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Comment by Sentionolo | Hacker News Reader

I have no clue what moderates really do and I have not seen any difference yet on reddit.

Good moderation is mostly invisible. Nonexistent or poor moderation becomes obvious very quickly.

That's what I've come to appreciate about HN. I'm further reminded of this by the volume of (largely negative) interactions I've had with Reddit mods over the years.

For many subreddits, poor moderation is very obvious and have basically become echo chambers

Not much. Plenty of nonsense posts/comments are ignored by moderators but the community just downvotes them mostly out of sight. I would say the community itself does most of the work and always has been the case.

You could not be more wrong. The work is mostly invisible to end users.

Not really. Sort by new and take a look yourself. Nonsense posts get downvoted before a moderator has to do anything. People who sort by top or whatever never see it.

>Sort by new and take a look yourself.

ignoring the autoamted tools mods created, distribtued, and customized themselves to capture certain keywords or websites before it even hit /new

>People who sort by top or whatever never see it.

nope, just low effort memes, reposts, and unhinged rants,depending on the community. Or just porn.

If mods have rules against those, then there's your moderator work right there. Congrats.

I’ve never understood moderators who are big enough busy bodies to spend their lives removing memes that they dislike so much that they proceed to view every single one submitted to a subreddit so they can remove them.

I moderated a subreddit that went from 50k to 200k subscribers and a lot of automation makes it easier to handle standard spam, but 5-6 mods still spent a few hours every day to make it work. This doesn't show up in any sorting.

That's why I left.

I babysit a small sub and have removed around 150 pornbots this month. Maybe I should just leave them since votes are sufficient? It would represent over three quarters of the submissions though.

Posts get filtered by automod rules and anti-spam before they hit the new queue. So this isn’t really sound logic.

The general point you are making IS correct though, upvotes/downvotes are the primary moderation mechanism on Reddit. Moderators are the second layer of moderation, and admins are the third. In my experience the users did an absolute majority of the moderation work except on weird heavily modded communities.

Most sort by top so it is in fact mostly invisible

Most large subreddits use AutoModerator and bots that remove posts or filter them for moderator review. Filtered posts are visible to the poster, from the poster's profile, or by moderators. Also, Reddit's spam filter automatically quarantines posts/comments which contain link shorteners and some other sites. None of these systems are apparent to end users unless your post is filtered or removed.

Here are some concrete examples of automatic post removals from my sub.

• Autoplaying Videos - e.g. TikTok

• Short Posts - e.g. discussions under 10 characters in length

• Vague Bodies - e.g. all emojis or punctuation, "lol", "see title", "this", "ty"

• Vague Titles - e.g. all emojis or punctuation, "Looking for...", "THIS", etc.

What is so insidious about moderation is you could have a moderator removing posts for whatever reason they like and you will simply never see that content or even be aware it was removed. I’d love dual versions of subs - moderated and unmoderated so these people could be regularly audited.

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