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Comment by srvmshr | Hacker News Reader

Reddit Enhancement Suite (RES) is going to be discontinued. Its a third party tool too. You probably missed the announcement a year ago where they announce to be only in maintenance mode and eventually sunsetted

As for desktop: Going by last week stats, in my community, there are about 83 posts/day and 969 comments/day on average with 6 posts getting reported for breaking ToS, and numerous other flagged comments. If I am constrained to using a desktop I don't think it is doable. Moderation is a sidehobby, not my main job. I simply cannot keep up with their tools.

My tool of choice should be able to highlight new answers quickly, switch between posts and respond reliably. I can't do this by reddit mobile and their new desktop UI. Reddit's old interface won't allow all mod tools (such as assigning removal reasons) and the new UI is half baked. The mobile third party interfaces have been at least reasonably consistent.

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You probably missed the announcement a day ago where they mention how things might change with the API update.

https://www.reddit.com/r/RESAnnouncements/comments/141hyv3/a...

I saw it. But they are not 100% sure either. They think that it should be fine until old.reddit.com remains up - and we hope too. This is basically the last hope at getting something done reliably.

If its too hard I'd probably throw in the towel. I cannot invest my time & energy in futility when the parent company itself isn't interested to solve that problem space.

> You probably missed the announcement a year ago where they announce to be only in maintenance mode and eventually sunsetted

I did, but maintenance mode doesn't have to mean discontinued, it just means the software is stable and will be patched as issues arise.

> Its a third party tool too

Yup, but explicitly not affected by the API changes.

> If I am constrained to using a desktop I don't think it is doable. Moderation is a sidehobby, not my main job. I simply cannot keep up with their tools.

The two largest subs I mod are about 500k and 300k respectively. I cover a LOT of the modding by configuring automod which is more capable than people realize, and allowing for self-moderation (if users report X amount of times it gets autoremoved).

> My tool of choice should be able to highlight answers quickly, switch between posts and respond reliably. I can't do this by reddit mobile and the new desktop UI.

This is exactly how I use RES.

I am not sure how you deal with opinionated debates with the Automod. I cannot speak for your community. It also depends on daily active members (we get about 5.6k DAU on weekly average i.e these people are upvoting/commenting at least. I hope these numbers scale linearly for you).

We have automod set up but given how strong opinions can be on heuristic driven scientific areas, I'd be careful not to make it rule based. People will be kicking each other's comments out. That defeats the idea of moderation: civil, well reasoned conversations & productive posts.

But then it depends from community to community. Maybe the conversations in your community are more linear. Mine has to deal with multipolarity & we simply can't do it with how flammable it gets.

(FWIW, this is a screenshot of our efforts to run it according to the rules: https://imgur.com/a/RuU0NKA

The top row is mine as others are dormant moderation members who step up on need basis. 1.3k actions are reasonably high which we can't solve only by automod)

> I am not sure how you deal with opinionated debates with the Automod.

Have firm rules about what is and is not allowed. Match comments for keywords and set rules for how you want such comments to be dealt with. Doing it this way eases moderation by having to review the mod log more often than the mod queue and approve false positives, which as you refine your automod rules, there will be less of.

> It also depends on daily active members (we get about 5.6k DAU on weekly average i.e these people are upvoting/commenting at least. I hope these numbers scale linearly for you

One of the subs I mod is for a very active and polarizing TV show, so it's much mroe active when the show is on, but yes, easily that amount of DAU.I take the view that voting doesn't matter at all, only rule breaking content. I prefer to have a police of minimal interference and suggest users block people they disagree with. Only rule breaking content need be dealt with.

> We have automod set up but given how strong opinions can be on heuristic driven scientific areas, I'd be careful not to make it rule based. People will be kicking each other's comments out.

You can use it irrespective of users, just have it match patterns and take action based on that. It's very very capable honestly. Reviewing the mod log for false positives is much easier in many ways.

> we simply can't do it with how flammable it gets.

Can you honestly say you understand the full extent of what automod can do before you say that? It's not just a simple tool, it allows for complex pattern matching and actions based on that. I mod the subs pretty much myself due to being 'always online', and I keep rejecting other people asking to be mod because I managed to do everything needed with automod and supervision. FWIW the community also says they are impressed with how well the sub is run.

> Yup, but explicitly not affected by the API changes.

Until they kill the old UI, which has similar issues to third party clients, and basically only gets by because they forgot about it for a decade.

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