>Reddit has fallen to this same problem with subreddit moderators. A subreddit moderator can remove posts and comments they don't want anyone to see. A lot of the popular subreddits and many of the more obscure subreddits are moderator-crafted echo chambers.

Coz it's cheaper to pay moderators with a power trip than with money.

I've yet to see a viable solution to this economic dilemma.

* Decentralized moderation tends to end up meaning no moderation coz normal users are not really motivated to clean up spam, etc.

* Free centralized moderation like reddit does inevitably means the space becomes a fiefdom from people who have their own reasons for doing grunt work for free (e.g. pushing their agenda, marketing, etc).

* Paid moderation isn't usually something people are willing to pay for.

The solution is found in proper accounting.

Hrmmm... Reddit pays mods? It would be very interesting to know how much they get paid by reddit. We didn't know how much Twitch streamers made until that info was leaked this year, and it encouraged many others to stop wasting their time on the platform in hopes of fairness.

It seems to me that reddit mods, and even the platform, often do(does) side deals with certain accounts to allow and help posts to reach the front page as well, while reddit also fosters this with paid promotions on the site. Lots of things that make it to the front page are not likeable, but somehow embedded with political and marketing messages, that's what corrupted the overall experience of browsing reddit for me... Not proven fact, but my opinion as a web developer mind you.

People play with anonymity that social media can provide to make money, now companies also do it. If transparency isn't practiced on the corporate side, everything online becomes a carefully controlled reality show while the shady deals go on behind the curtains.

Reddit removing public metrics, like displaying both upvotes and downvotes next to each other allows brigading to go on unchecked, and it enables an ideal that certain things are popular or likeable without dispute... The ideal that things make it to the front page because they are favorable, controversial, or popular is a big lie in itself especially if the numbers aren't truly accurate and/or transparent.

> Paid moderation isn't usually something people are willing to pay for.

Is there any reason to think that paid moderation wouldn't lead to its own (possibly worse) biases?

Hacker News has paid moderators, and seems to be higher signal than Reddit.

HN moderation is pretty terrible considering the slow amount of posts per day

Is that actually due to moderation?

What's wrong with it?

What works on a slow / low volume site (HN) doesn't necessarily work well on a high volume site such as Reddit.

I guess the reason would be that they could take away your pay.

But who is "they"? The one who pays the piper picks the tune.

Normal users browse new and vote for good content. This works pretty well!

Could you designate a bunch of people as mini moderators and have the majority vote of mini mods decide moderation?

Then have one moderator curate the list of mini mods. By spreading the work out, more actual time can be spent on the decision and feedback given.

That sounds like a good idea, but in practice it turns into an unmanageable disaster of petty removals and biased moderation.

r/science has something like 1500 moderators, most of which only have the power to remove comments. The rules are applied seemingly at random, and the problematic posts/titles are rarely actually fixed, they just have a sea of [removed] under them. This makes the biased posts even worse as the comments correcting them and the discussion about it disappears.

That explains it why /r/science is such a graveyard! Thank you!

It sounds like if any of the 1500 mods dislike a comment, then that comment disappears. That's extremely biased towards removing comments.

My suggestion would have those 1500 mini mods vote "keep" or "remove" - majority wins. The main mod can look at contentious votes and override the mini mods decisions. Further the main mod can remove mini mods that are voting poorly.

I am a mod on a subreddit that has public mod logs. There is a bot with mod permissions that logs every action any moderator takes including saving the content of erased posts and makes it publicly available.

I think more subreddits should use a tool like this.

As a general rule of thumb, this is a truth worth remembering about online fora in general:

In general, the voices with the most power aren't the most correct; they're the boxes with the most time (leisure or paid) to dedicate to being online.

> a "showdead" style option that let readers see removed comments.

If it had this option, why even allow the moderation at all?

Same reason as for HN, to allow transparency of moderation?

I.e. we (mods and flagging users) remove stuff, but for those who wonder (and have a small amount of "karma"?) they can always use showdead to see what they are missing out on and even vouch for things that have been killed for no good reason.

This works beautifully here, except for stories where it seems a few can kill it with next to no trace except in the server logs. (You sometimes find them in /active even after they are flagged off the front page.)

Yep. There’s clearly a reward structure being created to silence contrary information.

Problem is moderators can straight up ban you from posting anymore comments in a sub, and most do if they delete one of your comments. Try to talk about politics in any political tangent subreddit long enough and you will eventually get the boot because no sane person lines up with 100% perfect match to a certain political viewpoint

At least Wikipedia has its edit history. Or is that also editable by "Wikipedia Gods" nowadays?

In this regard Reddit is no different than traditional forums where a mod would ban you for liking the wrong flavor of ice cream. And why should it be? If you want your non-crappy version of a subreddit, then go create it. The truth is that people who want to volunteer their time to mod a subreddit are mainly doing it to power trip, with some rare exceptions.

You can subscribe reddit subs with RSS and fetch aggressively, this way you will see all comments and posts before the mods had time to delete them.