The worst mods for the community will be the best mods for reddit's bottom line. The power-tripping is payment in itself for those types.
Will it though? Twitter's moderation policies have all but collapsed and the net result is a near-total flight of high-profile high-dollar advertisers.
Like others have mentioned in the thread, the people who will most likely want to take over these subs are going to be some combination of bigots, cranks, and the severely deranged. That doesn't seem like it will do good things for user participation or advertiser attractiveness.
Who wants to advertise on /r/movies if the mod team is exclusively made up of chemtrails connoisseurs and the main topic of discussion is what movies are secret plots by the Jewish cabal?
So why would Reddit do it?
More likely, Reddit will pick moderators who are extremely advertiser friendly and who will squash "controversial" viewpoints -- as we've seen on other sites/ services, those "controversial" viewpoints are things like the precautionary principle, biological sex, free speech, free assembly, freedom of conscience, etc.
What supports the argument that it will go to "bigots, cranks and the severely deranged"?
As if the current mods are any different?
Honestly I don't mind this at all. The big subreddits have become so ossified in their power structures, that each community is its' own little fiefdom now. There is massive friction to being able to post anywhere. Reddit would be objectively better with a less heavy handed approach to moderation, and some kind of site-wide formal appeals process that neuters the ability of any individual mod from going on a power trip.
Whenever I see this sentiment I'm honestly stumped as to how anyone's experience can be so different from mine. What exactly is it that you're trying to post that's so difficult? because from what I see in nearly every sub, they'd be improved by more moderation, since nearly all of them get stuffed with off-topic and low-effort content, often actively breaking the community rules in the sidebar.
Here is a good example. As a new user signed up for an account and posted in a sub got a lot of replies but didn't come back for a few months. Tried replying and was forbidden because of low karma points. Never came back..
The reason why you as a long term reddit user are stumped is because your experience is different.
This is a core feature that distinguishes Reddit as a "Community of communities". It's not a bug, it's a feature
That's the problem, it can be anything. No, I'm not going to sit down and read every single bullet point of your specific subreddit rules so that what I'm saying perfectly jives with your little cult. I don't know how many times I've seen an interesting thread from a sub I've never visited, tried to add to the conversation, and got auto-moderated with zero recourse. No, I'm not going to "revise my post" to step in line with what you're expecting. I'm just never going to bother joining this community now.
So long as a post is on topic and not abusive or threatening, there is zero reason to remove it. But Reddit has become a place where mods curate their userbase into a nightmarish echo chamber, quash all dissent, and then use it as a bullhorn for their own ideologies.
Good!
I only visit well curated subreddits. I don't want drive-by visitors, floods of memes, or similar content. My bread and butter are subreddits like r/DebateReligion and r/AskHistorians.
If the mods are not to my liking, there usually is an alternate sub on the same subject that is.
So thank you for staying away.
And this is exactly why Reddit has gone to hell. Mods with that attitude. "I was here first, so therefore I get to unilaterally set the Overton window for all discussion herein. If you don't like it, you're banned."
HN seems to be the last place on the internet where competing thoughts can exist. It's amazing to me that if moderation is so hard, why dang can do such a good job single-handedly with a user-base bigger than most subs.
You can always create your own and be the first over there.
I agree though that there are some problems with the model, such as a long gone head mod suddenly poking back in and doing something radical, as well as a discoverability issue.
> HN seems to be the last place on the internet where competing thoughts can exist.
HN is good precisely because it's well moderated and ontopic. There are rules here as well, and content is filtered quite thoroughly. If you don't notice it it's just either because you happen to agree with the status quo by accident, or you got used to it over time.
Exactly. Like with politics, "no moderation" is really just "moderation I agree with."
And be the only one over there.
If r/keyboards devolves, sure, someone can create r/seriouskeyboards, but that doesn't mean anyone will join them. First, there are already X orders of magnitude subscribed to r/keyboards; second, if a new user is looking for a group on keyboards, they're more likely to investigate r/keyboards than r/adjectivekeyboards.
"If you don't like it then make your own" ignores all of the realities involved. It's arrogant and dismissive.
(pardon the edit, but I don't think it's a misrepresentation of what you said)
So in other words, you didn't actually want to participate in the community and the automoderation worked as intended to ward off someone who wasn't interested in following the rules used to curate a specific community. Subreddits who have aggressive automod rules are almost without exception ones that put them in place due to the excessive rule-breaking posts from outsiders, including ones exactly like you. Some of the subs enforce specific templates to filter out the flood of low-effort repeats from people who can't be bothered.
People who actually want to participate in the community will read the rules and stay. Anyone who's offended by being asked to do that probably won't be a positive contribution to the community anyway.
Also:
>auto-moderated with zero recourse. No, I'm not going to "revise my post"
You literally listed the recourse you were offered! In the next sentence! And said you refused it.
Or ensure group think.
(Also, you are now banned from /r/pyongyang)
Try posting literally anything contrary to the party line on any noteworthy sub, and see how long it takes you to get banned. Particularly with a new account.
I haven't bothered posting anything on that site in years because it's a 50/50 crap shoot whether it will even be seen, or that the post I just spent 5 minutes of my life writing out will be instantly auto-modded for containing the wrong keyword.
I notice you did not answer my question though. And I have to wonder what you're posting that you keep needing new accounts. As someone once said, 'If you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you keep getting banned and having your comments deleted, maybe you're the problem'
For more than a year, a handful of powermods were banning users which discussed the _possibility_ that SARS-CoV-2 was less dangerous than the media and politicians were claiming (now we have the data and it was less dangerous) or discussed the _possibility_ that the COVID vaccines were less effective or had worse side effects than the media and politicians were claiming (we now have the data and they were less effective and had worse side effects). These mods, who run the default subreddits, were banning users for posting in other subs which permitted such discussions -- that's right, if you posted in a sub that critically discussed what was going on, you'd get banned from default subs like r/pics and r/tifu.
I could list at least a hundred personal examples that had nothing to do with SARS-CoV-2 (usually opposing the American leftwing hive mind), but it's too easy for someone to just dismiss those as unsupported personal anecdotes. OTOH, it was well documented how Reddit shut down discussion re: SARS-CoV-2, as many other sites and services did.
Ideology has nothing to do with it. The post could be flamebait, have a bad title such as "Give me recs", a clickbait title such as "Does anyone else hate Popular Thing", be easily satisfied by searching the subreddit, etc.
Meanwhile, reporting comments that clearly violate the subreddit rules for things like ad-hominem attacks and spam in turn get the reporter reported to Reddit admins for abusing the report button.
From my perspective a few of the elder mods stepped down and were replaced by activist mods that are moderating with strong, shameless ego to reinforce their preferred viewpoints and narrative.
Although it depends on the size of the subreddit - you tend to get a lot of idiots who complain incessantly about plainly justified moderation, and we have to remember that these are literally unpaid volunteers, they're entitled to take actions that make their job easier.
People haven't liked this much when I've said it in the past, but I think there's more to this than just API pricing. I think there's a lot of general discontent about how reddit works that saw people more likely to support this strike. Some because it was the last straw, some to watch it burn.
While I do think reddit is blundering and taking their free labor and content for granted, I think the power mods and more generally the karma system create a lot of anger that has piggybacked on this.
I think you're right, but I think the new ones will be even worse and may actually cause the user exodus that will hurt them. It's these second order effects that Reddit doesn't seem to be taking into account because they're so confident this is mostly inside baseball to the average user.
Yes, as far as API pricing. No as far as the enshittification with "new" styling, NFTs, and all the other dumb shit. And the power mods.
I'm sure that the majority of this is
WOULD YOU LIKE TO READ THIS IN THE APP? ITS BETTER
true, but i think the API is one of the worst parts now. But there is
WOULD YOU LIKE TO READ THIS IN THE APP? ITS BETTER
some functionality I use for old.reddit.com, that I'm pretty sure will be next on the chopping block...
You know the best day I ever saw on Reddit? The day after Trump was elected. The bots and mods and preppanned Clinton themed party made for seemingly ONE DAY of actually unique and genuine content if you could get past all the crying in some places.
2016 is when I learned just how much the narrative is controlled. When they had nothing to post, it was a completely different place.
I’m sure because I dared mention Trump as a date reference some people won’t believe me.
Remember, "Most of What You Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People". <https://np.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most_...>. This also applies to powermods, assuming they're not being paid on the side to push some ideology.