaming group banning a bunch of people explicitly over politics (not discussing politics in the group, just having wrong politics at all), because "it's muh group!" (pretty much an actual quote)

Why would reddit stand for losers on a power trip controlling a community for a popular topic on their property, just because they were "there first"? It makes no sense. I totally buy an argument that most users just want to participate, and they only need mods to maintain the manners and clean up spam.

Reddit should just kick all the mods out from the major/general-purpose/large-geographical-entity subreddits, and have paid mods to do the above.

[seydor]

Does anybody know what s happening with r/MachineLearning? Are the moderators dead?

[ChildOfChaos]

Couldn’t Reddit just fix this by providing good mod tools before they make the api switch?

[johnnyanmac]

That means working on features that don't have short terms profitability. Can't have that, Huffman has an IPO to cash out on.

But yes. This isn't just some freak accident explosion from mods. This has been bubbling up for at least 7 years and is partially a result of Reddit refusing to help their free labor continue to give free labor.

Which is sad because it WORKED. Mods just made their own tools or used the tools of other. But now Reddit is taking those tools away instead of promising better native support.

[freediverx]

Reddit couldn’t design a decent piece of software if their life depended on it.

[wozer]

They could have.

But by now they have probably irrecoverably destroyed their relationship to the existing community. Maybe they can build a new community.

[seydor]

at this point they weren't moderators, they were squatters and vandals

[flixing]

they have every right to do so and it's well needed. Few teenager thinking they are playing games just by being a mod of a commercial platform. bunch of kids.

[TheLoafOfBread]

Then the platform should have professional paid mods instead. But that would not be economically viable for Reddit. So those teenagers are subsidizing Reddit by their free time.

[sethammons]

Help me understand your position. Why was it well needed? Why is it not a game being a mod and how does being commercialized play into that? Why does their age matter?

I feel you think the answers are obvious. They are not to me.

[johnnyanmac]

yes, replace your teenager mods with... more teenager mods for a future meltdown. Great strategy.

[ChildOfChaos]

This is good to see, a lot of moderators are power hungry, egotistical jerks.

I am glad these subreddits have been returned back to the community, perhaps the Reddit staff can moderate for now.

[rjbwork]

>I am glad these subreddits have been returned back to the community

The community voted on the changes. You can go look up the polls that were held for yourself.

>perhaps the Reddit staff can moderate for now

Lol. Not a viable business model for reddit. Their entire revenue is less than what facebook spends on just moderation.

[johnnyanmac]

>perhaps the Reddit staff can moderate for now.

I hope so. Put their money where their mouth is if they want the rules they refuse to put in the TOS.

But from your POV, we both know that won't happen. They just recruite more power hungry, egotistical jerks because it's cheap. And you'll continue to hate them.

[mhoad]

Seems like this thread is getting suppressed. We have front page submissions that have been around for an hour and have just 7 votes while this one is 45 minutes old and has 35. Weird and non transparent moderation decision.

[dang]

I added an automatic penalty for Reddit stories a while ago because of https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que....

Once this tsunami dies down, we'll put it back the way it was before. In the meantime, when there's significant new information (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=false&so...), we can take the penalty off. The trouble is that it's not exactly easy to tell significant new information apart from significant new drama. Plus I was offline for part of the day yesterday.

As you can see from the above HN Search link, it's not like HN has been lacking for Reddit discussion—the problem is all the other way.

[dredmorbius]

How long ago is "a while ago"?

Why change the weighting given stories on a given topic without notice?

And how do you reconcile this change with HN's long-standing policy that "We moderate HN less, not more, when YC or YC startups are the story", which is "literally the first rule of HN moderation"?

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34320816>

Reiterated within the past week: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36366909>

[dang]

> How long ago is "a while ago"?

A few days ago.

> Why change the weighting given stories on a given topic without notice?

We don't give notice about that kind of thing.

> And how do you reconcile this change with HN's long-standing policy

It follows it strictly. HN has had over 500 threads about Reddit, containing over 25,000 comments, in the 3 weeks since this kerfuffle went kablooey. (And that's just the threads with "reddit" in the title - there have been plenty more.) For any other topic that repetitive and drama-filled, we would have penalized it much more and much earlier.

The rule is that we moderate less, not more, when YC or a YC startup is the story. Note the word "less". We still moderate, we just do it less—and we've done it way less on this Reddit tsunami than we otherwise would have. In fact we probably went too far in the other direction.

I mean just look at those search results: https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1687485600&dateRange=custom&.... That is nuts, way over the top, and not at all standard practice for HN. The idea (if anyone is entertaining it) that we've somehow suppressed this story is pretty silly when it's one of the most-discussed (and most repetitively, and indignantly) topics of all time.

If there's significant new information, you'd be welcome to let us know at [e-mail] so we can take a look. I didn't see significant new information at https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36434885, and I certainly didn't see a substantively different discussion in the HN comments - merely the same rehash.

[dredmorbius]

As always, thanks for your response, dang.

My principle concern here is with transparency and fairness. I'll argue that HN is reasonably good about the latter. For the former, though, there's some pretty serious spelunking that's required to determine practices and policies. The task isn't impossible, you've written numerous times on why shorter and more flexible guidelines are preferable to long and strict ones. And I often (though sometimes grudgingly) come to understand, if not necessarily accept, your position.

I'm well aware of the recent flood of Reddit submissions, and I've made the point myself a couple of times in the past weeks: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36435319> and <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36321773>, and specifically noted that "Reddit" in titles is trending well above the historical high-water mark set in 2012 (46 mentions for the year), a point I'd made to suggest that HN was not over-penalising the topic.

I'd like to distinguish submissions and even threads (which Algolia search turns up readily) with front-page stories which it doesn't, and which really can't easily be determined without explicitly crawling the front page archive. That's something I'd begun undertaking in late May of this year, (initially to answer a different question: what state(s) get the most love on HN), and even now is answering a range of questions and curiosities about HN.[1]

The front page has both a significance and scarcity which submissions and threads do not: 10,950 slots in a regular year, an additional 30 on leap years. The archive and patterns it reveals over front-page HN activity, itself a mix of influences from submitters to community activity (votes, comments, flags), to HN moderation (automated and explicit), and of course, the larger world, SV and beyond, is catnip for me, and I suspect interesting to others. It's the confluence of influencing factors that I find most interesting --- submitters alone have suprisingly little influence in general on final disposition, something that's hard to recognise from the outside.

I've least concern for my own recent submission's fate (it rapidly ranked far higher than I'd expected, then fell quickly in StoryPos (story position) --- you've explained in email that was due to the flamewar detector). I would suggest that that introduced a new point that a Reddit admin pledge had previously been made to NOT reassign the subreddit. That said, yes, judging significance for a slew of similar stories, particularly as Reddit lays claim to four-, three-, and two-digit membership subreddits, isn't viable for HN.

The fact that there are topics HN has difficulty in discussing reasonably is somewhat painfully evident to many. I would suggest that this could be seen as a challenge to better enable those discussions, many of which are highly significant. And yes, many have tried and failed here.

There was a suggestion a few months ago for HN to feature a dedicated "customer-service-of-last-resort" section. I'd like to see that developed further. Even if the threads are repetitive, they afford a capability the present landscape is sorely lacking. And address a problem which YC in its role as a tech incubator has helped create, which is to say, internalises a cost to YC that's presently been socialised.

<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34941474>

________________________________

Notes:

1. Another way to look at this is what the minimum mean votes of a front-page HN article is (looking at StoryPos 30), which for 2023 has been 161 points. The threshold was last below 50 in 2009. There we see ... 76 posts between 2023-5-30 and 2023-6-22: <https://hn.algolia.com/?dateEnd=1687485600&dateRange=custom&...> Still high, but not quite so overwhelming as your points>50 threshold. It's also well above the number of stories which have made the front-page archive for 2023 to date.

It would be interesting to compare specific keywords which either don't appear on the front page, with high votes, or which do appear on the front page but with low votes. That's not trivial to accomplish presently.

[dang]

> There was a suggestion a few months ago for HN to feature a dedicated "customer-service-of-last-resort" section. I'd like to see that developed further.

I'm afraid I must disappoint you. We're never going to do that, because (1) it would go against what we're trying to optimize for (https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...), and (2) we don't want to run a customer support forum for other people's products. That would be a circle of hell, and not an outer one.

Re "highly significant" discussions - this is an internet message board. The genre is transient and trivial, and as we know from McLuhan, that factor dominates any of the content channeling through it. That's why when people try to do "highly significant" things in internet threads, it always comes across as overblown and overwrought.

[sethammons]

Hn has some automatic dampening settings to prevent charged threads / topics from spiraling. Too many points too fast with too many comments can get pushed down. Dang can remove the guard when called for. Source: just my memory of a comment dang wrote once