I originally posted this as a comment here but thought it might deserve it's own discussion.

I think that the rise of megathreads/ultrathreads/collections of threads on reddit has been a large detriment to the site.

I'm a mod for a few large subreddits that utilizes them (and I know a good portion of people reading Tildes right now are as well), and as time goes on I've started to dislike them more and more.

At first they were great - they seemed to silo off all the posts and noise that happened around an event, and made the lives of mods easier. Posts that should've been comments could now be removed, and the user could be pointed towards the megathread. Users could go back to the post and sort by new to see new posts, and know that they'd all have to do with that one topic.

I believe that this silo actually hurts the community, and especially the discussion around that original megathread, more than it helps. As modteams I think we underestimate the resilience of our communities, and their ability to put up with "noise" around an event.

The fact that we are in a subreddit dedicated to that cause should be silo enough - each post in that subreddit should be treated as an "atomic" piece of information, with the comments being branches. By relegating all conversation to a megathread we turn top level comments into that atomic piece of information, and subcomments into the branches.

But that's just a poor implementation of the original! There are some edge cases where this might make sense (take /r/politics, it wouldn't make sense to have 9 of the top 10 posts just be slightly reworded posts on the same issues), but I think this can be remedied by better duplication rules (consider all posts on a certain topic to be a repost, unless the new post has new or different information).

There is something to be said about the ability to generate a new, blank sheet of conversation with a post, that is not marred with previous information or anecdotes. New comments on a megathread post don't have that luxury, but new posts do.

Additionally, I feel like the way reddit originally conditioned us to view posts is to view them then not check them again (unless we interacted with someone in it or got a notification). This prevents potentially great (but late) content from gaining visibility, as a non-negligible portion of the population will still be browsing the subreddit, but will never click the post again.

I just showed up yesterday to this great experiment, and find myself with some fresh-minted drama over politics and bans to ingest. While I wouldn't presume to propose a solution to the issues raised in and by those threads, I found myself looking to the comment tagging system and finding some space to improve conversation.

My intent (as I believe is the intent of this community) is to help foster constructive discussion without outright banning inflammatory topics. I believe that simply ignoring controversial issues because of the problems they raise is at best stifling potentially useful discourse and at worst intellectually dishonest.
Tags I'd like to see:

• "Citation Requested" As a tag, it would be a more constructive way of saying "I don't believe you"
• "Disreputable Source" / "Source Disputed" is a civil way of pointing out issues
• "Reported" would be a tricky implementation, but useful as a way of flagging comments for removal. Should ideally only be applied to eg. doxxing or incitement

There should also be a moderation feature for removing tags that are no longer relevant or incorrectly applied. Alternatively, the display of comment tags could be reliant upon a critical mass of "reputation points" which would allow for, say, 100 people with 1 "troll-tagging rep" to get a comment flagged, or 2 people with 50 troll-tagging rep to do so. This of course is dependent upon the reputation system being fleshed out and has the very real danger of creating power users

EDIT:

@jgb pointed out that this is a lively discussion see these

Tags I missed that came up in other discussions:

• "Insightful" as a positive, almost a super-upvote
• "Solved" for a comment that resolves an issue

And, according to @cfabbro, @deimos is working on a public activity audit that can then be built upon to improve moderation

Posting this here because I'm also wondering about how this will affect moderation policy on Tildes going forward

As a former Reddit Moderator this has been something I've pondered for a long time: how does one define what a toxic user is in such a way that it can be easily understood as a community standard? I'll post the definition I defaulted to below. But I'd be most interested in knowing how other people think about this.

So, new here and looking around but haven't seen this addressed yet (though could be wrong! Happy to be linked if I missed something)

One common failure I've seen in online communities of various sorts is that moderation tools don't get grown in parallel with user tools and abilities, rather they lag behind, and are often in the end built by third parties. This is the case with Reddit, but also in a bunch of other areas (e.g. online gaming, admin tools were often built to basically provide functionality that users realised were needed but makers did not).

I get the impression there are plenty of reddit mods here, so can we discuss what are the key features needed to moderate communities that would be better built in than coming from third party tools (RES, toolbox) . A lot of these aren't needed with 100 users but with a million they become pretty crucial.

My initial thoughts:

• Something not dissimilar to the automod
• Group user tagging (shared tagging visible to all mods, tags can be linked to specific discussions/comments)
• Ability to reply as a 'tilde' not as an individual
• Ability to have canned responses/texts (for removals, for replies to user contacts)
• Some sort of ticket-like system for dealing with user contacts to mods (take inspiration from helpdesk ticket systems)
• (added) space per tilde for storage (tags, notes, bans, canned text etc) of reasonable size.

Plenty more to add I am sure but wanted to open the discussion.

It seems like a large percentage of us that are also moderators on Reddit-- myself included.

It seems that there's a generally negative attitude toward moderators on Reddit, which I totally get. Moderation on Reddit is flawed. Community members feel a sense of ownership in the community (which they should have), but bad moderators can ruin that. How do you guys think moderation should be handled here?

Here's a link from the docs that describes current plans: https://docs.tildes.net/mechanics-future

It highlights plans for a reputation system, which I think is the right way to go.

I also just realized that the same discussion was posted 18 days ago, but perhaps discussion with some of the newer users is worthwhile nonetheless:
https://tildes.net/~tildes/6e/community_moderators