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Comment by exelius | Hacker News Reader

Right; if you run the Craigslist model.

Reddit has been more interventionist with content, which means they need more people to manage the community. I would guess they have all the developers they need...

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Not sure about the second one. Isn't Reddit's whole point that volunteer moderators and community founders moderate the content, not a centralised moderation team? Honestly, I'd expect them to spend less on that stuff than something like Facebook or Twitter, since the users do a decent enough job of removing the truly objectionable posts anyway.

I don't get the impression they are spending a whole lot on community management.

In a way, that's a big part of what I see as their largest problem - they are relying on the zeal of the subreddit moderators to work for free. (They should have a model which allows moderators for large subreddits to get paid. And for the subscribers to vote for moderators.)

This is why the large subreddits are so incredibly polarized in either left or right directions - the moderators are not paid to deal with things fairly, they are there spending their time working free - the only benefit they get is that they get to enforce their particular political choice onto others in their subreddit.

Look at e.g. r/politics and r/the_donald as extreme examples of what I'm talking about.

I would go so far as to say that while the moderators of most major subs may have started as volunteers, they are almost certainly on someone’s payroll now as “social influencers”.

This includes the political subreddits (actually especially the political subreddits). It’s legitimate user posts and discussions filtered by whoever has the coin to rent access to those moderators.

There's also been a few accusations of r/tesla moderators being on payroll (can be read at r/realtesla).

I know someone who is a mod for a couple major subs and he absolutely does paid placements (he has his own bot network for everything, but being a mod his shill posts don’t get deleted).

Mods don’t necessarily use their mod power itself for profit, but knowing how the sub works and what users like is very powerful. So is ignoring obvious upvote botnets because they belong to you or another mod.

The inevitable conclusion I come to:

Something like reddit2 should be run by a minimalist apolitical company.

They should work on building some kind of democracy in each sub-reddit, based on some factors (where "participation quality" is one important factor). If the users are unhappy, they should be able to call for an election, etc.

The reddit2 company should focus primarily on keeping the platform alive and on fighting bots. And on tuning the scoring model.

They should be financed in some way that doesn't depend on the content. Be it individual contributments, random, anomymized advertisments etc.

The company should try to hire apolitical engineers and managers. People who just care about solving an engineering problem.

Tildes [0] may grow to align with much of what you're looking for here, maybe not.

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17103093

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