The craziest thing about this isn't just that so many people are controlling the literal news feeds to millions of others, but that they can do so while being anonymous, were not chosen or elected in any reasonable way, have zero accountability, and do not even have a public record of what they delete and censor

It’s much worse than that. It’s not many people, it’s a very small number that “run” Reddit.

92 of the top 500 subs are controlled by 5 people. [0]

Yesterday this post was locked, and so many of the comments were removed by mods with no self-aware irony at all - I just checked and saw very few [REMOVED] posts, I think they removed the evidence they removed them - crazy. Check ceddit.

Two mods, Cyxie and AwkwardTheTurtle moderate 1196 subreddits. They have more control over content on reddit than Sinclair Media has over news stations.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/r/interestingasfuck/comments/fko21a/9...

This is almost certainly a storm in a teacup.

I saw this and went to check - in the few subs i confirmed, they are not top mods. Top mods have the actual power, to assume that they are setting the agenda for every sub by being the 14th mod out of 28, or the 9th and so on is impossible, given how fractious moderating teams can be.

Drama is leaking into HN without anyone doing a sanity check on the claims.

>Drama is leaking into HN

This is the most important comment on this page. The reasons for this are varied, but it's pretty obvious that cultural changes have occurred on HN during this pandemic.

I think they’ve been here for a while, personally.

The undercurrent has always been there, but the degree of normalization appears to be cycling.

what indicators have you found most relevant during these cycles?

Except you are not correct.

Right now, criticizing any of the “default mods” will get you banned, making any post like the one I referenced will be deleted, Reddit is engaging in censorship like they never have before.

Take a look at r/WatchRedditDie/ and tell me how it’s nothing.

Because you always get banned for meta drama.

That’s not even new.

That is also moving the goal posts- exactly the kind of stuff you see on Reddit and not on HN.

The point was about the claim- ‘ 5 people “controlling Reddit” ‘ and how it’s been absorbed and discussed without reflection.

Not about default mods banning people for meta drama.

And dang has mod privileges on every single HN thread. Could you spell out exactly why this is supposed to be worrisome, instead of just hinting at it?

Seems to be the same as traditional media, there's a limited number of gatekeepers either way.

That’s true. Except... wasn’t it the point that “new media” wasn’t to be so heavily... “curated”?

At least with Facebook and Twitter the editorializing is driven by their corporate culture and profit. With the Reddit mod system that water is way more muddied.

Why are people accepting the claim without verification ?

I took cyxie, mentioned on the list and checked a few subs - they are not the top mod of any. It’s almost certainly true for all the other cases.

How is the claim “they control the news feeds” in any way substantiated ?

Looks more like power users playing subreddit Pokémon, and then doing nothing with the subs they are a part of.

You can literally go to the user page and see where the user is a mod. cyXie[0], who has been mentioned, is mod in hundreds of subreddits. /r/gaming, /r/pics, /r/movies, /r/IAmA and /r/EarthPorn are their top 5 by members, with anywhere in between 26 to 100 million members, depending on how much those communities overlap.

[0] https://www.reddit.com/user/cyXie

And that’s not anything.

He is not a top mod, being present on a mod list doesn’t imply control.

Someone of those power users was top mod for one of the subs I knew of - had 0 moderating impact or activity.

Cyxie is mod 14 on r/pics. Hardly a position of influence and power.

That depends on how much policing over the other mods (specially those above you) the rest of the team enforces. If the mods generally don't mess with another mods decisions, or if people don't complain (I've posted complaints after a post of mine was unfairly deleted from a sub) they can "get away" with whatever action they take.

Sure, and that’s a far cry from the click bait claim that “5 mods control 92 of the top 500 Reddits.”

It’s not even a statement of actual harm- just that in case the teams don’t check, these guys could be getting away with removing stuff and therefore exerting some form of control.

There may be some kernel, of truth, just to be absolutely and needlessly generous with the claim.

However the truth is not going to be close, by a galactic mile, to the worthy of the drama with which this topic has been en-robed.

I‘ve been a mod. If a shadowy mod had the ability to enforce their will effectively over a single sub, let alone multiple teams - frankly they would be amazing and should write books on their team management, work ethic and obsession.

What is a "top mod"? Why does that matter?

On Reddit, moderators are only allowed to add or remove moderators below them on the list. Therefore, the moderator who is listed first—generally the one who initially created the subreddit—can not be removed by anyone else, and has the power to remove all of the other moderators, making them the de facto "owner" of the subreddit.

Well, exactly who has the last call on the hiring of the talking heads of the major media networks?

I'm not necessarily trying to say this is better or worse than major media networks, but one issue is that it does appear to offer a greater illusion of 'this is what the people are actually saying'.

4chan is where all the memes come from apparently. They're all anon too. Not too problematic in my eyes.

"4chan is where all the memes come from" is in itself a meme and has never been true, including when 4chan was good (and it's certainly not now)

> were not chosen or elected in any reasonable way

Why would they be? The whole point of reddit is that users can create communities with whatever moderation and content policies that suit them. People visiting the subreddit aren't prisoners, they can view another subreddit, start their own, or just abandon reddit altogether. Who cares?

It matters a great deal because of the subreddit namespace land-grabs. Someone coming to reddit for the first time might naturally go to r/politics (which has become notoriously left-leaning) and not be aware of the rich history of censorship there.

> Someone coming to reddit for the first time might naturally go to r/politics (which has become notoriously left-leaning)

You've explained that someone might voluntarily visit a website on the internet that contains partisan content, but you haven't explained why this is a problem. They're not trapped on reddit, they didn't pay a cover fee to enter, who cares?

It's a problem because it sells itself as something else. I don't care that it's partisan, I do care that it's partisan but bills itself as something else to millions of eyeballs.

Why is that a problem?

This is a tired argument.

As terrible and kneejerk as/r/politics may be, it doesn't need to be some neutral ground of perfect arbitration for many reasons, the least of which is that it would be asking an insane amount of work from its volunteer moderators. If it skews left who cares? There are plenty of places to discuss politics online that skew to the right.

See https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23186995

Then advertise as such and don't pretend otherwise.

"/r/Politics is for news and discussion about U.S. politics."

How is it misleading people? is /pol also misleading people?

> is /pol also misleading people?

every chance they get. it's more honest that way

I have long held the position that the role of subreddit moderator should be elected by their respective communities rather than handed over to the first person to grab the namespace. There's no reason this position couldn't be determined in real time either. If a moderator does something against the wishes of the majority of the subreddit members it should be possible for the community to immediately replace the moderator. Blockchain's propensity for governance makes all of this feasible but I highly doubt reddit will ever implement anything of the sort. Political and monetary incentives are already too deeply entrenched from the top down to ever allow the power balances to shift to something truly meritocratic.

To accomplish this the community needs a sybil-resistant way to vote. This was a main, even primary, feature of community points in my opinion, and i hope experimentation in this regard can lead to a new relationship between mods and the communities they serve.

How do you decide who gets to vote? Anyone who subscribes to the sub?

Well that would be a start but I think it's pretty obvious you would want to base subscribers' voting power on duration of subscription, community involvement/contribution, their standing in the community and so on. This way you would avoid other communities subbing solely to influence the outcome of an election.

I think it would be pretty neat to include metadata in the calculation of the voting power metric as well. Such as how each subscriber votes in relation to other subscribers and assign a higher score to those who vote inline with the community. The goal being to optimize for those subscribers who embody the spirit of the community. Of course that brings up issues of echo chambers but other kinds of metadata could be factored in to offset that too. I would have to think on it for a while to come up with something I felt was as meritocratic as possible.

The problem with a lot of that is "low effort" versus "high effort" content.

I've seen a lot of great subs and communities take a pretty dramatic shift when the influx of new users is too great. It's basically the "eternal september" problem -- when the new users start to overwhelm the old users, they're no longer able to be effectively inducted into the community and the community makes a hard shift, usually to lower effort content as the quicker it can be consumed, the quicker it can be upvoted or otherwise appreciated (and usually it's quicker and more accessible to create than truly valuable content).

Or more straightforward--any community which experiences significant growth will eventually devolve into memes.

The one mitigating factor can be moderation (e.g., Hacker News). But if the mods can be replaced as well, then there's nothing holding it back.

I'm personally longing for transparent moderation logs (like lobste.rs does) coupled with user-elected moderators. AFAIK this was one of the defining features of Aether (https://getaether.net/docs/faq/voting_and_elections/) but it's still in development.

I hadn't considered the transparent moderation logs before but that's a great idea, so props to lobste.rs for that. Not sure that I've seen Aether before either, I'll have to check it out sometime.

This seems a) completely irrelevant to the topic, and b) almost completely irrelevant, full stop. Why is anyone supposed to care that a mod on /r/EarthPorn is also a mod on /r/Movies? Is /u/Cyxie pushing a sinister political agenda by selectively moderating which /r/DadJokes I can see? If I'm missing something, it would help if you or someone else could take the implicit and make it explicit. Spell out for me what this ominous warning is warning me about.

This user was trying to gin up an outrage campaign over something (which looks to me to be) pretty obviously benign. And since the outrage campaign called out five specific users, and he persisted in it after being told off, he was banned for harassment. None of this seems unusual. And the only connection I see to the current thread is "Reddit moderation is controversial, so putting currency in to the mix will also be controversial."

Downvoters, I wasn't being snarky, this is a genuine question. This whole subthread is baffling to me. I read through the thread[0] from yesterday as well, and I see a lot of people who seem to intuitively assume this is really bad, but no explanation as to why.

0: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23173018