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Comment by silencio | Hacker News Reader

I'm a default (twoxchromosomes) mod.

I would love to see better moderation tools. Most of the shitty content I've had to deal with are from newer/multiple accounts, as well as the older accounts that are sick of the trolls. Our AutoModerator shadowban list and our ban list is so ridiculously long I can barely scroll it. It'd be amazing if we didn't have to rely on a bunch of other tools (toolbox, RES, AutoModerator) or consider building our own tools (subreddit history scraper). It'd also be amazing if there was some site-wide automatic action against certain throwaway accounts so we don't have to clean up _after_ the 4th attempt at some idiot trolling us.

I would also love to see a better take on Reddit 101 too. We still get comments like "I'm a male and why is this on my reddit page" and people that just barge in without reading rules to post things against our rules (like a ton of misogyny _and_ misandry). Some of this is inevitable but it's pretty annoying that there isn't much we can do here either other than deleting things after the fact.

I don't think that those two alone will improve the site significantly, but it would be a burden lifted for default mods, and that might help clean up parts of the front page. Maybe. I don't even want to think about how much time we spend on everything from figuring out trolls to writing warning notes for each other, to discussing some idiot user trying to dox one of the mods. It'd be time we can spend doing other things for the subreddit. That would be nice.

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>"I'm a male and why is this on my reddit page" and people that just barge in without reading rules to post things against our rules

I think its asking way too much of someone who wants to join a casual site known for cat pics and meme jokes to read through the couple dozen default sub rules. There's no practical educational solution here. The volume of new users and the labor of understanding all these rules is huge and its impractical to expect people to digest it all, especially for a topic most users, being male, aren't into. Lets also not be ignorant of the massive feminist thought that dominates subs like 2x. To you, its mainstream, if not conservative, to others its very different from what they're used to. Why do you think subjecting random people to that and not expecting some kind of reaction?

Reddit's idea of default subs seems flawed to me. Perhaps it should have suggested defaults when you make an account and you choose what you're interested in. Non-logged in users should get, maybe, randomized top 500 or so subs. Hand-picking subs, many of which are instantly polarizing (atheism, worldnews, politics, 2X, etc) is really an insane way to run that site.

Worse, once a sub is made a default, its quantity goes up but its quality goes down. /r/writingprompts was once a fun place for authors to get some practice. The highest rated stories were usually good for a read, but now its a default sub, and its unreadable. The top comments tend to be half-assed efforts usually ending in a joke or even a reddit in-joke because the guy who posts something silly immediately will dominate while the guy still working on his story and posts after an hour of writing ends up being comment 78 and no one scrolls that far down to read. Heck, that sub is so bad, that if you want to read a decent story you start at the bottom, with the lowest ranked items, and scroll up. Talk about failure of design!

/r/books was an okay resource for the casual reader and now is dominated by items that are, imo, much more lowest common denominator. I'm sure there are more examples.

I really think reddit is about ready to have its disruptive MySpace moment when some Facebook-like competitor moves in. The default subs are unrreadable dreck, the politics a mix of the ugliest libertarian meets social justice warrior crap, and the mod policy a schizophrenic per sub mess that pleases no one. Most subs seem completely overwhelmed and just resort to strict rules and 'self post only' policies to keep some level of sanity. This isn't a sign of a healthy system.

> I think its asking way too much of someone who wants to join a casual site known for cat pics and meme jokes to read through the couple dozen default sub rules.

But it's not asking too much of that same cat-and-meme based system to be a focusing point for decently written short-stories and a good place to discuss books?

I mean, you're saying that it's asking too much of people that they just click 'unsubscribe' on twox - and that having the barest understanding of how subreddits work is just too much.

And that's the community you're complaining about your seeming inability to farm quality prose from? I'm as tired of stories ending in the "tree-fiddy" in-joke as you are, but maybe there needs to be a higher barrier to entry than 'spends time on reddit' for voting, and while 'is able to read a couple dozen default sub rules' isn't that much higher, it might encourage people to at least read the rules before spouting off.

My point is that the system at writingprompts worked fine before they were made a default sub. I imagine 2X was a better place before as well, but I'm not a reader of that sub, so I can't really comment.

Reddit's management simply has an economic incentive to promote these gems to defaults to draw in users and make the site more attractive to those unwilling to dig down, but in the end this hurts those subreddits. I suspect this will be reddit's downfall. It curates some grass-roots communities that are self-managed, watches them grow, and then throws them to the wolves of Joe and Jane CasualAsshole. Now these gems have been thoroughly bro-ified, meme-ified, and politically-correctified with endless arguments web commentators like to get into (religion, politics, accusation of various 'isms', etc).

So yeah, I eat my own dogfood. I know writingprompts will never be good again the same way I know 2X suffers from the same thing with casual visitors. The difference is I know its a symptom of reddit default changes and don't think there's anything here regarding "education" that can fix this. Reddit's need for growth and popularity means decent subs become shitty subs over time. Heck, even when they remove defaults, the damage is done. /r/atheism will never be this philosophical-type sub, it'll always be meme-ish anti-Christian crap. Whatever mindshare they hoped to attract long left, the same way the writers I used to recognize on writingprompts are long gone now.

In other words I blame reddit management, but she blames reddit users. I think those are pretty different takes on the source of those problems. She seems to believe some heavy-handed "reddit 101" is going to fix everything. I believe that is hopeless once you reach the level of a default sub. Shitty users are always there, its how you manage them, compartmentalize them, incentivize them, etc that matters.

Exactly my thoughts. The polarizing subs are probably casual stopper-by register bait. Who leaves the most feedback in satisfaction surveys? The satisfied? No. The enraged and the incredibly pleased.

> Reddit's management simply has an economic incentive to promote these gems...

Management's economic incentive is purely to get more money from existing sponsors and to get more sponsors - and if they had to close down /r/writingprompts to achieve those ends, it'd happen. Look at how Reddit handled the celebrity nudes leaks were handled.

I read the parent post as a plea for better tools to filter that, more than a rant on the type of people coming in. Users might or not get better over time, and as you point out they may have a completely different expectation of the site.

I think it's a good tradeoff to let these users run free on lax subreddits and moderate heavily on others, provided the moderating tools get better and make it easier on the mods.

For those of us who have run online communities, there certainly is a strong inverse relationship between age & size. A big community continually fractures off disgruntled users. There certainly are some exceptions to this, and examples to follow.

If, "In several years, I think reddit could have close to a billion users" then the quality of reddit will be just that. Hell, with a billion users, the average person will not even be fluent in your language. Alternatively it becomes a system where you very explicitly follow people and topics as one would do with Twitter. If so then can reddit be changed radically to accomplish this yet through small enough iterations as to not result in an exodus? There would be the challenge.

For now reddit remains a fairly good newswire for niche topics such as oculus.

"For those of us who have run online communities, there certainly is a strong inverse relationship between age & size."

The same is very often true of physical social spaces too. How often do you see a new, niche bar later attract a broader crowd and turn into the sort of place that attracts thugs? Or how often alcohol-fuelled violence starts around the larger venues because they attract a less thoughtful crowd?

Perhaps the early arrivals subscribe to the ethos while the late-comers are just there because their base needs are met. In the case of a social site: regular content, people to troll or others to upvote their jokes. In the case of a club: a reliable meat market and cheap drinks.

>Worse, once a sub is made a default, its quantity goes up but its quality goes down.

This seems to be almost universally true for any online community. As a userbase widens, content quality and even social dynamics become diluted to some extent towards a general population baseline.

As a mod of /r/changemyview (153k subscribers), we have discussed opting out of becoming a default sub if we were approached by the reddit admins. We already continuously struggle to maintain sub quality, given 50k subscriber growth in the last 9 months, though we have seen some success with our small set of very well-defined, strict, and heavily enforced rules.

>>Worse, once a sub is made a default, its quantity goes up but its quality goes down.

This seems to be almost universally true for any online community. As a userbase widens, content quality and even social dynamics become diluted to some extent towards a general population baseline.

Yes and no. I started spending time over on NeoGAF which has 141K members. Not nearly the size of some larger subs, but pretty good. The quality in content isn't massively scholarly, but it's far less juvenile than Reddit can be. This is largely due to the heavy moderation the forum uses. Which is likely the major flaw in Reddit. It can be a place for "good content" while also trying to be a more open form of discussion.

There should be a reddit of subreddits - a way to vote them up and down in order to determine the defaults.

the same effect can be had by making trending subs the defaults. Part of me thinks this could be the solution, but another part of me thinks there's no way they've gone nine years without having tried that already...

I think the problem with that is that subs like /r/thefappening popping up by default is kind of a PR nightmare. From the perspective of attracting new users it's great, though.

CMV: I just checked out your sub and subscribed, it looks interesting.

> There's no practical educational solution here.

If an account is new, perhaps it would be worth pestering them with a modal with a "this is the first time you're posting to this sub, have you read the rules for it? Here they are. Oh, and if you're wondering why this is on your page, here's how to remove it: ..".

right, reddit is "doin' it rong!", that's why their projected growth is so high.

Part of the reason they've been successful is because the default subreddits draw people in. This isn't about some high and mighty "what is 'proper'", this is about what people find interesting to talk about. The default subreddits are not there to scratch the itch of those like you with their nose in up in the air about "quality".

As much as I like having a deep intellectual conversation, I always like enjoy my memes and inside jokes.

People like you lost that war long ago and as much as you'd like to "predict" the downfall of reddit, all signs point to no, you just fail to understand why. That isn't reddit's failing, it's yours.

    > reddit is "doin' it rong!", that's why their projected
    > growth is so high

and then

    > much as you'd like to "predict" the downfall of reddit,
    > all signs point to no

While I think Reddit will go from strength to strength, I also remember how Digg pretty much went from (current) Reddit sized to almost nothing in about the course of two weeks. And I remember Myspace. Turns out internetters are fickle folk.

That's not actually how it happened.

Memes, inside jokes and other fluff content are good for attracting new users and light entertainment. That makes sense.

What we're saying is that such low-effort content gets old. Users get bored after a while and want something thoughtful and novel. If reddit does not come up with a way to provide such content (without the constant slide toward the lowest common denominator), it may have trouble holding users.

That wasn't the point. The point is the default reddits draw people in specifically by magnetizing them on an issue and getting them to discuss it vehemently.

Also, I've been a part of reddit for 7 years now, and was a part of digg before that. I've watched reddit grown.

about 3-4 years ago, IIRC, there was a rather large bucking back from the "old hands" onto the new because they viewed reddit as the "smart digg". uber great content, blah blah blah. They lost that fight and history has shown that reddit was right (it's still continuing to grow).

The post I was responding to is just another person from that era who is still salty about it. But here's the thing:

A large community cannot give that to you. That's the genius of subreddits. That experience is absolutely on reddit. I enjoy both types of content, and so I enjoy doing either. I think most people do as well.

It's only the pretentious pricks who really have a problem with reddit's lighter content.

great insight wrapped in ad hominem douchery

loop

I'm just somewhat puzzled that twox is a default. It seems like a prime candidate not to be just due to these sorts of inevitable problems. Lots of people new to discussion boards tend not to understand there may be different rules, sets of expected behavior, or the like on different sub-boards, so making something a default is likely to attract lots of people who are new and don't understand the rules.

Once you couple that with the general population skewing fairly male, young, not necessarily good with social norms, and a strong pseudo-libertarian streak, it just doesn't seem like a good combination with a sub that's supposed to be by and for women.

I'm curious why the mods decided to let it become a default.

"I'm curious why the mods decided to let it become a default."

Seeing as reddit is just usenet of the 80s and early 90s on a web page in 2014, both in application, discussion topics, and more or less in culture, one lesson from usenet readers of the dark ages was there are or should be no default groups.

I don't remember any default usenet groups in nn, tin, gnus... The same social pressures that lead to no defaults then, most likely apply now, even if the tech is slightly different.

"a sub that's supposed to be by and for women."

I lurked there and read a lot. Interesting to see their opinions vs mine. Eventually it got boring. Encouraging half or more of the new user population to lurk before posting was another usenet thing. So looking at it that way, it might be a good idea to force noobs to read, at least till they learn how to remove a default subreddit.

So I've presented two arguments, one for and one against. I think the argument against is slightly stronger although I could appreciate a good alternative interpretation.

> I don't remember any default usenet groups in nn, tin, gnus

The news protocol specifically included a recommendation mechanism for "default subscribed groups", so that a news administrator could point new users to some important groups.

In Gnus that behaviour is triggered by the variable gnus-default-subscribed-newsgroups.

I'm certain that nn, tin and whatnot supported it, as well.

Mods don't decide to make a subreddit a default, admins do.

That's not true, mods can opt out of becoming a default and at least in some cases the admins talk to the mods first anyway.

edit: http://i.imgur.com/IbiMa8g.png

This is true. I am a moderator for /r/mildlyinteresting and two weeks before we became a default, we were asked if we wanted to opt-out. It was hotly-debated between the moderators for about a week and any one of us could have answered the admin, but we put it to a vote and ended up becoming a default.

That image related to posts from that subreddit being seen in /r/all. Automoderater puts /r/all flair on such posts in certain subreddits.

The highlighted part is only 15 words. Why stop reading after 7?

That they can opt out does not mean they can opt in.

The mods were absolutely involved in the decision to make the subreddit a default. Unfortunately, moderators are not elected and they cannot be usurped. They have no obligations to their subscribers, and indeed in this case they made the decision behind closed doors.

> Unfortunately, moderators are not elected and they cannot be usurped. They have no obligations to their subscribers,

This is one of the big weaknesses of Reddit right now. As far as I can tell, who gets to moderate powerful subreddits comes down the the accident of history of who happened to think of it first. Several of the subreddits I frequent have had moderators slam down rules that most of the community disagree with (just for example /r/Android has a rule that you cannot post "questions", it is only for "news about Android" ...). This leads to a high variability in the quality of the moderation and curation of various subreddits. I'm not sure what the best alternative idea woudl be, but something better than "whoever thought of it first" should be possible.

The other end of the spectrum is the Stack Overflow method, which ends up with the most uptight and pedantic users ending up with all the control, who use their power to rain havoc upon those who might otherwise have been much better moderators.

With Reddit, you at least have a chance of having a semi-decent group of moderators who can care for and foster their community without it turning into an anal retentive hell.

I was under the impression that the admins consulted with the mods before doing so, but I could be wrong; how the front page has worked has changed many times over the years, and I haven't been keeping very close track.

They send you a message, but at that point it's already been decided what they have chosen to be the defaults.

You can always opt out though. There's literally a check box you can change if you don't want it anymore. You don't uncheck that box without a lot of communication and deliberation generally, but it's there.

I'm sure that the admins would remove any sub that asked from the default list.

Mods can opt out of being in /r/all (and from being a default with the same checkbox.)

Twoxchromosomes is a hellhole sub.

i) diverse people have a spectrum of extreme but sincere opinions, so they look like they are provocative trolls even if they aren't.

ii) A sizable proportion of Reddit hates any even mild suggestion that maybe women don't have the easy life and the sub is a target for that rage

iii) with the watter nicely chummed trolls have an easy time.

iv) a lot of the posters are just viciously unpleasant unless your posts aligns exactly with theirs.

The reality is that your sub is the dead-corpse human-shield used to protect other less awful feminist subs.

I really hope you mod some other nicer subs so that you get some pleasure out of Reddit.

(I've been a bit vicious a out the sub, but this doesn't reflect on the moderation or (mostly) on the real users.)

Yeah, Reddit's weakest link is its moderation tools or really, lack thereof. The mod tools were really written for a much smaller site, and hopefully this infusion of cash will let them hire devs who can make it their mission to make the mod tools useful.

Granular abilities - like the ability to give someone only the power to delete comments, or only the power to tag titles or something.

Restrict posting from new accounts - force accounts to be X days old before they're allowed to comment in a given subreddit.

Exposing the IP's of users to the mods - Most trolls/spammers aren't going to with proxies/whatever to get that many IPs, so exposing this is the first step to bans, which leads to...

Better bannning tools - even 4chan has good banning tools, why can't Reddit?

I spent all of 5 minutes on this so I'm sure a good developer can come up with a super useful list of tools, and them write them.

"hopefully this infusion of cash will let them hire devs …"

They shouldn't need additional developers for these features (unless all the existing ones left?), seems to me that these things should be doable fairly quickly.

"It seems to me that all this programming would be easy" is a common thought, and almost always wrong. I am included in this category.

These days I'm no longer shocked at the number of times I hear "this should be easy" from someone who has absolutely no experience in programming whatsoever. At this point I just smile, nod my head, and attempt to drag the discussion back to reality.

It makes me the "negative" one in meetings.

Makes me wonder how often this phenomenon happens in other industries.

I can say from experience it does happen in the design world. Back in my design days I can say I heard variations of the thought from time-to-time but not as often as I do now being a developer.

Yes, one thing I would like see in moderator tools is: edit the headlines. That's a commonly-used tool on HN and it would help subreddits, too.

I'm going to disagree here. It's giving the mods way too much power. There's already editable flair on posts to point out factual errors. (E.g. something claiming to be confirmed that isn't)

I don't like it on HN either - I'd rather have a headline with a touch of editorializing than the complete lack of context they're often edited to...this very thread being a prime example).

At least letting people edit their own headlines/links (possibly with the changes going into a mod approval queue) would be quite helpful.

Or at least not hitting the "you are doing that too much" limit for deleting and reposting when you realise you accidentally pasted the wrong link in and similar.

The headline editing is one of my pet hates about HN. I'd loathe seeing it spread to Reddit too.

Hi there. Your sr is one of the better ones I have come across. Keep up the good work.

I hope the cleaning and injections don't change reddit too much.

> consider building our own tools (subreddit history scraper)

I'd love to scrape my own posts (and the threads they were part of) as a personal log. I have been over 7 years a redditor and I can't reach past 1000 posts back in time, which is less than 10%.

Reddit guys, why can't users take their OWN content back?

What about the ability for Mods to set karma or time based limits before someone can post? (say 7 days and 100 upvotes).

Hacker News does something like that you can't downvote till 1000 upvotes iirc.

That would stop the casual trolls at least (of course there are ways around it but then there always are).

Shouldn't there be a rule that if posts from new accounts get reported by more than X number of people for Y reason they are automatically banned. Would make life of moderators easier. Would be easier if the tools allowed moderators to customize these X values.

There's already plenty of instances of bot swarms that mass-downvote new posts, presumably in order to give their own posts greater chance of getting to the frontpage.

If these bots could be used to auto-ban new users then Reddit would die very quickly.

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I was a founding moderator of /r/gamernews, which was founded with a seriously different mindset than that of r/gamingnews or r/gaming. When we started, we had a lot of people coming from the other communities trying to force in memes, rumors, blogspam, and other things that were against our founding principles. It took a few months before the submitted content matched the community we were looking for. Trolls realized they weren't welcome, and people who wanted news without rumors or other cruft felt comfortable there. If we didn't have heavy handed (and often controversial) moderation policies for the first few months, we never would have hit 100 subscribers, let alone 90,000.

Relying on a community to police itself is great for an open community (like /r/gaming), but if you want any kind of formal structure you need some moderation. Especially on such a sensitive subreddit as /r/twoxchromosomes where the potential for abuse, spam, and general hatred is so high. Although with that community, I seriously have to wonder why reddit would want it to be a default, or why the moderators agreed. Terrible, terrible decision to take a community of respect and trust and open the floodgates to the greater internet full of assholes and trolls. Oh well.

Voting in an open system only works to reenforce the viewpoints of the majority of voters, not the viewpoints of the specific community. That's why I can't vote in the elections of another country.

This is a really interesting idea. I wonder if there were a way to track per-reddit karma, and only allow redditors to vote in a certain subreddit once their karma reaches a threshold or account age. (Just like HN, but per-subreddit.)

"I wonder if there were a way to track per-reddit karma"

This already exists: each user has a "show karma breakdown by subreddit" link on the profile page for exactly this.

It does! I guess I meant "I wonder if there's a way to take this thing you're already tracking and use it as a per-subreddit voting gate."

> Although with that community, I seriously have to wonder why reddit would want it to be a default, or why the moderators agreed.

I assumed that reddit admins made /r/twoxchromosomes a default because it was a good subreddit and wanted to expose better content to the default users.

Also, I thought that subreddit moderators don't have input regarding whether the subreddit is made default.

Subreddit moderators do have input. The admins wanted to make AskHistorians a default and the moderators, who are already work overtime to ensure the posted answers are highly professional, said no. And some moderators have, I think, chosen to remove their subs as defaults.

Becoming default is opt-out.

Voting and karma is Reddit's biggest flaw because as you said "Voting in an open system only works to reenforce the viewpoints of the majority of voters." Subreddits can be ruined by any small influx of SRSers or whatever sub is annoyed for the day. The only subs that are actually good are the heavily moderated subs.

You do not want to see the cesspool that is moderated comments on 2xc.

Spam and hateful comments fall pretty fast anyway, but that doesn't mean that it should stay there. What would you prefer - a youtube page with all comments and some hidden due to a low score, or a page with all the shitty comments removed altogether? Someone is going to see that shit anyway and it's going to be awful as it involves everything from rape threats on support threads to someone that is trying to post something completely irrelevant to the subreddit.

And then there are comments that are really unpopular but they aren't hateful or spam, and even if it's buried we don't remove those. They would be mixed in with the hateful comments just because people don't like what the person is saying.

Some type of moderation is, in my opinion, a necessity. There are very few free-for-alls on the internet - if you have a good example of that working out, then I would like to know.

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Feel free to start your own community with a hands off approach. :)

We have 1.1 million subscribers in an active and default subreddit. Related and private subreddits are growing too to meet the random niche demands of some of our users, and that's a great thing. Our users have options if they don't like our moderation style.

Great attitude, and don't let assholes convince you that responsible moderation is ever a bad thing. The "freedom of speech" thing is just another trolling approach. Someone has a right to say anything they want, but they don't have a right to say it anywhere they want. If you and your participants have built a community and a culture that is inclusive and respectful, anyone choosing not to participate within those guidelines is opting themselves out of your community.

And, it's worth nothing that HN is a moderated community, and while there are people who find that problematic, the reality is that a significant portion of the best contributors here wouldn't stick around if it were not reasonably moderated. I believe that's true of communities in general, but particularly communities that are controversial (I'm a mod at /r/occupywallstreet; I've seen some shit).

No.

Precisely because, as alexis said (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8390156) reddit is a platform for communities as much as it is a platform for users, and the norms for communities are created through moderation. The moderator gets to create the community they want, and it's up to users to accept the standards of moderation or move to/start a different community

It doesn't work in practice and I don't know of any big reddit community that has managed to keep things clean without strict moderation. For example, one problem that happens very often is that image macros and other "lighetweight" content get more votes than longer articles. It only tkes seconds to look at a picture but ot everyone can take a couple of minutes to read an article and vote on it (not to mention that the "hotness" metric gives less weigth to votes after a few minutes than votes after a few seconds).

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This kind of argument pops up all the time whenever a subreddit has a discussion about moderation but in my experience it doesn't work in practice. For starters, only are there technical disparities between what the rating algorithm considers hot and what the community actually likes (for example, images can get lots of quick votes soon after submission, which propells them to the front page). But perhaps even more importantly, there is the "eternal september problem": moderation lets a subreddit enforce their culture to the new users, which is very important. Something like /r/askscience would be impossible to maintain in its current state with just user voting.

As for tagging, it helps in some situations but its not an universal solution. The UI is kind of lacking (you need a 3rd party extantion to hide unwanted tags and it doesnt filter posts in the reddit.com frontpage) but it also doesnt do anything for passing users who havent configured their tags.

In a hypothetical world maybe its possible to create a smarter "hotness" algorithm that is less prone to these problems but in the current system I really don't think "just downvote the bad stuff" is a practical solution.

What if moderators had control of how posts are ranked in their subreddits? I think that would result in some very interesting subreddit specific ranking algorithms.

No, the point of reddit is that communities of people moderate themselves under the rules they make up. Voting is not a substitute for moderation- see memes, offtopic comments, trolls, or the middlebrow dismissal that plagues HN. The later is always sitting at the top of page and in the positive; HN would be better if mods removed the comments or punished the accounts who make them.

We need Yahtzee to make a "WHAT THE FUCK IS REDDIT" video!

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ben_%22Yahtzee%22_Croshaw

Reply on news.ycombinator.com