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Comment by MAGZine | Hacker News Reader

The amount of effort that goes into good-faith moderating can't be underestimated.

The goal that reddit is trying to accomplish is to reopen the closed subreddits. I think that this MIGHT accomplish that. What I think it may also accomplish is kicking mods who have been committed to their communities for years. Their replacement may be better in the vector that they click the "public sub" button, but almost certainly worse in the vector of actually caring about their community over the long-term.

Especially for large communities, signing up for a moderator position without the API-supported mod tools just makes me think you're going to get inept moderators. Nobody who knows how to effectively moderate would take that job. It would be like signing up to build a house with only a screwdriver.

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>The amount of effort that goes into good-faith moderating can't be underestimated.

Yeah that's why HN is good. Not the case with reddit mods

There's lots and lots of reddit mods. Many, many good ones and many bad ones too. Differs massively by community.

> but almost certainly worse in the vector of actually caring about their community over the long-term.

And there is the crux of the issue.

Reddit leadership cares about looking good for the IPO. That is it. Whoever is left holding the bag after that isn't their problem.

Reddit is banking on the mods coming back and re-opening the subreddit to avoid being ousted. Mods who have put their heart and soul into a sub for years won't want to give it up so easily.

I'm not so sure. My completely anecdotal experience across communities on many platforms is that users love to say "I'm gonna quit!", then never do it, but when mods say that they mean it. I can't recall any times I've seen a mod come back, but plenty of times where it's led to cascading resignations (if it wasn't a coordinated "mic drop" in the first place)

The currency of good moderation is respect, and if you tell a mod you don't need them, there's a high chance of them calling your bluff

You could well be right, as it sounds like the trust between the mods and admins is gone. The main mod of r/apple has quit at least.

It sounded like they were willing to remove the mods and let the forums pick new ones

in light of this and the previous mod revolt at stack overflow, I really find myself wondering why people bother volunteering to mod, donating enormous sums of their time to large for-profit companies. I understand wanting to create a great community. but I’m wondering if maybe we have, for the better, I think, arrived at a point where those generous people realize that they should not donate their time when they have zero stake in that business, as well as zero ultimate control, when the business chooses to make decisions against the interests of their communities.

I think the obvious answer is to go back to before these monoliths and build community controlled spaces. We are seeing the beginning of that especially with Lemmy, there's currently a Cambrian explosion of software designed for this going on right now.

> Their replacement may be better in the vector that they click the "public sub" button, but almost certainly worse in the vector of actually caring about their community over the long-term.

It very much depends on the sub. There are some mods heading big subs who are power hungry jerks who do it for all the wrong reasons. Their replacements could well be better.

Obviously many will be worse also, but I think reddit admins will do at least some level of vetting before assigning new mods.

> some mods heading big subs who are power hungry jerks

I've seen this complaint, but never the reality. I've seen heavy and light handed mods, but in either case, I've only ever seen mods that are thoughtful about the balance they have to strike between the two. Some subs have strict rules, but I've never thought they were fascistically strict, just that those mods were deliberately cultivating an alternative to another subreddit (usually from the "posts only" alternative to a larger sub that allows image posts, like r/games vs r/gaming).

> I've seen heavy and light handed mods, but in either case, I've only ever seen mods that are thoughtful about the balance they have to strike between the two.

The heavy-handed moderation isn't typically visible, which is intentional. You'd be surprised how many comments and submissions are silently removed, or how many users are explicitly or "shadow" banned (by automod, not site-wide) for simply posting in a subreddit one of the mods disagrees with. A lot of mods used things like MassTagger to bulk-remove "toxic" users.

Someone in /r/subredditcancer created a transparent mod log project, but they were driven off the site by mods and admins.

You've never been permabanned just for disagreeing with someone you didn't realize was a mod?

Well, it happens, more often than you might realize.

It happens enough that there are entire subs devoted to complaining about it, but not so often most of reddit is unusable or affected.

No, I have never been banned from any subreddit in my account's nearly 15 year history. Likewise I can't remember any comment or posts being removed, except for automoderated reasons (like a sub that auto-mods profanity, mentions of piracy, or has picky post format requirements).

A lot of these examples are suspiciously lacking in precision. Exactly what kinds of things are you disagreeing with mods about that got you in trouble? Posting in exactly which subreddits got you banned from others?

You wouldn't be aware of any comments or posts removed unless automod or a moderator specifically notifies you. They still appear to you as normal, but show as 'removed' to anyone else.

I disagreed with a mod in a city subreddit about the best cinema, and was banned for doing so. Didn't insult them, just a difference of opinion. Just for example. This is a pretty common thing which is why there are entire subs dedicated to documenting the behavior.

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