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Comment by tazjin | Hacker News Reader

Reddit's weird setup where essentially random people who were first "own" entire categories (= subreddits) of discussion is totally absurd.

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I was a moderator for r/robots for awhile. I even spent a few hundred dollars hiring an artist to create a theme.

I begged them to help me pin down what the subreddit was about since the submissions were all over the place, and some people seemed to think it was for a certain type of robot content and others a different type. Most ignored the question.

I tried to share articles and videos of actual leading edge robots that I though t were awesome. Generally these were ignored, along with most such things. Occasionally a video of a real robot would randomly become popular for some reason. The worst most repeated robot sketches would often receive many votes. Anything even remotely erotic went straight to the top.

They seemed to like art quite a bit, but often the voting was the opposite of what it should have been. Like artwork that was clearly derivative or low quality was top billing for the day, and amazing work was ignored.

Then there was someone who really wanted to use it for some channel that was obviously kind of a stealth marketing system. I repeatedly warned everyone about it and tried to discourage it, but the only feedback from anyone was that they liked the content and I was overreacting.

Due to the incredibly poor judgement of the people voting in the sub, I got fed up and left.

> Like artwork that was clearly derivative or low quality was top billing for the day, and amazing work was ignored.

With all Reddit-like forums, there are big secondary factors to what bubbles to the top. Just as an example, the timing can be critical [0], the current top posts [1], the current trends and even just whether the people who like that particular style are browsing new at just the right time to give the post some starting traction. It's a bit like the difference between weather and climate, you really need to sample a lot to get an accurate picture.

[0] If a lot of users are online when the post is new it will earn a lot more votes. Someone on a data subreddit actually modeled which times are the best to post content for maximum visibility. EDIT: There's even a website for this now: https://dashboard.laterforreddit.com/analysis/

[1] "Blocking" the top spots can easily happen. Just look at what stays at the top of HN on a Sunday vs. when Elon stirs something up at Twitter yet again.

With art specifically, people and especially non artists don't judge it on art-school kind of criteria. They don't care that someone somewhere else did something similar. They don't care about formal quality.

They care about how it makes them feel.

Good for them. You obviously wanted something else than the actual users.

Eh, the problem with this idea is everything appeals to the lowest common denominator eventually. All subs (and even HN) would fall to Sturgeon's law if lead to its logical conclusion.

Smaller forums in the past tend to deal with this by having some groups that were strongly moderated with a strict set of rules and no/low tolerance of them being broke. Then more 'general' discussions where the rules were lessoned.

What he wanted was a community with a specific theme and purpose. What he got was a bazaar of randos showed up to share softcore pornography.

If a bunch of people showed up tomorrow on Hacker News, who mostly wanted to discuss Pokemon, they'd probably be shown the door. I don't see why a person running a subreddit shouldn't be able to do the same thing.

They wanted the clickbait and trash.

What do you think would be a better model? I have a hard time imagining one.

It doesn't seem all that different to me than whoever is first to claim a company name, a domain name, or when we go back further in time, land.

IRC Network administrators tend to enforce "official" names (owned by a particular group) vs "unofficial" names. For example, "#Ubuntu" is owned by the Ubuntu devs. While the unofficial ##Ubuntu is just fan owned.

This already is a huge step forward compared to Reddit, where you aren't even sure which subreddits are owned by the corporation / official groups, or if they're "fan run". Are you sure /r/Ubuntu is a fan-run subreddit, or does it have official Ubuntu communications?

Which companies do actually own and moderate their own subreddits? I have always treated all of them as unofficial, even if there are employees of the company that post periodically.

Many streamers are root mods on their own subreddits. I doubt they do most of the moderation themselves, but they appoint and manage other mods. Most aren't companies, but some of the big ones have LLCs to handle their streaming businesses.

I'm pretty sure /r/Wargroove was company run (and well run) mind you. Its not necessarily a bad thing to have company run subreddits. But it should be clear when its an "official" vs "unofficial / fan-run" subreddit.

/r/Hololive is like that

Some are pretty much modded semi-officially for corporate cucks that remove anything that might hurt their favourite corporation, even if community clearly wants to discuss the topic

For a large-ish one, /r/Stadia (rip) was run by Googlers that also tagged themselves officially on the subreddit.

> IRC Network administrators tend to enforce "official" names (owned by a particular group) vs "unofficial" names. For example, "#Ubuntu" is owned by the Ubuntu devs. While the unofficial ##Ubuntu is just fan owned.

I didn't realize this was a thing outside of Libera, and maybe Freenode still. But then, I haven't been on other networks in quite some time.

I don't think it is. That said, the Freenode extended universe is the only corner of IRC that's really designed for official project communications.

The problem this is that historically a person will create a subreddit, add other moderators, and then vanish. The other moderators will build up the community and culture of the subreddit, and then one day years down the road the top moderator returns and decides they want to make unilateral changes that the actual moderators are powerless to contest.

I'd say that's a feature, not a bug. I've done it. In my particular case shortly after the beginning of covid some mods wanted to ban all discussion of hobbyist medical 3D printing, things like 3D printed masks and even those Prusa face shields.

I didn't think that we had the expertise to be the judges of truth in that area (it was during those few weeks where the governmentwas saying "don't use masks", and these moderators agreed with that), and the relationship quickly deteriated.

> I'd say that's a feature, not a bug. I've done it.

Arguably, what right do you have to decide the direction of a subreddit you have never actually contributed to? It's like an absentee parent returning after a decade and immediately trying to enact major changes in your life because "I'm your father".

There have been countless controversies of useless "head mods" returning and doing just that. WSB comes to mind, but there have been many worse ones.

https://www.reddit.com/r/wallstreetbetsOGs/comments/vd4gn7/w...

(I am not saying that's applicable for you specifically, as given your example it sounds like you actually had some level of care and activity.)

I find that mods who are heavily invested in a community tend to be worse, doing things like getting into arguments with users and then banning them. Obviously you mileage may vary, but most of the times I've seen this happen it's been used to kneecap mods I'd consider to be "power tripping". /r/linux is another example.

I wonder if it's possible to replace mods completely with a bridging algorithm such as the one used for Community Notes. The algorithm is very clever in that, so far, there doesn't seem to be a way to game it. It aligns user incentive with a goal of quality. As a result, it tends to make high quality decisions.

It might be possible to use this method to crowdsource things like creating subreddit rules and removing comments that break those rules.

The first person rules forever is almost the worst possible model. Assigning modship randomly would be better.

Erm. I can't agree. How is this different from be the first person that invent something, or be the first person that organize people around some new idea, or first person to create company?

I do miss the slashdot style meta moderation in a lot of places … I like the idea of running stuff past a screening group of users to temper the ability to wildly push around the moderation system by newly created accounts or low engagement users or bots. It seemed to work pretty well. But no such system is perfect so I’m sure there were flaws I just never noticed.

After a subreddit reaches a certain size voting tokens should be used to elect officials to run the subreddit.

Quadratic voting with your vote ratio being a derivative of your activity on the subreddit to mitigate bot voting, et cetera.

No. Reddit has too many bot accounts. There's no way to enforce one-vote per real life person.

Make them pay a small amount of reddit gold and enforce a minimum time subscribed to the subreddit.

That's just turning votes into a convoluted reddit-gold / money value. If I cared enough, I'd make myself moderator by just buying a ton of reddit gold for myself.

If I were too poor to make a big difference in reddit gold accounts, then I'd be forced to move to a different webpage without any power to make a change on Reddit.

Lose/lose from all sides.

I had enough of R.gold to give out meaningless awards to random people. I never paid R. any money and don't have a popular account by any means.

I see subreddits the same as opensource projects in this regard - users have all the tools and rights to fork. And the mods/maintainers can run the original to the ground if they so wish

Not exactly that easy to tell users that is happening tho

True, but the mandatory scheme to hand over your project to a vote also has consequences. The point it what's better overall and I don't think there is a clear and universal answer that works in all cases so we are left with the safer option

Namespaced subreddits

this model effectively e-parastroika

It's not absurd, it's reddit's killer feature and the primary reason that reddit is as big as it is.

I've had my fair share of terrible moderators on Reddit. Even on major / big name subreddits.

There's not much to do aside from start a rival subreddit (with a less popular name), or just give up on Reddit entirely and go elsewhere.

> I've had my fair share of terrible moderators on Reddit

Welcome to the internet, the same thing could be said about every web forum since the 90s.

> There's not much to do aside from start a rival subreddit

Yes, that's the system working as intended. You don't have any right to the subreddit any more than the people who got there first. There have been many successful offshoot subreddits that go on to eclipse their predecessors in size if the new subreddit is actually better.

> Welcome to the internet, the same thing could be said about every web forum since the 90s.

Not USENET, not IRC. There's other systems, older than Reddit, that have other rules.

Ah yes, usenet and irc, two platforms where moderators never ban people for capricious reasons.

I'm less interested in bad moderators per se, as much as I am more concerned about "permanently owning a major, important name on Reddit".

On IRC, if the channel goes dead, the channel name is back up for grabs. This means that the admins can kick everyone out of a room and "Reset the ownership" of a name, if necessary. (Ex: #Ubuntu suffers from a glitch and gets taken over by griefers. Admins come in, kick everyone off, and gives official #Ubuntu devs control of the channel again).

Reddit can ban redditors who are poor behaving (even moderators). But the name of the channel remains in their control. The subreddit name can be lost forever. I don't think its a good system of name management.

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USENET was way more ad-hoc. The alt.* distribution lists were fully unmoderated and fully ad-hoc from what I remember. I don't think it was even possible to ban anyone, and as such, a lot of those alt.* channels became filled with spam, porn, and other unfavorable material.

The comp.* moderated lists were done better. I don't fully recall the administrative structure. But I know it wasn't done like how Reddit did things.

Reddit's decisions can be discussed in light of its competitors. Be it Discord (today), or USENET / IRC (from the past).

> The subreddit name can be lost forever. I don't think its a good system of name management.

This is mistaken. Subreddits without active moderators get replaced with a landing page that instructs interested parties to put in an application to take over.

In fairness if a subreddit goes dead (unmoderated) you can request ownership of it from the admins in /r/redditrequest

/r/redditrequest ?

I would argue that “killer feature” killed its potential to be much bigger and more profitable than it is.

Killed it's potential? It's in the top 20 biggest sites in the world with no competitors anywhere near it.

It’s not nearly as big or profitable as the other social media companies, by a long shot. I think it has the potential to be though.

How much bigger could it possibly be?

Reddit is one of the smaller social media sites at 430m yearly users.

Yes absurd number but TikTok, FB, Instagram etc all have more.

Counterpoint: 430 million users is actually a lot. I just checked, and most sites don't have that many.

The first result on google (not verified) says it's the fifth most visited website in the US. There is much more room upwards if you are honest.

Sorry, I am not familiar with reddit’s model.

What is “ownership” in this case? Total private tyranny, with delegation of authority? Does it transition to collectively and more democratically managing the channel, as stackexchsnge does?

There is no collective or democratic management, unless the tyrannical overlords choose to allow it. "Total private tyranny, with delegation of authority" is correct. What it leaves out is that anybody else can make a competing subreddit, dedicated to the same issue, where they have control.

The only thing getting there first does is prime realestate in the namespace and network effects of having an existing community.

Ah, so like Valve Software then.

On a related note, the only reason the United States' citizens directly vote for the President is at the pleasure of the State Legislatures. The Constitution allows them to choose the manner in which electors are elected, and they in theory could elect them directly (by specifying this before election day), usurping the power from the public.

https://www.justsecurity.org/73274/no-state-legislatures-can...

Almost no countries have a directly-elected chief executive. Certainly that's not the case in the bulk of countries with parliamentary systems. For instance, outside of his own district ("riding", I think they call it there), no Canadian even saw Justin Trudeau on the ballot, and the few who did only saw him as a candidate for Member of Parliament, not Prime Minister.

What typically happens in those countries is that the party hacks of whichever party (or coalition of parties) has a majority get together and decide who's going to be the Big Cheese. The average voter has little or nothing to say about it. Voters who are registered members of the majority party or parties may have a (small) degree of influence, but the ones who belong to other parties don't get a say.

Worse, most Canadian parties actually charge you dues to belong to them (to its credit, Trudeau's party is not one of these). No pay, no say.

It's a web forum for shitposting, not a government for a country. Using hyperbolic language like "private tyranny" to talk about unpaid moderators curating a stream of news articles and posts typifies the terminally online madness of the current zeitgeist.

It's true, there is no violence involved. Private tyranny is a technical description.

I don't agree that it's a technical description, I'd say it's a political description meant to inflate the perceived harmfulness of what is a completely typical and mundane event on the internet.

Yes, it's total private tyranny if the person who started the subreddit chooses to keep it that way. But if Reddit (the company) doesn't like the way you're running your sub, they can and will replace the people in charge.

That's kind of bizarre to me. They act like they're firing employees, and replacing someone for that role, when they're just random volunteers to a community set up by a person unaffiliated with Reddit.

The issue here is stuff like brigading and stuff against the terms of service like straigh out nazism etc. And even those subs stay long often.

Brigading is when members of sub coordinate and go to harass people on different sub or mass downvote their posts etc. The subs that have been closed or taken over were notorious for that.

Sounds like the perfect activity for botswarms controlled by a couple guys

If someone founds a company they get to own it. Why shouldn't someone get to own a community they found?

Nah, it's pretty amazing getting those people to work for free.

The weirder thing is that redditors make it possible to own categories.

The name of the subreddit shouldn't matter much at all. For each category there are several subreddits but people don't actively move to the subreddits with the best moderators.

For aggregators as a whole, it's the same. Places like https://tildes.net/ don't have many visitors even though Reddit's flaws should incentivize significant amounts of users to try other aggregators.

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