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Comment by hutzlibu | Hacker News Reader

"And fix the moderator system so "first to register controls the sub" is no longer the case"

Suggestions?

This is a complex proplem.

"the top 20 most upvoted comments in the subreddit within the last year, with the user having more than X posts per year in the subreddit, Y karma per post and more than 1000 characters per post, are invited to become moderators"

Only really works for the in-depth subreddits, I guess it's not going to get you far on image or other media-based subreddits...

That seems non obvious, the most upvoted comments are just as likely to be memes or jokes than in-depth research, and even if they are that may not correlate to a good mod very much at all.

You can see this in action on ANY subreddit by sorting by "Top of all time". Almost every post is either some in-joke or meme, some random brigade that happened from a sudden temporary influx of users, etc. for at least the first 10 posts.

Wouldn't this just turn reddit into a spam site?

Do you mean it's not already?

Do you think having all the members of the subreddit (or the entire site) vote on who the mod should be? I think there are many ways to make this efficient by statistical sampling, proxy votes, and detecting when statistical errors occur. To restrict people to one account you'd need to verify phone numbers.

I'm currently trying to build this but I'm not a programmer so it's slow going. I'm interested in your thoughts as I'm sure I'm missing something obvious.

There is nothing to stop people or groups of people from making thousands of accounts and joining the sub, and then eventually taking control. Even if these user accounts have to be X years old, or subbed for Y months, none of that matters in the long term.

Yes. With this system it would be important to verify identities on sign up. I think verifying phone number would largely resolve the issue (SMS short codes don't work on VOIP phones). There many other levels to reduce fake accounts that can be added if problems begin to occur.

The main issue is the more difficult sign up is, the less people sign up. It's a balancing act.

With any voting system you have to detect the validity of the votes, even upvotes.

Make creation of subreddits paid maybe along with phone verification?

Imo, moderation logs should all be public. Lobsters does it well:

https://lobste.rs/moderations

Very cool! Thanks for the link!!!

It's even open source!

Yep. Though they don't have a concept of communities/subreddits. They rely on tags instead.

> SMS short codes don't work on VOIP phones

My experience is mostly with Google Voice, but I've not found that to be true. Years ago that was the case, but these days, I've encountered by few that don't work.

I think google voice may be the exception. Of the 6 other voip providers I've tried none could get short code sms.

https://support.google.com/voice/thread/1592118/wellsfargo-s...

I think it probably needs to not be fully automatic, but users should be able to vote to nominate a moderator for removal or addition, subject to admin discretion. Ideally, any user of the sub should be able to see the 'case' and contribute why they think the mod would/is doing a good/bad job, and people can upvote and downvote reasons. Maybe kind of use AITA's style of comment voting (but with admins finalizing decisions as a check valve against gaming).

Not fully automating, means humans for each reddit big enough. (What is big enough?) That is expensive. So this probably means lots of decisions in short time for those administrators ... means lots of wrong decision and lots of drama.

Voting? Who has the right to vote? Anyone? Any socketpuppet account? Only verified real people? (would be a different reddit)

The base problem is called politics.

I think eligibility should be based on a minimum karma-within-subreddit (comments and submissions) threshold.

And yeah, this would cost Reddit some in admin labor, but they should be able to use some of this revenue stream towards those few hires. I'd imagine a team of 6 would be plenty for this purpose, maybe could get away with 2 or 3.

> I think eligibility should be based on a minimum karma-within-subreddit (comments and submissions) threshold

A million little HNs.

Practical guarantee of brigading.

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