Re:Ask HN: Why has HackerNews succeeded despite the rise of ...
by rabz on Saturday September 03, 2016 @07:57PM
(#12421867)
The only subreddits in my experience that approach this "professional," disinterested standard of moderation are /r/askscience and /r/askhistorians. I know AH has a huge team devoted to enforcing their rules, and it's off-putting to newcomers from other subs but absolutely makes AH what it is. AS takes more of an unapologetic scorched earth approach to keeping focus on relevant discussion.
Reddit moderation tends to boil down to camps and high school politics pretty darn quickly where it's more common than not for moderators to push their own agendas.
This is overall a pretty broken moderation model which only really works on private forums.
You need to have a "professional" (joblike) moderation where the moderator enforce rules rather than opinions and philosophies.
On the other side of the spectrum you can have a "detached" core-rules only extreme violations level of moderation which what makes places like 4/8Chan work even tho it seems that they aren't moderated at all.