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> One somewhat-related bit on the topic of moderators: does it bother anyone else that the stewards of some of these communities are effectively 100% anonymous?

It doesn't bother me one bit. If the community is that big a company should fork over cash and pay employees to moderate it instead, or keep an eye on the volunteer moderators for any suspicious actions.

Instead of exposing identification I rather have moderators be subject to yearly votes. That way squatting is less of an issue.

> Instead of exposing identification I rather have moderators be subject to yearly votes.

The would just create a brigading problem.

Political subs could encourage their members to join lists of hundreds of subreddits and all vote for picked candidates. Coordination could happen on some other site as well.

I thought of a similar issue.

It could be limited to active high karma participants of the community, however anyone can game that with GPT powered bots.

Another possibility is to have yearly oustings instead of voting mods in.

At 90% disapproval mods get kicked out. This along with brigading detection should cover damage by bad actors for the most part.

Oh yeah, GPT pretty much ruins that. You don't even need humans to brigade now, you just need a bot army. The AI future is going to be amazing...

Any formula you can imagine will be gamed

If the bots are gaining enough karma to vote, maybe they deserve it.

To prevent the use of bot farms (or people farms) to stockpile votes, maybe we could look to the field of sybil resistance and digital IDs?

Stack Overflow has been holding moderator elections for a while. How do they do it?

Okay, and?

It's a subreddit, not presidential nomination.

"It's a subreddit" is a diminishing comment when it comes to these channels where you have significant amounts of people turning to them for information.

That's the point of my comment, really: this isn't just some site on the internet anymore.

It's literally just a site on the internet. You can go to any other site on the internet, even the same site but different slice.

A lot of moderators hide the moderator list because they get far too much abuse for decisions they make. It's dead simple: make a moderation decision based on the rules of the subreddit -> person affected by decision whines to the moderator and clogs up their inbox. Need to make more decisions per day -> inbox filled with more and more whining.

But a lot of the moderator decisions on reddit are personal in nature, not because of the rules. That has been one of the biggest issue with the reddit mods, they sit on these fiefdoms and punish anyone they disagree with. That makes for a bad, bad community. It's like if dang and YC rate limited your account because they personally disagreed with your point of view. This kind of behavior is routine on Reddit.

> does it bother anyone else that the stewards of some of these communities are effectively 100% anonymous?

No. Reddit isn't Facebook. The whole place is anonymous. Do you really think mods of large subreddits wouldn't get swatted, doxxed, harassed, etc?

>Do you really think mods of large subreddits wouldn't get swatted, doxxed, harassed, etc?

Did you... read my comment? I'm clearly aware that's a risk.

It doesn't stop the question of "should these high-and-wide distribution channels be allowed to be run and controlled by people we know nothing about?".

How does knowing someone is "John Smith" rather than "spezzy" change anything?

What information do you want to know about them, and why? Their name? Address? How many children they have?

The main thing I might want to know about them is their history of actions on Reddit. That is who they are - at least as far as we're concerned with respect to their role as a mod.

I dunno, maybe some kind of idea of who they're affiliated with, etc.

Unless they're a celebrity outside of Reddit, you're not going to be able to get a list of their in-person (non-Reddit) friends.

    does it bother anyone else that the stewards of some 
    of these communities are effectively 100% anonymous

Reddit communities fork and spawn offshoots regularly. So for those who "get" how Reddit works it's not an issue.

However, yeah, considering the clout carried by big Reddit communities... it's a concern. I certainly don't think the answer is de-anonymizing those mods, though.

> One somewhat-related bit on the topic of moderators: does it bother anyone else that the stewards of some of these communities are effectively 100% anonymous? Are we actually okay with these spaces that shape significant discussion/sentiment being guided by people who lack accountability?

That doesn't follow; just because people aren't going by their real-world names doesn't mean that they're not accountable. For that matter, what would their real name even tell you? Okay, user someusername1 is actually John Doe and lives at 123 Main St. What exactly do you know now that makes you more comfortable with them being a mod, that you couldn't tell by their history of moderation and interaction in the forum where they're a mod?

Whether they work for an organization that's pushing a view, etc.

You (like many here) seem to think I want full documentation of who a Mod is, when I'm fairly certain my comment implies otherwise.

>Are we actually okay with these spaces that shape significant discussion/sentiment being guided by people who lack accountability?

No, but there's no way to change this situation because Reddit won't create a situation where they have oversight capabilities for mods... that creates too much liability for them. In addition to getting value for the free labor of mods, Reddit also gets a legal shield.

    Reddit won't create a situation where they have 
    oversight capabilities for mods... that creates 
    too much liability for them

It's definitely interesting to watch how they walk that tightrope. Because they certainly do remove mods that are inactive or problematic, like how they are threatening to remove mods that have taken their subreddits dark.

Yes, and they seem to be absolutely 100% unaccountable.

Various mods have gotten plenty of heat over the years, like being grilled by andersen on CNN