Comment by andrewinardeer | Hacker News Reader

Comment by andrewinardeer | Hacker News Reader

It wouldn't surprise me in the slightest if every moderator from every subreddit who joins this 'protest' finds that their account is removed from moderation privileges and they end up with a banned account.

In no way, shape or form does a moderator "own" a subreddit. They are merely harvesting the land on Reddit's server farm. At the first sign of disagreeable dissent The Reddit Overlords, with a few clicks of the keyboard, can and will remove the protesters from their property. Any appeals will go to /Dev/Null.

I'm genuinely surprised that moderators are putting what little power on the site they have at risk. We all know that most moderators like a good power flex and some genuinely thrive off it yet I don't think they have thought this through. While they think it may be a noble and just cause Reddit won't tolerate a dip in ad revenue and will happily nuke their accounts and hand the subreddit off to someone else who will toe the line in exchange for free janitorial and field plowing duties.

I don't really see what the risk is. So far as I follow the ultimate threat from the mods is that if reddit makes the proposed changes to the API, they'll stop modding. Given the changes will take a way a lot of the tools larger subs rely on to mod effectively its an unsurprising move.

If reddit wants to step up and moderate the site itself, it's free to, but if it wants volunteers to keep working for free it'll need to play ball with em in some way or another. That or play chicken and see if it wins.

As much as us HNers like to talk about technology, moderation of content is the key to any social media platform being successful. Moderation goes away or drastically changes and the users leave when the site fills with garbage.

Occasionally mods will duck out for a day, on purpose, to let members go nuts with content. That is what would happen without moderators and after a while, all those un-moderated subreddits would become cess pools of bot content and spam with members leaving and traffic will take a giant nose dive.

At a certain point Reddit might decide that it’s simpler and cheaper to pay an ops person $15/hr to manage a high-profile subreddit than deal with the unpredictability of volunteer moderators. That’s ultimately where this is heading.

IMDB tried this at one point and the quality of the moderation plummetted. Same people, they just decided to pay them. It seems to be related to some phsych behavior I’ve read about in behavioral economics. Similar to daycares that add monitary penalties to being late for pickup then have more late parents. It’s like it turns it into a chore somehow adding money into the equation. I’d like to think reddit might know not to fall into this problem, but I suspect you’re right that they will likely just try to pay people thinking it will solve their problems.

Yup, "Operant Conditioning".

The more appropriate study is the one where rewarding children for drawing leads to a decrease in drawing compared to groups that were not promised rewards. What they did for fun and intrinsic rewards becomes less appealing when it becomes about extrinsic rewards.

I'm not sure what the theory is behind the mechanism i.e. why are intrinsic/extrinsic rewards not additive? Why does the extrinsic reward dominate and why is it less effective and less sustainable than intrinsic rewards?

After looking at a bunch of these behavioural experiments that often use money as an easy to implement reward or punishment - I suspect there is something just straight up "funny" about money. It contains some type of hidden resentment and pain. It's bribery to do something distasteful. It's compensation for damage. There is something unfair and insufficient about exchanging it for non-fungible life. There is something about it that poisons the exchanges it is involved in.

They did an experiment with rats recently as well, where the experimenter played hide-and-seek with the rats (with his fingers in a maze of some kind). It turned out the rats were way more engaged versus when they did tasks for a reward.

It’s really fascinating stuff.

I wonder if the principle applies to dogs as well.

>At a certain point Reddit might decide that it’s simpler and cheaper to pay an ops person $15/hr to manage

if this was a profitable and beneficial endeavour it would already work this way. The reason moderation still lies in the community's hands (to whatever degree it does) is because reddit has hundreds of millions of monthly users and many tens of thousands of large subreddits and this is not $15/h but millions of dollars in costs per month that is currently being donated by community members to a large for profit company.

It also adds a layer of deniability for reddit - "we didn't do it, that moderator did it" etc. You can see what the response to moderation is on twitter and figure out how valuable not having to deal with it yourself is.

Your solution isn't scalable with profit.

I would love if Reddit actually went and banned most moderators. The resulting meltdown of the website would be deliciously catastrophic.

I'm nearing the 15 year account mark, mod several 1M+ subreddits. I fully expect to lose my account over this.

Before you do this, create a new account for each subreddit through a separate Tor session for each and different email address (or none) then add them as moderators. Gives you a chance that Reddit won't delete these and you'll still have moderation access afterwards

My understanding is that accounts created over Tor are automatically shadowbanned.

Mods could create temp accounts, mod them to their subs, then use those for the announcements etc. Even without being careful about IPs or email addresses it would make a bigger mess for reddit admins to sort though when banning people.

Absolutely. Yet this is strategy is completely void if an entire subreddit's moderation group is removed and reddit admins installed instead.

Yeah it depends on their goal. If it's to scare individual mods out of participating this would work, if it's to just take over whole subs, then obviously reddit could just do that no problem all over the site.

Reddit recently started throwing around the term "Anti-evil operations" - this seems par for the course.

Reddit described the Reddit model such that moderators "own" subreddits, just like you "own" your Facebook profile. They're reneging on that. It's as if Facebook is saying it is becoming a telephone directory so it will force every profile to have an accurate picture of your face

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