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Comment by PrimeMcFly | Hacker News Reader

I genuinely hope Reddit ends setting up their own demise with this. It's a good infrastructure (at least old.reddit is), but the sheer amount of power hungry mods who abuse their power is out of control. There needs to be a system where mods can be reported and held accountable.

Or, alternatively, have everything be decentralized lie the fediverse, although until that becomes more user friendly I don't see it taking off.

A lot of people were suggesting the apollo developer write his own backend and setup an alternative to reddit, and I sure hope he considered doing so.

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Why shouldn’t mods be able to run their communities the way they want? It’s not like you can’t open a competing /r/newsButNotModeratedVeryMuch.

The same reason every make your Twitter fails, the people are already there.

They are servants of those communities, not their owners. Or at least that's how things used to be.

This is a romantic view but completely false. Reddit admins over the years have always completely backed the view that subs belong to their moderators.

Because /r/news has a massive, massive advantage over /r/newsButNotModeratedVeryMuch.

If there were multiple /r/news pages and none were a default that might work, but that has always been Reddit's big structural weakness.

/r/newsButNotModeratedVeryMuch might as well be a different website.

The thing about Reddit is that it's "the front page of the internet", and the "front page" has been captured by special interests in collaboration with Reddit, Inc.

One problem is subreddit names. People who want to discuss bitcoin will head to /r/bitcoin, world news to /r/worldnews, etc.

That happens occasionally but it's rarely successful.

/r/onguardforthee/ has ~270K users, /r/Canada has 1.76M. That counts as a success. Most similar replacements never got off the ground.

Network effects exist and constitute a massive moat for new entrants, both within platforms and between platforms.

Often things go like this:

1. Niche refreshing or funny subreddit becomes popular. Power mods request to join the mod team, are rejected by the mods of the sub, who are just normal people like you and me.

2. It hits 100k users, becoming subject to more stringent rules from the admins

3. Incestuous relationship between powermods/astroturfers/reddit admins is used to get the original mod banned (at least accused of "allowing hateful content" or some other false flag)

4. Powermods take over the sub, keep some old mods, but ban anyone speaking up

5. The subreddit is now under the full control of powermods, and becomes an astroturfed echo chamber like the rest of the reddit front page. Sub's front page becomes a mix between the original content and the marketing page for ShareBlue-like organizations.

I wonder if part of the problem with this is due to how subreddits tend to be categorical in nature in that the moderators for a subreddit get to essentially own the discussion and narrative around that given thing. The issue with that is there is an expectation that there is no curating happening because nobody should have that much power to own and oversee over an entire topic.

I wonder if we will see a shift in engagement to smaller, more curated communities centred around the curators instead of discussion happening under broad sweeping discussion boards. Perhaps it's better for discussion to happen under categories within a community curated by somebody with intention. In this scenario, the expectation going in is that there would be a level of controlled oversight.

I've been working on a platform to help content creators offer their communities for this sort of thing where their communities can become a sort of privatized social network curated by them.

https://sociables.com/creators

Who moderates the moderators?

Afraid that can't ever work.

The admins? A small group of throats to choke who would declare themselves responsible for any and all moderator actions.

Who manages the managers? A hierarchy that terminates at a single responsible party the stakeholders, the board, can control.

> A hierarchy that terminates at a single responsible party the stakeholders, the board, can control.

I think that's the organization structure that everyone complains is responsible for some of the most sociopathic behavior in the world. Or at least sociopathic behavior at the largest scale.

Human beings have no new ideas on how to organize things, and so they keep going back to the same old ideas that have been proven defective. In this case, defective in exactly the ways they claim to want to avoid. It's a little bizarre.

Of course it can. Simply have clearly stated rules for mods and the ability to report mods who violate them.

Who would apply those rules to the mods? Rules aren't magical, bolts of lightning don't shoot down from the heavens and obliterate the offending moderator. If only.

Who do you report mods to? Other mods?

There is no one to report them to.

The trouble is that people demand that the discourse remain pleasant and unobjectionable. That it drives on in a direction that they agree with. And good, human conversation can't ever do that. We have unpleasant things to discuss, and we have objections. The direction can and should be capable of changing at any time.

But because most people are cowards and children, you strive like little eusocial insects to deconstruct and destroy conversations like that. It bothers you. And the biggest and best tool for that is the moderator, some unintelligent busybody with grudges.

Until the one day of course that you yourself realize the there is something unpleasant to be said. Until the direction should be different. Until there are objections to be made. Then you get banhammered and you want to cry about the very juggernaut you helped to enable.

The confusing part is why you think that the solution could be an ever larger juggernaut? Why do you think that could ever help? How do you even propose creating it?

> Who would apply those rules to the mods?

Admins.

This isn't nearly as complicated an issue as you're trying to make it out to be.

The same folks complaining mods are tyrants will complain the admins are tyrants when they back up mod decisions.

Strict moderation is always controversial. I tend to prefer it.

The admins like it the way things are. You won't get any relief from them.

If anything, expect things to be like now, but more so. They clearly intend to increase the intensity of the policies you dislike, they just haven't figured out how to do that yet.

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