Moderators of Reddit, tell us about your experiences in fostering quality discussion and content (or failures to do so)

The biggest issue facing large communities in my experience, is the lack of people who want to moderate them, and the abuse those mods face leading them to quit.

That leaves a less than ideal group of people moderating the largest communities. They're the only ones who put up with the abuse.

A lot of people with real skills (like programming automod in creative ways to limit false-positives while weeding out junk, or policy for making good rules or decisions, say) duck out because they've got skills that they can put to other use without all the abuse.

I think a lot of people underestimate how vastly more terrible reddit would be without the tremendous volume of filth mods and their scripts remove. Especially the subreddits with bad reputations as it is.

Reddit has a hate, discrimination and civility problem. All the other English-language large social media sites have rules against the most vile stuff. Reddit does not. That means all those folks group up on reddit. It's become the core, vile demographic that chases away others. They're pervasive in all subreddits, from pictures of cute animals to the most controversial communities. Everywhere.

I only saw a relatively small segment of the larger Reddit moderation community, so I'm coming from a limited degree of understanding. But these are some of my own feelings on the matter, for what it's worth:

• At some point the amount of traffic, becomes so large that a more "personal" approach to moderation is no longer tenable. There's a deeper question buried in there about whether or not you actually want your mods to have some degree of relationship with the users but eventually the quantity of busywork simply no longer allows them to interact in the same way as before.
• As the number of users (and as a corollary mod actions) scales transparency becomes more and more difficult, and moderation decisions more opaque. Information asymmetry between regular users, long-time users, and mods increases. Abusers prop up with more frequency and providing too much transparency allows them to skirt the rules more regularly, but too little transparency and your regular users may feel like mods and users are no longer on the same wavelength. Most of this is because a lot of users don't see the actual work being put in or the issues facing the mod team or don't know what has or hasn't been tried to resolve it, so any discussion starts out with different assumptions and theories.
• Prolific community members do not automatically make good mods, if moderation is also a degree of community management then soft skills and willingness to consider issues critically and objectively are far more useful then any long list of quality replies or submissions.

Did your subreddit take strict measures to maintain quality ala r/AskHistorians, or was it a karmic free-for-all like r/aww?

This is too funny: the first subreddit I moderated was /r/AskHistorians. :)

I've moderated a few different types of subreddits since then: /r/PoliticalDiscussion for a few months; /r/Australia for a while; /r/Help for a couple of years; /r/DaystromInstitute for 5 years and counting.

Some have had very strict moderation approaches, like AskHistorians and Daystrom. Some have been more middle-of-the-road, like Political Discussion and /r/Australia. /r/Help was a bit more lightly moderated, where the moderation consisted more of me writing AutoMod code than dealing with trouble-makers.

I personally tend to avoid the free-for-all subreddits. I'm an activist moderator, so I would never want to be on a hands-off moderation team. I was/am a good fit at AskHistorians and Daystrom because their insistence on high-quality, in-depth, insult-free discussion aligns with my personal preferences.

Do you think the model was an appropriate fit for your sub? Was it successful?

Their different approaches work (mostly) for the different types of subreddits they are. I found that the political ones (Political Discussion and /r/Australia) were the worst ones to moderate - people just can't seem to hold back from making political arguments personal. Terms like "libtard" and "conservatard" were tossed around quite freely. And, then, when I moderate someone for insulting another person, they insist that it's my political bias showing through: I've been a right-wing sympathiser and a left-wing sympathiser, and a fascist and a socialist. It just depends on who I pulled up most recently.

What were the challenges faced in trying to maintain a certain quality standard (or not maintaining one at all)?

AskHistorians was the epitome of this. The purpose of the subreddit is right there in the name: "Ask Historians". However, some people interpreted this as "Ask anyone who ever took a high-school history class or watched a historical documentary once, and can half-remember a historical factoid." When you tell someone their uninformed, half-baked, shallow response isn't up to scratch, they get offended. They feel like they're entitled to answer a question just by virtue of having seen it.

Then there were the people with agendas: the racists, the bigots. One of their favourite tricks was to post leading questions, and then argue with the answers. For example: "Why didn't Africa develop civilisation?" was a good Trojan horse question for racists who wanted to make their point that Africans are stupider than white people.

Will any of the lessons learnt on Reddit be applicable here in Tildes?

One thing I learned from comparing /r/DaystromInstitute to /r/StarTrek: start out with the standards you want to have. It's a lot harder to raise standards than to lower them. Once a certain type of culture has embedded itself, it's almost impossible to root it out. At one point, /r/StarTrek tried to impose stricter conditions on posting images because they were starting to dominate the subreddit (this is about the time that we created Daystrom). They basically had a user revolt on their hands. It was an extremely painful process to shift the subreddit from looser standards to tighter standards. Meanwhile, we never had a problem like that at Daystrom, because we'd started out with very tight standards. People knew from Day One what they were getting into. Some people who turned up later assumed they could do stuff on Daystrom that they could do elsewhere on Reddit but, by that time, the culture of Daystrom was already set in place - and these people were told quite firmly by other Daystrom members that they needed to get their act together or get out. We moderators still had our job to do, but the members supported what we did, rather than fought it.

That's my biggest lesson: start out as you mean to go on.

In larger subs, as a user, the overwhelming drowning of signal in noise. Even well-moderated subs (AskScience, AskHistorians) see frustratingly little, and generally low-effort, interaction.

As a moderator of several smaller subs, generating traction and return-engagement (long-term sustained discussion) on posts, plus numerous redesign issues. Covered several times over the past 5 years or so, and with little if any improvement:

• On Tools, Methods, and Workflow

• FAQ: So, Reddit's got everything you couldn't find at The Other Place?

• Poor engagement mechanics

• 2018 redesign issues

• I won't even pretend that Reddit is the principle root of my recent radio silence. But autoplay video ads are awful close to a final straw.

I'm planning on moving my activity elsewhere, in process.

The core two things I moderate against is off-topic discussion and insults. I don't remove comments as long as they're voiced in a civil way. Since people from both sides of the isle sometimes go beyond the line I frequently get called Nazi and Commie on the same day. As for specific types of content or narrow content definitions I usually let the community decide (either via up- and downvotes or if that doesn't work via polls).

Being that I moderate a political subreddit the hate I see is quite more extreme there than in other places but I feel like our strict rules against this at least help to tackle the issue a little bit.

I moderate a 100k+ subscriber video game subreddit. We try to promote higher quality posts by not allowing low-effort content to be posted to the subreddit. We'd monitor the /new queue to make sure that no low-effort memes make it out alive.

It's a weird situation though, because the game series is effectively over, which means we're sort of in a permanent "off-season" mode. There's less original discussion to have since there's no new material, and most posts are either people playing the games for the first time or fan art.

The policies we used for moderation worked very well back when the series was more active, but over time, I've found them to be less impactful. That said, we still restrict low-effort posts and I think it does make an impact on the type of posts that people make to the subreddit.

As for challenges, the only real challenge is making sure that I'm objective in removing things considered "low-effort." It's difficult to quantify "effort" and I'd hate for people to think their post is only allowed or not based on favoritism.

/r/NeutralPolitics (and subsequently /r/NeutralNews) uses a very strict moderation method by removing low-effort comments and requiring sources for all statements of fact.

I think that it's a very successful method in fostering high-quality content (see user feedback).

/r/Steam moderator checking in. I’ll answer in order.

Did your subreddit take strict measures to maintain quality ala r/AskHistorians, or was it a karmic free-for-all like r/aww?

• I’d say we’re about 50/50 on that scale, we don’t allow low effort memes but we do allow “fluff” which is basically shit-posting and the likes but just a bit higher in quality.

Do you think the model was an appropriate fit for your sub? Was it successful?

• Honestly, and I speak for myself, I think that it isn’t a huge success at all. Sub’s still the same as it was. Sure, no more low-effort “big guy vs one [insert adjective] boi” memes but the fluff posts are still dangerously close to being low-effort stuff.

What were the challenges faced in trying to maintain a certain quality standard (or not maintaining one at all)?

• Challenges... well for starters, getting people to read and adhere to the sidebar rules. The average Mod queue consists of FAQs, Support Questions and Frequently Posted Bugs though we do get scammer reports and baseless accusations here and there (people actually think that we’re offical Valve employees working Tech support).

• Continuing from the last point. Another challenge is the nature of /r/Steam itself. It’s a subreddit for a platform, how the hell does one make, let alone hold, a high quality discussion? At least if it was say /r/TrueGaming then it’s a bit easier because unlike them, /r/Steam is too “narrow”.

• Lastly, we seem to have different opinions of what constitutes as a “meme”, hence we are not very consistent removals wise. Some of us would let a few posts slide while the others would remove every last one of them on sight. That, coupled with “fluff” posts really muddies the whole thing up.

Will any of the lessons learnt on Reddit be applicable here in Tildes?

• Apart from “not being a dick”, not really though I will say this. Tildes has the scent of Reddit but it is still a different beast due to the generally higher quality of discussions. and the fact that we do not know whether Tildes is going to be fully public or gated. So experience can be transferred but it’s not going to be 1:1.

I have moderated /r/sports 5 years and in that time we went from 80 thousand to almost 14 million subscribers so I might be able to speak on how growth changes things like what is bound to happen to tildes

Did your subreddit take strict measures to maintain quality like r/AskHistorians, or was it a karmic free-for-all like r/aww?

Strict all the way, or at least we try, we do our best to remove any joke or meme posts, I'd say well over 50% of what makes it past our super strict automod to the /new page is removed by a mod anyway, we go hours without a new post that we don't delete due to being low effort. Which is pretty crazy for a sub of our size.

Do you think the model was an appropriate fit for your sub? Was it successful?

I think it was appropriate. I'd take one or two quality posts from our sub hitting /r/all a day over a ton of low effort meme posts and similar content like some other of the 'default' subreddits became. As far as successful I'd say mostly. One or two a week slip by because we really only have 1 or 2 active mods and I'm the most active by far currently and I have to sleep sometimes. And those posts tend to rise quickly when it's a nice, easy, low effort joke to send to the top.

What were the challenges faced in trying to maintain a certain quality standard (or not maintaining one at all)?

People don't like when you remove their low effort meme post that is sitting at the top of /r/all, the backlash is pretty hard because of course, all moderators are satan and literally nothing should be remove whatsoever because the votes decide what is quality, right?
And to be honest we could handle it better, I'm sure some of you know some of the juicy drama that has come out of the /r/sports mods. I wasn't around for a few years so I missed all the drama thankfully but it is still brought up a lot. We honestly ignore 99% of the 'why did you remove my post' modmail because it is really tiring to explain over and over, so we could work on that but we won't honestly.

Will any of the lessons learnt on Reddit be applicable here in Tildes?

I think so, as with any user-submitted content site you reach the point that you have to remove quite a few posts and people question why, as tildes grows we all know there will be obstacles along the way as far as backlash goes when it becomes public and people will inevitably treat it as a new reddit where jokes and pictures rise to the top. There really isn't a way to prevent it, just try to foster a community big enough that knows what content is expected here so when the floodgates open it's a bit easier to deal with. Moderation in some form is going to become a huge part of tildes or it will fail.