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Comment by benjaminbachman | Hacker News Reader

The only real news here is that Reddit mods are power mad tyrants, which is nothing new at all. AI generated art has just given them newer, funnier ways to be in the wrong.

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"Power" moderators, that is people who moderate a large number of subreddits, are untenable. It is not possible to effectively or fairly moderate dozens of communities, even if you were to spend all your waking moments doing so. This is, in part, why it's so common for popular submissions to be locked or deleted because "y'all can't behave".

The people that do so are largely doing it for their own self-gain (e.g., self-promotion) or because it makes them feel important. I had a very low stress job for a few years and ended up as a moderator for over a dozen large subreddits, including a few defaults. Socializing with Reddit's prominent moderators was enlightening.

Please tell us more about what you learned from socialising with these "power mods", I think it would be enlightening to us too.

I wonder if/how a hard limit on number of communities moderated would work? Make it so one person could only mod 2-3 subreddits. Unfortunately, this would require some work from Reddit the company to keep those same powermods from just making new accounts so probably won't happen.

They already have rules about making secondary accounts to evade bans, upvote yourself, etc. If anything it'd probably be easier to enforce a "no moderating a bunch of subreddits across multiple accounts" rule since it's mainly bigger subreddits that matter, and "mod teams of big subreddits" is a smaller group of people to monitor.

And if there was really some big conspiracy to skirt around this system they'd have to organize on a platform outside of reddit, ensure everyone is always accessing through VPNs so reddit doesn't notice multiple accounts modding from the same IP, and hope no one ever defects and exposes the underground moderation ring.

It'd be logistically easier, I just doubt Reddit is going to put forth the money and staff time required to enforce it. Current enforcement is based on reporting, I believe, and don't reports go to mods first.

And they definitely will organize off site. Discord is huge for this. I also bet they would use VPNs since a lot of them have the barest hint of tech knowledge and a burning ideological conviction they're doing something important.

> hope no one ever defects and exposes the underground moderation ring.

Man, whoever had the balls or ovaries to do that would be immediately smeared and mobbed.

>They already have rules about making secondary accounts to evade bans, upvote yourself, etc.

If that rule was enforced, huge swathes of the so called power mods (and admins) would be removed. That's probably why, much like Twitter, they declined to hire me on to work on anti-abuse technology.

The so called humans in the loop are evil and replaceable.

Reddit just doesn't have any incentive to do this - you're talking about people who are doing free labor for them. Maybe it's got problems, but if you get rid of the power mods (and don't change the structure to add any incentives like pay), you probably just end up with a bunch of unmoderated communities that then die off.

Yes. This is why I doubt it will happen.

I would suggest that they follow the US system of government where users can vote out corrupt or useless moderators via referendum.

Why do Reddit moderators do their work? They are paid in power. They get to decide what viewpoints are seen or not by others. That is a very compelling wage. And of course they all think they're doing a service by advancing their ideology because of course their ideology is the right one.

That's an extremely reductive claim. Can you really not think of more mundane reasons someone might find themselves moderating reddit?

It's hard to imagine "ideology" being relevant to the vast majority of reddit... Do you really think the moderators of ELI5 or PeopleFuckingDying or some obscure porn reddit or whatever are primarily concerned with "ideology"?

I used to help moderate a poker forum. I was a professional poker player, and an extremely active user of the forums. I don't recall pushing an ideology beyond "keep discussions constructive and topical."

The person you just replied to was a mod. Are you implying that their work was somehow about pushing an ideology?

> It's hard to imagine "ideology" being relevant to the vast majority of reddit...

This is egregiously incorrect.

In what sense? Would tipping that scale entail that "all reddit moderators are only and exclusively motivated by ideology?"

It's common knowledge now that abstaining from politics is taking the side of the oppressor. This has the effect of giving many subreddits and other topical communities a political orientation even if politics is nominally offtopic. To give an example, it is increasingly hard to find an online knitting community that tolerates conservative viewpoints; most have followed the lead of Ravelry.

So the implication you're drawing from this... which was the topic at hand... is that all knitting forum moderators are motivated exclusively be the desire to espouse an ideology?

No, but preventing the Nazi camel from getting its nose in the tent is now an important motivator for moderators.

Sure, yeah. I doubt most knitting forum moderators wake up thinking "gosh I'd better get to that knitting forum to prevent the Nazi camel from getting its nose into the knitting tent," but I don't know any knitting forum moderators.

The comment I was replying to - "all individuals of class X are motivated exclusively by vicious desire Y" - isn't a truth-seeking comment, and I think we can do better.

Please don't troll or make bad-faith arguments on HN. This post contains two instances of moving the goalposts and using extreme language for strawman attacks.

People are pointing out that moderation is often biased and that the power of controlling the narrative and topics & viewpoints that are allowed is a motivator for many moderators. Your strawman argument that "all moderators" being "exclusively" motivated is just rhetoric to try to win against a claim no one is making.

No, it's not "common knowledge" that abstaining from politics is siding with the oppressor.

That's an unfalsifiable ideological assertion that has been well-socialized, but that doesn't make it fact and lots of people disagree with it, because it's an opinion, and it's one that presupposes a Foucaultian worldview of human dynamics as being able to be distilled down to pure power struggles.

It's absurd to see that bandied about as truth just because it's "common knowledge." I bet in Communist China it was "common knowledge" right before the famine that killing the sparrows would bolster the harvest, too.

It does not "presuppose a Foucaultian worldview". You have centuries of this sentiment permeating culture at the very least.

One example of many:

> Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.

~ John Stuart Mill

This absurd beyond belief. Knitting has precisely nothing to do with politics, so I struggle to imagine what "conservative knitting viewpoints" even are. Or liberal ones, for that matter. Cross-stitching is a tool of systemic racism? Purl stitching is inviting the illegals to tukk-urr-jurrbs?

To me phrases like "abstaining from politics is taking the side of the oppressor" are just so damn American. You guys, more than any other nationality I've met, tend to dive head first into whatever ideology or sect or even hobby you happen to get into. There are, of course, people who are "extra" in every viewpoint or occupation. But more so for Americans.

One example of the top of my head: knitting is probably one of the most heavily gendered hobbies, which carries a ton of political baggage with it wrt gender politics.

>This absurd beyond belief. Knitting has precisely nothing to do with politics, so I struggle to imagine what "conservative knitting viewpoints" even are. Or liberal ones, for that matter. Cross-stitching is a tool of systemic racism? Purl stitching is inviting the illegals to tukk-urr-jurrbs?

Apparently politics definitely leaked into that community a few years back. I recall reading stories about it back then.

https://www.vox.com/the-goods/2019/2/25/18234950/knitting-ra...

I am not part of that community but if it behaves like almost any other online community, any accusations of racism seem to always create a backlash that lumps the conservatives leaning folks within the group to racism whether the conservative has outright committed any racism or not. There tends to be a guilt by association that seems to happen often—where if you have opinion “A” (some standard conservative opinion on some subject not directly tied to racism) you must also have opinion “B” (some fringe race-oriented opinion sometimes found in conservative circles).

So folks just stay silent and try and just knit (or focus on whatever interest of the group), afraid to disclose any political opinion in a non-political interest group for fear of the label. Then…they get called out because if there isn’t overt acknowledgement by concerned members of the “correct” political ideology. That results in the abstaining is oppression attitude. You then find these kind of communities creating rules that don’t just discourage political conversations but rules attempting to exclude people who may fall into a political viewpoint altogether.

I don’t know if it’s distinctly American, but it definitely seems to happen here a lot. To be honest, I find it all ridiculous.

> There tends to be a guilt by association that seems to happen often—where if you have opinion “A” (some standard conservative opinion on some subject not directly tied to racism) you must also have opinion “B” (some fringe race-oriented opinion sometimes found in conservative circles).

To be fair, U.S. conservatives are only reaping what they sow. The overtly racist wing of conservatism received such a drubbing after civil rights went through that they had to scale back the racist rhetoric and talk about social and economic policies that disadvantaged certain races, but appealed to traditional ideas about federalism and small government. So now whenever anyone talks about federalism and small government, it is assumed that there is a racist agenda lurking behind those appeals because historically, there was.

So it’s ok then to tell some 80 year old lady who just wants to share knitting things with other knitters that she is no longer welcome because some knitting activist asked her if she voted for Ronald Reagan in 1980 and she said “yes”?

Sorry, but that is just hateful and completely unnecessary.

"keep discussions constructive and topical."

is subjective

Of course it is. That does not entail that forums moderators (myself included) are exclusively motivated by a desire to push an ideology, which was the topic at hand.

Nor does "subjective" entail "ideological" unless you're going to torture the term ideology being having a useful meaning.

We're not talking about forum moderators, really, but power moderators. Someone who mods a random topic they like is probably decent at it and not trying to push something. Someone whos gotten themselves in a position to mod 10+ of the largest subreddits on reddit is probably not doing very much actual modding and is very much trying to push something.

The person above stated "Why do Reddit moderators do their work? They are paid in power." They appear to be talking about moderators in general, not just power mods. The root comment here also appears to be talking about mods in general (with little idea what they're talking about, AFAICT).

> Nor does "subjective" entail "ideological" unless you're going to torture the term ideology being having a useful meaning.

What is your useful definition of "ideology"? Why isn't "subjective" included in your definition? Why would including "subjective" in your definition make it less useful?

Before hearing your response, I'm going to guess that you're thinking ideologies need to be "significant" for them to be an ideology. I'm guessing you don't think that subjective opinions are ideological because you don't think they're important enough to get that label.

Reddit's larger subs, particularly their political ones, are 100% content farming and ideological cults. Subs with hundreds of thousands of millions of subscribers that regurgitate twitter screenshots with timestamps removed, and where dissent is often banned. Antiwork, Latestagecapitalism, WhitePeopleTwitter, and many others.

Related, I got banned from entertainment for saying an exchange between jk Rowling and a trans person wasn't "mocking". I didn't defend her, I just called out a shitty title.

When I messaged the mods saying, in essence, "y'all are dumb and need to distinguish fact from opinion" they flagged me for harassment, which is one demerit away from a sitewide ban.

I know some mods are decent, and it's better in smaller subs with some actual purpose (city, hobby) that isn't memes, violence, porn or politics. Any of those categories, and with subs of any large size, and it gets really scummy really fast.

(Shout out to r/Texas mods for not sucking).

Reddit mods have a habit of blocking/censoring views they don't agree with, (mainly all on one side, consistent with their ideology). That doesn't mean it applies to every subreddit, but if it weren't a widespread problem do you really think anybody would be talking about it?

That may be true of the big subreddits. I moderate a small, niche one simply because I was visiting it every day for years and then they needed a mod. I saw it as a chance to improve an online space that I liked.

This doesn't seem to contradict the parent. Presuming that you are improving it along a certain direction, not in a random walk back and forth.

This is a common pattern with all organizations, but especially charities, non-profits, or volunteer roles. At first, the work is done by those who love that cause, and commonly some combination of

- the cause becomes prominent enough that there is influence or prestige associated with the role now, that it attracts power-seeking personalities

- the original founders are too burnt out to care, or clueless/trusting such that they get outmaneuvered by savvier entrants

Personally, I see it as the entropic drift of an organization away from an original cause or mission (order) towards a vehicle for the pure exercise power (chaos).

I think this is spot-on.

There's a theory for it. https://meaningness.com/geeks-mops-sociopaths

> This is, in part, why it's so common for popular submissions to be locked or deleted because "y'all can't behave".

But they have no problem digging into downvoted comments and deleting them, even if the system already did the job for them (put the downvoted stuff at bottom and hidden).

Maybe this is already well-known, but I saw another behavior recently on some subrreddits where a lot of new posts are seemingly getting a single downvote to a score of zero. I suspected there was some troll doing it, so I went down the line and gave about 20 or 30 of them a single up vote back to one, refreshed the page, and most of them had immediately gone back to zero. I think the mods must have a button for squashing a post without actually deleting it, and on some subs they use it for a huge number of the posts.

/r/3Dprinting has no such button for what it's worth. If there is they haven't given it to me.

They've added custom CSS to hide it, it isn't actually removed. You can easily bypass this by disabling custom CSS or using a mobile app.

13of40 was talking about a single button that mass downvotes multiple comments. None of the default (nor popular) clients support this functionality, but you could script your own version using the reddit API.

Oh, I guess I misinterpreted that because it's a bizarre speculation.

Shwartzworld is correct, the votes are fuzzed and deliberately fluctuate so that it's difficult for bots to tell whether they've been detected.

I was talking about a button that sets the score for a single submission to zero and makes it stick. I know the numbers are fuzzed, but I don't think fuzzing will take something with a score of 1 and show it as 0.

I highly doubt such a button exists.

> I don't think fuzzing will take something with a score of 1 and show it as 0.

If one or more people decided to mass downvote new submissions (which isn't exactly uncommon), or the submissions are controversial, they will show as 0 even if they're actually -/+ 2 (for example).

If you decided to mass upvote them you will initially see the total increment by one, however, subsequent refreshes will show you fuzzed numbers. I believe the more active you are (e.g., upvoting 30 posts in the span of a minute), the more aggressive the fuzziness will be.

There is also just a massive amount of bots on reddit. Unidan, a old famous redditor, was involved in a controversy where he would use bots to down vote all the posts made at the same time as his own posts so that his posts would be more visible. He's not the only one doing things like that

There are a LOT of bots, yes. Pretty much any submission that makes it to /r/all had a high likelihood of:

- being a submitted by bot reposting popular posts

- having comments from bots that repost popular comments from prior submissions

Though I'm pretty sure Unidan just logged into alternate accounts and downvoted things manually.

https://www.reddit.com/r/SubredditDrama/comments/2c9ida/reca...

Those numbers are fuzzed. You don't see the actual exact number of votes.

> I think the mods must have a button for squashing a post without actually deleting it

No, Reddit does not provide such a feature. And setting up an outside bot farm to hide posts makes no sense for mods who can already just delete a post outright.

Reddit allowing moderators to lock threads was a mistake. It just enables lazy mods to be even lazier.

The laziest thing to do is to not do anything and let someone else moderate. While the disagreements over moderation are normal, complains about volunteers being "lazy" for not doing impossible are absurd.

Hardly. Volunteer positions come with responsibilities. No one is forcing them to waste their time on moderating an internet forum, but they chose to do it for whatever reason and then chose to be lazy and actively harmful.

The complaint here is about moderation tactic that is not actively harmful or abusive to people and ease their own load when threads become too much. Complaining about that is absurd.

No. The purpose of a subreddit is to let users engage. Excessive locking decreases user engagement and is harmful, not to mention that it punishes users (who are no longer able to continue a already started conversation in the comments) for violations of others.

>"Power" moderators, that is people who moderate a large number of subreddits, are untenable.

At least you know it's just one person, spread across multiple contexts.

I had a string of unusual behaviors when I ran /u/dontbenebby, culminating in being involuntarily being made the moderator of several Snapchat related subreddits around the time that Reddit let you view analytics and things I was posting were getting six or seven figure views as I dodged literal assassination attempts every time I tried to take a peaceful walk in the woods.

For context, I was (in)famous for not logging IPs, or even numbers of pageviews as far back as when I dropped that Facebook zero day on my blog and virtually planted myself in the middle of the protests against Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, and then went on to lecture class full of CMU students they should use strong anonymity tools and careful opsec if organizing protests in oppressive regimes like Tehran or Times Square as I threw up an image of a dead protester on the screen.

I meant what I said then, and I mean it now.

And maybe I spoke offline with whoever made me the moderator of a subreddit I never visited, for an application I have never used? In that case, let's share it with the whole class the three core points my art was intended to drive home:

1.) They are going to nuke Penn Quarter, not Pittsburgh.

2.) It is not my problem if you drop dead of a heart attack because you fucked around and found out.

3.) I am an alumni -- that means I can do whatever I want.

Anyways, I'm off to read a book and "do email".

Cheers!!

- Greg.

Reddit is a worse echo chamber than Twitter ever was.

I gave up on it when I got banned from certain subreddits for posting quotes from congressional testimony. If you post anything that deviates in the slightest from the moderator's viewpoint, you get banned.

The end result is an echo chamber that's getting tighter and smaller, excluding any diversity of opinion. It's no way to run a business.

Reddit's business is to house all of the echo-chambers, though, isn't it? That seems like a great business to be in, during this Heyday of Echo Chamber Construction™.

>"all of the echo-chambers"

All of the like-minded echo-chambers. They seem to have no appetite for certain heresies and have walked back Aaron Swartz' original emphasis on free speech as a virtue.

> All of the like-minded echo-chambers. They seem to have no appetite for certain heresies and have walked back Aaron Swartz' original emphasis on free speech as a virtue.

Reddit is ultimately amoral, despite the sensibilities of its moderators, imo. They want to sell ads and IPO, thus they've been increasingly purging communities, posts, and individuals that are either not advertiser-friendly or create trouble.

Even as a casual user of the site, I have noticed a sharp increase in the number of submissions and comments that get Removed by Reddit (i.e., administrators) for no reason. I think they just went completely 'mask-off' after the debacle with Aimee Challenor.

It's not just the mods, the users on Reddit are equally awful and contribute more to the echo chamber imo.

The UK politics subreddit used to be one of my favourite subreddits back in the early 2010s. Back then it was quite a small community and while we had differences of opinions I think it's fair to say we enjoyed each other's company. But around the time of the Brexit vote, then Trump shortly after that, the subreddit started getting flooded with reactionary, low-effort comments and anyone who tried to provide a nuanced opinion or alternative view point was typically downvoted and insulted.

I along with a few other long-time commenters were mostly in favour of Brexit at the time so we would constantly be downvoted and insulted whenever we wrote anything in favour of Brexit. And the worst was when a post made it to /r/all because then you'd an even larger flood of low-effort commenters just downvoting and insulting everyone with a different opinion.

And this wasn't even just minor insults, this was people telling me to kill myself and that I'm a horrible person literally everyday. I'm not sure how much this was a political subreddit thing vs Reddit generally, but it was honestly ridiculous the stuff people would say to me there.

Needless to say, I obviously left the community shortly after 2016, but I've seen similar things play across the site since. There seems to be no room for a difference of opinion there anymore. The mods if anything are just an amalgamation of the average Redditor.

The users being a horrible part of the echo chamber stems from echo-chamber-promoting moderation. Mods instaban (shadow ban) anyone and everyone in an extremely automated fashion based on a long list of rules and filters. You're only left with people that perfectly toe the line.

Fun fact: there's a popular car sub that will ban you for mentioning dealer markups in a disparaging way. That's right: if you say that Joe's Toyota tried to upcharge you $15k for a Camry, you'll be banned for life!

If it is the one I think they have both automatically blocking comments containing "stealership" too.

>you'll be banned for life!

Or for the 30 seconds it will take you to make a new account.

is it /r/cars?

Reddit mods are ineffective or harmful a lot of the time, but so is Reddit itself in how it incentivizes thankless moderation and oversized and noisy communities for the purpose of ads and their upcoming IPO. Most non-niche subreddits could be replaced by ChatGPT at this point.

Many just look like RSS feed of news outlets, except moderated by morons. And obligatory wide reaching TOS where the discussion about say how fighting games could be more accessible to new players gets removed under "no content for fun or entertainment allowed" TOS point...

> Most non-niche subreddits could be replaced by ChatGPT at this point.

According to the "dead internet theory" they already are. I'm inclined to believe that a lot of the political discourse on there is bot driven.

It feels like it. It is so single minded compared to any real group of people I know.

For real. From the headline I thought this was going to be a "ban" from an art department or marketplace or something of actual value, which would actually be news. Being banned from a subreddit for an arbitrary/idiotic reason is just reddit as usual.

HN is really lucky to have dang. Although he is a payed mod, so it's not 100% comparable.

Reddit mods fully convinced me that most of what we read on the internet is written by insane people. And I include most Reddit mods in that.

See previous discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18881827

The amount of great discussions I've seen shut down because a moderator removed the post on some stupid minor infraction is infuriating.

It is still surprising - at least for me, I've been using Reddit for years but mostly niche subs, nothing popular - how such a petty power warps people's minds. I dread to think what a real power does then.

But in this case, the mods can't win. If they let AI art take over, HN will be condemning them for putting artists out of business. If they refuse to allow AI art, HN condemns them anyway.

On the contrary, AI will put a lot more artists in business by drastically expanding the range of artistic works than can be created and kinds of people who can create great works. Hanging a rectangle still painting on the wall is of limited appeal in the age of smartphones and VR. Imagining being able to paint walls and ceiling of entire house with aesthetically appealing, one of a kind art, for the same effort as currently required for a small still painting. A lot more people will be interested in paying for that and they will be willing to pay a lot more.

I wonder if the simple solution is to prevent mod accounts from interacting on the subreddits they moderate.

I'm almost in favor, but I would worry that for really small communities that deprives the sub of its biggest contributor

Maybe implement it once the community reaches a certain size/certain volume of posts?

This would probably make the situation worse. You'd remove the incentive for people who moderate for the good of their own community, leaving only those who do so for the power they get (which are probably worse mods, though I don't have a citation for that).

Not sure if that would not create more problems, but there should be some accountability when they behave like a-holes. The mod in question could have asked for proof (draw live on webcam? - not an expert, just wondering) or peer analysis instead of just silencing the artist. Then another user contacted the mod to complain, and got this reply: https://nitter.bird.froth.zone/MeaririForever/status/1607826...

That mod has become toxic and imho should either apologize or be removed asap.

That's the opposite of what you want. Good mods are those that are invested in the community and are well-known and respected participants.

That's not news and applies to pretty much any moderators, especially the non-paid kind.

proof: I was a mod of a small hobby subreddit for a while, and I'm an idiot.

Small hobby subreddits are the best subreddits, and among the only ones I visit. I don't usually have problems with those mods. Anything front-page, or remotely popular to a wide audience, are where the worst mods (and posts / commenters) are.

Came here to say this.

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