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Comment by evandwight | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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...

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