I don't understand how they still have mods. Reddits boss hates them. Everyone else, too. They have 100% a negative impact. The site would be wonderful without moderation as that's already covered by the voting mechanism.
This makes me think that you’ve never been a mod of an active forum or subreddit.
Without mods, popular forums will be spammed and/or gamed into oblivion. Most voting mechanisms are trivially easy to manipulate when potential earnings are involved.
As a mod of a larger subreddit this comment makes me laugh. Good mods are invisible. In fact I do everything in my power to not use my power for bad, and only to help people out.
Unfortunately many subs are set up so that if you go against the hivemind, you get instabanned, or close to it. There seem to be many mods on Reddit who have nothing more rewarding going on in their lives, or else just cherish that small bit of power over others.
I mean, yes and no. At the same time there are power hungry mods, there are limitless hordes of complete asshole users that are only there to cause problems and not engage in legitimate debate.
Forums really kind of suck once they get over particular sizes and never ending battles erupt.
You'd be surprised just how much effort people put into using a message board to cause harm to others.
I was a mod on a reasonably large subreddit. One day, someone decides to post links to extreme and shocking images but make them look like regular posts. Delete, ban, move on. They come back with a new account. Delete, ban, move on, implement limits on new accounts. They would then spend months warming up new accounts, using them to write regular posts and messages, before doing the same thing. This was a thankless task and most regular users never realized it was even going on.
Then, on the other side, there were people who absolutely lost it when they felt you made a bad decision. I deleted a post asking for cash under the table work in a local sub, combined with multiple people offering what looked like clearly illegal work. Multiple regular members of the community went absolutely crazy, as if I had personally wronged them.
I enjoyed running the subreddit but I had to give up. The person who took over after definitely enjoys the power a little bit too much. That's what you get when it's a volunteer gig.
You're like 20 years behind on forum manipulation if you think so...
So, if the admins of the site to a really good job of banning accounts that exist for the purpose of vote manipulation, then voting works ok. If not the votes that generally dictate how well a post/topic does occur within the first few minutes of posting.
Post topic -> Upvote -> Post conformation messages of approval of the topic -> bots upvote these posts -> bots downvote anyone that disagree.
Moreso, downvotes themselves don't directly address things like raids and sustained attacks by bad actors. These kinds of attacks make the end user feel like they don't want to be in that subforum driving them off elsewhere and lowering participation. It can also embolden others to post more similar content to what the bots are posting.
>There seem to be many mods on Reddit who have nothing more rewarding going on in their lives, or else just cherish that small bit of power over others.
Correct. There are powermods who "moderate" hundreds of subreddits. This is not an exaggeration. Hundreds. At least one has/had thousands.
Why do they do this, when they are not paid? 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 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 (/r/politics being an obvious example).
As you said, losers who crave ruling a petty fiefdom because it's the only thing they can exercise agency over in their lives. And/or are mentally ill.
Quoting another:
>and for each moderator there are 100 sycophants and narcissists lined up to take their place
Most mods know this, which is why so many surrendered and reopened their subreddits during the recent "protest" the moment admins told them that otherwise they would be replaced. /r/formula1's mods forthrightly said as much; those of /r/nba claimed that negotiations had progressed far enough to justify reopening, which the thousands of replies show that the userbase 100% disbelieves.
Even worse, a) /r/nba's top mod made more than 150 comments to six other NBA teams' subreddits during the blackout. b) /r/nba mods posted secret threads—including the Game 5 discussion that they denied from their own users—and made comments during the blackout. When users discovered the threads the mods of course scrubbed the comments, but there is no way for mods to actually delete (as opposed to hiding) posts, so evidence of their hypocritical behavior will live on forever.
I help moderate a large sub, a country sub. I dare you to just be a mod for one week, the amount of SHIT that gets posted every single fucking day is insane, without mods (good or bad) reddit would be worse than 4chan in its crappier moment.
A disclaimer, I'm super against on how reddit is being managed nowadays, I've been a user since 2010, the golden era, no political bias crap, no stupid woke mods, everyone was happy and content was objectively moderated. Having said that, I can assure you moderation is a necessity.
What are you talking about? The mods are the only thing letting Reddit get away without employing or contracting content teams of their own. Reddit would lose so much more money than it already does if it had no mods
Some mods are, but the only reason people really think this is because the heavy-handed aspects are the visible ones. Nobody really sees mods removing random spam threads and comments, that's the whole point. Good modding is mostly invisible.
Maybe, I think it seems like that. I felt similar until I had some posts moderated away or banned, which made me realize there is probably a lot more of those going on then I realized. There isn't a big notification when things get removed. There is also trying to post and dealing with automoderator. There's subreddits I don't read or participate in anymore becasue of how annoying it is to get a post through.
I get their necessary, at least for now, because of spam. But like I'm said I think there's a better middle ground and we can rely on the community users more.
You cannot, in fact, rely on the community users more. It does not scale.
You'll see situations where most people are nominally opposed to low-effort memes while everyone upvotes the low-effort memes, and then people complain that there are too many low-effort memes cluttering the front page and now the sub is trash and they're leaving.
edit: though honestly I don't think volunteer mods scale well either. A tiny niche sub can get by with just a couple mods just fine, but when they get 100x as popular, can they then have 200 mods? Or have 2000 mods for the most popular subs? No, there's just no way to coordinate that many volunteers sensibly, not in an environment like Reddit.
4chan mostly does legal moderation and offtopic. I think the latter is already too much. But still, 4chan is by far the best online community out of the big ones - exactly because there is so little censorship ("moderation")
1. 4chan has plenty of moderation; "jannies" are regularly derided over there. This is easily debunked, posting on about crypto on /g/ will get your post deleted. /a/ pretty much has the same content as reddit.com/r/anime.
2. I believe you, like many others, conflate 4chan's right-ward overton window, with "less" moderation. moot had a saying "one man's shitpost is another man's board culture". You perceive 4chan as having "less moderation" because your world view aligns with 4chan, not because they do less moderation.
I agree and disagree. Reddit moderators often get very involved into the community and make high-visibility changes and proclamations, and actively try to influence the culture of subreddits. Janitors do delete things and ban users, but in general they are far more hands off in their curation of boards.
>but in general they are far more hands off in their curation of boards.
This is exactly what RapeApe did with /pol/. Because 4chan is less transparent, it feels like there's no curation; especially when what stays on the board feels like "board culture". Would infinity-chan and other boards would exist if they did their current style of moderation of silently deleting posts instead of moot coming out and openly lambasting gamergate?
4chan moderation used to be way more visible, especially under moot, because moderators actually openly interacted with the board. Now that moderators are functionally anonymous, it seems like they don't try to influence the boards, when in actuality, 4chan mods are far less transparent.
People once believed 4chan was less moderated because they stopped seeing "(USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST)", when in actuality they just removed the posts instead.
That's not only not what i said, that's also not true. 4chan has orders of magnitude less "moderation" than reddit. And outside of literally one single part of it, doesn't even have a much different overton window.
