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Comment by Firmwarrior | Hacker News Reader

What tools do they actually need? It seems to me like Reddit mods mostly automatically ban people for participating in subs they don't like. Last time they went on strike en-masse they were upset that Reddit didn't give mods more ability to track and spy on users in an Orwellian fashion

I made one comment on an anti-parent hate subreddit to try and explain why I thought they were wrong to automatically hate people for having kids, and then the subreddit for new parents automatically banned me. I tried to ask the mods on the subreddit for parents to unban me, and they muted me, and then Reddit gave me a temporary ban from the entire site for "harassment" of the mods

So far as I'm concerned, I'm happy to see the end of the little pocket dictator mods and the admins/Spez. It'll be a lot nicer if I can keep completely separate throwaway identities for talking about diapers and talking about philosphy

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It's sad to see comments like these. It just reminds me that people will so readily take the work of others for granted.

The thing about the work mods do is that it's mostly invisible. If mods are doing their job, spam is getting deleted, reports are being serviced, and no one notices a thing. The subreddit seems to be working fine without them! It'd be easy to trick yourself into thinking they provide no utility. Even worse, since you don't notice the good work being done, all you do notice is the bad work (i.e. power tripping). Which, don't get me wrong, can be bad.

But tbh the complaints I've heard about "Orwellian" mods are completely overblown. I've used reddit for over 10 years and subscribed to hundreds of subs. I've had my posts removed by power tripping mods maybe a handful of times. The number of times I've seen a subreddit go to shit due to lax or nonexistent moderation is much much higher.

I want to be charitable here, but honestly, I looked over the list of mod tools someone posted in a sibling comment.. and most of them are just tools to attempt to blacklist people for wrongthink

I'm sure there are some small subs where the mods aren't huge jerks and benefit from usable tools to fight spam and deescalate flame wars, but I think we'll all be a hell of a lot better off with a bunch of unaffiliated or loosely-affiliated topical forums than we are with this current panopticon. The mods will be better off too: A guy moderating his own website will have better tools to combat spam and punish whatever he defines as trolls within his own kingdom.

> I've had my posts removed by power tripping mods maybe a handful of times.

I thought this too until I went to Reveddit one day and WOW there was a lot of stuff silently removed without disappearing from my user history.

This made me curious, and I'd never heard of this tool, so thanks for making me aware!

To further my point, I just looked myself up (same as my HN handle), and I only found 7 comments removed by mods. Most of which were honestly fair to remove, in my opinion.

Absolutely agree with you. My experience with Reddit moderators is that they are largely abusive, arrogant egomaniacs and I have absolutely zero sympathy for their hardship caused by lack of API access.

This is pretty much like people who say that we could just get rid of the police because all they do is harass everyone all day anyway.

Users in a well behaved system never notice the fantastic amount of work that goes into keeping the system well behaved. If you do your job right as few people as possible know you exist. It's the dilemma of the maintainer: extremely vital component of the system who everyone thinks does nothing in the best case and enraged at when something breaks in the worst case.

> It's the dilemma of the maintainer

Why not publish some stats every week/month about what kind of content/users were banned/suspended etc.

You must have misunderstood me but just to reiterate, I have no sympathy for the moderators of reddit whatsoever.

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