Reddit - Hackdot

Re:Reddit by sillysaurus3 on Tuesday September 30, 2014 @05:18PM (#8391326)

Most people go to reddit to hear about news or see what's popular, not to sift through new submissions for gems. If reddit cared only about democracy, it would solve the problem of an incredible submission being buried by a measly five to ten downvotes in its first twenty minutes regardless of how many people would have liked it overall. Personally, I have neither the time nor the incentive to try to influence groupthink. (I was very careful in my choice of "groupthink." A democratized frontpage that hundreds of thousands of people influence is almost equivalent to literal groupthink. And that's not terrible in and of itself, but if you're going to argue that mods should be stripped of their tools, then it becomes quite the dilemma.)

HN, on the other hand, seems much truer to the overall thrust of your argument, because there are no downvotes for submissions, and only two upvotes are needed for a story to reach the first or second page of HN. But HN only works because there are exceptionally smart and prudent moderators who are constantly curating the singular frontpage.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Reddit by diminoten on Tuesday September 30, 2014 @05:41PM (#8391468)

If Reddit had the moderators that HN had (and the proportional quantity), there simply would be no problem. HN mods are a group of people selected specifically for the task of moderation. They were appointed.

But Reddit doesn't have those kinds of moderators, because the moderation system is alarmingly broken on Reddit.

The folks who moderate the various reddits are there by no virtue other than the fact that they were either there first, or have some relationship to the person who was there first.

It keeps sounding like there's a crisis of identity happening over at Reddit HQ, and I really hope they come out the other side of it with an understanding of how damaging moderators have been to the website, as currently implemented.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:Reddit by cfreeman on Friday October 03, 2014 @01:15AM (#8404400)

  The folks who moderate the various reddits are there by no virtue other than 
  the fact that they were either there first, or have some relationship to the 
  person who was there first.

This is what I think the biggest problem with Reddit is. There needs to be a better system for picking moderators. I don't know what that would be but the current one is broken.

[ Parent | on HN ]