I am in some "community" subreddits and moderators are just there to enforce the rules that they made up and not everybody necessarily agree with. As an example, it's very common to have vague rules that silence some flavour of on-topic conversations... and then they are arbitrarily enforced, depending on whether the mod likes or dislikes where the conversation is going.

In my opinion, if mods from small subs were gone, that would be a huge positive. I'm glad that this abusive relationship of mods who think they own the entire community (including the users) is coming to an end.

In the olden days the subreddit would be their personal PHPBB forum.

Now they are just sharecroppers for Reddit, and guess what, Reddit isn't a better admin.

There's a real frustration when you join a new subreddit, and you think you're joining a category of discussion and quickly discover (by having a post removed) that this particular category has someone who enforces a huge list of arcane rules.

Obviously there are exceptions. Some subreddits have non-obvious names, and were built into focused communities by the efforts of the moderators. But not all subreddits are equal, and I think this situation has revealed the gulf between them.

and I think a few months with new eyes will show why those arcane rules exist. Losing that tribal knowledge just means the sub will re-experience the same growing pains until we come full circle back to the rules we deemed arcane.

Tech moves fast. Human nature, not so much. social media is a lot more about the latter.

> [...] I think a few months with new eyes will show why those arcane rules exist. Losing that tribal knowledge just means the sub will re-experience the same growing pains [...]

I also predict that most people will not even recognize that what they are witnessing is a repetition of what happened before. I think the math of growing a community means most users have joined after the rules (that make the community a decent place to be) were established.

I think subreddits are better off without mods. Therefore, I have never modded one.

You might enjoy /r/interesting as fuck. They removed all rules except the sitewide rules. It seems to be mostly porn and OF spam now.

It was basically no effort. Occasionally, someone would post spam, users would report it, and I’d go “yep, that sure is spam. Remove”. It was just another “mindless action” to take during Reddit time.

I’m sure larger subs are exponential harder to mod.

I'm struggling to parse this, maybe partly because of the other small sub that's in the news atm.

Meant to type “programming sub”

And you trust the replacements, that in your words are "mostly power tripping and/or want to control the conversation?". Unless you yourself are taking over and trust yourself to not grow to be what you hate?

This sounds more like a revolving door in your eyes than cleaning out the trash. why bother if you haven't addressed the core problem?

8chan doesn't even exist anymore.

So you have no idea of what you're talking about, which means you have no business making suggestions for anything.

That's unnecessarily aggressive. I agree with the poster's point, which is that no (or very minimal) moderation gives you results that are very undesirable for most communities.

For smaller communities (<10k members), it's probable that reformation would not happen in a clear way if a founding mod destroyed it, unless the community is booming.

For communities in the 10k-100k range, I could see things going either way.

I'd say the bar is more around 500k, with 300-500k being the uncertain range. I definitely can think of some 100-300k communities that will be irrevocably damaged if they tried to split (usually ones focused on specific genres, or subs focused on personalities or series). I can't think of any sub <100k that would survive in this decade if ruptured.

I would hazard a guess that most mods feel more like stakeholders, having already done a large amount of unpaid labour should entitle them to have some say over the future direction of that subreddit.

That’s just on the admin level, mod to mod, generally users who are active and willing to do the work are more likely to be promoted to mod and less likely to be kicked from the mods.

But in short, yes your willingness to do unpaid labor is absolutely part of what entitles you to be a mod. It’s not always sufficient but it’s often required.

There are a bunch of forums online which will gladly accept an influx of refugees from reddit, and the world will move on. If there isn’t one, one will form, somewhere.

However, past behaviour also predicts future behaviour. The current actions of board of directors (and the silence of others) speaks volumes.

Reddit may go as far as salting the earth for communities that do end up successfully migrating. I wouldn’t put it past them to hire a troll farm to spam a niche community with low-quality content.

It’s been a nice break away from Reddit.

And I say that as someone with a very low bar for when time is well spent. Like John Lennon, I believe that time you enjoy wasting isn’t wasted. Reddit wasn’t clearing that bar for me. It felt like a slot machine. There was some compulsion to pull the handle again but ultimately I walked away less happy.

(Slot machine mechanics are, unfortunately, present to a degree in every discussion board, group chat and mailing list - other people posting potentially interesting content == variable-schedule reward, which is the way to get addicted fast.)

Reddit has been on a downward slide for quite some time, and the quality of discussions there has been getting consistently worse.

Many of the subs that used to bring me joy have been overtaken by the toxic sludge that you’ll find on other social media. There are still some pockets of goodness left, but it increasingly requires deliberate work to unsubscribe, apply keyword filters, etc. It has become increasingly difficult to justify my time spent there.

None of this has to do with the UI or apps, and I had already decided to trial some time away from Reddit because I could feel it pulling me in daily, and increasingly I’d find that my time there was not well spent, and often made me feel angry after I’d encounter the same bullshit again and again.

So this latest mess is not even the primary reason I’m leaving. It’s just a very very strong push over an edge I was already teetering over.

I know many people who are in the same boat, and I’d argue that this is Reddit’s future. The latest actions are like a poison pill. They won’t kill the site overnight, but more and more people will feel poorly about using the site and implicitly supporting Spez’s bullshit.

Reddit will survive like Twitter is surviving. It exists, but people don’t want to be there anymore, and the kinds of people who made it a compelling place to spend time are the kinds of users who are leaving in droves.

I envision my future Reddit use looking more like my current google use. Something that will happen in an incognito window while searching for something specific. I don’t see myself continuing to spend time contributing.

If the information located within had been posted on discord, it would have been lost. Forums with their own file hosting are often the last documentation we have of something, as file hosters die off.

Ever noticed how google will say 600k results but only show you 1.5 pages? The mass knowledge of the internet is being lost.

Sure things were different 2005, but for the last 5-10 years it's been pretty clear what direction reddit has been headed in. So, I can't agree more that past behavior predicts future behavior.

Reddit's been like this for a long, long time.

I remember when hate speech was just discovered as a reason to ban people, and mods of major subreddits would find ways to use that either out of protest or complete incompetence to ban people. For example, banning users for disagreeing with a controversial decision because “I hate your take, thus it is hate speech.”

Or the constant other entitled drama like when a soccer subreddit started mass banning people discussing a major game because his team lost.

There’s also just constant nuking of entire threads and locking them with no reason other than a blanket accusatory pinned comment about how “everybody” can’t behave. Nothing better than opening a thread about a picture they took of their dog only to find thousands of deleted comments and a temper tantrum post from some mod. Or multiple pinned spam posts from mods advertising junk in like a 5000 character copy paste spam in every post that just adds to the useless scrolling you have to do to see legitimate content.

Try making a comment that maybe all Boomers arnt property owning rent seeking monsters…

Or having a nuanced debate around how renting out your property on AirBNB doesn’t make you responsible for the destruction of society…

The entire sub is overrun by zealots with an overly simplistic view of the world.

Still, they are doing news.com a massive favour by seemingly giving them endless material to reuse without credit!

Being banned from Reddit in 2023 is a blessing.

I still hang out on Aussie forums, notably OCAU which is still going strong!

I guess they probably hated my speech.

I also made some silly quips about spez in the same timeframe. It is possible he was salty about it and arbitrarily chose a comment to reference in the banning, not being the true reason. It certainly would not be out of character.

Theres serious issues that far exceed those or the mods, not least of which being that they are even more prone to abuse of power without Any oversight of substance.

If you have a problem with an admin who banned you, your only recourse is to violate the TOS to make an alt to complain in a post in a sub where they will then immediately ban that alt account and remove the post "due to ban evasion"...

In my original comment I mention mods banning for hate speech in an abusive / ironic manner (so nobody is truly worried for their safety for example).

I think reddit used to automatically forwards reports for this category for admin review probably due to a legal requirement. Due to the mass quantity of reports vs staff, I suspect they automatically flag mod reports as credible. As such they have automatic admin superbans.

Admin reviewed bans are a higher level of ban and super bans and use every possible privacy exploit to go far beyond basic account or cache banning. It’s far beyond even IP banning.

These seem to be intended for truly extreme, severe, violent actions such as credible acts of immediate impending mass violence, coordinating true terror, promoting actual adult offensive exploitive content, etc.

Instead, they map hate speech and some other serious reports to this category. Technically, it sounds like it makes sense on paper, but this is abused so heavily that essentially meme reports are nearly sending automatic SWAT raids to people’s homes.

I’m guessing these are only summarized in a broad category to staff as “Mod reported + Admin reviewed. User banned for performing or conspiring terrorism / active police verified death threats / extreme exploitative adult content / active police verified mass murder / hate speech”

That last one technically fitting the rest if it’s used correctly (or at least one could argue) but as a chain of OR listed reasons, someone who was ironically banned because the mod “hated that they disagreed with the mod’s decision to ban scumbag steve memes from the meme subreddit” is suddenly flagged in the same category of true terrorists, as if Bin Laden himself had his own subreddit and was posting live content of his active mass public attack.

This is one reason they want people to download their app. Any association such as unique app combinations installed or other accounts (including non-reddit accounts) can be linked to a user even when they opt out of traditional tracking. They can then sell this data or use it in a magnitude of ways.

This is a specific core problem I’ve been tracking but this is a general template example of many of Reddit’s problems I’ve strongly disagreed with that go beyond general debatable business choices or general preferences.

"As previously warned, your unsolicited reply has been reported. Any/All replies going forward will continue to be reported for modmail abuse.

*Do Not Contact Us Again*"

So obviously I messaged them back, they just muted me for 28 days. So I guess 4 weeks till I get muted again.

Oh, also I forgot to add that when I commented, I hadn't even watched the video, I was just going off the title. So I'm guilty of a low effort comment, but hell that's 99% of what I contribute.

HackerNews is no better. I've gotten feedback for calling out SV and the nation of Germany... I guess I could have been more "constructive", but what you find is these things are applied selectively.

I don't really agree that you need to be constructive when talking about big institutions; arguably this isn't even a good idea. There's no need to use kid gloves with bigoted nations or billionaires.

Yeah. Of all the comments I have made, I least expected it to be that one. As it was a complete Reddit ban, not just a subreddit ban, it is possible that it was just Huffman doing his usual round of trolling and not really about the comment at all. I had participated in a discussion about the API changes earlier the same day said comment was made, so I was "on the radar".

Either way it was pretty funny.

Lol Yeah, I'm sure THAT'S what you were banned for. What particular aspect of their marketing did you take issue with? Maybe you let slip some of your obvious-to-everyone prejudice in your "criticism".

And I doubt that mulvany was the issue. People don’t want politics in their beer. I guarantee you that both a pro-choice and an anti-abortion marketing campaign would have negative effects on their sales.

>both a pro-choice and an anti-abortion marketing campaign would have negative effects on their sales

Ok? I wasn't commenting on the efficacy of various political themed advertising campaigns, I was challenging the notion that benign lamentation of advertisement quality was what got him banned.

If I had to put money on it I'd put a 3-4 digit sum on what that guy actually got banned for. And it rhymes with ransphobia. Anyone who cares that much about an ad only cares about that ad for one reason. And I'd bet his phobia leaked out in his totally benign criticisms.

I don’t drink bud anyways since I don’t enjoy the taste of vodka spiked urine, but if my drink of choice started making their opinions on abortion known I’d stop drinking it too.

Make product. Sell product. I buy product. Fin.

The point politics enters the equation, I exit. I’m already so incredibly exhausted from hearing trump this Biden that hunter this Zelenskyy that day in day out.

Does that meaningfully differ from "some laughs when you strike the ban hammer"? One may not physically laugh out loud, but no doubt the appeal of which you speak stems from pleasurable emotions that stem from the entertainment in experiencing those things.

It is understandable why some people would be drawn to those incentives, but I am not sure those incentives align with good faith participation. Power and influence is best experienced when used in bad faith. When only used in good faith, one will not even recognize that they have it.

In the old owner/operator forum days there were other incentives to be a good faith mod. Financial gain being one possible incentive. But in the case of Reddit, they take all of those parts for themselves, leaving just the scraps for any would-be mods. As such, the earlier "reddit has some of the worst mods I’ve ever seen in any capacity" assertion is not surprising. There is nothing to attract "good" mods.

Did this have any material impact? I don't know. But its an example where a set of random people can at least try to leverage their position for more than just "some laughs". Its one example of what I mean about "influence peddling".

The main reason I stopped doing it is because it was just too much work and having the community mainly shit on you doesn't make it more enticing to continue. Everyone assumes the worst about you, how you're somehow in it for the wrong reasons, when for 99% of mods I've interacted with that definitely wasn't the case.

+that long a$$ auto mod pinned comment is also annoying to scroll

for larger subs, I think users underestimate how much trouble it is to do that job. And Reddit hasn't made it easier for mods to do that. On the contrary, this move will make it more time consuming to delete spam.

Mods like this are awful - way too much power has gone to their head just because they happened to be the first to create some subreddit.

Can it? How many people with moderation experience can they find right now who can take over the larger subreddits? How many will be ok with doing it for free in this situation?

We'll see how well will the reopened communities work given the loss of the good mod tools.

There are a bunch of companies in low-cost-of-living countries who provide moderation services out of call-centre-like facilities. They also provide ML human labelling services.

They won't be providing thoughtful, nuanced guidance to guide the growth of the community - but if you just want to keep beheading videos and female nipples off the front page, there are companies that can provide the workforce faster than you can code the integration.

You're 100% right - people want communities where the posts are largely relevant. Has AI advanced enough to make AI moderation possible? Can upvoting/downvoting posts help train an AI what a community values and what it doesn't? That's where I think things are eventually headed.