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Comment by evandale | Hacker News Reader

> Sure, but without those moderators there's not much of a site.

I believe moderators on Reddit like to think that they're that important and integral to the site functioning smoothly, but I think the reality is upvoting/downvoting/reporting works perfectly fine in nearly every subreddit.

The only time it doesn't work is in places like r/AskHistorians or r/science which require high quality comments much like this place. You might argue with no moderation the subreddit would turn into a cesspool of reposts and memes - but who really cares? If that's what people want and that's what people are upvoting then let it be. There's no reason to have editorial control over subreddits when the entire point of the subreddit is to have stupid conversations, memes, and jokes. If people keep upvoting and enjoying the same stupid memes and jokes why do moderators feel like they need to step in and disrupt what the people find enjoyable?

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> I believe moderators on Reddit like to think that they're that important and integral to the site functioning smoothly, but I think the reality is upvoting/downvoting/reporting works perfectly fine in nearly every subreddit.

This seems very naive, since afaik the mods also deal (thru 3rd party apps or extensions) with the large amount of spam that reddit gets. And, of course, who is going to deal with those reports?

I mean, sure, Reddit could close everything but the top 20 or 30 most popular subreddits, hire some offshored mods, and start the content moderation speedrun[1] anew. But, why? And how bad will it get before the IPO? Reddit has spent the past two decades washing their hands of any moderation tasks, as their first party mod tools show. Starting now, with a pissed off power user base, seems suicidal.

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[1] https://www.techdirt.com/2022/11/02/hey-elon-let-me-help-you...

Long-time user of the site, although currently taking a break:

I'd strongly disagree with that. Mods do an immense amount of work on Reddit just to keep their subreddits remotely on topic and not filled with constant reposts and spam. Also, they're the ones who actually deal with most of those reports - they don't get handled by magic or admins in most cases.

Unmoderated/absentee mod subreddits are frequently overrun by spam nonsense or taken completely off topic.

> If people keep upvoting and enjoying the same stupid memes and jokes why do moderators feel like they need to step in and disrupt what the people find enjoyable?

Because then every subreddit becomes basically the same thing and you might as well just have a giant impossible to navigate pile of content that's at best vaguely related to what the place it was posted is supposed to be for.

A lot of users spend part of their time just scrolling their home page feed and part of their time looking at specific subreddits. When doing the former, they're (IMO) less inclined to vote on if it fits in the place it was posted or not, just on if they like it - they may not even notice what sub it was actually posted in.

But that can ruin the subreddit as a place for a specific type of content, which is the typically the reason they joined/followed that subreddit in the first place.

How much work does a mod of a city subreddit with 600k subscribers really do though? Is it really necessary to have rules in a city subreddit such as 1) no questions or 2) no posts about crime?

That's what I don't understand. The mods in my city subreddit love to claim they get a ton of alt-right posts and are constantly fighting spam but I've browsed new for years on it and it's _extremely_ rare I see content like that and I highly doubt the mods are acting so fast that they're seeing things I before I do with how often I sat on new auto-refreshing the page.

It’s possible for automoderator tools to immediately hide all new posts, or posts matching certain criteria, pending moderator approval.

Just because you don’t see it in new doesn’t mean it wasn’t posted.

Then what value are the moderators adding if what they do can be automated by a regex filter?

Did you miss the "pending moderator approval" part of that?

Do you think that all online moderation can be accomplished with a regex filter with no human review?

Even if it magically could, someone needs to maintain the regex.

This is what I'd like to know. Based on mod comments in r/Toronto I suspect their regex is literally "ends with ?" and they have to manually approve every question.

They invented work for themselves that doesn't even need to exist and can be solved with the voting system. Every rule change they've made seems to be in an effort to make themselves relevant and take on unnecessary work. This seems like a common theme with Reddit moderators - they give themselves more work to do that nobody is asking them to do in order to justify their existence.

They seem to like to do it for free.

City/place subreddits tend to turn into an endless sea of the same question if unmoderated:

"I'm coming to visit as a tourist/think of moving here - tell me everything interesting to do in the city, where to eat, and where to stay/live"

These tend to be better answered by a wiki section, or a once a month/year thread that all those are referred to - because 95% of them are pretty much all the same for the answers.

That can basically overwhelm all actual news/discussion about the city and most of the larger city subreddits ban/restrict those for a reason.

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There's certainly places with mods run amok harming the ability to have constructive discussions/discuss certain topics most would find worthwhile, but a problem with one city's subreddit isn't every city's subreddit.

A glance at Toronto (I don't normally follow it) suggests they don't allow questions because they have set up a separate subreddit specifically for questions - /r/askTO. (NYC also does this with /r/asknyc). Aside from the past two days, it seems like decent questions over there get a decent response rate, and there's ~180k members, so it's not as though they're being kicked off to oblivion.

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> I've browsed new for years on it and it's _extremely_ rare I see content like that and I highly doubt the mods are acting so fast that they're seeing things I before I do with how often I sat on new auto-refreshing the page.

I will note that it's likely that a lot of the crap is being caught by how they've set up automod (and so, never makes it even to "new"), but depending on what they're doing, that probably still requires a human to sift through the results for stuff that they actually want to allow/is caught up in the filtering rules by mistake.

> reporting

Wasn't reporting handled by the mods?

> You might argue with no moderation the subreddit would turn into a cesspool of reposts and memes - but who really cares?

Presumably the people who used the subreddit would care. It seems like you think Reddit was only for shitposting, that wasn't my experience. It was a collection of forums, each with their own norms.

> Presumably the people who used the subreddit would care.

Right, I mentioned that for r/AskHistorians and r/science. What about regional subreddits? Why in the world does a subreddit for Toronto need rules like no CN tower pictures, no questions, or no posts about crime? Why can't the only rule be the post has to do with the city?

Why do moderators want to go beyond moderating spam and insist on presenting us with a curated feed of what they feel like I should be consuming? Why can't they let upvotes, downvotes, and reports speak for themselves and use that information to make removal decisions?

Why are so many moderators of subreddits against public moderation logs?

One phenomenon that I think drives this is that the engaged users (ie commenters) are usually a small subset of the total user base that upvotes things.

The engaged users care about the topic of the sub and tend to interact with it directly, while the larger audience is subscribed but mostly upvotes things from their main feed without caring which sub it is from, or visiting the sub itself to see what all has been posted there.

I have seen many cases where the “just let the votes sort it out” method leads to things being upvoted, presumably by those users scrolling their main feed who don’t even notice what subreddit it is from, and then comment sections full of “who is upvoting this junk” “this is the third time this has been posted this week” and “mods can we please do something about all of the X posts?”

So mods tend to be pulled in two directions by those two groups, and one is louder than the other so they tend to get their way.

> I have seen many cases where the “just let the votes sort it out” method leads to things being upvoted, presumably by those users scrolling their main feed who don’t even notice what subreddit it is from, and then comment sections full of “who is upvoting this junk” “this is the third time this has been posted this week” and “mods can we please do something about all of the X posts?”

Also known as the "all unmoderated subreddits eventually become /r/pics" problem. It's why a lot of major subs opted-out of being default when that was still a thing.

I've heard a lot of argumentation along those lines from users that seem to really not care what really made Reddit a special place on the Internet. To them, Reddit is another Instagram/TikTok/Facebook clone, and it seems that's a viewpoint the company is trying to support. It seems completely brain-dead in terms of understanding why the website got popular in the first place, but it seems there's a good number of "satisfied" users that want it that way.

Oh come on, you can't be serious. These are different groups of people. The same users who upvote things are not also complaining about what is being upvoted. You're not going to upvote things and then comment on the post to complain about how it's being upvoted.

It's the "engaged users" who create comment sections full of "who is upvoting this junk" because they don't understand the little circle of of people who make multiple "high quality" posts every day are the minority and the unwashed masses the moderators hate so much actually _DO_ want to see the reposts, memes, sunset pictures, and questions about the best place to find a burger because it's the one neutral topic people don't get into petty political fights over and comb through your comment history in an effort to dunk on you and defeat your point with an ad hominem.

> Oh come on, you can't be serious. These are different groups of people. The same users who upvote things are not also complaining about what is being upvoted.

Yes, that was the entire point of my comment.

The worst I've seen are subreddits focused around physical location like cities/colleges, you get a lot of what amounts to cyber-bullying of individuals (like students posting hateful memes of professors they don't like), and this can lead to a pretty toxic subreddit (even inciting violence) without close moderation.

> I think the reality is upvoting/downvoting/reporting works perfectly fine in nearly every subreddit.

Would you be able to provide examples of where you believe this to be the case?

Pretty much any small city or regional subreddits. My favourite example is r/Toronto. It's about 600k users and I don't expect it to be very hard to manage because I used to religiously browse by new before it got neutered earlier this year and made completely useless.

Lots of posts the powerusers over the years have complained about and slowly got rid of are repetitive are things like pictures, questions, and touristy stuff. Those things were extremely popular and got lots of upvotes but a couple powerusers who browse new got tired of them, decided to troll every post they didn't like, and the end result was the mods caving to them and not allowing the posts anymore rather than moderating the bad users and letting the votes sort themselves out.

On top of that, in January they decided to make the rule to ban articles about crimes happening in the city unless it has a significant impact. They were going to run a user survey at the end of January to gauge its popularity. They decided not to and now rule 8 of r/Toronto is no posts about crime. Now r/Toronto is just a sanitized feed of .. pretty much nothing? I don't know what content gets posted anymore that isn't complaining about the Ford government or housing prices. It's pretty sad when we don't even get the news about what's happening in Toronto in r/Toronto anymore unless the mods feel like it's an important enough for the whole city to know about. Why do Reddit mods get to decide what's important to r/Toronto users? I don't believe the subreddit should "belong" to them just because they had first mover advantage and now they get to run a major city subreddit using whatever rules they want.

and no, it's not realistic to spin off your own subreddit and create a new one. It works with bigger places like Canada or Ontario, but Toronto is too small to support multiple city subreddits and you'll never be more popular than r/Toronto because that's naturally the place everyone is going to go to first.

> If people keep upvoting and enjoying the same stupid memes and jokes why do moderators feel like they need to step in and disrupt what the people find enjoyable?

The same question could be asked of Hacker News, which is run very much like a topically focused subreddit with rules, moderation, merging of duplicate topics, etc.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

Yeah, I addressed this and you had to skip this sentence to quote the sentence you did: "The only time it doesn't work is in places like r/AskHistorians or r/science which require high quality comments much like this place."

Ah I missed the “this place” piece. We’ll call that even on misreading each others comments considering your last reply to me.

Well then it’s clear you understand the value of good moderation, even in a place like Hacker News which is not nearly as strict IMO as the subs you mentioned.

I get your examples of over moderation and of course there are plenty of examples of this. I just think you may be in danger of conflating good moderation, which is often invisible and doesn’t involve a lot of moderator posting and onerous rules, with the lack of need for moderation at all.

Who do you think receives and handles the reports?

Most posters use third party apps too. The people who use the official app treat it like About.com, not Instagram

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