Ask HN: Why do we need moderators at all?

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I hope you're not flagged for this great bit of satire, considering Poe's Law and all.

They were. Let's see how long my vouch holds.

I'm not saying we shouldn't have teams of people filtering this kind of comment. We already do. The issue I have is with the marriage of one specific moderator team to the board/subreddit in question. Comments like yours are the easy ones, automated tools will usually catch it (and it looks like they already did!)

When it comes to tricker cases, like with political content, some people have different preferences and those preferences are just that: a preference. If I want to view into a subreddit downstream of a politically-minded set of moderators, I should be able to do that without locking other people into the same view. Right? It doesn't mean that teams aren't all going to universally remove spam.

The community should moderate itself. If a comment like the parent appears it should be downvoted by the community to hidden. The only reason for moderation is to remove things that are illegal. Therefore, all speech is acceptable provided it is not illegal content. A simple flag of "illegal" should be provided that will be marked as review by a moderator.

The problem with moderation is the same as the problem with representative democracy. Moderators become entrenched and yield power unilaterally eventually not representing the community. I can't tell you how many times I have been banned, shadow banned, comments removed, not allowed to participate, etc due to the fact that a moderator decides what is best.

Edited: to remove ambiguity

Moderation is also essential to keep communities on topic and enforce a baseline quality level. It doesn't matter for a generic "funny" kind of community, but something like /r/AskHistorians doesn't work without someone ensuring that the guidelines are met.

Of course those can also be grounds for disagreement, and I'd be lying if I'd say that I have never been frustrated with a mod when I posted something that was removed even though it clearly didn't break the rules, but I think that kind of false positive is sort of the price you have to pay to keep a community on track.

I'd rather have that than have everything devolve to low quality and effort Threads.

I think the same logic can apply to your scenario. If it is off topic it gets downvoted by the community and disappears to hidden. The relevant data gets voted up to the top as again decided by the community.

This would inevitably reward first commenters, but that is the situation anyway with current thread voting. I think later commenters as long as not downvoted past a threshold would stay visible with an even(ish) vote count to give those comments the visibility to rise.

What about comments that people disagree with that are still on topic but controversial? Well, we are running out of directions so they should get a side vote. Downvotes to explicitly send to hidden as not relevant (spam, off topic, etc), upvotes for agreeable comments base on popularity, side votes for relevant but disagreeable.

The thing is thought that through discovery and feeds it happens often that a much larger amount of folks than the ones belonging to the core community flood in. Downvotes alone won't work because nobody knows how things are supposed to work.

If you have a costume party with 100 people and 10 arrive without costume, they are the outsiders that have to adapt. If 1000 people join your party you're the weird minority and your costume party will be over.

Things that are off-topic and illegal aren't the only ones that get downvoted, though. HN is unusual in the sense that it's discouraged to downvote things you dislike; that's the effective status quo in most other communities. In your proposed system, you'll have some people side-voting those comments, and you're going to have others downvoting them.

it’s not discouraged. people flag and downvote things they don’t like as well. the difference is that newcomers don’t have the ability to until they get a certain level of Karma.

Hmm. I thought that was one of the things listed in the posting guidelines. I was mistaken.

1: Spam makers can make far more spam than you would think possible. 1a: Spam makers can make far more spam accounts than you would think possible. 2: Moderators handle the grand majority of that spam before you ever even see it in addition to managing admin tasks. 3: I don't want to have to block 300 posts and posters to see 1 that I have any possibility of enjoying. 3a: In the best possible world, AI would handle the majority of that grunt work, but there's no telling how wrong it can go.

As far as I know moderators are not responsible for most of the spam that comes through. As you said it can be plentiful. I have been caught in spam (other) filters many times just for using tor browser (thanks HN!). We already have spam filters available with spam trends that are pretty discernable that can do the bulk of the work.

There are other ways to make this work through some heuristic that auto identifies a comment and starts it below a visible threshold. What spammers are not good at, is spending time to go edit comments and content to evade these filters.

My point is that moderation is extremely limited. Review illegal content flagged comments, check appeals for false positives of a spam filter. All other content should it make it in the thread can be moderated by the community.

The only time i see this works well is in r/manga, where active mod is only a single one for a fairly big sub. Almost everything that floats up and down that sub is by reader's discretion. Although it's an exception that proves the rule.

The sole mod has sanely make the sub stay open (also maybe because the sub is ad-unfriendly so it's actually more productive for the strike to have it open).

Sure. But not all venues go by the "all content that isn't illegal is acceptable" standard.

Also, how do I know content is being downvoted because it's spam and not simply unpopular.

For instance, when I say "COBOL is a better programming language than Python," or "I liked my Treo much more than any iPhone," what's to prevent people from downvoting it into oblivion?

I proposed a solution in another comment that had a "side vote" feature as the disaggreement/unpopular option (since we rand out of directions for arrows).

In the reddit model, moderators are sitting by a gentle stream and when they see a turd floating by, they scoop it out and throw it away.

In your model, moderators are in a sewer tunnel sitting next to a raging river of shit and when they see something that looks relevant to their interests, they scoop it out and wash it off.

I don't see how that could be true. It's the same workflow for the moderators, it's just that users can unsubscribe to their view.

How is it the same workflow? Let's say today, there's r/widgets and their rules are no memes, no politics, no nsfw, etc. Most of the users understand the rules and keep it on topic. Now and then moderators have to delete off topic posts or ban users, etc.

You want a fire hose of widgets, widget memes, widget gone wild, erotic widget fan fiction, widget remix videos, widget music, widget swapping, widget swapping in the greater boston area, nsfw widget swapping, ask widget, widget jokes, hold my widget, midget widget porn, gidget widget porn, etc all lumped together. Instead of maybe 100 posts a day with 10% off topic, there are a thousand posts a day and 90% are off topic (for any given moderator's interests). Instead of deleting the relatively rare bad stuff, you have to pick out the relatively rare good stuff.

What would a moderator normally do? Delete comments, issue warnings, ban if necessary. So they can just do the same thing. Nothing changes on their end, but for the user, they're only banned from one curated feed and not from the topic. I guess eventually a user might want to occasionally submit stuff that doesn't belong in every feed, maybe they indicate that somehow, if they care. For most people this isn't a big deal and for the 99% of lurkers it just lets them pick what curated feed to view.

Sounds like you want to flip the model upside down, all the mods would have to approve every post that jives with their POV in order to filter on them.

Now, break the rules and get your post deleted (or however it works there).

Worth reading:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moderation

My view is that it is needed. Otherwise communities quickly devolve into cesspools. Even toxic places like 4chan have moderation, despite attracting the worst of humanity.

Right. My question is closer to this: why do we need exclusive moderators? If posts & comments are our dataset, what is the purpose of only allowing one, singular curated view into that dataset?

There are removals for ToS/legal reasons, which can be fairly universally applied. I see that as traditional moderation.

However, there are also community-specific removal paradigms based on what a moderator team sees as the vision for a space. This is much more "curation" than it is moderation.

So, assuming we will always need category 1 moderation, why do we marry only one set of category 2 moderation (curation) to a dataset of user-submitted posts and comments? What's the harm in allowing me a moderated but uncurated feed, and allowing me to apply my own filters? This would allow topic-specific items to congregate in one place with different curation paradigms present based on what users want. This solves many of the problems I see in the federated-reddit world.

I suspect that's not the Wikipedia article you'd meant to link.

I feel like a lot of people are only reading your question and not the rest of your message.

The problem with what you're describing creates a lot of duplication of effort, while also creating this weird community that's fragmented yet all in one place, and also creates a lot of work for moderators.

Using reddit as an example, say you have a game, with a dedicated subreddit for it at /r/game. A lot of people decide they don't want it filled with shitty memes, the moderators have everyone take a vote, and they decide to spin off memes to /r/game_memes.

It sounds like your example would instead rely on people basically choosing specific moderators to curate the sub, and you only see the results of actions taken from moderators you "subscribe" to, effectively. This would rely on moderators having to manually watch the sub for memes, and if a mod sees a meme, they remove it, and if you're not subscribed to an anti-meme moderator, you would not see the result, and would still see the meme.

Can you not see a problem with this setup?

You're relying on moderators to flag the memes. You could let users flag the memes on their own, but then you get people abusing flags.

It's best to just let moderators be what they really are -- not curators, but janitors. Moderators keep a community clear of abuse and spam. Yes, some subreddit moderators have extreme power trips and ban people for the stupidest shit, but there's not much you can do about it. Your solution just creates a ton of extra work.

Why do we need moderators at all?

I've never had a Reddit account but in the spirit of the current Reddit discussions, moderators are required due to the sheer scale/size of Reddit. Automation is far from being able to keep threats, illegal content and abusive messages off the system. One set of global admins would just shuffle where these admins are to a centralized location much like how Facebook is moderated. There are pros and cons to distributed moderators, too many to name here.

I also understand that Reddit may not have invested much in human capitol around moderation meaning that they must have the volunteer distributed moderators to keep running or they would need to start building large centralized moderation teams like Facebook. From what I have read thus far I would not expect this to occur. If they centralize the volunteers then there would be a higher risk of power-tripping moderators managing communities they are not actually a part of. This also increases security risks. Pop one moderator in a centralized model and now the entire site can be nuked. The risk of this is lower in a paid centralized model as the moderators are employees or contractors can their access can be limited with VPN's and other corporate tools. This type of moderation also requires really good audit trails. I have no idea if Reddit has this level of auditing.

Even in the old school forums phpBB and the like I had moderators for specific sub-categories that could only moderate the part of the forum that they focused on. Global moderators carry multiple risks and require a great deal of trust.

Let's set aside your idea for aggregating federated content - it's pretty close to what the fediverse does, but it doesn't explain why the individual fediverse instances themselves need to be moderated.

You're looking at this problem as if content just happens, like it's a vast jungle just growing up all around us and we only have to just pluck the best stuff.

But what induces people to post, or contribute, or write anything at all? A community has to exist that will appreciate it. This community will only grow through shared norms. Even if it's a shared norm that we're all here to just post nice cat pictures. So leadership and moderation is essential to create the audience, the aesthetic, the norms - everything that makes the community a rewarding place!

If you don't have that you just have a site with random content and no audience, so there's no reason for anyone to post anything.

See the Slashdot moderation model.

Users could rate things as Funny, Informative etc. And users could choose what comments they got to see.

https://slashdot.org/moderation.shtml

Based on observed behavior, I never believed that was how it actually works there. It seems to actually just be an upvote/downvote system.

Classically, Slashdot moderation:

1. Applied only to comments. Stories are selected by (paid staff) editors.

2. Was enacted by a subset of members, who would rotate through the active moderation pool.

3. Each moderator could only moderate a small number of comments, after which they dropped out of the rotation.

4. Each comment could be moderated only within a specific range, I believe -1 to +5. Each moderator's vote moved the comment by one unit up or down. Negative-voted comments were hidden or collapsed.

The second and third aspects were highly effective against moderation brigades or collaboration. It was unlikely that any one group would receive and be able to coordinate moderation activities at any one time, whether to promote or bury comments. The limits may have been too extreme, but the effect was useful.

The fourth aspect meant that a given comment wouldn't converge on some ultimate value (say, as with a five-star rating system, with all the issues involved there), but rather each moderation action shifted score by a full point. The result was ... a fairly uneven ultimate rating of content. Yes, really bad stuff tended to get buried, and really good stuff ... might ... make it to the top of the page. But an awful lot of mediocre-to-good content just sort of languished in the middle. Reading large comment pages felt ... kind of bleh.

(Mind: HN's comments threads can often feel the same way, though they seem somewhat less prone to this.)

I've long felt that averaging weighted ratings of content, on a 3- or 5-point scale, would be better. A comment could approach but not attain a perfect score (3 or 5), and the overall moderation could be "fuzzed" by the uncertainty given the number of votes and points assigned.

(One problem / annoyance of voting systems is the false certainty of perfection in rating items. Reddit adopted fuzzing to address this, though somewhat poorly in my view. Using a voted range + random fuzz factor might do better at placing items at various levels within a displayed ranking, achieving a more fair final result.)

Though I've also come to feel that crowdsourced moderation has its own tremendous limitations. The assessments of a thousand laypeople really shouldn't outweigh that of a domain expert (acting in a well-justified and good-faith manner, of course). And many moderation systems really don't seem to have given deep thought to what they are trying to measure. Something I've written about at length: <https://web.archive.org/web/20200629055317/https://www.reddi...>

It's labor cost. There is, historically, never enough moderation capability to go around to start duplicating the effort: that's why Reddit can have a "moderator strike". A solution that rests on choosing who curates you most likely means you have the labor-saving technology for an AI to do the curation based on a prompt, in which case, you can jump to that solution.

The problem with your model is that there won't be a community because people wont't see the same view. Reddit moderation is annoying when there are responses to deleted copmments or discussions about where post went. But Reddit is pretty good about leaving markers that something was deleted. The different views with your idea means might as well have two different forums. BTW, any good federated system should be able to handle multiple forums on same topic; the Reddit multi-reddits do this.

Also, it will kill discussion because the positive filtering requires someone to approve posts before they are seen. If the moderators are sleeping, then no one can have post seen until they wake up. The Reddit negative filtering means that moderators delete the bad stuff when they see it.

People talk about Usenet killfile and how each person doing own moderation. But having to do everything yourself was annoying. It also resulted in an indvidual view where could miss stuff. The not-very-good solution was to quote content in every post like email.

Usenet killfiles were only part of the solution, with the Usenet Cabal / The Lumber Cabal and Cancelmoose offering systemic and global control over abuse.

I've argued loudly since early on Google+ (2011s-ish) that personal content management tools are part of the solution but not a total solution. It is quite easy for a single person to be utterly overwhelmed by a concerted or prolonged attack, or by factors such as pervasive cultural discrimination or abuse. And communities as a whole require systemic defences.

That's a message I've taken to Mastodon and the Fediverse, where ... it does seem to largely be heard. Things are far from perfect there, but the ability for both individuals and instances to apply a range of content defences, from keyword or individual profile blocks (permanent or time-limited) to limiting or entirely blocking instances, is useful, and seems to be working pretty well at limiting the types of spam and abuse I've seen elswhere.

(There are occasional outbreaks, these to date have been quite limited and quickly addressed, at least on well-managed instances. And yes, there are poorly managed instances. Those tend to get defederated quickly and widely.)

I suspect that one problem might be that not that many people want to do the job.

Your suggestion relies on having sufficient people willing to moderate a forum.

That's already a problem with the spaces we have today. Even so, subreddits have moderator teams that keep them running. What would be the issue with allowing a B-team, maybe with a lighter touch, and allowing users to choose between one of those teams to curate their view of what is otherwise the same space?

Without @dang there would be chaos.

Starting to think his account is shared by a small team of people. He has to sleep like all of us, you know? And when you have his pattern-of-life documented on HN, you can discern when he sleeps, but his account is active 24/7 so there has to be a team.

No, we don't do that - it wouldn't feel right.

Of course. The question in the title isn't exactly the one I was trying to ask, but it is close. In my mind there is a difference between content moderation, which enforces the ToS and removes illegal content, and curation, which is more about community preference.

Clearly there are some things that dang needs to remove for legal reasons. And the same goes for Reddit, some things just can't be hosted.

But when it comes to curation, which is the subjective judgment that a post or comment is either fit or not fit to be posted, do we need a singular moderator (or group of moderators) to enforce this? Is there any real issue with allowing multiple sets of curators for the same dataset? If we're trying to escape the fiefdoms of Reddit, I think we also need to escape the "law" that moderator teams and communities must be one to one.

You don't need them (other than a basic level for legal compliance). In fact, most social media does not have moderation in the sense we see in Reddit.

What the Reddit model provides, and your example lacks, is a shared reality. There is a bit of variation with comment orders (both different view modes and some fuzzing); but for the most part, two users viewing the same community at the same time see the same thing. Without that type of shared reality, it is essentially impossible to build the type of community/unique subreddit cultures we see in Reddit today.

Most social media doesn't do this. HN does. Twitter and Tumblr operate operate as more of a social web. Most content gets spread by users reposting it, propogating it through their network. In that way, the accounts you follow act primarily as the "moderators" for your view of reality. No two people see the same reality, and it is incredibly difficult for distinct subcultures to emerge; and even more difficult to participate in multiple subcultures, as your view of reality does not distinguish between them.

There is also the TikTok model of a super-charged algorithm employing black magic. Or Youtube's model of algorithmic discovery, combined with meaningful subscriptions to particular creators.

The other question is one of labor. The motivation for most moderators in Reddit is control over a community (which can be either a good or bad thing). If you take the community away, then all you are left with is unpaid labor. Unless you can have individual posters say "I want to post to the moderated list X", in which case you are back to the original model.

Most reddit communities have policys restricting cross posting, and "brigading" across communities is generally not allowed by site-wide rules. Having a model where your content goes to everyone, and is then blacklisted by specific mod lists is essentially auto-brigading everything by design.

Again, this is not nessasarily a bad thing. Plenty of social media does it this way. But it is meaningfully different from how Reddit works.

I've suggested, from time to time, a multidimensional model of moderation. You could have the obvious dimension of "banned", along with "spam", etc... either as tags, flags, or numbers

Most people like a simple model, and it's easier to code. There are always corner cases, which is what this discussion is about. Multidimensional voting/moderation would help in those cases.

You'd have multiple communities existing in the same space interacting akin to normal and dark matter. The reputation of one can spill over and affect the others.

You can technically do it, but I don't it being worth the hassle.

If the future model is going to be anything, I suspect it'll be pay-to-join networks where it is primarily the users that are moderated instead of the content.

This sounds like it would require a lot more people to perform moderation -- an emotionally taxing and thankless task -- to come up with a community that everyone enjoys their own facet of.

I also think it will lead to the Nazi bar problem: https://twitter.com/IamRageSparkle/status/128089153745134387...

>"you have to nip it in the bud immediately. These guys come in and it's always a nice, polite one. And you serve them because you don't want to cause a scene. And then they become a regular and after awhile they bring a friend. And that dude is cool too.

>And then THEY bring friends and the friends bring friends and they stop being cool and then you realize, oh shit, this is a Nazi bar now. And it's too late because they're entrenched and if you try to kick them out, they cause a PROBLEM. So you have to shut them down.

>And i was like, 'oh damn.' and he said "yeah, you have to ignore their reasonable arguments because their end goal is to be terrible, awful people."

If someone posts totally innocuous, on-topic content one day, and absolutely heinous stuff the next, I don't want to only see the innocuous stuff -- I want to not have to be around someone who has shown that they are an awful person at heart, and I also don't want to be in a space that will quickly be filled with their friends (and which my friends will have to endlessly moderate away).

I'm actually talking about having virtually the same setup we have now, just with a moderator B-team (and C, D, etc.), whose view you can subscribe to instead of the main one. Really the question is not "should we have moderators?" but rather "what does the 1:1 moderator-team-to-community ratio do for us?"

From the perspective of an average user, subscribing to a big sub and using the default moderation view, nothing is changing. The only difference is that there are other moderator views created by different teams using the same content source.

For discussion to happen, someone needs to create and maintain the space for discussion. Nobody wants to visit a forum that’s full of unrelated garbage, and nobody wants to talk in forums they don’t like to visit.

The curation is what makes it a forum in the first place.

We don’t, at least not all of us. I’d much prefer simple automated spam filter and site wide rules. This is how most forums I used prior to Reddit worked. I loathe the idea someone silently removes posts or bans people for whatever reason they like.

According to Python, flat is better than nested, so Reddit's solution has always been just to make a new sub for each set of mods.

It doesn't solve the problem of views of the same content though.

It's how you get /r/X and /r/TrueX and /r/X_memes and /r/ECKS

People like to be moderators because they like to control what others get to say or hear. Your system take their power away so it's unworkable from that perspective.

There's a lot by way of answer to this in a 2009 essay by Paul Graham, "What I've Learned from Hacker News", written after the site had been live for about two years: <http://www.paulgraham.com/hackernews.html>

It's been discussed several times on Hacker News itself, of course, notably at the time (<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=495053>) as well as in 2012 (<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4285333>) and 2019 (<https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19210923>).

This addresses general issues around moderation, including things that seem to be especially harmful: dilution, the distinction between behaviour and people ("It's bad behavior you want to keep out more than bad people"), "broken windows", the "two major types of problems a site like Hacker News needs to avoid: bad stories and bad comments", the Fluff Principle ("on a user-voted news site, the links that are easiest to judge will take over unless you take specific measures to prevent it"), and the "two main kinds of badness in comments: meanness and stupidity".

Graham doesn't get into why one set of moderators is essential, but I'll suggest this: editorial voice.

When you visit a traditionally-edited news source --- news paper, television network, magazine, radio network --- what you'll find for most of these is a specific editorial voice. The Financial Times, Fox News, the New York Times, Breitbart, The Daily Caller, The PBS News Hour, the Daily Mail, the Guardian, the BBC, NPR's All Things Considered ... each have a distinctive voice. Like it, love it, despise it, or hate it, it's there.

For a discussion site, a problem with offering moderation-as-a-service is that the moderation you see is not that which others will see, and for at least some members, that means seeing a lot of what would be considered "dumb comments". On which Graham said:

Bad comments are like kudzu: they take over rapidly. Comments have much more effect on new comments than submissions have on new submissions. If someone submits a lame article, the other submissions don't all become lame. But if someone posts a stupid comment on a thread, that sets the tone for the region around it.

That is, the problem is that multiple moderation views means that those bad comments --- mean, stupid, or both --- are going to dominate the conversation. As it stands, HN tends to weed these out reasonably quickly (flags and downvotes really help, don't feed the trolls, and email the mods at hn@ycombinator.com in egregious cases).

In practice, different moderation philosophies are best enacted through multiple channels. For sites such as Reddit, this means different subreddits with different moderation policies. For Hacker News ... you'll have to go to a different discussion site, maybe lobste.rs, Tildes, Lemmy, or kbin, say. Keep in mind that even on Reddit there's often considerable "bleed-over" between different subreddits (a chief annoyance of mine there, and a reason I'd largely abandoned the site well before the current contretemps).

I've seen subreddits which have relaxed rules, or permitted certain types of content on specific occasions ("low-effort Fridays" being one variant), and ... it still strikes me as highly corrosive.

On Tildes, a text-only site, a newly-arrived Reddit refugee suggested enabling images on the site. That's ... not been well received: <https://tildes.net/~tildes/16fe/considering_image_posts_on_t...> (I've posted my own brief objection, though there are many well-considered ones by others.) This comment by a former mod of /r/photography explains how and why images can absolutely change the entire dynamic of a subreddit even one devoted to the topic of photography: <https://tildes.net/~tildes/16fe/considering_image_posts_on_t...>

Graham did open his essay with the observation that both the format of HN, and HN itself were, at the time, young. I'd argue that neither are, with Hacker News now in its 17th year. However Hacker News still remains in large part true to its founding vision. It is also still a useful and valuable online forum. Not perfect by any means. But far better than much else that's come (and often gone) in the meantime, and in particular durable in ways that few other fora have been.

Play with its formula with extreme caution.