People with vendettas and power vacuum opportunists

People that want a different narrative on a subreddit

There are tons of people that have other causes and interests than API tooling or company drama

You know, this is all quite ignorable

I think that's part of Reddit's problem - They can replace the mods with random people if they want, but the likelihood that those people will put in the work and do a good job is not high.

based on what? is the control group the current mods because that's already a laughable set of people. there is no criteria before and there will be no criteria after.

1. Corporate marketing departments

2. Unpopular political/religious factions seeking to surreptitiously "move the needle"

3. Those who wanted to become mods before but didn't make the cut for completely valid reasons. Now they have an opportunity, only the quality will decrease as a result

Unfortunately the hysterical racists are so loud and pervasive that this is yet another issue we see broken down in a Manichean battle to cover for a total lack of new ideas.

Ideas are worth very little, it's the execution that matters.

Good shout on bringing it up though

That's not what the word "original" means.

Sequels, adaptations, remakes, reboots, etc. are not "entirely original" because they're using existing stories or characters.

Whether you like those works or not, it's flat out _false_ to call them "entirely original".

I don't watch television much except for a little bit of news and local weather, but it seems to me there's always about the same number of family-centered sitcoms and dramas set in the present, about one's parents generation (nostalgia aimed at 30 something starting a family) and grandparents or older ancestors (mythmaking, culture reproduction). Sitcoms are like the McRib of television; they generally don't age well but since they come and go as the cast ages out it's easy to get teary-eyed at how great they used to be.

Whereas drummers actually experience this panning configuration in real life, and when you're placing the mics in the mix, that's the set of ears you're trying to mimic, really because there isn't any _other_ set of ears to opine. And it's an important one because it provides the lion's share of the stereo image.

Live albums get a pass, of course. And yes, lefty drummers exist. If a lefty drummer wants their kit panned the way they hear it, that is of course fine.

Barbecue sauce.

(please don't ban me)

The pauses are built into the script. It’s worse, it’s far worse. It highlights that the scripts are usually pretty bad.

Classic example of a completely unfunny basic show https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=jKS3MGriZcs

If the timings could be adjusted I feel shows might actually be better off.

just not in the way the creators intended

How would that be different from the status quo?

The front page politics of even my local subreddit are completely divorced from the concerns of my neighbors and other millenials I know.

It was a blackmail operation. I am certain it was a means to an end.

Same as being a Reddit power mod. It’s about control.

In the status quo, Reddit, the mods, and the subreddit users have all coevolved with each other.

https://www.britannica.com/science/coevolution

They may not be entirely happy with each other, but they've developed with each other slowly over time, developed callouses, and generally worked out how to live with each other. Even if a mod here leaves and a mod there joins, the incremental changes to the community can be absorbed.

A complete replacement of the mod structure of a subreddit, especially a lot of subreddits at a time, will cause more chaos than you may initially expect. In ecosystem terms, imagine simply yanking out an entire species and trying to replace it by engineering fiat. Yes, eventually the ecosystem will resettle into some new equilibrium... but there is no guarantee that that equilibrium will be similarly healthy, biodiverse, etc. There's no guarantee it will even be an ecosystem at all; the Sahara Desert is basically an ecosystem that was so disrupted that it just straight-up collapsed. It is theoretically possible for it to end up healthier, but, well, look out in the real world at what ecosystem modification tends to produce and I think you'll be on the right track.

Replacing all the co-evolved mods with brand new ones is going to be intrinsically more disruptive than you may think. Moreover, the selection mechanism for the new mods is also likely to be highly disruptive; however they do it they're not going to be taking some mythical random sample, there's going to be some sort of systematic correlation between them all that will further tend to result in the communities experiencing rapid and non-trivial change. Plus, new mods will have no habits, no tools developed, no support structure from other existing mods, etc.

Continuing the biological metaphor, this is all coming at a time when Reddit is inflaming the entire community. Speaking for myself, I'm not particularly passionate about the API issue, I've just been following the community lead on it for the subreddit I'm a mod in, but I am definitely taking note of the loud notes of contempt coming out of Reddit in this drama. If this is the level of contempt they have for us all in vetted public statements, how much more contempt we must all be held in inside the organization when they can speak freely with each other. Consciously and otherwise, people are picking up on this, and things that a user might otherwise have pushed through will become reasons to leave for inflamed users.

The sum total of all of this is that while Reddit has the _technical_ ability to remove and add mod status as they see fit, the community dynamics are more complicated than someone simply modeling the community as "the given set of people" may understand. They are living organisms of their own, if not ecosystems of their own, and the level of disruption will be greater than you expect. Moreover, if you are not looking at the situation properly, the disruption will initially be smaller than you expect. The first day the invasive species is introduced into the ecosystem, nothing appears to be wrong. The first week after Reddit just boots all the mods and installs their own may seem like nothing much has gone wrong. The initial sound and fury will die down. But the sound and the fury isn't the damage; that's just the inflammation. The damage will only be seen in the weeks and months afterwards.

One of the most challenging things about managing communities is that for the most part, in my considered opinion, mass exodus is not the beginning of the trouble. It is the end. If you judge the quality of your community management simply by the membership numbers, you won't be getting any alarms until well after it is too late. By raw numbers I doubt in 2-4 weeks that Reddit will appear to be in any trouble. But the processes set into motion by such a drastic action will play out nevertheless.

I think it will be exactly like the current status quo. You see subreddit and mod drama happening all the time.

So many people want to moderate a local subreddit for Seattle that we have at least three different ones. The mod teams for each all have strong (and different) political views. But the threat of their community splitting keeps the mods acting fairly reasonable when in the public eye, because each seems to desperately want to be the Seattle subreddit.

Yeah, this is something I’ve seen multiple times on Reddit. Mods on larger subs start putting into place capricious rules, and told the users that if they don’t like it, start their own subs. Then if someone does this and the sub actually start gaining traction, the original sub gets nervous and suddenly starts relenting because they don’t actually want users to go elsewhere, they just want to exert as much control as they can before they trigger an actual exodus.

It shows the importance of competition if we want users to be treated fairly. Unfortunately, there’s strong network effects working against it (both inside Reddit, and among the web in general), and mods have made things worse by working to shut down rivals.

Either way, though, the supply of mods greatly outstrips the demand.

Do you mean three segments between pretty left and extreme left? Because I am kind of skeptical there is a conservative mod on the Seattle sub. I saw how much of CHOP and the murders there were covered up.

The SeattleWA subreddit is pretty angry. That community expresses a lot of stereotypical 'I vote republican values'.

I prefer the Seattle reddit but don't much like either. The Seattle subreddit can have too much holier than thou sniping for points for my taste. Its the kind of place where if you expressed some doubt about this 'defund the police' thing you've heard about you might get some thoughtful responses and you might also get a breathless history lesson that accuses you of supporting chattel slavery. The SeattleWA subreddit is too full of violence for me - many posts are about violent crime, conversations about street people frequently have people fantasizing about using violence to resolve the issue. Its the kind of place where a post asking what post-covid seattle is like mostly has people expressing contempt for masking policies in the abstract and deriding people they have seen wearing a mask, a few folk addressing the question, and one person who has been around long enough to compare it to the recession in the 80's (which I thought was neat enough to mention).

I don't know of a third, but those two are different enough that I think even a casual inspection of both will give you an idea of which you might prefer.

Curious in general, has Seattle as a greater entity mostly split into red & blue lines?

Last time I was there, I remember there were more independent (and interesting) anti-WTO/globalization and anarchist contingents.

There are certainly those, but not sure it is accurate to generalize to mods as a whole.

There are powermods who "moderate" hundreds of subreddits. This is not an exaggeration. Hundreds.

When questioned, they invariably say that they "just watch the incoming queue" or something, and the other mods "do all the work". While likely true in the literal sense (again, hundreds), such answers of course completely evade of the question.

Remember, "Most of What You Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People". <https://np.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most_...>. This also applies to powermods, assuming they're not being paid on the side to push some ideology.

I'm not sure how you would properly prompted LLM change moderating standards based on community feedback? Sticky threads for popular topics? Have the understanding of things like local politics or a newly released game in 2023 to be able to separate out bad faith discussion from real? Reddit isn't twitter where the main thing the mods do is remove abusive replies. They're community crafters and maintainers.

[1] https://platform.openai.com/docs/guides/moderation

Will the future be Star Trek or Dune as far as AI is concerned?

[1] Source: am responsible for trust and safety including the tech solution and the moderation team for a 1bil+ views site. [2] For example https://hivemoderation.com/ or https://www.openweb.com/

If they don't think this is a situation for an LLM, you can probably safely assume it's not.

The worst mods for the community will be the best mods for reddit's bottom line. The power-tripping is payment in itself for those types.

As if the current mods are any different?

Honestly I don't mind this at all. The big subreddits have become so ossified in their power structures, that each community is its' own little fiefdom now. There is massive friction to being able to post anywhere. Reddit would be objectively better with a less heavy handed approach to moderation, and some kind of site-wide formal appeals process that neuters the ability of any individual mod from going on a power trip.

People haven't liked this much when I've said it in the past, but I think there's more to this than just API pricing. I think there's a lot of general discontent about how reddit works that saw people more likely to support this strike. Some because it was the last straw, some to watch it burn.

While I do think reddit is blundering and taking their free labor and content for granted, I think the power mods and more generally the karma system create a lot of anger that has piggybacked on this.

I think you're right, but I think the new ones will be even worse and may actually cause the user exodus that will hurt them. It's these second order effects that Reddit doesn't seem to be taking into account because they're so confident this is mostly inside baseball to the average user.

Yes, as far as API pricing. No as far as the enshittification with "new" styling, NFTs, and all the other dumb shit. And the power mods.

I'm sure that the majority of this is

WOULD YOU LIKE TO READ THIS IN THE APP? ITS BETTER

true, but i think the API is one of the worst parts now. But there is

WOULD YOU LIKE TO READ THIS IN THE APP? ITS BETTER

some functionality I use for old.reddit.com, that I'm pretty sure will be next on the chopping block...

You know the best day I ever saw on Reddit? The day after Trump was elected. The bots and mods and preppanned Clinton themed party made for seemingly ONE DAY of actually unique and genuine content if you could get past all the crying in some places.

2016 is when I learned just how much the narrative is controlled. When they had nothing to post, it was a completely different place.

I’m sure because I dared mention Trump as a date reference some people won’t believe me.

Whenever I see this sentiment I'm honestly stumped as to how anyone's experience can be so different from mine. What exactly is it that you're trying to post that's so difficult? because from what I see in nearly every sub, they'd be improved by more moderation, since nearly all of them get stuffed with off-topic and low-effort content, often actively breaking the community rules in the sidebar.

Meanwhile, reporting comments that clearly violate the subreddit rules for things like ad-hominem attacks and spam in turn get the reporter reported to Reddit admins for abusing the report button.

From my perspective a few of the elder mods stepped down and were replaced by activist mods that are moderating with strong, shameless ego to reinforce their preferred viewpoints and narrative.

Although it depends on the size of the subreddit - you tend to get a lot of idiots who complain incessantly about plainly justified moderation, and we have to remember that these are literally unpaid volunteers, they're entitled to take actions that make their job easier.

Here is a good example. As a new user signed up for an account and posted in a sub got a lot of replies but didn't come back for a few months. Tried replying and was forbidden because of low karma points. Never came back..

The reason why you as a long term reddit user are stumped is because your experience is different.

This is a core feature that distinguishes Reddit as a "Community of communities". It's not a bug, it's a feature

That's the problem, it can be anything. No, I'm not going to sit down and read every single bullet point of your specific subreddit rules so that what I'm saying perfectly jives with your little cult. I don't know how many times I've seen an interesting thread from a sub I've never visited, tried to add to the conversation, and got auto-moderated with zero recourse. No, I'm not going to "revise my post" to step in line with what you're expecting. I'm just never going to bother joining this community now.

So long as a post is on topic and not abusive or threatening, there is zero reason to remove it. But Reddit has become a place where mods curate their userbase into a nightmarish echo chamber, quash all dissent, and then use it as a bullhorn for their own ideologies.

Good!

I only visit well curated subreddits. I don't want drive-by visitors, floods of memes, or similar content. My bread and butter are subreddits like r/DebateReligion and r/AskHistorians.

If the mods are not to my liking, there usually is an alternate sub on the same subject that is.

So thank you for staying away.

And this is exactly why Reddit has gone to hell. Mods with that attitude. "I was here first, so therefore I get to unilaterally set the Overton window for all discussion herein. If you don't like it, you're banned."

HN seems to be the last place on the internet where competing thoughts can exist. It's amazing to me that if moderation is so hard, why dang can do such a good job single-handedly with a user-base bigger than most subs.

You can always create your own and be the first over there.

I agree though that there are some problems with the model, such as a long gone head mod suddenly poking back in and doing something radical, as well as a discoverability issue.

> HN seems to be the last place on the internet where competing thoughts can exist.

HN is good precisely because it's well moderated and ontopic. There are rules here as well, and content is filtered quite thoroughly. If you don't notice it it's just either because you happen to agree with the status quo by accident, or you got used to it over time.

Exactly. Like with politics, "no moderation" is really just "moderation I agree with."

And be the only one over there.

If r/keyboards devolves, sure, someone can create r/seriouskeyboards, but that doesn't mean anyone will join them. First, there are already X orders of magnitude subscribed to r/keyboards; second, if a new user is looking for a group on keyboards, they're more likely to investigate r/keyboards than r/adjectivekeyboards.

"If you don't like it then make your own" ignores all of the realities involved. It's arrogant and dismissive.

(pardon the edit, but I don't think it's a misrepresentation of what you said)

So in other words, you didn't actually want to participate in the community and the automoderation worked as intended to ward off someone who wasn't interested in following the rules used to curate a specific community. Subreddits who have aggressive automod rules are almost without exception ones that put them in place due to the excessive rule-breaking posts from outsiders, including ones exactly like you. Some of the subs enforce specific templates to filter out the flood of low-effort repeats from people who can't be bothered.

People who actually want to participate in the community will read the rules and stay. Anyone who's offended by being asked to do that probably won't be a positive contribution to the community anyway.

Or ensure group think.

(Also, you are now banned from /r/pyongyang)

Try posting literally anything contrary to the party line on any noteworthy sub, and see how long it takes you to get banned. Particularly with a new account.

I haven't bothered posting anything on that site in years because it's a 50/50 crap shoot whether it will even be seen, or that the post I just spent 5 minutes of my life writing out will be instantly auto-modded for containing the wrong keyword.

I notice you did not answer my question though. And I have to wonder what you're posting that you keep needing new accounts. As someone once said, 'If you run into an asshole in the morning, you ran into an asshole. If you keep getting banned and having your comments deleted, maybe you're the problem'

For more than a year, a handful of powermods were banning users which discussed the _possibility_ that SARS-CoV-2 was less dangerous than the media and politicians were claiming (now we have the data and it was less dangerous) or discussed the _possibility_ that the COVID vaccines were less effective or had worse side effects than the media and politicians were claiming (we now have the data and they were less effective and had worse side effects). These mods, who run the default subreddits, were banning users for posting in other subs which permitted such discussions -- that's right, if you posted in a sub that critically discussed what was going on, you'd get banned from default subs like r/pics and r/tifu.

I could list at least a hundred personal examples that had nothing to do with SARS-CoV-2 (usually opposing the American leftwing hive mind), but it's too easy for someone to just dismiss those as unsupported personal anecdotes. OTOH, it was well documented how Reddit shut down discussion re: SARS-CoV-2, as many other sites and services did.

Ideology has nothing to do with it. The post could be flamebait, have a bad title such as "Give me recs", a clickbait title such as "Does anyone else hate Popular Thing", be easily satisfied by searching the subreddit, etc.

Will it though? Twitter's moderation policies have all but collapsed and the net result is a near-total flight of high-profile high-dollar advertisers.

Like others have mentioned in the thread, the people who will most likely want to take over these subs are going to be some combination of bigots, cranks, and the severely deranged. That doesn't seem like it will do good things for user participation or advertiser attractiveness.

Who wants to advertise on /r/movies if the mod team is exclusively made up of chemtrails connoisseurs and the main topic of discussion is what movies are secret plots by the Jewish cabal?

So why would Reddit do it?

More likely, Reddit will pick moderators who are extremely advertiser friendly and who will squash "controversial" viewpoints -- as we've seen on other sites/ services, those "controversial" viewpoints are things like the precautionary principle, biological sex, free speech, free assembly, freedom of conscience, etc.

What supports the argument that it will go to "bigots, cranks and the severely deranged"?

Remember, "Most of What You Read on the Internet is Written by Insane People". <https://np.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/9rvroo/most_...>. This also applies to powermods, assuming they're not being paid on the side to push some ideology.

I was going more for "very hard, especially in bulk and on short notice" than irreplaceable there.

>wouldn’t it make more sense to protest by quitting?

Already did a while back...used to mod some big-ish subs.

Going private seems like a reasonable intermediate step though. A bit like workers holding a strike instead of straight to mass resignation

That's technically true, but that's because nobody today really thinks about Reddit AMAs, because there are fairly few of them and they're mostly lousy.

When they employed Victoria, AMAs were frequent and involved high-profile public figures engaging with the users in a way that, even if it was self-promotion, felt relatively genuine and was entertaining - This was because Victoria was essentially interviewing people with user-submitted questions, and she was good at it. The Reddit AMA was a cultural touchstone, like the late-night talk-show circuit.

Victoria herself was not somehow utterly irreplaceable, but as far as I can tell, they fired her and replaced her with nothing. With the result that Reddit lost a popular, interesting feature and a lot of cultural relevance.

I think it's very appropriate to compare that situation with the situation today, though perhaps not as you intended it; it won't burn down the site, Reddit will go on, but it will be a little worse and a little closer to that tipping point because of yet another bad management decision.

Looking through /r/IAMA, and I can't say that I'm seeing that. If you look through the top voted AMA's of all time there, the vast majority are some years after Victoria's departure. Comparing those to the few on there from prior to her departure doesn't seem to show much of a difference, at least from what I can tell.

It does seem like the sub peaked a few years back, but again, that was still several years after her departure.

It would probably be an interesting exercise to download the data for all the AMAs and adjust by MAU to see what the actual most popular threads were, but I'm not going to do that right now.

It does today, yet most of the top upvoted ones aren't from the last few years. Rather, most seem to be from 2 to 3 years after Victoria was fired. So they seemed to get more popular in the first few years after she was fired, and then less after that. I'm not sure that can simplistically be chalked up to an expanded user base.

The most upvoted AMA of all time is Obama's from a decade ago. However, that was a year before Victoria started working there (she only worked there two years from what I can find).

None of this is to denigrate her work, for what it's worth. Just that the doomsday scenarios that were given back then (IAMA mods were claiming they wouldn't be able to continue unless Reddit changed its decision) never came to pass.

The subreddit was a default subreddit for a while, and no longer is. So for some years, every new Reddit user was automatically subscribed to it, and that stopped being the case.

Everything you're saying is consistent with OP's claim.

That doesn't account for user growth though. You should normalize the figures by dividing by the total number of Reddit users, or at least IAmA subscribers.

It could also be explained by a growing userbase. More users in recent years means more upvotes in threads from the same period, compared to older ones. I checked a few big subreddits that are at least 10 years old and their all-time top posts are from up to five years ago.

Also, reddit changed how the upvotes are counted somewhere in 2016.

I actually can’t think of more than a handful of examples of great AMAs the last few years. At one point it was a press stop for almost anyone famous doing a tour, and that doesn’t seem to be true anymore.

My guess is she trained the guests less familiar with Reddit on how to have a successful AMA (e.g., “don’t be Woody Harrelson”).

And because they were so successful, publicists were probably more willing to allow them to happen.

Same. I loved AMA back when it was new and was a mixture of famous people, interesting jobs, or just people with unusual stories. Victoria did a good job of balancing those and making the ones with famous people still feel fairly authentic.

After she was fired, AMA became almost entirely famous people shilling stuff like a generic forgettable late night interview show. I unsubscribed.

https://www.reddit.com/r/IAmA/top/?t=all

I had to scroll for pages and pages to find one that was recent. The heyday appears to have been 5 to 9 years ago.

It looks like this sub got established as the place to go and then it slowly lost momentum over time.

I think the general consensus among Reddit is that AMA's were a lot higher quality back then.

The average user noticed no difference because AMAs just kinda faded into the background and became an unimportant part of the site.

I used to visit it often back when she was around, but I don't think I even remembered it exists anymore, until you happened to mention it. It just lost relevance.

Ultimately that protest went no where because there was no end game -- Victoria didn't want her job back. It was just done. End of era.

I can't say that that subreddit was better in the Victoria Taylor era than today because I don't visit it anymore. I also can't say I stopped visiting it because of the same event.

But I know at some point I stopped caring about the high profile threads and the answers they gave.

Why do I need so many members to show up when search for servers? That means I need to have a community somewhere else.

This wouldn’t be an issue at all if the official reddit app was even half as good as the worst of the 3rd party clients and reddit actually providing parity in mod tools across their own clients. I have to go to new reddit to do multiple mod actions.

I suspect a lot of communities, especially the smaller ones, feel the same way.

Mods that feel that strongly about protecting their community would do so much better in a federated context.

It's psychologically unhealthy, any therapist would tell you that.

Current front page:

>A new study has found that both Christian nationalism and biblical literalism are associated with a greater tendency to believe in conspiracy theories

>Being female, liberal, intellectually humble, and having weak party identification are all positively associated with writing more persuasive political arguments

>When house prices increase, homeowners are likely to strengthen their belief in meritocracy

I really hope a mass migration to lemmy instances really sticks.

They are not asking a lot, just don't shut down the site in a hissy fit

I made no such statement.

sorry for pharaprasing.

do you have any evidence that there is a negative correlation between 'bottom of the barrel mods' and 'mods that are going to be outsted by the message about subs having be made private?'

Competent - many I'm sure. Damn near anyone that has supervised people in just about any context is probably overqualified.

Competent and willing to put in hours of unpaid work dealing with crazy people and drama and bickering and spam deletion...less so.

That was what you said before.

Who would want to instantly have status over millions of people? Hmm, that's a hard one...

These sites need to ensure they deliver on numbers represented to paid advertisers, and now it's pretty much the only way to make it to top rankings, so how much one is willing to pay determines what's on the front page more than anything else now.

The corporate mods are the ones that prevent harmful and deceptive things from staying at the top of the front page I bet, and they're not likely to be regular mod roles any time soon due to the power wielded.

These massive social media sites all get corrupted after a while and then can never manage to come back. This may well be that point for Reddit.

There are surprisingly few mods for how much engagement the subreddits have. There has to be mods that are just as good as the current batch, but haven't had a chance to shine.

This of course assumes the selection process is built to identify and promote mods that are as good, or better than the old mods.

Question for HN: If you were the Reddit admins, how would run the moderator selection process to get a great crew?

The same type of people who want to be on the boards of HOA's. eg: the ones you least want doing it.