I spoke out by just quitting after 6 years as a mod. Why continue to dedicate my free time to a broken system that the site's administrators have no intention of fixing? I got into moderating...
I spoke out by just quitting after 6 years as a mod. Why continue to dedicate my free time to a broken system that the site's administrators have no intention of fixing? I got into moderating because I wanted an outlet for a passion of mine, then it became a janitorial role doing chores that should have been handled at a site-wide level. Anything that doesn't fall into their monetization goals is ignored. I'll say this, the last two months since I quit have been a massive relief.
The only thing worse than a tech-support job is being a reddit moderator, because they don't even pay you to listen to other people not read the manual.
The only thing worse than a tech-support job is being a reddit moderator, because they don't even pay you to listen to other people not read the manual.
I had you in mind with my wording of the second sentence since I remember you describing it that way to me a few months back. I guess we were able to rationalize doing tech-support jobs because it...
I had you in mind with my wording of the second sentence since I remember you describing it that way to me a few months back. I guess we were able to rationalize doing tech-support jobs because it was under the guise of our biggest passion. The amount of admin work vs content-oriented work just kept getting further and further skewed towards the admin side until I realized I only enjoyed one thing all year (Best Of), and even that required some very heavy lifting of mundane tasks to accomplish. So much so that we didn't release the 2016 installment until like May 2017.
I was very public about the reasons I stepped down from moderating, which largely amounted to "Ain't nobody getting paid for this shit, and I'm being expected to have the skills and patience of an...
I was very public about the reasons I stepped down from moderating, which largely amounted to "Ain't nobody getting paid for this shit, and I'm being expected to have the skills and patience of an angel; peace." You can see me get into the specifics of what I'd keep moderating for here, and the reaction makes it clear that it ain't happening any time soon.
On the other hand, I stopped caring because of a lack of tooling. When I was a mod on reddit, I modded a single subreddit and I loved it. Over time the community turned to shit and I decided to...
On the other hand, I stopped caring because of a lack of tooling.
When I was a mod on reddit, I modded a single subreddit and I loved it. Over time the community turned to shit and I decided to call that out-- and got removed.
The community died less than a month later, and is perpetually on it's last legs now.
I decided that instead I would help where I could-- CSS, and then noticed that why stop there when I could help with the system itself-- /r/ModSupport was recently created and I got very, very bored of doing CSS work because I'm not a designer.
When I found out reddit was open source, I was elated, and started making pulls and implemenations of things moderators wanted left and right.
There was even some point when @Deimos pmmed me asking to check in with him or the other admins before making PRs because of the amount that I was doing and (iirc) he didn't want my work to be going to a complete waste.
The reason I declined, whatever it was, was a mix of stupid and smart. I'll have to really dig through my pms to find it, and I can't do that on mobile (travelling), but whatever it was, it was also the fact that I felt as if I would be limited in what I would be doing that way.
I did not do what I did for "glory" (as some people strangely though), nor to "stick it to reddit" (as others thought)...I was just bored and in a rut and wanted to improve the platform I cared about.
Eventually my pull requests started collecting dust, so I stopped in my tracks with my last one, which was a report muting and anonymous conversation system (muting was finished, not the anonymous conversation, the labels weren't hashed because I was still debugging during that gif so I made the hash function an identity function).
And then six months later reddit stopped being open source.
Wow, the responses to your comment there are incredibly disheartening -- seemingly another example of people on the internet expecting content (and work) for free, to the detriment of the users...
Wow, the responses to your comment there are incredibly disheartening -- seemingly another example of people on the internet expecting content (and work) for free, to the detriment of the users said content.
I just looked at /r/leagueoflegends' mod list and not even Adagio or KoreanTerran are on there anymore. The only person I recognize is sarahbotts. Mod attrition is real. Edit: well picflute is...
I just looked at /r/leagueoflegends' mod list and not even Adagio or KoreanTerran are on there anymore. The only person I recognize is sarahbotts. Mod attrition is real.
Edit: well picflute is back, I guess some people just can't stay away.
KT was gone well before I left. He got burnt out in no small part because he was putting in like 30-40 hours a week and, again, wasn't getting paid to do that despite owning the shit out of what...
KT was gone well before I left. He got burnt out in no small part because he was putting in like 30-40 hours a week and, again, wasn't getting paid to do that despite owning the shit out of what he did. I think Adagio stepped down a few months ago, and picflute was gone for a while and came back, also a few months ago.
The funny thing is I think the /r/leagueoflegends team has seen less attrition than even the normal subreddits its size, but it's just not that rewarding of an experience so it takes the type of person who doesn't expect to be rewarded to keep plugging away day after day. People complain about moderators all the time, but they get what they pay for: a bunch of volunteers using their spare time to do what they hope is best for the community, without all that much guidance from anyone unless they get lucky.
KT was also putting in an even more significant amount of time to /r/nba. He is the one that got me into moderating and he was connnnstantly doing things. From what I've seen on facebook he is...
KT was also putting in an even more significant amount of time to /r/nba. He is the one that got me into moderating and he was connnnstantly doing things. From what I've seen on facebook he is doing alright these days.
I deleted my account about a year ago and it's been great. I had been averaging 12-14,000 mod actions a month for like 5 or 6 years. I still get asked to join subs from people that know my new...
I deleted my account about a year ago and it's been great. I had been averaging 12-14,000 mod actions a month for like 5 or 6 years. I still get asked to join subs from people that know my new account, but I will never mod there again. Sometimes I miss fucking around with mad users, but my disgust for the monetization is just too much.
Reddit, as a company, doesn't seem to care about mods. What happened to all those anti-brigading tools we were promised? There was a whole "community outreach" thing where they asked mods what we...
Reddit, as a company, doesn't seem to care about mods. What happened to all those anti-brigading tools we were promised? There was a whole "community outreach" thing where they asked mods what we wanted and needed and then ignored it so they could make a "mod best practices guideline" that they don't even enforce. Mods have been promised better tools and more admin attention for literally years now, and the admins have yet to deliver. The best mod tools available are done by an unpaid 3rd party, and have been for years.
The problem is that mods often care about the communities they've helped shape. And if they've done a good job of building the community, there will be others more than willing to take their place and shovel shit for free. Volunteer labor has basically no bargaining leverage unless all the mods work together which seems highly improbable.
Reddit right now is far more focused on finding a way to try and turn a profit for their investors. The foundations of the site are starting to give, but it seems the admins would prefer not to get involved unless something happens that makes the site look bad in the news.
And that's the bizarre thing, that it started out open source, but they scrapped that. Even if they didn't open source everything (they never did completely anyways) they could still leave some...
And that's the bizarre thing, that it started out open source, but they scrapped that. Even if they didn't open source everything (they never did completely anyways) they could still leave some things up, and have the community (which is literally one of the biggest in the world) make PRs to improve the functionality of the site. Like mod tools—people could just add a little bit if they knew what they were doing. The redesign took them for fucking ever, and then it took them like three months after that to add a dark theme? Can you imagine how much faster that would've gone if they allowed 1000s of people to contribute, potentially?
They'd be keeping users happier, improve functionality, and not have to spend any money on that (besides cost for people to review the PRs etc, but that's trivial compared to what you're getting back. The community would've been involved, maybe some drama over what did or didn't get added, but overall things would be able to move much quicker. Hell, throw some money at it as a prize for 'coolest feature added this year' or something and you've made an incentive. Or make a 'learn to program using the reddit code base' sub, and you're teaching people from scratch how to add more stuff to your site.
Anyways, this isn't just to be a rant about being open source, it's more meant to highlight exactly what you're saying: they don't listen to the community. They could have done that through many ways—open sourcing is one very visible way of doing that—that either don't add any overhead, or even take it away. It's baffling that their mismanaging their own volunteers so badly, and seem to understand so little of what their product actually is or could be.
I've learned through hard personal experience that you have to have a very thick skin while moderating large or high-profile subreddits. I happened to start my moderation "career" on a mid-sized...
I've learned through hard personal experience that you have to have a very thick skin while moderating large or high-profile subreddits.
I happened to start my moderation "career" on a mid-sized but high-profile subreddit. Also, my moderation style tends to be quite visible: I would leave comments explaining what I had removed and why, and teaching people how to write better comments (while most of my fellow mods would just silently remove the crap and move on). This visible modding style of mine made me an obvious target for trolls and trouble-makers. I therefore copped a lot of abuse. I had continual abuse rained on me, up to and including death threats. I didn't realise at the time that some of this was coming from alt-right types (I didn't know about the "alt-right" movement back then - they were just generic racists and bigots to me) who were trying to push their agenda in our subreddit. But, the point is that, for months, my Reddit inbox was a magnet for hatred. I naively thought that all I had to do was try harder to educate these people about the rules of our subreddit, and why their comments weren't appropriate. I was stupid. These people weren't acting in good faith, and my education was just a waste of time.
After about 9 months of that, I had a mini-breakdown. I resigned from that moderation team (I say "resigned", but it was a bit messier than that because I was in a bad way).
It was only when I learned to distance myself from online abuse and learned to do the opposite of "remember the human" (i.e. to ignore the fact that there's an actual hate-filled person writing those nasty things to you, who would probably carry out some of the things they're saying if they met you face to face) that I became an effective moderator. I asked that mod team to take me back 6 months later, and they did. I then moderated there for another couple of years. Meanwhile, I branched out and tried moderating a few other subreddits.
What I learned over that time was that, if I want to be a communicative and teaching-focussed moderator, I needed to just get out of certain types of subreddits. That's why the biggest subreddit I moderate these days is about a science fiction television show, and not the politically oriented and high-profile ones I used to moderate (the ones that attract trouble-makers).
Moderating Reddit is not for the faint-hearted or the thin-skinned. That might be why so many high-profile moderators seem to be bastards: the soft-hearted ones drop out, and the ones who don't drop out learn to develop a thick skin.
Absolutely agree with all your points. I've been at the target for witch hunting and defamation. You have to have a thick-skin to get through moderating more large communities. I feel like at...
Absolutely agree with all your points. I've been at the target for witch hunting and defamation. You have to have a thick-skin to get through moderating more large communities.
I feel like at times though, moderators are severely let down by the administrative team especially with how much work the moderators go through for the sheer goodwill of the community, the tools are just lacking, and so are their responses to inquiries. The admin team of Reddit is probably going to experience another mod blackout like the one we've seen in 2015.
To push back slightly, some of the more community-minded admins do try to help (I remember two particular heroines that put in their all to help my team), but often they get (got) little to no...
To push back slightly, some of the more community-minded admins do try to help (I remember two particular heroines that put in their all to help my team), but often they get (got) little to no support themselves, so there's a vicious cycle involved.
The company as a whole doesn't really seem to value doing anything more than talking about how much they appreciate their moderators, and inviting them to dinners and other cute stuff. Actual tools and advice are typically thought to be best left to the moderators themselves to make and hone.
I just wish it would get through to these corporations that however much money they're making, when people repeatedly tell you something sucks, it sucks. And pacifying us with a "we're listening...
I just wish it would get through to these corporations that however much money they're making, when people repeatedly tell you something sucks, it sucks. And pacifying us with a "we're listening to your feedback~" is the equivalent of spitting in our face. Not that that will stop them. There's money to be made. Sure, you have to survive as a company. But are you willing to abandon your ethics? Apparently yes. Can we start holding people accountable? Can we go beyond a simple "send your feedback to this email! :)" where you know they're ultimately going to completely ignore it?
Holy fuck, GallowBoob mods those subs? It's fallen down now. I've seen how mad people are when a political themed post comes up, I shudder at what it looked like before the mods came through. Good...
GallowBoob, Allam moderates r/tifu ("today I fucked up"), where more than 13 million subscribers share their schadenfreude anecdotes, and r/oddlysatisfying, where 1.8 million subscribers post content that is inexplicably satisfying to watch.
Holy fuck, GallowBoob mods those subs?
Reddit overtook Facebook this year to become the third most popular website in the US, behind Google and YouTube.
"With politics where people are constantly angry, you're talking daily abuse to the point you couldn't even filter through all of it.
I've seen how mad people are when a political themed post comes up, I shudder at what it looked like before the mods came through.
Good read, OP. I wonder how tildes will deal with the problems reddit faces with modding. Since Deimos isn't apathetic in the same way the reddit admins are, I hope he can find a way.
Edit: The posts in r/drama about this are extremely infuriating to read through.
Have you considered that there's a bit of selective filtering going on with regard to who moderates subreddits? Let's take as a given that a moderator will get threats of various kinds from at...
there is an art to deescalation and I don't see many moderators of big subreddits practicing it.
Have you considered that there's a bit of selective filtering going on with regard to who moderates subreddits?
Let's take as a given that a moderator will get threats of various kinds from at least some redditors. That's not really a controversial claim.
If you're a diplomatic, sensitive, sympathetic person, you'll receive these threats - and they will bother you. Meanwhile, your more blunt, thick-skinned colleague will get the same threats, but not be bothered. If you receive enough of these threats, and find yourself unable to cope with them, you'll stop moderating. Meanwhile, your thick-skinned colleague just keeps on moddin'.
Rinse and repeat.
Imagine a subreddit with over a million subscribers, and a team of 50 moderators acquired over a couple of years. Who are those moderators more likely to be - diplomatic sensitive types with excellent communications skills, or blunt thick-skinned types who just don't give a fuck?
Yep, I've seen this exact story play out in a sub that I used to moderate. As an additional wrinkle, those thick-skinned people also seem to be biased towards having an attitude of "if you're not...
Who are those moderators more likely to be - diplomatic sensitive types with excellent communications skills, or blunt thick-skinned types who just don't give a fuck?
Yep, I've seen this exact story play out in a sub that I used to moderate.
As an additional wrinkle, those thick-skinned people also seem to be biased towards having an attitude of "if you're not as thick-skinned as I am, it's your fault for being unable to handle the internet".
Why are diplomacy and sympathy only a trait of thin-skinned people in your example? I feel like there can be more mix-and-match of these traits than you're implying. I think the ideal moderator of...
Why are diplomacy and sympathy only a trait of thin-skinned people in your example? I feel like there can be more mix-and-match of these traits than you're implying. I think the ideal moderator of a big sub would have thick skin, but also be able to communicate well and effectively, while shrugging off the insults of trolls. I don't think diplomacy and thick skin are mutually exclusive.
If you moderate for Reddit, tildes (if/when it gets there), a Facebook group, hobbyist forum, or any website that directly benefits from your presence, they don't owe you anything beyond the...
If you moderate for Reddit, tildes (if/when it gets there), a Facebook group, hobbyist forum, or any website that directly benefits from your presence, they don't owe you anything beyond the original agreement, which is, in general, "I will enforce my subreddit's rules for free for the benefit of the website, and no gain to myself." If you sign on as a paid employee, then certainly they're responsible for you. The community you moderate should help you with knowing what you're getting into, and dealing with the mental issues that can come up from this sort of endless abuse. Your contract, for lack of a better word, is not with Reddit, Inc., but with the specific community(s) you moderate. If such a time comes when you can't do it, it is entirely up to you to determine when it has come, hopefully before you've been caused some sort of mental trauma. My point is that you don't owe Reddit anything, and they don't owe you anything. Heck, if more stuff like this article is how it's going to go, Reddit should introduce a contract for moderators to sign that legally absolves them of any responsibility to the moderators.
I'm not going to talk about the moderation tools because if they truly are as deficient as the claim is, it needs to be fixed, but I felt the people in that article weren't being entirely honest with themselves, probably by accident, about their relationship with Reddit, the website, and the company.
EDIT: I feel I shouldn't need to clarify this, but the abuse is totally uncalled for in any instance, but is, unfortunately, a reality of the near-anonymity of internet communities.
I don't think they care either way. Mods are just users to them. They are easily replaceable with an army of others who are willing to do the same thing. The only thing they care about is the...
so hopefully they don't realize the criticism is coming from me as a moderator
I don't think they care either way. Mods are just users to them. They are easily replaceable with an army of others who are willing to do the same thing. The only thing they care about is the bottom line. If something looks like it could hurt their income, they will act but only after being forced to.
I think @Rez meant it more in the sense he isn't representing a given community as a moderator, but a concerned, if anonymous, moderator so it doesn't get connected to his communities. I agree...
I think @Rez meant it more in the sense he isn't representing a given community as a moderator, but a concerned, if anonymous, moderator so it doesn't get connected to his communities.
I agree with you on how moderators are essentially just users, and are treated as expendable.
I took exactly the opposite approach. I've been moderating on Reddit for over 6 years, across a variety of subreddits, including moderating the officially sanctioned /r/Help subreddit for a couple...
When I have criticisms not related to technical matters I try to criticize them on an alt account so that the weight of being a moderator isn't behind my words, because I don't want it to be.
I took exactly the opposite approach. I've been moderating on Reddit for over 6 years, across a variety of subreddits, including moderating the officially sanctioned /r/Help subreddit for a couple of years. This experience should add a lot of weight to my words: I'm not just some fly-by-night trouble-maker, I'm someone who's been around, done the hard yards, dealt with annoyed & confused users, and who therefore knows what I'm talking about.
I realize this is a discussion about a very complicated and important subject, but did anyone else think it was weird that "Emily" clearly made it obvious she wanted to be difficult to identify in...
I realize this is a discussion about a very complicated and important subject, but did anyone else think it was weird that "Emily" clearly made it obvious she wanted to be difficult to identify in person, and as a female, and then the first half of the entire article was dedicated to pointing out exactly who she was, and giving a nice picture of her in person?
That seems somewhat counter to her wishes...
I agree that the Reddit administration/owners definitely don't give a shit about the far right/white supremacists communities on the site. I'm curious if anyone has ever explored the idea of...
I agree that the Reddit administration/owners definitely don't give a shit about the far right/white supremacists communities on the site.
I'm curious if anyone has ever explored the idea of "fingerprinting" subs (or communities as a whole) based on moderator and user overlap, textual analysis, etc. While not exactly easy it seems like it would be at least possible to determine of two subs shared the same "DNA"/"fingerprint" so to speak, and then just proactively ban them as they re-emerge.
FiveThirtyEight did something sorta like that last year. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/dissecting-trumps-most-rabid-online-following/ Also someone did a "reddit map" back in like '15 so...
FiveThirtyEight did something sorta like that last year.
Reddit admins do not seem to give one single shit that they host some of the most active forums on the internet for white supremacy and misogyny. By even allowing those subreddits to exist they...
Reddit admins do not seem to give one single shit that they host some of the most active forums on the internet for white supremacy and misogyny. By even allowing those subreddits to exist they poison the entire site. I have to run extremely aggressive automod filters for dogwhistle words and ban like crazy.
Honestly the only subreddits I visit now other than maybe the front page once or twice a day are circlebroke2, AHS, TMoR, negareddit and the likes. I have moderated 100K+ subscribers subreddit and...
Honestly the only subreddits I visit now other than maybe the front page once or twice a day are circlebroke2, AHS, TMoR, negareddit and the likes.
I have moderated 100K+ subscribers subreddit and it's not worth the stress. You're an active mod, right on many famous subs. Can't even imagine.
Yes and I find that sort of thing more prevalent on reddit than other sites. Do they have a home for it on reddit? Not that I've discovered, but it never 'went away' as it still simmers for...
Did you moderate at the time of FPH and are saying you've noted no significant difference between then and now?
Yes and I find that sort of thing more prevalent on reddit than other sites. Do they have a home for it on reddit? Not that I've discovered, but it never 'went away' as it still simmers for certain types
They do, unfortunately. /r/holdmyfries is a toxic shithole keeping the FPH spirit alive on reddit. There is also /r/fatlogic too, although at least the moderators there banned dehumanizing...
Do they have a home for it on reddit?
They do, unfortunately. /r/holdmyfries is a toxic shithole keeping the FPH spirit alive on reddit. There is also /r/fatlogic too, although at least the moderators there banned dehumanizing language, but even with that restriction it's not much better.
How can anyone still believe that anymore? Reddit and the current state of social media have clearly demonstrated that this is a false assumption. Giving these people a space to gather has made...
How can anyone still believe that anymore?
Reddit and the current state of social media have clearly demonstrated that this is a false assumption. Giving these people a space to gather has made their ideas more intense and their believers more feverish as they create an echo chamber where only their already-conceived notions have space to grow.
You say that but /r/fatpeoplehate and its spinoffs are dead. And an ideology that was everywhere seems to have died off almost completely. Ignoring things just allows them to fester. The concept...
Banning/censoring them don't make those ideas go away... if anything they make them stronger.
You say that but /r/fatpeoplehate and its spinoffs are dead. And an ideology that was everywhere seems to have died off almost completely.
Ignoring things just allows them to fester. The concept of "containment boards" is bunk, they never work. Giving cancer it's own space doesn't make the cancer go away, it just lets it grow.
The community on reddit was over 150k when it get nuked back in 2015. 40k on voat is nothing compared to that. If it'd been left unchecked, I bet the subreddit would be 3 to 4 times the size it...
The community on reddit was over 150k when it get nuked back in 2015. 40k on voat is nothing compared to that. If it'd been left unchecked, I bet the subreddit would be 3 to 4 times the size it was back in 2015 at least.
You have anything to back that up? The community on voat is way smaller than the subreddit was. And the overall traffic stats for 8chan are pitiful compared to what reddit is now. I don't see any...
probably grown the exact same amount or more regardless is my point...
You have anything to back that up? The community on voat is way smaller than the subreddit was. And the overall traffic stats for 8chan are pitiful compared to what reddit is now. I don't see any indicators that the FPH mindset has grown off-reddit in a meaningful way.
Million Dollar Extreme is a comedy sketch group, with Sam Hyde (probably the most notorious), Nick Rochefort and Charls Carroll. They also did a comedy series on Adult Swim. If you’re familiar...
Million Dollar Extreme is a comedy sketch group, with Sam Hyde (probably the most notorious), Nick Rochefort and Charls Carroll. They also did a comedy series on Adult Swim. If you’re familiar with Sam Hyde and his “humor”, you’d probably understand how it would attract certain types of people.
I spoke out by just quitting after 6 years as a mod. Why continue to dedicate my free time to a broken system that the site's administrators have no intention of fixing? I got into moderating because I wanted an outlet for a passion of mine, then it became a janitorial role doing chores that should have been handled at a site-wide level. Anything that doesn't fall into their monetization goals is ignored. I'll say this, the last two months since I quit have been a massive relief.
The only thing worse than a tech-support job is being a reddit moderator, because they don't even pay you to listen to other people not read the manual.
I had you in mind with my wording of the second sentence since I remember you describing it that way to me a few months back. I guess we were able to rationalize doing tech-support jobs because it was under the guise of our biggest passion. The amount of admin work vs content-oriented work just kept getting further and further skewed towards the admin side until I realized I only enjoyed one thing all year (Best Of), and even that required some very heavy lifting of mundane tasks to accomplish. So much so that we didn't release the 2016 installment until like May 2017.
No shit. Customer support lines and the reddit modmail button should be labeled "I can't read" or "I don't want to read"
I was very public about the reasons I stepped down from moderating, which largely amounted to "Ain't nobody getting paid for this shit, and I'm being expected to have the skills and patience of an angel; peace." You can see me get into the specifics of what I'd keep moderating for here, and the reaction makes it clear that it ain't happening any time soon.
On the other hand, I stopped caring because of a lack of tooling.
When I was a mod on reddit, I modded a single subreddit and I loved it. Over time the community turned to shit and I decided to call that out-- and got removed.
The community died less than a month later, and is perpetually on it's last legs now.
I decided that instead I would help where I could-- CSS, and then noticed that why stop there when I could help with the system itself-- /r/ModSupport was recently created and I got very, very bored of doing CSS work because I'm not a designer.
When I found out reddit was open source, I was elated, and started making pulls and implemenations of things moderators wanted left and right.
According to @agentlame, apparently I became a mod-meta fixture overnight.
There was even some point when @Deimos pmmed me asking to check in with him or the other admins before making PRs because of the amount that I was doing and (iirc) he didn't want my work to be going to a complete waste.
The reason I declined, whatever it was, was a mix of stupid and smart. I'll have to really dig through my pms to find it, and I can't do that on mobile (travelling), but whatever it was, it was also the fact that I felt as if I would be limited in what I would be doing that way.
I did not do what I did for "glory" (as some people strangely though), nor to "stick it to reddit" (as others thought)...I was just bored and in a rut and wanted to improve the platform I cared about.
Eventually my pull requests started collecting dust, so I stopped in my tracks with my last one, which was a report muting and anonymous conversation system (muting was finished, not the anonymous conversation, the labels weren't hashed because I was still debugging during that gif so I made the hash function an identity function).
And then six months later reddit stopped being open source.
Guess it sucks to suck, eh?
Wow, the responses to your comment there are incredibly disheartening -- seemingly another example of people on the internet expecting content (and work) for free, to the detriment of the users said content.
I just looked at /r/leagueoflegends' mod list and not even Adagio or KoreanTerran are on there anymore. The only person I recognize is sarahbotts. Mod attrition is real.
Edit: well picflute is back, I guess some people just can't stay away.
KT was gone well before I left. He got burnt out in no small part because he was putting in like 30-40 hours a week and, again, wasn't getting paid to do that despite owning the shit out of what he did. I think Adagio stepped down a few months ago, and picflute was gone for a while and came back, also a few months ago.
The funny thing is I think the /r/leagueoflegends team has seen less attrition than even the normal subreddits its size, but it's just not that rewarding of an experience so it takes the type of person who doesn't expect to be rewarded to keep plugging away day after day. People complain about moderators all the time, but they get what they pay for: a bunch of volunteers using their spare time to do what they hope is best for the community, without all that much guidance from anyone unless they get lucky.
KT was also putting in an even more significant amount of time to /r/nba. He is the one that got me into moderating and he was connnnstantly doing things. From what I've seen on facebook he is doing alright these days.
I deleted my account about a year ago and it's been great. I had been averaging 12-14,000 mod actions a month for like 5 or 6 years. I still get asked to join subs from people that know my new account, but I will never mod there again. Sometimes I miss fucking around with mad users, but my disgust for the monetization is just too much.
Reddit, as a company, doesn't seem to care about mods. What happened to all those anti-brigading tools we were promised? There was a whole "community outreach" thing where they asked mods what we wanted and needed and then ignored it so they could make a "mod best practices guideline" that they don't even enforce. Mods have been promised better tools and more admin attention for literally years now, and the admins have yet to deliver. The best mod tools available are done by an unpaid 3rd party, and have been for years.
The problem is that mods often care about the communities they've helped shape. And if they've done a good job of building the community, there will be others more than willing to take their place and shovel shit for free. Volunteer labor has basically no bargaining leverage unless all the mods work together which seems highly improbable.
Reddit right now is far more focused on finding a way to try and turn a profit for their investors. The foundations of the site are starting to give, but it seems the admins would prefer not to get involved unless something happens that makes the site look bad in the news.
And that's the bizarre thing, that it started out open source, but they scrapped that. Even if they didn't open source everything (they never did completely anyways) they could still leave some things up, and have the community (which is literally one of the biggest in the world) make PRs to improve the functionality of the site. Like mod tools—people could just add a little bit if they knew what they were doing. The redesign took them for fucking ever, and then it took them like three months after that to add a dark theme? Can you imagine how much faster that would've gone if they allowed 1000s of people to contribute, potentially?
They'd be keeping users happier, improve functionality, and not have to spend any money on that (besides cost for people to review the PRs etc, but that's trivial compared to what you're getting back. The community would've been involved, maybe some drama over what did or didn't get added, but overall things would be able to move much quicker. Hell, throw some money at it as a prize for 'coolest feature added this year' or something and you've made an incentive. Or make a 'learn to program using the reddit code base' sub, and you're teaching people from scratch how to add more stuff to your site.
Anyways, this isn't just to be a rant about being open source, it's more meant to highlight exactly what you're saying: they don't listen to the community. They could have done that through many ways—open sourcing is one very visible way of doing that—that either don't add any overhead, or even take it away. It's baffling that their mismanaging their own volunteers so badly, and seem to understand so little of what their product actually is or could be.
They never were truly open source. It took months to get to a single PR. I had PRs collecting dust for 2 years.
I've learned through hard personal experience that you have to have a very thick skin while moderating large or high-profile subreddits.
I happened to start my moderation "career" on a mid-sized but high-profile subreddit. Also, my moderation style tends to be quite visible: I would leave comments explaining what I had removed and why, and teaching people how to write better comments (while most of my fellow mods would just silently remove the crap and move on). This visible modding style of mine made me an obvious target for trolls and trouble-makers. I therefore copped a lot of abuse. I had continual abuse rained on me, up to and including death threats. I didn't realise at the time that some of this was coming from alt-right types (I didn't know about the "alt-right" movement back then - they were just generic racists and bigots to me) who were trying to push their agenda in our subreddit. But, the point is that, for months, my Reddit inbox was a magnet for hatred. I naively thought that all I had to do was try harder to educate these people about the rules of our subreddit, and why their comments weren't appropriate. I was stupid. These people weren't acting in good faith, and my education was just a waste of time.
After about 9 months of that, I had a mini-breakdown. I resigned from that moderation team (I say "resigned", but it was a bit messier than that because I was in a bad way).
It was only when I learned to distance myself from online abuse and learned to do the opposite of "remember the human" (i.e. to ignore the fact that there's an actual hate-filled person writing those nasty things to you, who would probably carry out some of the things they're saying if they met you face to face) that I became an effective moderator. I asked that mod team to take me back 6 months later, and they did. I then moderated there for another couple of years. Meanwhile, I branched out and tried moderating a few other subreddits.
What I learned over that time was that, if I want to be a communicative and teaching-focussed moderator, I needed to just get out of certain types of subreddits. That's why the biggest subreddit I moderate these days is about a science fiction television show, and not the politically oriented and high-profile ones I used to moderate (the ones that attract trouble-makers).
Moderating Reddit is not for the faint-hearted or the thin-skinned. That might be why so many high-profile moderators seem to be bastards: the soft-hearted ones drop out, and the ones who don't drop out learn to develop a thick skin.
Absolutely agree with all your points. I've been at the target for witch hunting and defamation. You have to have a thick-skin to get through moderating more large communities.
I feel like at times though, moderators are severely let down by the administrative team especially with how much work the moderators go through for the sheer goodwill of the community, the tools are just lacking, and so are their responses to inquiries. The admin team of Reddit is probably going to experience another mod blackout like the one we've seen in 2015.
Abso-fucking-lutely. You're left to your own devices with no help from the admins at all.
To push back slightly, some of the more community-minded admins do try to help (I remember two particular heroines that put in their all to help my team), but often they get (got) little to no support themselves, so there's a vicious cycle involved.
The company as a whole doesn't really seem to value doing anything more than talking about how much they appreciate their moderators, and inviting them to dinners and other cute stuff. Actual tools and advice are typically thought to be best left to the moderators themselves to make and hone.
I just wish it would get through to these corporations that however much money they're making, when people repeatedly tell you something sucks, it sucks. And pacifying us with a "we're listening to your feedback~" is the equivalent of spitting in our face. Not that that will stop them. There's money to be made. Sure, you have to survive as a company. But are you willing to abandon your ethics? Apparently yes. Can we start holding people accountable? Can we go beyond a simple "send your feedback to this email! :)" where you know they're ultimately going to completely ignore it?
Holy fuck, GallowBoob mods those subs?
It's fallen down now.
I've seen how mad people are when a political themed post comes up, I shudder at what it looked like before the mods came through.
Good read, OP. I wonder how tildes will deal with the problems reddit faces with modding. Since Deimos isn't apathetic in the same way the reddit admins are, I hope he can find a way.
Edit: The posts in r/drama about this are extremely infuriating to read through.
EDIT 2: some wording.
GallowBoob is a mod in tons of top tier subs on Reddit. You'd be surprised how many.
Have you considered that there's a bit of selective filtering going on with regard to who moderates subreddits?
Let's take as a given that a moderator will get threats of various kinds from at least some redditors. That's not really a controversial claim.
If you're a diplomatic, sensitive, sympathetic person, you'll receive these threats - and they will bother you. Meanwhile, your more blunt, thick-skinned colleague will get the same threats, but not be bothered. If you receive enough of these threats, and find yourself unable to cope with them, you'll stop moderating. Meanwhile, your thick-skinned colleague just keeps on moddin'.
Rinse and repeat.
Imagine a subreddit with over a million subscribers, and a team of 50 moderators acquired over a couple of years. Who are those moderators more likely to be - diplomatic sensitive types with excellent communications skills, or blunt thick-skinned types who just don't give a fuck?
Yep, I've seen this exact story play out in a sub that I used to moderate.
As an additional wrinkle, those thick-skinned people also seem to be biased towards having an attitude of "if you're not as thick-skinned as I am, it's your fault for being unable to handle the internet".
Why are diplomacy and sympathy only a trait of thin-skinned people in your example? I feel like there can be more mix-and-match of these traits than you're implying. I think the ideal moderator of a big sub would have thick skin, but also be able to communicate well and effectively, while shrugging off the insults of trolls. I don't think diplomacy and thick skin are mutually exclusive.
Yes, I over-simplified for the sake of making a point.
If you moderate for Reddit, tildes (if/when it gets there), a Facebook group, hobbyist forum, or any website that directly benefits from your presence, they don't owe you anything beyond the original agreement, which is, in general, "I will enforce my subreddit's rules for free for the benefit of the website, and no gain to myself." If you sign on as a paid employee, then certainly they're responsible for you. The community you moderate should help you with knowing what you're getting into, and dealing with the mental issues that can come up from this sort of endless abuse. Your contract, for lack of a better word, is not with Reddit, Inc., but with the specific community(s) you moderate. If such a time comes when you can't do it, it is entirely up to you to determine when it has come, hopefully before you've been caused some sort of mental trauma. My point is that you don't owe Reddit anything, and they don't owe you anything. Heck, if more stuff like this article is how it's going to go, Reddit should introduce a contract for moderators to sign that legally absolves them of any responsibility to the moderators.
I'm not going to talk about the moderation tools because if they truly are as deficient as the claim is, it needs to be fixed, but I felt the people in that article weren't being entirely honest with themselves, probably by accident, about their relationship with Reddit, the website, and the company.
EDIT: I feel I shouldn't need to clarify this, but the abuse is totally uncalled for in any instance, but is, unfortunately, a reality of the near-anonymity of internet communities.
I don't think they care either way. Mods are just users to them. They are easily replaceable with an army of others who are willing to do the same thing. The only thing they care about is the bottom line. If something looks like it could hurt their income, they will act but only after being forced to.
I think @Rez meant it more in the sense he isn't representing a given community as a moderator, but a concerned, if anonymous, moderator so it doesn't get connected to his communities.
I agree with you on how moderators are essentially just users, and are treated as expendable.
I took exactly the opposite approach. I've been moderating on Reddit for over 6 years, across a variety of subreddits, including moderating the officially sanctioned /r/Help subreddit for a couple of years. This experience should add a lot of weight to my words: I'm not just some fly-by-night trouble-maker, I'm someone who's been around, done the hard yards, dealt with annoyed & confused users, and who therefore knows what I'm talking about.
I realize this is a discussion about a very complicated and important subject, but did anyone else think it was weird that "Emily" clearly made it obvious she wanted to be difficult to identify in person, and as a female, and then the first half of the entire article was dedicated to pointing out exactly who she was, and giving a nice picture of her in person?
That seems somewhat counter to her wishes...
I agree that the Reddit administration/owners definitely don't give a shit about the far right/white supremacists communities on the site.
I'm curious if anyone has ever explored the idea of "fingerprinting" subs (or communities as a whole) based on moderator and user overlap, textual analysis, etc. While not exactly easy it seems like it would be at least possible to determine of two subs shared the same "DNA"/"fingerprint" so to speak, and then just proactively ban them as they re-emerge.
FiveThirtyEight did something sorta like that last year.
https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/dissecting-trumps-most-rabid-online-following/
Also someone did a "reddit map" back in like '15 so it'd be super outdated now.
https://thewinnower.com/papers/1603-science-ama-series-we-created-a-map-of-reddit-to-make-it-easier-for-you-to-discover-new-communities-we-are-drs-zachary-neal-and-randy-olson-from-michigan-state-university-ask-us-anything
I remember when they did that article, it was so much fun to play with their tool.
The admins could do it by IP address of the moderators and users.
That would be super easy to work around. Just use TOR or a VPN. Heck ,many ISPs assign you a new IP as soon as you cycle your modem.
Well first thing they'd need to not publicly indicate that they're using IPs for that sort of thing.
Reddit admins do not seem to give one single shit that they host some of the most active forums on the internet for white supremacy and misogyny. By even allowing those subreddits to exist they poison the entire site. I have to run extremely aggressive automod filters for dogwhistle words and ban like crazy.
Honestly the only subreddits I visit now other than maybe the front page once or twice a day are circlebroke2, AHS, TMoR, negareddit and the likes.
I have moderated 100K+ subscribers subreddit and it's not worth the stress. You're an active mod, right on many famous subs. Can't even imagine.
I disagree. I mod for a couple of health / food related subs and we still see the fat hate culture trying to rear it's ugly head fairly often.
Yes and I find that sort of thing more prevalent on reddit than other sites. Do they have a home for it on reddit? Not that I've discovered, but it never 'went away' as it still simmers for certain types
They do, unfortunately. /r/holdmyfries is a toxic shithole keeping the FPH spirit alive on reddit. There is also /r/fatlogic too, although at least the moderators there banned dehumanizing language, but even with that restriction it's not much better.
How can anyone still believe that anymore?
Reddit and the current state of social media have clearly demonstrated that this is a false assumption. Giving these people a space to gather has made their ideas more intense and their believers more feverish as they create an echo chamber where only their already-conceived notions have space to grow.
You say that but /r/fatpeoplehate and its spinoffs are dead. And an ideology that was everywhere seems to have died off almost completely.
Ignoring things just allows them to fester. The concept of "containment boards" is bunk, they never work. Giving cancer it's own space doesn't make the cancer go away, it just lets it grow.
The community on reddit was over 150k when it get nuked back in 2015. 40k on voat is nothing compared to that. If it'd been left unchecked, I bet the subreddit would be 3 to 4 times the size it was back in 2015 at least.
The moment has probably grown the exact same amount or more regardless is my point...
You have anything to back that up? The community on voat is way smaller than the subreddit was. And the overall traffic stats for 8chan are pitiful compared to what reddit is now. I don't see any indicators that the FPH mindset has grown off-reddit in a meaningful way.
I'm afraid to ask, but does milliondollarextreme mean something? Or is it just random?
Million Dollar Extreme is a comedy sketch group, with Sam Hyde (probably the most notorious), Nick Rochefort and Charls Carroll. They also did a comedy series on Adult Swim. If you’re familiar with Sam Hyde and his “humor”, you’d probably understand how it would attract certain types of people.