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Comment by BlargMcLarg | Hacker News Reader

>If those moderators leave,

Then they will find new ones. As long as Reddit has usecases, as long as the powertrip is worth the lack of ownership and poor tooling, there will be mods willing to moderate subs and feeling powerful and getting drunk off of it. 'Historically', this has happened in every social medium with moderation so far.

There's no anarchy here. Most Redditors don't care for the mods in particular. If the underlying reason doesn't move them, a new generation of mods will take place and the cycle continues.

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>Most Redditors don't care for the mods in particular.

Because the current batch of moderation work well enough.

Now imagine the current batch leave, and the new ones take over are worse (and they will be worse since Reddit has shown that Reddit has direct control over the Moderators' position safety, if the actions are not aligned with Reddit's CEO. Some reasonable people will not like that.)

Eventually the remaining good ones will be replace again, and after a few generation, only the bad moderators are left.

For example, just look at every dictatorship government in the world. No dictator starts out hiring only bad officials. Everyone's benevolent with good intention. Eventually, the good officials gradually get push out and sycophants fill the rank.

Your assumption relies entirely on the difference between new and old being a noticeable, significant bad. Nothing in this story implies noticeable, let alone significant.

Old Reddit to New Reddit was noticeable and growth continued. The push from browser to app was a noticeable bad, an intended one, and Reddit still grew.

You seriously underestimate the passivity of most users. Reddit has, by all regards, truly messed up several times and still went on. It'll become a problem when mod quality is obviously, significantly worse, and no sooner than that.

>Your assumption relies entirely on the difference between new and old being a noticeable, significant bad.

Because we are in generation 1. What about X generations later?

As for the UI change. That's a completely different topic and I am not sure why you are bringing this up. The UI change doesn't change the content/moderation of the communities.

>It'll become a problem when mod quality is obviously, significantly worse, and no sooner than that.

And I am predicting the mod (thus content) quality will eventually be significantly worse because of this action by the CEO.

Edit: The parent post edited his post so the arguments are now don't quite directly counter his points. Now it seems like I am strawman-ing. Why would you do that?

>What about X generations later?

X generations later the number of possible mutations are so big you'd be grasping to point at this as 'the' moment Reddit messed up, unless the statistics clearly indicate it (at which point you can still argue against it). For each person like you who said 'this API change was the moment things fell apart', you'll get another pointing out Reddit mobile, new Reddit, spez becoming CEO, the other incidents they scapegoated onto someone, and more.

Even now, people could argue the worst thing happening isn't the mods being replaced, but Reddit allowing mods to put popular subs on private. The way things are going, those two events will be so close together they'd be practically indistinguishable in the grand scheme.

>As for the UI change. That's a completely different topic and I am not sure why you are bringing this up.

No it's not. It boils down to the same thing: UX experience degradation. Redditors have been on the receiving end of UX degradation for more than a decade now. Your whole argument relies on new moderation making UX bad enough to drive users away.

>And I am predicting the mod (thus content) quality will eventually be significantly worse

Great, like almost everybody, nothing new. Only difference being, you set your forecast on 'in some day in the future' now, which wasn't at all clear from your OP, rather than 'this is the event that will kill Reddit in the next 3 months' everybody is proclaiming it as.

> Then they will find new ones.

Looks easier than it actually is. Here's how a mod routine looks like:

check modqueue (that's the place where all reports come). Some are fake because one user has some beef with another, some trolls, some spam, some user insulting each-other.

you work through the queue, by the time you are done users who were banned are already complaining on modmail, you take your time to read all complaints and try to shrug the threats and the attempted doxing. you get a thank you for each 100 threats.

rinse and repeat. whereas it might look glamorous from the outside in practice is boring, repetitive and tedious. in large subs you also have to coordinate with other mods to make sure there is some consistency in modding actions.

finding new mods is easy, having them stick around, I'd say not so much.

Reddit came down hard on threatening mods the other year. Did you forget, or are you omitting that on purpose to strengthen your argument?

If you're a mod, and get threatened, ban the user. It's simple. Move on with your life. 90% of your problems in Reddit are caused by 10% of the people. Get rid of the trouble makers and your job is a cakewalk.

Is this really that difficult to reason through?

> If you're a mod, and get threatened, ban the user. It's simple. Move on with your life.

Have you ever moderated a sufficiently large community?

> If you're a mod, and get threatened, ban the user.

threats always come after the ban and is trivial to create a new account and continue the threats. the complaints about mod harrassment are as old as reddit but spez always promissed solutions and never delivered. heck, my sub had its mod discussion archive leaked - on reddit!, we reported it to admins repatedly and they did a big nothing.

one of my mod colleagues got doxxed and had a banned user ringing at his very physical door demanding "to discuss the issue", how would you feel about it ?

edit: and this is a boring country sub, I can't even imagine what modding a political sub is like.

I do not care for the mods themselves, but I do care for their output - which is that each community has its own vibe and rules. Also the Reddit strike showed that powerful moderators are great for self-organisation - nothing like that would be possible if moderators could not shut down the communities, users on their own can't realistically self-organise for action like that.

The thing with mods is even if you don't recognize their value shape how a community works. If dang wasn't working on HN it would be a different place would it be better or worse? We don't know. If it's ok for reddit to reshape their communities it's fine to replace them but random mods are not a drop in replacement.

You're making my point for me. People are already assuming the new moderation will be noticeably worse to a significant degree, and using that assumption to assert their position as absolute. You know, in a place full of software devs who routinely mess up estimating something far more similar to their past experiences.

No, I said it will be different and as we learned numerous amounts people hate change. The kneecapped their growth with their redesign and now this shit show.

This is a good point, and explains why HN is comparatively quite good while a large number of subreddits (especially the biggest ones) are a complete shitshow. The problem that I see is that many subreddit mods erroneously think they are Dan-level.

I don't totally disagree, but mods without good tooling are dead in the water, and reddit has failed for years to build good mod tooling.

Reddit has seriously improved their mod tools in recent years. I really don't understand these complaints.

I'm not a sock puppet, I just don't see the validity in saying over and over that the mod tools are bad, when they are clearly not and work for quite a lot of mods.

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