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Comment by JanneVee | Hacker News Reader

This is partly what is happening. Reading in out of the loop subreddit the trigger is Victoria but the problem is different. The one I see as one of the biggest problems is. The unpaid volunteers aren't given the tools necessary to handle moderation of subreddits by reddit corporate. The tools moderators use comes from third parties and volunteers. [0] As an outsider I have understand why they are angry, trying to create safe spaces by sweeping(and inconsistent) bans of subreddits but not giving the tools to moderators to keep their subreddits clean.

[0]https://www.reddit.com/r/OutOfTheLoop/comments/3bxduw/why_wa...

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I'm not sure the reddit community (either moderators specifically, or redditors in general) are intelligent enough to know what tools they need.

I once tried to suggest a new tool, and was attacked there for 3 weeks after on subredditdrama for requesting such a tool.

My crime? Suggesting that moderators be able to ban everyone who (wrongly) upvotes an offtopic post. This would allow them to steer things back on topic, by punishing those who refuse to stay on topic.

Suggesting that moderators be able to ban everyone who (wrongly) upvotes an offtopic post

Reddit already has a problem with moderator abuse and nontransparency, and you want to give them the ability to ban people based on their votes? The literally only control that a user has over content?

I can see why you were "attacked". That is an awful idea.

Indeed. I think I read once that HN weights votes or comment positions by how often someone is drawn in by political "honey pot" stories. I don't know if it's true, but it at least suggests less drastic alternatives to banning for voting.

That sounds like the same basic idea -- moderators putting a mark on posts that basically says, "An upvote for this is a negative contribution to the community." Is the problem with the general idea, or with one specific detail which could be modified in implementation (banning versus ignoring votes)?

The entire idea is problematic, massively, in that it allows for covert manipulation of a community.

Why are a small handful of unaccountable people determining what is a "negative contribution", on the sly no less, when the whole reason for the existence of karma systems is to do that organically and by consensus?

More importantly, what does such a system accomplish via deception that flattening such posts in a visible and accountable way does not?

> Why are a small handful of unaccountable people determining what is a "negative contribution", on the sly no less

On some of the smaller (but not tiny) subreddits, a submission can be both against the rules and plainly a bad idea as it pollutes the subreddit's goals.

But because voting is anonymous, no matter how much everyone complains about them being upvoted, no matter who weighs in and admonishes people to stop upvoting the garbage, it still occurs.

Over time, people submitting good content stop doing so, and people who submit bad content start doing it more. Vicious circle.

Mods can't just delete those posts either, because this reddit gets pissy that they're playing favorites.

It would be better if the mods were able to say "if you think this is upvoteworthy for this subreddit, you are no longer welcome here".

Instead of each subreddit being some big generic free-for-all, they could stay on topic. Could get rid of alot of fluff. And you could do it without those being banned being able to claim it was for personal animosity.

a submission can be both against the rules

Lock the thread (with AutoModerator) and explain why. No need to disappear it.

Over time, people submitting good content stop doing so, and people who submit bad content start doing it more. Vicious circle.

Is this really the case? It's a common complaint, but it's usually presented without any backing. Why is the content necessarily "bad" if the community has chosen to feature it?

Mods can't just delete those posts either, because this reddit gets pissy that they're playing favorites.

Why do you suppose that is?

It would be better if the mods were able to say "if you think this is upvoteworthy for this subreddit, you are no longer welcome here".

Leaving aside the fact that you literally just advocated for thought crime, the problem is that an upvote can mean multiple things.

(Don't say "reddiqutte" either, I'm talking about use in reality)

An upvote can mean "like", or "on topic", or "contributes to the discussion", or about 20 other positive things. A downvote can have just as many other meanings in the other direction. The other thing is that with multireddits and /r/all, "on-topic-ness" isn't even going to be evaluated by the users unless you're looking at the front page of the community itself.

I really don't see how more covert moderation is a valid answer to abuse of non-covert moderation.

Removing the single submission doesn't fix the problem.

The people who upvoted things that shouldn't be upvoted are the problem. They may never notice that it was removed anyway.

So now the subreddit (which may only have 15,000 users) has to staff dozens of moderators just to keep track of the shit.

And those posts still polluted the subreddit. They can't be instantaneously removed.

> Why do you suppose that is?

Because in groups of thousands and tens of thousands of people, there's always someone who thinks not only was the meme post funny, but that everyone should lighten up and allow it anyway.

They argue publicly in a pseudo-anonymous forum. And you can't make them stop either, or even more backlash occurs. Nor can you remain silent, or out-argue them.

So a flame war erupts, and everything goes off-topic even more.

> An upvote can mean "like", or "on topic", or "contributes to the discussion", or about 20 other positive things. A downvote can have just as many other meanings in the other direction. The other thing is that with multireddits and /r/all, "on-topic-ness" isn't even going to be evaluated by the users

Unless those users are punished for failing to evaluate.

Guess we're going to have to agree to disagree on this - but let me know if you ever start a community website, because I want absolutely no part of a place where I can be punished for not liking things the staff wants me to like.

If you're going to run a community like that, why even have the people there in the first place? What you've just described is a blog.

I think what they meant was more along the lines of "for upvoting the things that are supposed to not be what the website is about".

If you are referring to the "Unless those users are punished for failing to evaluate."

I think that was meant to mean "unless those users are punished for not distinguishing whether the thing was in an appropriate location, and therefore upvoting something which does not belong where it is."

Not sure, but seems like a likely interpretation to me.

> Mods can't just delete those posts either, because this reddit gets pissy that they're playing favorites.

You absolutely can, and it's easy to do so. I moderate a small sub, and you can remove individual posts with the click of a button if you don't think they're a quality contribution.

But beyond that, AutoModerator allows you to automatically remove posts according to criteria that you set up in advance. You can ban certain sites, titles with certain keywords, certain types of content, posts from certain users, and so on. It makes moderation much, much easier.

There is always the problem that users will discover the filters and revolt if the mods haven't been transparent about filters. /r/technology users threw a fit when they discovered that the mods had been filtering stories with NSA in the title. Lots migrated over to /r/futurology as a result.

> It would be better if the mods were able to say "if you think this is upvoteworthy for this subreddit, you are no longer welcome here".

Banning 100s or 1000s of users in one fell stroke for having upvoted a single low-effort post would be far more disruptive and unjust than simply removing the offending post.

Because karma systems have systematic weaknesses that make them incapable of doing that in many situations.

Easy example: Let's say there are 10000 people who like cat pictures and 150 people who like long, in-depth articles. I'm one of the people who likes long, in-depth articles, so I make a forum for people to post and discuss long, in-depth articles. 10% of the cat-picture-lovers happen upon my forum and are delighted to see a new place that they can post cat pictures. My 149 friends and I downvote these cat pictures with all our hearts, but we simply can't outvote the 1000 cat-picture-lovers. Even worse, a cat-picture-lover can look at and upvote a hundred cat pictures in the time it takes me to read one long-form article, so the content that the forum is intended for is buried before even the 150 long-content-lovers get to see it. So the complete destruction of my long-article forum happens organically and by consensus, just like karma systems are supposed to work -- but it's not a desirable outcome!

Basically, karma systems are good at finding something that some group of people will like, but if that's all you want, subreddits are a bad idea, because the entire point of them is to focus on a particular thing and exclude other things that very likely more people would like to see.

Like I said, all the true* subreddits show that there are people who want to have more focused subreddits. The idea that focus should be impossible if a sufficient number of people who are don't have that focus stumble upon the subreddit just doesn't seem very reasonable to me.

Slashdot's metamoderation achieves this well. http://slashdot.org/faq/metamod.shtml

It's not fully transparent -- not to the moderators and meta-moderators, at any rate -- but it's an effective check and balance for "policing the police."

Is that it? No matter my score, I am usually at the bottom of a field of identical comments. I've been below comments deep in the gray more than once.

I don't know, in my experience, Reddit is much more rife with low-quality posting and bandwagoning than moderator abuse. It happens on rare occasions, but most accusations of moderator abuse I've seen have turned out to be nothing more than some first-world anarchists trying to stick it to the man and a bunch of other people bandwagoning on. Meanwhile, most subreddits with more than 10k posters are just awful because it's so hard for moderators to actually moderate the community (see, for example, all the true* subreddits that have sprung up just to create less popular versions of popular subs).

I read a few subreddits that might be considered outsiders. I get the impression that Reddit is slowly being subverted. Subverted by the sort of people that might have a strong voice on Tumblr and Twitter. Slowly censoring anything that's undesirable to their world view.

Being "subverted" by a different community would be the best possible outcome for reddit. It's a proud soapbox for white supremacists and misogynists to virulently spread hatred under the guise of "free speech". If this "community", seemingly comprised entirely of self-entitled white men in their 20s, were scattered to the winds tomorrow, the world would be a better place.

I don't disagree but there is a beautiful irony to posting that here.

I was banned from r/history a few months ago. The moderator was attempting to humiliate me and added flair to my comments. I turned flair off. Then the moderator abused the stylesheets to hardcode flair that I couldn't turn off...

That's against reddit's own rules, and the admins claim they will ban moderators from reddit sitewide for that.

I went to the admins, they made him turn it off... and 1 minute later I was banned.

The admins never banned him.

Mod abuse occurs all the time. There's just nothing to be done about it, and there's no point in whining so you never much hear of it.

In my experience, it's rife with both.

Since a moderator can kill an entire post, nullifying "the only control that a user has over content" anyway, is it really going out on that big of a limb to allow moderators to ban people who, say, upvoted child porn to the top of r/politics?

Of course not.

But we both know that your fanciful hypothetical is not how that tool will be used in over 99.999% of cases, because that kind of thing almost never happens, while moderator abuse often does.

Just because there are cases where a tool can be used well doesn't mean that introducing it in to a system rampant with corruption and abuse won't make things worse.

Moderators can't disappear posts outright, they can only remove the links from their respective communities. If someone has the link, it still can be interacted with in the usual way.

The hypothetical you chose is disgusting, unnecessary, and impossible in the real world.

Arguments to child porn I think are the modern equivalent of godwin's law - the moment it gets brought up, all productive discussion stops and is replaced by emotion.

Moderators can ban people for posting things. OP was talking about banning people for upvoting things. Your point about the link being removed vs the content doesn't fit. Let's say it just partially bans them and still lets them post stuff that won't make it to the actual page, but if anyone has the link they can see it. Is that really a meaningful distinction?

Yes, because the latter doesn't stifle discussions already in progress. It's the difference between saying "you can't talk about this here" and "you can't talk about this at all".

That doesnt seem meaningful, if a mod happens to catch it fast no one sees it, if she catches it slow, people can begin and continue a discussion. If it was based on any kind of fundamental right of discussion, it is hard to imagine moderator attention and reflex speed factoring in to the underlying principles.

Plus, moderators already use bots to instantly pre-ban things things and then go through and manually whitelist them.

The distinction is between banning for posting vs banning for upvoting. One reasonable argument I can see is that Reddit goes to some length to hide what you up and down vote in every other context, and people might be able to use the ban tool to dox people who thought votes, as opposed to submissions, were wholely anonymous.

I don't see why the mods ever have to know the names of those who upvoted (or downvoted) to be able to ban them. A message would be sent out to those who were banned, letting them know why, and if they choose to reveal themselves as having made the bad vote... no one's doxxing them except themselves.

> Reddit already has a problem with moderator abuse and nontransparency,

1. That's the discussion that should have occurred... debate on the merits of the idea. 2. Mods already ban people, which is the problem. They get rid of people they like, whether or not there is cause for it. This would be mods banning people whose names they don't even know for objectively wrong behavior.

So yes, I think it would be a good idea. At the very least, the experiment could have been run in a few test subreddits.

Argue more, overreact less.

Well, nothing says that it should be a democracy. But there is discord how moderators manage their communities and what support reddit could add. e.g. there are subreddits that have removed downvoting through CSS, so it is still possible to downvote with apps or changing the CSS. It should be possible to add that as a setting to the subreddit that makes it impossible to downvote.

But like I said it isn't a democracy, reddit can decide to not implement that and explain it to the mods why not.

To be fair you used to post some really antagonistic and trollish comments. Maybe you still do. You're not exactly well known for your agreeable and altruistic behavior.

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