A bad thing about moderators is that nowadays they tend to be immature teens, it's one of the reasons Reddit content quality has been going down in the past few years.
It also creates some moral questions, as companies with giant revenues are outsourcing their internet janitor duties to naive unpaid child labourers
A great point. Succinctly, the moderators need moderators.
Have you ever worked with a PR firm or talked to folks that work at one. Have you ever worked at a large company, or talked to people who manage social media at one? They are very far from this level of coordination. Most can't even manage to deploy a properly measured ad campaign, much less some kind of op sec driven Reddit content campaign.
There are plenty of companies doing things like SEO and suchlike that build up networks of websites/content farms, and bots to comment on blogs and suchlike. Not much of a jump from bots commenting links on blogs to bots commenting more subtle messages on Reddit.
There are also plenty of companies that are "doing things like SEO" but none of them run networks of interconnected websites that they all control or content farms because those tactics stopped fooling Google over a decade ago.
it's an interesting phenomenon and am curious as to whether its better this way, or actually making things worse.
1) Moderators create alternate accounts and gobble up offshoots. They'll either have multiple mod accounts so they can "step down" and pass power to themselves when opinion rallies against them or they straight up seed themselves throughout reddit as moderators to dozens of communities
2) How do you spread the word when moderators have final word on what's posted in the "main" subreddit? Say there's an uprising in some obscure fandom and fans want a new place to correlate outside of the moderator's rule; how do they spread the word to the community efficiently that they exist when there's only one main hub for that fandom currently and the moderators silence anything (often with the AutoMod) that reference the new community?
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I think public moderation in general is good. But the tools for the community to branch out are often lacking and when moderator power-tripping crosses a line there's no outlet for members to reach Admins who will objectively weigh the facts and act on complaints.
I got banned on a platform for saying a public figure was physically attractive to me. Prior to that, I had engaged in a perfectly factual discussion about certain statistics that were in favor of a particular political position. There is no doubt in my mind that I was flagged for having a political position (to clarify: I didn't actually have the position, I was just posting statistics that supported that position).
I like HN's approach to moderation. You don't ban the person unless they are really unreasonable. You flag the comment, disappear it from the thread and tell them to behave. I also like Gab's approach which is: if it's not illegal and you don't like it, then just block them from your feed.
The wholesale banning of people for single statements that are generally taken out of context is emblematic of cancel culture and it isn't surprising to me that "hacker news" is more nuanced and understands that people are not one statement or one act.
It’s also an emblem for “people doing things other people don’t like and getting ditched for it” but which emblem you choose to see is up to you.
That’s kind of the power and the weakness of emblems.
That line is not the line between "good" and "bad", necessarily. I'm just saying it's a relevant difference that shouldn't be blurred away.
That does happen, but HN also silently rate-limits and downrates comments for people that have been flagged as troublemakers by the mods.
I'm currently rate-limited on HN to no more than five comments in a period of, I think, several hours. Trying to post more often produces a cryptic error message that I honestly thought was a bug. I eventually messaged the mods and was told that I must have done something disruptive (they couldn't tell me what) and they'd restore my privileges if I'd promise to stop doing that (which I can't do in good conscience without knowing what "it" was). I received no warning before this began.
They said the obfuscation was necessary because, if I were a troll or a spammer, I'd just create a new account or three if I realized I was being restricted.
I don't claim to be a perfect commenter. I know I've let emotion get the better of me on occasion, and it's fair to want to rein that in. But I think it's clear from my history that I'm posting in good faith, at the very least. Treating me like a malicious abuser benefits no one.
I guess gab is the way to go. Block others from your view if you disagree, not from the platform.
(The error I get is "You're posting too fast. Please slow down. Thanks.", if that sounds familiar.)