I don't know why it took this long for moderators to quit.
1. Popcorn subreddits — r/pics, r/funny , r/twitterScreenshots
2. hobby & employment related
During my time modding, I viewed the subreddit I ran as being very thoroughly in the second group. All the users shared an interest in a particular game. Myself and all the other mods were people that enjoyed the game first and foremost. We did not accept any moderator applications from users that were the prototypical Reddit mods and no one ever went on to join other mod teams.
And I will say, it was honestly extremely fun. I got to build moderator tooling through the API that was interesting and had immediate real world use. Reddit moderation was the catalyst for becoming a developer myself and directly lead to my current career.
I met a diverse group of people from across the globe and formed many lasting friendships with people I would have never met otherwise. Beyond that, it also gave me opportunities to learn more about video game production, go on studio tours, meet game developers, and have experiences that few others ever will.
The mods on the team were not naive. We understood we were providing an extremely valuable service to both Reddit and the game developer for free— but for us, it was a mostly straight forward hobby that presented interesting logistical challenges. For years now, the status quo has been that Reddit may be making some obnoxious UX choices, but none of them had any actual affect on the moderator experience. Most mods were insulated from the changes because we used third party apps and old.Reddit.
I think it is deeply unfortunate that Reddit moderation does attract some of the worst internet users and many people have very negative experiences and opinions when it comes to mods —but for some corners of the site, Reddit moderation was a genuinely enjoyable hobby shared with like minded friends.
I was a mod for a while with /r/AskEngineers. It was never really that big of a subreddit, slowing crossing over 50K subscribers during my time there. And while small, we got to deal with all the usual issues any subreddit sees. In our case, it was conspiracy theorists "just asking questions" about the WTC tower collapse, school students asking people to do their school assignments for them, and stuff like that.
In my time moderating /r/aiclass, I also got the experience of interacting with someone with a genuine mental illness. :-/
I didn't become a mod to win Internet points or for some kind of social status. I was just there to facilitate good conversation between engineers, so that we can help each other. I didn't mind the labor involved, and I just wanted to promote engineering as a discipline.
There was just one active mod when I joined, and he started building up a good (if small) team. That continued through the years as people came and left, and we had a good crew when I resigned. I won't do it again anytime soon (maybe after I retire, who knows), but it was definitely worthwhile, and I hope I was able to make a difference for people.
Also the "power" users would probably be happy to pay reasonable prices to interact with it via app/api, so go ahead and charge something REASONABLE.
There's something nefarious going on behind the scenes and it's all very suspicious. I'm happy to go back to targeted forums if I need to.
On the bright side, avoiding reddit this week has shown me just how much time I waste on the site.
this is explicitly blocked by TOS. You can notionally do it by taking a "RedditIsFun" APK and injecting your own API key and then sideloading, but they'll do app store takedowns for any third-party app that supports it natively (because it's a TOS violation).
Google has a similar policy in general but sideloading makes it relatively pointless.
They're probably tracking revenue and engagement metrics. This happens in a lot of places. Everyone knows there's important infrastructure that keeps things working, but new user-facing projects are always more exciting. Even with physical infrastructure, it's more exciting to build new roads than fix potholes.
I realize giving reddit mod advice on HN is a bit weird, but here is what we've done that has significantly helped
1. Operate off a white list for links instead of a blacklist -- allow posts from domains like twitter, github or whatever is a normal for your community. Set up auto mod to filter any domains outside of the whitelist so mods can review and approve the appropriate ones
2. No URL shorteners at all. There are very good anti-url-shortener scripts for automod. Adding this cut out 90% of the spam we got
Those are two suggestions that i would give to any subreddit. Here are some that you should carefully weigh before you implement
1. Set up automod to filter a post / comment if it gets to a certain threshold of reports. 2. Enforce a minimum karma amount & age to post w/ automod 3. Enforce a minimum karma amount to comment with a link w/ automod
To give you a starting point -- even our large subreddit, our requirement to post is an account older than 6 hours and >0 Karma. For comments with a link, we do >25 karma
I have some ...doubts about how well something like this would work in practice. Burning large systems down and starting over is generally not more efficient than tweaking the system you have.
We’ve learnt a lot about the necessity for institutional knowledge and continuation over the years.
Reddit with a whole new set of mods will be a worse experience overall. The largest and most general subs will probably be alright but good luck finding mods for the more focused and specialist subs.
They like the power of being a moderator and smacking down people who break the rules. Usually they also like to bend the rules themselves to push a personal agenda, promoting what they like and squashing what they don’t like.
It’s the same motivation people have to serve on HOA boards or elected government positions.
I know that when I've taken on unpaid positions of responsibility (not as a reddit mod but within my hobbyist community), it's because I cared about the organization and the people in it, and getting things right.
As the creator and moderator of a 100k sub these are the last things on my mind - and same for the other moderators. The whole point of creating and moderating that was because 13 years ago I thought it was the best place to build a community that I wanted to exist.
I have no idea if that's true for the moderators for /pics or whatever massive sub-reddits are, but I do know that for a lot, and especially the long tail subs and the folks I see in the /modcoord sub and discord, moderators are people who are interested in maintaining a community because they are interested in the affinity.
There are definitely power-trippers who are attracted to these roles. But there are also people who just want to facilitate a nice community and enjoy their little corner of the internet while making it enjoyable for others.
I think people who accuse mods of "just being on a power-trip" are the same people who get mad when their HOA tells them they have to trim the hedges so their neighbor can back out of their driveway safely.
It's myopic and doesn't give mods credit for seeing the bigger picture. This website, for example, is heavily moderated to keep protecting the feeling of "Reddit in the early days." If the mods here weren't on top of that, this place would be overrun by the type of stuff that is now on Reddit's front page.
The same reason you'd be a moderator for a non-profit, which is power.
There are literally thousands of small subreddits run by people who actually care about their communities. I feel most of the hate here for all moderators is coming from people who believe there should be no moderation at all.
You also get empathy for anyone who does have to deal with arbitrary internet commenters and posters
I only take exception with the idea that mods are doing their jobs thanklessly.
With these changes not everyone is winning anymore.
I feel for moderators who have had to deal with crappy tools for so long and have had to rely on the API to get things done. I do question what Reddit has done with the VC money and the dev time they have put in. Their app is undeniably worse than the 3rd party alternatives, and the lack of decent mod tools that required the use of bots is something they should have sorted out YEARS ago. The lack of accessibility from their own app is also very questionable, and their response was to only allow not-for-profit accessibility tools to continue using the API for free. They should have addressed their shortcomings instead of features that have questionable utility, like real-time chat.
It's been known for ever, do prople think these guys just shit money? And the "sensitive" content deletes itself?
This is the sole, minuscule bit of power that most mods have in their lives. It’s sad.