On Reddit moderation - it's a matter of scale.
I apologize in advance for what's probably going to be a very rambly post. This has been stewing on my mind for a while now and I just need to get it out.
I've been on reddit a long time, 11 years as of today in fact. In that time, I've watched the site grow from a small community of mostly tech nerds to one of the biggest sites on the web. I've also moderated many communities, from small niche subs (/r/thecure, /r/makeupaddictioncanada) to some of the biggest subs on the site (/r/worldnews, /r/gaming). I've modded communities that have exploded in popularity, growing from 25k to 100k to 500k and beyond, and seen how those communities change.
When you're in a subreddit of say, 10k users, there's more community engagement. You know the users, the users know the mods, and you know when people are engaging in good faith. The mods themselves are basically just another user with a bit more control. People coming in just to cause shit are generally downvoted to death and reported quickly, and taken care of - it's a community effort to keep things civil. Modding a community like that is piss easy, you can generally check every thread yourself and see any nastiness easily before it becomes a problem, and the users themselves are more invested in keeping things on topic and friendly. Disagreements are generally resolved amicably, and even when things get heated it's easy enough to bring things back to center.
Then the community starts to grow, and gather more users. Ok, you adjust, maybe add another mod or two, the users are still engaged and reporting threads regularly. Things stay more or less the same. The growth continues.
At 50k, 100k, 250k, etc you notice differences in the community. People argue more, and because the usernames they're arguing with aren't known to them, they become more vitriolic. Old regulars begin drifting away as they feel sidelined or just lose interest.
At 1M a major shift happens and the sub feels more like a free for all than a community. As a mod, you can't interact as much because there's more traffic. You stop being able to engage as much in the threads because you have to always be "on" and are now a representative of the mod team instead of a member of the community. Even if you've been there since day one, you're now a mod, and seen by some as "the enemy". Mods stifle free speech after all, removing posts and comments that don't fit the sub rules, banning users who are abusive or spammers. Those banned users start running to communities like SRC, decrying the abuse/bias/unfair treatment they've gotten at the hands of X sub mod team. Abusive modmails and PMs are fairly regular occurrences, and accusations of bias fly. The feeling of "us vs them" is amplified.
Once you get above 10M users, all bets are off. Threads hit /r/all regularly and attract participants from all over reddit. These threads can attract thousands of comments, coming at the rate of several hundred every minute. Individual monitoring of threads becomes impossible. Automod can handle some of it, but we all know automod can be slow, goes down sometimes, and can't handle all the nuances of actual conversation. You've outgrown any moderation tools reddit provides, and need to seek outside help. Customized bots become necessary - most large subreddits rely on outside tools like SentinelBot for spam detection, or snoonotes for tracking problem users. Harassment is a real problem - death threats, stalking, and doxxing are legitimate issues and hard to deal with. I won't even touch on the issues like CP, suicidal users, and all the other shit that comes along with modding communities this large.
I wish I had some solutions, but I really don't know what they are. We all know the tools we have as moderators on reddit are insufficient, but what people often overlook is why - the community is just too large for unpaid volunteers to moderate with the limited tools we have.
This is what I've never understood. If Reddit is so very clearly focused on growth above all else, why have they not started to bring in paid mods? Leaving your site's quality in the control of unpaid mods and then not giving them tools to mod easily is a terrible idea.
Paid mods: won't happen. Having paid mods means reddit loses the immunity of common carrier, and are then responsible for everything posted on the site and opens them to lawsuits. It's why they're VERY careful to not give moderators direction on what kind of content they should allow or remove on their subreddits beyond things that actually violate the law.
Relevant LiveJournal lawsuit: https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/thr-esq/appeals-court-rule-website-moderators-can-potentially-undercut-copyright-defense-992002
Better mod tools: I'm sure they want to fix the problems, but better mod tools don't improve the bottom line. Development of features that will make money will always come first, with mod tools coming in at the bottom of that list. I know there are some things in the works, but they're not the top priority.
Here is Steve Huffman (spez) at a talk with Brian Armstrong, CEO of Coinbase.
I am linking to the part where they start discussing possible ways to pay users who contribute content. Spez says they have "tried, tried, tied but we can't find a practical, legal way to give equity in Reddit to users... But can we give monetary value back to users to are creating this value for us? We don't make money now, but that won't always be the case... We made a promise to our users that we will give them value, and we would still like to do that." The part I linked to starts with them talking about regular users, not mods, but I have to assume when Spez says "users that create this value for us" he must be thinking mods as well as normal users.
The entire talk is worth a watch if you haven't seen it and are interested.
note: I totally paraphrased the quotes. Also, I have never been a mod, and am a total outsider. I just saw this video a while back.
The previous CEO, Yishan Wong, was the one who came up with the Reddit cryptocurrency idea, prior to the latest couple rounds of VC funding. Since then they laid off their cryptocurrency engineer (who went on to found yours.org). I wouldn't put too much stock into the hedged remarks Steve Huffman made in that video.
Also when they refer to "users" they're likely not talking about moderators at all, but rather Original Content creators; Reddit added a new OC tag in their official app recently, plus there's the redesigned profile pages. If they do pursue this cryptocurrency "giving back to users" thing, maybe they want to make a play in the Patreon space?
But there was another comment, maybe here on Tildes, saying how the ship has sailed on the idea. Instead, Reddit's putting all their resources behind advertising. Why would their investors let them risk resources on an unproven technology when advertising is a clear road to profitability?
Yeah, "notes" lasted for about five minutes before it disappeared and was never spoken of again.
I like the idea of rewarding contributors with value.
I don't think paying them is a tenable way to do it, though, unless you don't mind those with the most money being the ones doing most of the voting and rewarding (which means they control the content and the narrative). The central issue isn't 'how do we make money to pay people', it's 'how can a pay to play system remain honest, open, and democratic'?
This is pure supposition, but perhaps they don't want moderators as members of staff because they lose that layer of separation and any "plausible deniability" that comes with that.
Agreed, paid mods will never happen. See my response here: https://tildes.net/~talk/3qe/on_reddit_moderation_its_a_matter_of_scale#comment-13ky
Spot on, reads like a summary of my old rant about this stuff.
The only solution I can think of is scale - the mod team has to scale up alongside the number of regular users. The original members have to become that large mod team over time. That's the focus of the proposed Tildes trust system.
I also think that the way Tildes is designed might help with this. There is no /r/all equivalent here, so there won't be a 'place' that a thread can go that's going to get that thread and that community the attention of everyone on the site. That should help cut down on the drive-by user problem. Unlike reddit there are no default subscriptions, so people indicate an interest in a topic area before they see the content from that area. This should help sort users better than reddit, where for example every christian on the site was being auto-subbed to /r/atheism which is just a recipe for disaster.
Also, the content bubble-up idea should keep a lot of the submission activity focused away from the largest communities. A lot more of the threads here will get their start in smaller subgroups before bubbling up into larger communities. We're hoping this selects for quality, but it has other advantages too, like making sure the thread gets off to a good start in a highly on-topic area before it gets seen by large numbers of people. That should help with initial comment quality.
The final difference here is that we track the reputation. Users who continually go around shitting up threads and being one kind of jackass or another won't become mods, and won't have any power to abuse. They'll also likely end up getting warned, muted, and eventually banned if they don't stop harassing people. All for-profit sites can't take actions that might reduce their userbase - Tildes doesn't have that problem.
That's all I've got for how to do things better than reddit, and that's the reason for a lot of the proposed systems we talk about here. I think I speak for everyone here when I say we'd love to hear any and all other ideas on how to solve this problem. I should also point out that almost no one has ever solved this problem before. The only examples I know of that truly solved it completely and permanently were forums that required the user to use their real name (like The Well). Also, communities that require a pay-for subscription and ban for bad behavior (keeping the money) tend to weather the storm better - SomethingAwful is a good example of that method. Having a barrier to entry and a barrier to access to systems that grant expanded power also seems to help on a variety of other sites.
I agree with most of what you've said here, but I will throw in one caveat:
People change over time. I've seen good moderators go bad, and bad users grow into useful members of a community. If a reputation follows you around on a site, it should also be something you're allowed to hit the reset button on, and should reflect the current person.
I think it's easier to handle situations where people outgrow bad behaviour than it is to police those who are changing for the worse.
I actually just stepped down from the (former) music defaults on Friday after moderating on reddit for over 6 years. Couldn't agree more with this post. I felt like I was in this endless loop of trying to fix a broken system that even the system's creators actively sabotage. Why keep giving up my free time when the situation never improves? They had to have known the extreme burden placed on moderators of former defaults and other popular subreddits, yet they never implemented the tools to make things easier.
To this day, the best tools I used for moderating on reddit were through either the /r/toolbox extension or one of our many custom bots. Says a lot about reddit admins.
EDIT: Let me just give you an example of how frustrating they were during my experience there. In late 2016, reddit's head of community management or whatever actively engaged with /r/music's team to work on a policy for removing inactive top mods. I can't remember his username, but he was super helpful and chatted regularly with us in slack. He left the company, then they rolled out this new policy we had shaped in discussions with him over the course of several months. We submitted our request to remove the inactive top mods the same day the policy went live... it took them 7 months to act on that request. I had lost all my motivation by that point and never recovered even after I was made top mod.
/u/achievement_unlockd (I think? May be off on the spelling). According to the rumour mill, he left because he knew a losing battle when he saw one.
Yes! I remember chatting with him after he left, and that's the vibe I got even though he didn't come out and say so explicitly. Can't really blame him.
My experience is a bit different to yours - I've worked in strategically growing communities for videogames for a number of years now (not any more, my sanity is worth more to me than the non-existent wages), but not much explicitly within the reddit ecosytem. I certainly see a number of parallels with what I've had to deal with as well, but having a central focus to the community and the fact that people can't just stumble in from /r/all seems to create some significant differences as well.
I find that one of the big hurdles is in managing the community through the intermediate levels of growth. When I was still relatively new to that kind of things I tried to map out the stages of community growth as part of some 'grand theory', and without digging out my old notes iirc there were seven or eight sizes that had different properties.
At the smallest stage (say, stage 1), everyone knows everyone by 'name' and you pretty much don't actually need anyone enforcing rules at all. A good example of this might be a small discord channel for speedrunning a game, or a small IRL meetup based around some hobby - so long as you're not actively trying to recruit new bodies all you really need is someone keeping things going and perhaps to ensure that any newbie poking their head in isn't met with the feeling of an impenetrable in-group that wants nothing to do with them. In a group like this, off-colour humour is generally tolerated (because everyone knows whether or not the person saying it actually means harm, etc.), and generally everyone actually gets along surprisingly well because they're focused around appreciation of some focus - even if they would normally be at each other's throats elsewhere.
At the very largest stages, you can basically run things as society itself is informally run. Generalized rules can in theory still work, so long as things are handled consistently, but concrete lists of what is and isn't allowed is often used as a fallback because it takes less work for those on the front lines. There's an existing power structure to deal with transgressions, a hierarchy of respected/infamous users and OGs, and unless you make a significant effort to distinguish yourself nobody can tell the average experienced user from a complete newbie. That doesn't matter, though, because so long as you play nice and unless you do something wrong, you all end up getting equally ignored on the whole. It takes a lot of manpower to keep things running and it's a big ship that can only be steered slowly, but generally it's better to keep your hands off the controls too much anyway and instead focus on the janitorial duties behind the scenes.
Both of these situations are pretty easy to think about, and pretty easy to manage in practice. The difficult part is in the transition between stages (say) 3-6, where neither approach is effective or desirable. Because things can no longer be effectively managed 'face to face' with people as every issue arises, old general principles governing behaviour need to be replaced with clearer rules, but the OGs will lament the good old days of informality, freedom and things being just about the topic. Word slowly leaks out from the existing users, and so new people keep popping in, causing disruption in the same way as the original Endless Summer on a smaller scale. And as new people come in, your have to deal with varying levels of engagement with the original focus of the community, different ways of engaging with it, and different reasons/agendas for wanting to be a part of the community itself. Subgroups, cliques and niches start to form between users along many unrelated fault-lines, before all of a sudden those in charge are having to deal with all kinds of drama between people that haven't gotten to know each other and often have no desire to do so either. The danger here is not just in striking the balance between strict management and a more relaxed, lasseiz faire approach, but also in keeping all of the sub-groups feeling that membership in the community still has benefit for them individually and that the community as a whole has a purpose relating to the topic.
Fail that juggling act, and at best the fractious community will (likely irreversibly) split up into groups that either die due to lack of critical mass (the users often being permanently lost), or begin down diverging paths that often lead to Romeo-and-Juliet-like divides despite what was once a common interest. At worst, the community becomes a cesspool often defined by the basest qualities - things that require little effort (e.g. endlessly regurgitated memes), are fueled by the strongest emotions (hatred and frustration), and with a perverse sense of pride in an elitist sense that if you cant handle the way the community now is, you are irrelevant to anything concerning the original topic. Getting that right while keeping within the natural restrictions presented by whatever it is that the community is based around is really difficult.
This turned into a way longer rant than I was expecting so I'll quit rambling there. My original point was going to be that the major problem is keeping the management of a community relevant to the realities of its dynamics (which are itself a function of its size). However doing that in itself poses problems to do with where and how to make those incremental changes at the appropriate time, but still in a way that doesn't alienate the users or burn out those in charge.
I feel you. The largest subreddit I ever moderated had only 250,000 subscribers - nowhere near ten million or even one million - but I've seen the same patterns for myself. For example, I've been moderating one particular subreddit for five years now, since it was created. As you say, in the early days, there was a sense of community but, now that there are 40,000 subscribers (only 40,000!), that sense of community is long gone. As you say, I no longer feel like a member of the community there, only a moderator.
You'll have seen the discussions about when it is that a subreddit goes bad. Some people think it's as low as 10,000 subscribers.
Maybe it is all about that sense of community that develops in small groups where everyone knows everyone else. As soon as the subreddit grows large enough that you can't even recognise all the prominent contributors, you all just become random pixels to each other. The usernames blur into each other and stop being people.
Interesting. I modded a now-defunct (for the most part) forum about vaping, based on a particular aspect of that topic. It was begun when vaping was for most a means of quitting smoking, not the hobby "cloud contest" thing it's become to a lot of people today. We never got huge, and everyone pretty much knew every body else's name, and shared a common interest. It would seem simple for a small mod team (I think we were six or seven people at the height, with myself among three "admins" of the site with full access to admin tools) to handle the load, but it got to where we'd have 20 or 30 reports a day to deal with, some of them requiring mod discussion to resolve, so that it became a pain in the ass, and no matter what decisions we made, we became unpopular with certain users. Those users ended up in a bit of a "faction" over the banning of one particular member whose rule-breaking had been clearly documented and was repeated after multiple warnings, and they basically did everything they could to wreak chaos on and off the forum.
There ended up being a break, with the disgruntled faction moving to a group on FB, and that led others away as FB was just getting massively popular at that time. We had that sense of community going for at least two years; we had vendors that gave away literally thousands of dollars worth of gear to our users, who never blatantly abused our system for promotion of their products but instead actively participated in discussion and recruited beta testers from our members; we watched new companies be formed by our members to supply accessories needed for vaping, some becoming very successful; we held contests that gave away thousands of dollars in gear twice a year, with all work done by the mod team with no compensation, including a rule that mods couldn't enter contests. A real, thriving, very active community and it all fell apart because of a few really bad actors.
So it's not necessarily just raw numbers. After reading that (if you bothered; sorry to ramble), you might think we had 5000 or 10,000 members? At our height, we had just four hundred and twenty-one members. That's it. And it crumbled, with six or seven very well-intentioned and in most cases experienced mods. It crumbled due to a few bad actors who couldn't handle that we banned their friend who repeatedly broke very serious rules, who was warned again and again. The final posts of relevance there are all "what happened?" and "holy shit, where did my forum go?" type posts. It's now a ghost town.
Ha. Don't really have much to add to this, except leaving the r/worldnews mod team after roughly five years did me a power of good. I actually enjoy modding again, because my subs are small and cosy.
Modding should be about curating and helping create/promote the best content of a community, not acting as unpaid janitors and police officers. That's the only way to keep the burnout at bay.
That would be ideal, but unfortunately it's not the reality. The sheer volume of spam on reddit means acting as janitors is a requirement - people spend countless time writing automod rules and custom bots to deal with it because it's so widespread.
The other dark side of reddit is that it has become home to a very large number of racists, sexists, and homophobes. Posts that hit /r/all draw comments that are just... tbh unless you've modded a sub like /r/twoxchromosomes it's hard to describe just how bad it is. People think reddit is better than YouTube or Twitter because they don't see as much of the nasty stuff. It's not better, it's just got mods that give a fuck and filter out the shit before the users see it.
I've stepped down from modding some major communities on reddit (/r/twoxchromosomes being the most prominent) for the same reason - it was not helping my mental state.
At this point, I just take frequent breaks from any modding and don't kill myself trying to clear queues constantly. It's something I recommend to anyone new to modding on reddit - TAKE BREAKS. You won't last if you don't.
On a related note: if everyone stepped down from modding one of the big subs, what would the end result be? Let's say all the worldnews mods just said fuck it, I'm done. What would happen? I don't think it'd ever actually happen, but it's an interesting thought exercise.
Same! I've learned that I like moderating small "boutique" subreddits a lot more than large ones. The large ones are just work without benefit, and come with stress, while the smaller ones have more pay-off and I can actually participate in them.
The small subs are definitely more fun to moderate and be involved with, because you actually DO feel involved. I'm not part of the community of the former defaults I mod and I know it, I'm there to try and keep the peace as best I can and remove the garbage topics. That's it.
Exactly. As a mod of a larger sub, you're so busy shovelling shit you never get to enjoy the place.
Do we know each other, or are we from different mod cycles?
Oohh. Yeah. Our paths crossed briefly. I was on a different username back then. Biggest mistake I made was trying to help at r/technology.
That was such a shitshow. Don't want to dig up the past though, because I still get a bit irritated at how much bullshit and dishonesty was involved with that debacle.
Glad to see you made it out the other side in one piece.
I wasn't there in those days. Gimme the dirt on slack when you're in the mood :P
Heh. Will do.
Oh hey, I recognize you from /r/modded. That was always one of my favorite subreddits, and I think one of the first subreddits I actually posted to. I thought it was cool to see a place focused on high-quality articles. Hmmm, what else does that remind me of?
You two are making me happy I turned down an invitation to apply to be a moderator at /r/WorldNews!
I was never on /r/Games, not even as a participant. I simply don't play computer games.
I did hang out a lot in meta communities, though. Like... the 2+ years I spend modding /r/Help & /r/ModHelp. ;)
EDIT: "participator" => "participant" What was I thinking?
We worked really hard on r/worldnews. For a while we made good progress and then the US election happened, Trump got in and r/worldnews, along with a large chunk of rest of the world, went insane.
Having been a mod on /r/worldnews for about a year now, the team itself has the right intentions and is made up of good people. I wouldn't stay there if they weren't. But yes, it's not perfect and there are issues.
I'd just like to say that everyone should look at r/MMA for an example of a decently sized good community. That sub has a great community feel at 250,000 subscribers. Posts consistently make it into r/all and somehow the mods stay on top of everything while still interacting with the users. The community prioritizes good content and its an all around a great sub. I'm not sure how many people they have on their team, but whatever it is its working. They even have time to give large swaths of people custom flairs for almost anything they want.
It may have something to do with the niche topic of the sub or the admirable amount of community participation as well as the mod team.
/r/mma is one of my favourite communities on reddit, and BuzzKnights is an awesome mod. They put a shit ton of work into it and it shows. It's one of the subs I looked at for inspiration when I got involved in running /r/rupaulsdragrace. BTW, they're at almost 700k subs now.
Reminds me, I've been meaning to pick BN's brain over a few things they do that I'd like to implement on RPDR.
Oh damn, its been a long time since I've looked at the sidebar haha
Just touching on one aspect: the "very large" communities.
I think there was a grand total of a single subreddit that gained a million subscribers without ever being a default before the concept of defaults was removed from reddit.
That is to say, all analysis of subreddits larger than ~750 000 subscribers (ex: gonewild) are analyses of communities of random people who have no connection to the community other than not opting out. It's no surprise they're a different breed than others.
That's easy to forget.
Very large communities aren't as rare on reddit as they used to be. Right now there's about 100 communities with 1M+ subscribers, and many more about to tick over. While the former defaults are the biggest communities on the site (and may always be), removing them has led to faster growth on other communities. Out of the communities I mod that were never defaults, /r/facepalm is at 1.5M, and /r/outoftheloop will hit 1M any day now. And I'm guessing /r/wellthatsucks, /r/peoplefuckingdying, and /r/mademesmile will hit 1M within the next year.
Again, the whole dynamic changed after the removal of defaults.
Now the users who never read rules and don't feel associated with any specific community are spread around way more subs than before.
I don't think more mods is always the right solution, so much as better mod tools and more community involvement. The problem is, how do you get people invested in a "community" that has a population larger than some countries?
Personally I would love to see some transparency when it comes to moderation. I think a lot of the "us vs them" mentality that OP mentioned could be fixed this way.
First, let me say this is well written and spot on with things I've seen at reddit as well. At first I thought "how do you fix that?" but then I actually had an idea based on the introduction in your post. You mention that you modded /r/makeupaddictioncanada and I kind of chuckled and thought that was oddly specific. Like, is makeup really that different in Canada that Canadians needed their own subreddit? But then I thought, maybe that's exactly the answer. As a community grows, it's forced to split into more specific groupings each with it's own moderation team to keep things small and personal. Let's say tomorrow they start ~makeupaddiction. That's well and fine for a while, but at a certain point, too many people have a makeup addiction on Tildes and the community becomes unmanageable as you outlined. Through a community vote, it's decided that the most logical split is to parse it into ~makeupaddictionUS, ~makeupaddictionCanada, and ~makeupaddictionAsia. Each new community gets it's own set of mods and the old ~makeupaddiction becomes a meta-community of the three. You can't actually post to ~makeupaddiction anymore since it doesn't exist, but if you were subscribed to it, you'd see stores from all it's affiliated subcommunities. If applied in a sane manner, it could possibly maintain that goldilocks zone of active users for each subcommunity. I say active users because that's really what I think matters. If you have 1M subbed to your community, but only 1000 active posters while everyone else just lurks, those 1000 people will set the tone for the community.
Now, rules on how to split, changing affiliations in subcommunities, etc. would all have to be worked out and probably would require some experimentation, but I think it's an interesting idea.
I'm not sure if you're aware of it, but Tildes is kind of built with this exact concept in mind, even though it's not really being used yet. The groups are built to be able to support a tree-like hierarchy, so your "splits" like ~makeupaddictionUS and ~makeupaddictionCanada would actually be something like ~makeupaddiction.usa and ~makeupaddiction.canada. Currently the only sub-group like this that exists is ~tildes.official.
There are also some really neat parallels with the tagging system, so initially there would just be the single overall group with the posts tagged "usa" or "canada", but eventually they could be split into more formal subgroups if needed. Once they are, that's when a sort of "bubbling-up" of content to the main group might start to happen.
A lot of the details of this concept really haven't been worked out yet, but it's the general idea, anyway.
Ha! I had no idea that's how it was set to work. I just got my invite the other day and I'm still pretty new. I know you said it's not all worked out, but is there a post or something where I can read more about it? How would you handle merging existing tildes? For example, let's say we had ~thing1 and ~thing2 but later on it was decided that it really makes more sense to have a ~things and make ~things.thing1 and ~things.thing2 out of the old communities.
In general, it's pretty easy to move posts around, so I don't think it'll be too big of a concern (but maybe just a bit confusing). I expect most of the sub-groups will come "internally" though, where you're taking an existing piece of a group and turning it into a formal sub-group, not so much merging two independent ones. In your example, that would be things like taking the posts from ~makeupaddiction with the "canada" tag and then creating a formal ~makeupaddiction.canada.
I don't think we'd necessarily want a ~makeupaddiction since I personally hate that name. But maybe a ~cosmetics as a more general catch all?
When's the next period for suggesting content buckets?
Oh, yeah, I was just going along with their example but we'd definitely want a more "standard" name. Reddit really just ends up with those kind of names because the expected name was already taken by someone - it makes finding the "real" subreddit for a particular topic really difficult sometimes.
I'm not sure when the next time to add more groups will be, most likely after we get another decent-size group of people in.
To address your initial question: yep, countries definitely need specific subreddits for things like makeup. Not only do trends differ from country to country, but availability, brands, retailers, and prices also differ greatly. The default /r/makeupaddiction is dominated by Americans as you'd expect, and the USA has a much wider, cheaper variety of shops and brands available to them, whereas up here in Canada we get hit with extra duties on US purchases plus the currency exchange that means we pay a premium for the same products. And a number of companies just won't ship here.
But we have brands here that aren't available in the US, companies like Deciem and Bite that are Canadian based so their shipping is cheaper/free for us, and stores like Winners and Shoppers Drug Mart that don't exist there. It's all very region specific and would get drowned out on the main MUA subreddit.
The splitting idea is a good one, but the one thing I'd say is that having a general bucket is still applicable. For example, a Lisa Eldridge tutorial on how to master winged eyeliner is a more general interest makeup topic, whereas a company like Joe Fresh introducing a new foundation might be more Canada specific.
Wow, that's getting very makeup specific. That is a sentence I never thought I'd type. I guess I think of it more like single cell organisms; they maintain, they grow and split, or they wither and die.
To try and generalize the point you're making ... how to highlight something specific to the greater meta-community? Would you say that's a good summary? If so, I'd think if it was a really good post, the subcommunity would vote it up. That would get it greater exposure to the meta-community, where people subbed to the meta-community (but not the specific original subcommunity) could continue to upvote it based on the merit of the post.
Let me first say that everything in this comment is my personal opinion and is welcome to be challenged, and second I was the main moderator for a small ~25k subreddit for about 6 months, so while I don't have as much experience, I still know what it's like. I don't think mods are necessary for sites like reddit, and I think they cause more problems than they solve.
First of all, modding is way too much work. You're essentially doing a part time job for no pay. And when you're doing a shit job for no pay, guess what? You don't do it properly. That's why we get locked threads-- because the time and effort to "clean up" the incoming trash isn't worth the possible gems, right?
Second, who's to say what's good for the community? Why are the opinions of say, a dozen or two people more important than the other tens of thousands? Time and time again I've seen mods screw over a communities with dumb rules that they think will make the sub a better place, when really all they're doing is alienating people. Or maybe one mod is okay with X content but another mod isn't, so you get a post that's up for 8 hours until the second one wakes up. Or you get intentionally vague rules about "no low effort posts" so they can cherry pick what's on their subreddit. I understand that places like r/askscience or r/legaladvice or r/askhistorians wouldn't function properly without heavy moderation, but those are clear exceptions to the rule (and don't operate like most subreddits do.)
Time and time again I noticed that reported posts and comments already had negative score. At that point, who cares? They're at 0. Nobody's going to see em. It doesn't make a difference whether the mod removes it or not. And if the reported post has a lot of upvotes? Well, the community has already judged what they want to see-- why is that 1 reporter's opinion more important than the 300 upvoters?
Mods can and should be replaced by community tools, like voting and flagging. We (as a society) just haven't figured out the right implemention yet.
I don't mean this in a condescending way, but I know it's gonna come across that way so just try to take it in the best way possible: modding a sub of 25k is a totally different game from a sub with 250k, which is again different from a sub with 1M, which is different from the >10M subs. The scale is just.... different. The tools needed are different, and the approach has to change. It's just a fact of how reddit moderation works.
Yep, you're exactly right. I can pretty much guarantee that any post that features a woman cosplaying on /r/gaming needs to be locked because 90% of the comments are some variation on calling the cosplayer a whore or discussing how much they want to bang her/not bang her because sharp knees or whatever, and I just don't have the time or mental energy to deal with it.
Generally speaking, mods ARE doing what they think is best for the community, and are also members of said community. I try to err on the side of believing the best intentions about what they're doing, but we all know subs and individual mods where that isn't the case. I could name a few people that shouldn't be in charge of a wordpress blog, much less a major former default sub.
More likely situation: the post sat in queue until mod 2 woke up and mod 1 was never involved. I've seen it happen countless times. It's a side effect of having volunteers who are mostly NA based, and have to work/sleep/live outside of reddit.
Subjective rules like "low effort" are always going to be open to different interpretations by different moderators. It's not a malicious thing, just human nature. If a post is on the edge I tend to approve it, but others will remove it. This is where communication between the various mods of a sub becomes key.
In large communities, what the community judges as good content is often not what makes a good community because of the Fluff Principle. Basically, easy to digest content (memes, funny images) are more likely to be upvoted within the initial few minutes of posting, which is the crucial period in reddit's algorithm for boosting content to the top of a subreddit/reddit itself. A longer, more insightful post takes longer to digest, and suffers because of it.
This is paraphrasing from an old comment on reddit here:
https://www.reddit.com/r/circlebroke/comments/vqy9y/dear_circlebrokers_what_changes_would_you_make_to/c56x55f/
Relevant bits:
When I submit a long, good, thought provoking article to one of the defaults, I don't get downvoted. I just don't get voted on at all. I'll get two or three upvotes, but it won't matter, because by the time someone's read through the article and thought about it and whether it was worth their time and voted on it, the thread has fallen off the first page of /new/ and there's no saving it, while in the same amount of time an image macro has received hundreds of votes, not all upvotes but that doesn't matter, what matters is getting the first 10 while it's still got that youth juice.
This single problem explains so much of reddit's culture: It's why image macros are huge here, and why those which can be read from the thumbnail are even more popular.
The end result of this fluff principle is that the content you see upvoted to a top of a subreddit isn't necessarily good content, it's just easy to digest content.
I wouldn't go so far as saying replaced, I would say supplemented by voting and flagging. Flagging systems are far too easily exploited without some kind of human interaction at some point of the chain. Say for example you implement a system where by a post with X number of reports is automatically removed as suspect. I can guarantee someone will figure out the value of X and begin exploiting it to remove posts they don't agree with, or posts by users they don't like, instead of using it to flag bad posts. I'm not sure what the ultimate solution is, but full on automation via votes/flagging isn't it, it's too open to abuse.
Gresham's Law is a bitch.
This echoes my thoughts pretty much exactly. I didn't join Reddit as early as you, but I was one of the first thousand subscribers to a small subreddit called r/SpaceX back in 2011. Posts were few and far between. Commenters knew each other. The community vibe, while a bit desolate, was very tight-knit and felt like a little bit of a home on the big wide internet.
I became enough of a fan to eventually become a moderator of this community. It was fine for the longest time, but around 2014, we reached 20,000 subscribers and occasionally started getting influx from other subreddits. The community closeness began decaying at this point. We had to deal with sports-subreddit-esque spikes in activity, which put a strain on our intentionally-small moderator team (more on this below) during launches as we dealt with dozens of comments a minute.
On my part, it was continuously an experiment in promoting high quality discussion and friendliness. We (the moderator team) tried hard keep the community chill and professional. My personal view was that Reddit was a mess of jokes and low effort commentary, and I wanted to create a community. To see this through, I was very much a proponent on keeping the subreddit moderator team small to limit conflicting opinions and ensure decisions could be made with agency and in an agile manner. We strategically gathered moderators in places around the globe to ensure we had no "offline zones".
After the 20k mark, we started having issues with a small number of problematic users who would harass the moderator team, me in particular. On a number of occasions, these users would exploit flaws in the Reddit system (such as being able to send unlimited modmail messages—this was in the pre-mute era), and as a lot of us moderators were public figures, post our not-entirely-public information in places we'd prefer they didn't. One user even went as far as contacting my university accusing me of plagiarism because my contributions to the subreddit Wiki were too similar to Wikipedia (truly bizarre).
It eventually becomes a numbers game. Even if 999 in 1000 people are totally rational, sane people, when you're dealing with 20-50 to even 100k users, you've got dozens and dozens of truly crazy people. They get on your nerves, and a good moderator is able to not let that get to them and their vibe elsewhere on the community (I failed on numerous fronts here).
As we got up to 100k and beyond in 2017; the community quality went downhill drastically. The balanced relatively nuanced discussion was replaced by mostly speculative and un-balanced commentary that didn't have much basis in reality. That continues to this day. I stepped down in early 2017 after seeing little point in attempting to stem the tide.
I'm fairly convinced at this point aiming for continuous community growth is orthogonal to commentary quality. I don't regret my moderation of the community, but I wish I'd done some things differently for sure—I was not perfect, and my goal for a large community that felt tight-knit was foolish. I don't know what the solution is to encourage quality commentary, to be honest. But I don't believe the solution is unmitigated growth. If a community can reach a steady state of new users in == old users out, then it's probably in a place where it can stop fire-fighting and start strategically taking meaningful steps towards community improvement.
If the goal is to stem growth (which is not in human nature, it's hard to accept sustainability), then there's a number of steps that can be taken. Whether that's Tildes direction, I'm not sure.
Yes, sustainability is absolutely the goal here, not incessant growth. The ability to be able to aim for sustainability is the major motivation for many of the core choices—non-profit, no investors or advertisers (both of which always push for more growth), and so on.
A comparison I've made before when trying to explain the growth vs. quality conflict to people is to compare sites to restaurants. People can create amazing restaurants that have an excellent menu, a great atmosphere, and work out to be completely sustainable, lucrative businesses even while only appealing to a relatively small, local market. Sites can be like that too, but when a site takes a bunch of venture capital, that's like a restaurant pledging that they'll turn themselves into a nation-wide franchise.
Part of the process of becoming a franchise is going to be killing many of the unique aspects of the restaurant to make it more "accessible"—a varied menu needs to be reduced to fewer than 10 simple choices, the nice decorations replaced with mass-produced plastic parts, and so on. In the end, the franchise probably reaches more people and generates a lot more income, but it's lost almost everything about it that made it a high-quality restaurant in the first place. And that's exactly what happens to internet communities when they move from "small and sustainable" to "one of the most popular sites in the world".
Good thoughts and info.
Scale matters. In ways I'm still only partially realising. But yes, community dynamics change profoundly with size.
I'd written something, somewhere, on how that impacts platform and site development. Essentially: the problems you have when you are small, and which directly contribute to growth, are of a completely different nature from those you have at scale, and are therefore a very bad guide.
Ah, here: Social is Hard
There's also the problem that success is a poor teacher.
I've written about elements ofthis topic over the years. Possibly tangential, but still relevant:
Imzy was an interesting experiment. I can't put my finger on why, but it just never felt right to participate there.
I initially really wanted it to succeed.
I'm very glad the plug was pulled: Toxic culture and incompetent leadership and staff.
God I can't upvote this enough. I know people think it's all "LE REDDIT CABAL", but the truth is people mod other mods they know are reliable and will actually put in the time to help the sub, instead of just being able to greenhat on a sub to look more "important". Or someone who will just fuck up the sub and demod. It happens, and while most of it is recoverable, it takes time I don't have.
I know SRC especially fantasized about the dark, deep depths of /r/modtalk and how they were taking over Reddit from the inside. When in reality it was little more then an IRC full of amicable people willing to help, and some grumpy old mods who spent too much time being grumpy.
Sorry to be a bit off-topic, but just an aside from a regular user: I've never been clear about whether or not reporting is useful. I worry that it just makes more work for someone, so sometimes I just collapse it and move on. Maybe many users think that way too?
On reddit at least, reporting something does make it jump out of the page at the mods. Everything you report is wrapped in a big red highlight for mods. We can click on the report and see what people chose as the reason (and thank god that reddit here, at least, did improve - for at least 8 years there were no reasons, so we had to guess).
This old school report thing, though... I think that's the tip of a much bigger, smarter system. Instead of using reports for everything we use tags to do most of the basic stuff, and hope that works out well being almost entirely trusted-user moderated (access to tags should be a low hanging fruit, the early benefit of basic trust).
Tags here aren't intended just as text to identify something. Each tag can change the behavior of the comment or thread. This can be used for sorting, filtering, categorizing, but also to do things like create/manage stickies, and give a visibility boost to AMAs. The users themselves can apply and vote on the tags, so tags can have a vote threshold where they 'trigger' and activate... so you could say something like 'remove any comments that have [these tags] where more than 20 people voted up that tag'. It's a rather crude, simplistic method of crowdsourced moderation.
If this works it should clear a lot of noise out of the report system, which instead can be focused on more serious issues, such as threats, doxxing, illegal content, etc.
Yeah, I'm really excited to see the comment tag system implemented, as it's what attracted me to Tildes in the first place. I think Reddit's content is great, but that's because I read places like /r/Permaculture, /r/Composting, /r/NeutralNews, etc.--small places that focus on in-depth discussion, people's own experiments, or just on-topic small posts. Many of the larger subreddits, especially those focused on news, are to me worthless (at best) or even offensive. I guess because of my experience reading the heavily-moderated "Neutral" subs, I find joking around about news topics (especially low-effort jokes) kind of offensive. I also don't value people's random thoughts about those topics unless they have researched and thought about them carefully. Discussion about important topics should be productive.
To get back to the comment tag system--I think it can help a forum the size of Reddit to stay productive, or at least geared toward the user's preferences. I might browse news comments and filter out those tagged with "Joke," "Noise," "False Claim(s)," and "Unsupported Claim(s)," while emphasizing those tagged with "Verified Claim(s)" (throwing in a couple of my suggestions there). Or I might browse unfiltered sometimes to help tag/vote on tags to help other users have a better experience. To me, this would fix some of the problems I have with Reddit (the other problems stemming basically from it being a for-profit organization).
I had never thought about how it would make mods' lives easier, but I'm glad to hear it. For some communities, it sounds like modding is a part-time job that happens to be without pay. It sounds pretty unpleasant, too.
Good to know! Most of my reporting has been in /r/NeutralNews or the other "Neutral" subs because I know that they're heavily-moderated--and because it's clear to me that the mods want to get to everything. I guess I'll have to start reporting more of what I see. The mods can always ignore it if they want to.