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Comment by kharak | Hacker News Reader

Huh, I'm one of several mods for a Sub-Reddit. Works fine. Only things that changed are a) my own comment quality standard is higher and b) the way I read other comments. Now, I scan comments for rule infractions, which lessens my reading enjoyment a bit.

Also never observed a problem between mods and other users in other Sub-Reddits. Maybe because mods on Reddit are not that visible?

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Depends on the subject matter as well. I've moderated a - large - forum for years and in the beginning I was also a user of the site. That quickly led to people figuring out that the moderator is a part of the scene and so you get people that try to get into your good book and others that try to set each other up. Every word you write gets lawyered over and so on. If your Sub-Reddit doesn't have those problems count yourself lucky. But personally I think that the way dang here does it is perfect (see: sucking up ;) ), he only enters the conversation to explain his moderation actions, but does not actually take a position on any of the issues discussed, thus leading to perceived impartiality (he still gets plenty of flak but imo that is undeserved).

> (he still gets plenty of flak but imo that is undeserved)

Yeah I don't think it's possible to escape the criticism even without taking a position. That said, of the two options, I agree that not wading in may have less of a chilling effect and thus encourages more interaction.

It gets more complicated behind the scenes. If you're making a lot of content moderation decisions without disclosing them, you may be introducing bias without realizing it. Eventually people are going to be hip to that. Platforms are rife with this right now: selective invisibility, visibility filtering, ranking, visible to self, reducing, deboosting, and "disguising a gag" are all words platforms use internally or externally to justify non-disclosure of content moderation decisions. Without public awareness of the existence of these secretive moderation decisions, administrators may feel they have to use them in order to compete with other forums.

I think transparent moderation is the sustainable way forwards for social media, and I recently made my case for that here:

https://meta.discourse.org/t/shadowbans-are-bad-for-discours...

> Huh, I'm one of several mods for a Sub-Reddit. Works fine.

Reddit is mostly anonymous, which can make people think they can do whatever they want as moderators/users without any repercussions. Of course that isn't true: all of our actions impact our own behavior, attitude etc.

> Also never observed a problem between mods and other users in other Sub-Reddits. Maybe because mods on Reddit are not that visible?

It happens all the time. These r/Libertarian [1] and r/LibertarianUncensored [2] threads may be the most succinct examples of how far users/mods will go to make their voices heard. I list many more in my talk [3].

[1] https://archive.ph/O0GN8#selection-2701.0-2707.56

[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/LibertarianUncensored/comments/uotv...

[3] https://shadowmoderation.com/2022-10-transparent-moderation/

It's funny you mention /r/libertarian x) I was shadow-banned for saying (verbatim) "Imposing your will through violence is always illegitimate" (the context was Chile's 1973 coup).

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