Hacker News Reader

Comment by andsoitis | Hacker News Reader

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.

View on HN

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com