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Reddit announces new limits on moderating large subreddits and for moderators to remove content sitewide
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- Title
- Evolving Moderation on Reddit: Reshaping Boundaries
- Authors
- Go_JasonWaterfalls
Translation: We don't want anyone to notice our plummeting levels of engagement and user retention, so we're going to obfuscate it to the point where nobody can tell what's going on anymore. Oh, and we don't have the time/energy to manage our own website effectively, so we're just going to let any rando mod delete everything site-wide instead to save time and keep legal happy. Oh, and powermods that hold a lot of real estate on the site still represent a threat to us, so we're nerfing the guys who do most of the real work. Again.
I sense another Tildes invite wave approaching.
Coincidentally, it is actually September this time around.
Unfortunately I think we've somehow passed Eternal and ended up at a September Ouroboros.
In all honesty I would be surprised if we still wanted to do that. I still check in on Reddit every once in a while and it seems like the quality commenters and posters have all gone away in the more recent years. If we did an invite wave at this point I feel it would be more detrimental to Tildes than beneficial.
Everytime I venture outside the one small community I follow on reddit I'm blown away by the lack of quality across the site. 99% of comments are on par with YouTube, Facebook, and Instagram comments. I keep an eye out for thoughtful submissions that I can send an invite code to, but I think I've only given one out in the past year.
(just kidding) Well, once I stop posting there, the avg word count per comment noticably decreased.
(But honestly, I agree) The communities I used to frequent and spend time responding to have gone fairly quiet, while some have become overwhelmed by obviously fake posts to the theme of "I'm a suffering saint while my parents/partner are mustache twirling villains, am I overreacting when I do this thing which gives everyone a Justice Reaction?"
The craziest thing is that for some niche interest YouTube channels I subscribe to, the quality of the comments are quite decent.
Are you saying that I'm the asshole, then???/
INFO: well, are you? :)
SMH How dare you let the answer rather than the votes decide AMITA or not! :( :(
It's funny, back in the 2000s and 2010s, "YouTube comment" was an understandable, common pejorative to describe a low quality and abrasive comment.
Nowadays, if you follow thoughtful channels, the comments are often decent. There are people having discussions, and obnoxious ones get pruned, because channel operators can moderate their own comments.
Facebook is atrocious, and Reddit has been on that path for a long time.
That is a good point I hadn't noticed. Although I think part of the difference is that YouTube's algorithm seems more tightly tuned than Facebook or Reddit's in the sense that it mostly shows you new content that is actually similar to content you like. So if you only follow/watch thoughtful content on YouTube, it will mostly show you other thoughtful content. While FB and Reddit seem a lot more loosey-goosey with their recommendations, which allows us to see more non-thoughtful content on those platforms. Despite there being plenty of non-thoughtful content on YouTube too. YouTube encourages more selection bias, as another way of framing it.
The one good part about this, I thought, is that they decrease how many subs you can mod. I have always thought it was absolutely ridiculous that 1 person can be the mod of 100 big subreddits. Nobody's actually moderating all of that..?
I'm curious about this point of view that powermods are a good thing.
Maybe they're not a good thing, but I am not sure I have faith in Reddit to replace it with a "not even as bad" thing
They're just forcing those mods to go away, usually those subreddits have a large mod team anyway, so they'll just be replaced by someone new.
For all the mods complaining about how much work they do for free, this should be good, since they now don't have to do nearly as much work. It might make some subreddits worse, but I think on average it would make them better, since they're more likely to have a head mod that is actually interested in the subreddit and not just interested in building an internet kingdom
I used to kinda be a "power mod" not to the level of any of the big ones, but still a few defaults. I like this limit idea but it's a little low. Should be like 3~ big subs, not just one. Other than that it's a good idea.
Edit: oh they changed it since I last read about this. It's now a limit of 5, that's perfectly fine IMO
The limit is 5 big subs, not 1.
Additionally, between account sharing and alt accounts, I'm not sure what impact this will have. Reddit is getting better at detecting alts, but ban evasion is still possible.
Yeah they had the limit at 1 for any sub with over 1 million visitors for a few months when they first announced this to the mods, they upped to 5. I think that's a perfectly fine limit now.
It's not difficult to just go through modqueue and approve/remove most reported comments
But for a hundred different subreddits, all with hundreds of thousands if not millions of users?
It just kind of blows my mind that even if it's actually possible to moderate all of that (with mod teams), why would you even bother sitting on that many subreddits like this?
Yes, with multiple active mods there's not much to do in reality. Doing it alone is difficult, don't recommend it.
I dislike that list, it was misleading and actually caused a lot of shit because it was first posted on a sub I mod while everyone was sleeping.
I wonder how many of the mods who get cut were only mods to manage automod rules or the css.
What’s wild is their stock price. I haven’t used Reddit in nearly 2 years (after they killed Apollo), but I can’t believe their stock price continues to soar.
If you look at the current reddit front page without logging in, it looks almost exactly like Instagram.
So yeah that doesn’t surprise me, all the defaults are meme pics, you scroll endlessly on them, and interact by voting. You cant tell whats and ad and what isn’t and Reddit openly targets by region. Its everything investors want.
Not only is everything an ad/bot account, it's all constantly reminding me how fucked up American politics are too. Legitimately every major sub is just constant trump trump trump or bot reposts of someone's cat that probably died 15 years ago, it's unusable.
People like us have left, but people like my friends have begun using it. Not to disparage my friends, they're just the type of casual user that populates the Internet these days.
I started on Reddit back in 2011 or so, Fark prior to that and various forums for the 90s to the 2000s. None of my friends would have ever touched any of that back then, but they started scrolling Reddit about a year or so ago now, as well as using Instagram and the like. All as myself and many like me have really migrated away from that stuff as it becomes enshittified.
So I left, but two people I know have now begun using it and I'm sure that's not anomalous.
Yep. My wife and her good friend are now regular reddit users when neither would touch it even a few years back despite my regular suggestions for communities to my wife.
It's just a totally different demo these days. Reddit is losing (has lost?) its charm but I think we won't really see it totally implode until the chaos gets so bad that the quality of submissions is notably not even worth reading anymore. Hence I hope digg or something else more public than tildes takes off. I like the quality here but I miss 2015 reddit's constant generation of quality reviews, comments, and original content (rip /r/unearthedarcana)
Wow, I haven't checked their stock price since the IPO. Now I kinda regret not buying into it when I has the chance. Oh well 😆
I felt the same following my 2018 sale of $500 of Etherium because 'this thing is a dumb pipe dream that'll go nowhere.'
Poor us.
FWIW, Digg is starting to "reboot" itself. Unfortunately, they are starting with mobile/app first.
Mobile or desktop, I am actually holding my breath! Hoping they can revive the late 00's, early 10's forums feeling.
When they say mobile first, that depresses me because it brings with it so many privacy issues. Just let me use a vanilla browser.
On one hand, this isn't wrong. On the other hand, this + the api shenanings last year clearly mean they don't want people showing how little reddit is growing. It shouldn't matter for a top 20 visited site, but they are a public company now. You know what thst means.
So, most of the mods for big subs... Until they use alts they have to maintain it. I guess we'll see how hard reddit enforces this, but it's probably their most interesting move in a decade.
I don't want to completely drip my response in cynicism, but it's clear that this is to prevent another blackout situation, where a few big mods can close down dozens of subs at once.
Welp, there goes that optimism. They want to emphasize "only 0.1% of mods impacted", but also open the door for exceptions off the bat?
My favorite thing in 2025: less transparency!
Again, I clearly have bias against reddit but I don't want to come off as hating every change (I moved on long ago outside of viewing a few niche communities without an account). But while shakeups are interesting, I'm not sure if they'll really shake much up in the grand scheme of things.
I'll also note that the comments don't see that pleased with the changes.
I think the 'five subs...' isn't too bad. I run a 1.8m sub and some smaller ones around 50k or so. I had another around 350k when I passed it off. I solo mod all of my subs, but over the years I've had people come on board, appearing eager to help out and stuff... and of the dozen or so, only one guy did anything and he was an absolute asshole about it, which was perfect for the time.
I like this. I get that most of this stuff isn't very popular, but I am all for clearing out the dead weight.
I'm OK with this, too. I never really liked the idea of "power mods" and "power users." I know the latter really hasn't been a thing for quite awhile, but power mods who help handle or control multiple very large subreddits is still a thing, as far as I'm aware. I think that concentrates too much power in the hands of a few.
I get that power mods have a lot of skills and knowledge, and that modding large subreddits is a different skillset from modding small ones. I was briefly on the r/politics mod team as a low level mod and it was crazy to see how different it was from my "home" subreddit of several several thousand subscribers where there were just two of us who didn't have to do much day to day (still don't).
But anyway, it's not like these power mods are the only people who can do this. Let new people rise through the ranks. It's a different site than it was back then. It's a different audience and userbase than it was back then. Maybe other people have better or different ideas for a sub.
Feels like theres an unaddressed structural issue with reddit that reduces all fixes to band aids. Unpaid/volunteer management of massive communities just primes the entire system for abuse. You've seen it for yourself the difference between your <10k sub and r/politics. There is a user created heirarchy with operational layers, procedures and rules. And it's all on an anonymous volunteer basis.
If you become a power mod of the right subs, it gives you positions of unfathomable power. You have a say in how millions of people see the world, with little to no real world responsibility or accountability. And while Reddit is a publically traded company with salaried employees, mods see no tangible benefit to spending spare time scrubbing up the worst of the internet from public view.
It is not impossible to track who the powerusers are and to subject them to relentless spearfishing attacks or make them an offer they can't refuse. Hell, it doesn't exactly take much for coordinated efforts to spin up countless sockpuppets that rise up moderation ranks and fully take over high traffic spaces or even work around the new rules. Moderation capture started getting traction in 2016 and gone into overdrive since.
Large Discord, Twitch and YouTube communities can thrive when the founders take initiative and fund moderation to their own standards. And theres a central figure of accountability with incentive to maintain acceptable standards. Theres plenty of toxic community heads, but they take the brunt of backlash. I've watched reddit accuse bystanders of terrorism, foster facist echo-chambers and very recently bully a animal rescuer to the point of taking their own life. And that's just accidents we know about. The worst punishment the people who allowed this can face is not being able to control online discussion.
There barely is any subreddit where it is actually millions. The subreddits with millions of subscribers are mostly historical defaults with a sharp drop in activity after reddit stopped doing that. More importantly the majority of people visit reddit never visit specific subreddits or even actively seek out new subreddits. Instead they browse the popular feed. While it isn't unthinkable to reach people through there you need to have tight control over many subreddits to a degree I don't think even the biggest subreddit collector mod ever had.
Popular YouTube channels have a greater reach than any subreddit.
This is a popular narrative, but I honestly don't think it happened to the degree people think it does.
This isn't just baseless speculation but based on actual experience. Given that I am one of the main founder of one of the tools used by the majority of mods at one time and used to moderate some fairly high profile subreddits as well.
In fact, I think I have seen at most two laughable attempts of "partnering" with mod teams. To be fair, for the toolbox browser extension we received a few more offers over the years. Mostly to incorporate shady ad stuff and only a few low-ball offers to buy the extension outright.
I am not saying it never happened or can happen. Because I am sure it did, but if I was a widespread core issue I am fairly confident in saying that I would have been exposed to it at some point in time.
I agree, but where does this money come from? Sometimes it might come from the community but in the case of twitch and YouTube it often also comes in the form of ad revenue or other sponsored deals. Given that the reach of many YouTube channels is bigger than that of most subreddits I think this is equally if not more problematic.
Basically what I am trying to say is that while there certainly are issues with power mods on reddit. I don't think they are the source of the majority of issues reddit has and is facing. Or are unique to reddit in a significant way to make them a reddit specific issue rather than an internet wide issue.
I’m not a big fan of paid mods. I think that’s fine for administrators - people just generally cleaning up clear ToS violations, like calls to violence or hate speech or whatever. But mods decisions are as much based on community goals as anything else.
Some subs ban images because they want to foster text based discussion. Some ban dissenting opinions. Some have strict user verification. All that kind of stuff is ultimately subjective, and I don’t think it makes sense to put that on what would ultimately be Reddit staff. They would just not have the context.
Additionally, adding any kind of financial link just causes all kinds of trouble.
the main issue is the time commitment. I keep messing with the idea, but I'd love to have my community largely self-moderate itself based on community karma -- like 150+ and you can reply with '!spam` and it'll remove a spam comment.. etc.
I can't imagine modding a large sub like politics.. especially a political one. it would need a half dozen mods just to look through comments. So crazy.. so much coordination and stuff that would make it feel like work.
And that's exactly what us bottom-of-the-list mods did. Our only responsibility was monitoring the mod queue, which of course was never ending. I think there were around 10 of us who's only job was that. And it was overwhelming. I think I lasted a few weeks, at most, before giving up my position and heading back to "easy mode" in my main sub, which was also political, but at a state and local level.
What helped in my sub was that, at least back then, we fostered an environment of civility from the start, with many of the early members sticking around to help teach and enforce that norm. We didn't allow the behavior that one frequently sees in news, politics, worldnews, etc. We had members from opposing sides who would debate and scuffle a little on reddit, but then go into IRC and just shoot the shit. It felt like an actual community. So it wasn't only the two or three mods having to play enforcer. The community helped, even if it wasn't a formal, technical system like you're suggesting. Which allowed us mods to also participate as more normal users, instead of just Internet jannies or even Internet police.
But that's obviously impossible to do in such a massive sub like politics. Not without severely restricting the ability to comment. But given how useless most comments are in political subs...maybe nothing would be lost.
Honestly, I don't even think sub needs to get that large to lose that community spirit. In my main sub, I started noticing us losing that community spirit probably around the 2000-3000 subscribers mark. Too many new faces who didn't know or even care for the rules/norms. People from "outside" who would drop in briefly, often from the larger sub, to yell and cause a ruckus. Which caused the OGs to leave, which meant people weren't enforcing community standards, which meant more yelling and incivility...
do you ever think that political subs, local or not, would benefit from a lobby sub / quarantine -- then the stand-out people from that relative shit show get invited to the real sub, which is private? IRC has had treehouses since the dawn of time and I think the system really works well.
Wild that you saw a shift around 3k. In one of my more tech support subs, the culture took a big shift around 10k or so while my main was around 100k then goes in waves. Every community suffers from its own Eternal September, in a way.
Back to your sub and maintaining the culture, this is why I really want to give people special powers based on community karma. Let those OGs who get the culture do a little policing when they see it. For mine, they just comment
!botor!removeand it removes the post or comment and also their comment. I don't have a lot of people using it now, but they do handle a post or two a day. This isn't based on community karma, though; they're hand-picked.Its so tough to foster a good community when its been soured. For my main, it took a good two years to really turn things around.
I wasn't sure what my feelings were on your lobby/quarantine idea. I was never that deep into the IRC scene. I think most of my time on IRC was spent playing idle games, ha. But then I realized, "Wait a minute...is that what reddit is to Tildes?"
After all, Most of us are still redditors, or at least former redditors. Quite involved, long-time ones, too, given how many reddit mods are here. Even a former power mod, a former major tools developer, and of course a literal former reddit admin. This site and this community are deeply linked to reddit. Perhaps inextricably.
Going further, Tildes isn't open registration. It's invitation only. Which, I imagine, are mostly sent to other redditors. I know the invitation thread on r/tildes isn't necessarily vetting, but I'm sure Tildoes who do send invites look at reddit post histories a little bit. I know I do.
So in a way, reddit is the lobby/quarantine, while Tildes is the real sub, the real reddit. So maybe it does work.
haha this is absolutely a treehouse for reddit in a lot of ways.
i think everything needs a holding tank-like system, though. for F1, the poor mods on discord spend most of the race kicking people who are asking for streams. for the Lakers, they simply don’t take new joins leading up to the games… for me, a perfect middle ground is to restrict the new people to a channel that is silent. it sucks for the people who genuinely want to chat about F1, but they can join the normal chat after while the stream hunters go elsewhere.
overall, i just want more systems i. place to make moderation a total breeze so more people will step up without it being a burden or stripping the romance from the community.
Especially in politically-charged subreddits, someone might fear retaliation for removing something with a comment that shows their name. But you could allow report reasons like
!remove 5afc-90dd-6a01-159cwhere you assign (or revoke) GUIDs to each trusted user and set automod to handle such reports.I'm curious how those visitor numbers on the subs you mod are going to look compared to subscriber numbers. Since it's a weekly number, I imagine it's going to be not even 10% (unless reddit is going to fake them which I wouldn't put it past them).
You can already see visitor numbers for subreddits you mod, so this won't be any new information for a mod team, unless that mod team was just ignoring the stats page.
For the sub I am a mod of, we have about 90k subscribers, and 20k unique visitors each day.
These numbers could be faked, I suppose, but Reddit can fake unique visitors just as easy as they can fake subscriber numbers.
right now its 201K w/ 6k contributions for a 1.8m sub --- not great, to be honest. It's a higher effort sub, but I think those numbers are pretty low or at least appear low, like you guessed.
I'm highly critical of reddit and no longer use it, but the first two seem like positive changes to me. Visitors over subscribers seems like a reasonable perspective change; I'm surprised they ever focused on subscribers first. I guess they assumed that subscribers and visitors scaled similarly, but I have a feeling that depends a lot on the subreddit.
Limiting mods to 5 large communities seems like something that should've been done back when they were trying to be a quality product, as powermods with way too wide of a footprint were a repeated problem. Too much consolidated power is bad. And even with the best of intentions, even if it were a paid full time position, there is an upper limit on how much you can expect a single person to effectively handle the throughput.
The change in removing content gave me more pause, and seems like laziness. If it's used to remove illegal or objectionable content, streamlining the removal is a good thing (notwithstanding the challenges and risks of deciding what is "objectionable"). If it's something a mod personally objects to, it's rife for abuse. A mod could effectively silence a user across communities, but only if the user only posts the content in communities that moderator controls.
I wonder how this related to using AI for moderation.
Using visitors gives them a much stronger lever to control which subreddits meet their metrics. They decide the home page and recommendations, which makes a massive impact on visitors to a given subreddit but a much smaller impact on subscribers.
Subscribers is a much better metric of how many, shall we say "at least minimally engaged" members of a community there are. Visitors is easier to manipulate.
Only to a certain degree, there are multiple subreddits with millions of subscribers as people used to be subscribed to them by default. This does skew this metric as it was historically also messed with by reddit.
There are complications, yeah, but ultimately visitors is more under their control than subscribers.
Is it? Both are firmly under their control and we know reddit has messed with them both in various ways to fit their needs. In the end both are metrics provided by reddit and you just have to believe them they are correct.
Exactly, they can just automate a million page views to an advertising partner post using one robo account and call it the same or better user engagement than a million subscribers un-subbing, or million comments being left by 100,000 angry people saying they're leaving reddit.
If the admins are willing to do that, I don't see why they couldn't setup the subscriber count on subreddits they like to be "current sub count +100k" and those they dislike to be "current sub count -20%". There's no technical reason preventing this, it's not like they allow you to see a list of subscribers and thus would need to maintain fake accounts to keep up the illusion.
Back when YouTube modified the subscribe button to allow you to receive no, "personalized", or all notifications from a channel, a lot of people complained since, well, they subscribe to channels for a reason. And I get the immediate impulse to dislike the change, but it makes sense when you consider that a lot of channels (particularly older channels) have a very high ratio of subscribers to actual viewers (even when you ignore fake subs from channel boosting services) because people get bored and move on, they make new accounts, and just generally stop interacting without unsubscribing. So it makes sense to have the default be "personalized", so that YouTube can examine if you are actually watching the channel and make recommendations accordingly.
Likewise, many subreddits have tons of subscribers from abandoned accounts, bots trying to cloak themselves, and people who have moved on without thinking to unsub, plus the legacy of default subs (remember when /r/atheism was a default? I do).
My only problem with this change is I would like to be able to see both the visitors and subscriber count on the old UI. Currently, we can still see subscribers on the old UI; I have to get to the new UI via a private window to see the visitor count.
It seems like removing posts site-wide (versus one subreddit) would only matter for cross-posts? How common are cross-posts?
The issue is removed posts can still be viewed by going to the users profile.
Now they will be completely gone.
This should be a change with very minimal impact, it might make spam bots harder to detect since if you are a mod, you will not see posts that have been removed by other mods. However usually these bots will hit inactive communities, and usually you can tell they're a spam bot without needing to look at the post history. So I think it can mostly be ignored.
I've also noticed that it seems like reddit admins are less likely to remove content that breaks sitewide rules if it is already removed by mods. So this could also help them to clean up rulebreaking content which is still accessible despite already being reported and removed.
In all honesty, Reddit has a gigantic issue with a cabal of power mods controlling all content that goes on the site, although some of the more prolific ones were banned from the site two years ago over the API protests.
As for if I think this is a good or a bad thing? Not sure...
Reddit's moderator guidelines at one point forbade mods from banning people for their activity in another subreddit, yet this was never enforced. What is going to stop power mods from just using alt accounts?
With the new ability to hide one's posting history (honestly one of the worst changes they've made, IMO-- nearly every bad faith engager in the subs in still active in immediately did so, and the privacy aspect was handled well by alt accounts instead) and the API changes, is this even possible to do going forward?
Mods can see the full history of users that engage with their subreddit, iirc
With their subreddit, not other subreddits. I no longer do mod on reddit, but to spot spammers it is extremely useful to know if someone has posted a sus link to just your subreddit or a ton more. This is something you can't easily glance anymore if mods on other subreddits already removed the post.
I think that one major reason Reddit is willing to “reshape boundaries” this way is because they have ramped up their own anti-spam efforts, but also, critically: when user-level moderators inadvertently tip off spammers, the spam rings change tactics.
There’s a good faith desire by moderators to combat spam, and five or six years ago the moderators were doing almost all of the effective combat of spam. We had to do it because the admins left it up to outdated algorithms, or just user reports.
Now, however, it absolutely needs the kind of analysis only admins have the data to do, and I’ve suspected that a lot of their motive has been to gently shift moderators out of that domain, to better maintain fighting entire spammer rings sitewide.
We never should have needed to be volunteer sitewide Trust & Safety. Now we don’t need to be, but it’s a hard habit to break.
That is a valid point, the sort of spam that got through into queues has changed and you could (up until I left) see that more of the "raw" spam was being caught.
But, not all spam is created equal. What the admins don't consider spam, some mods might still consider spam for very valid reasons.
Not to mention that there is highly domain specific spam that will simply not be recognized by admins.
Basically what I am getting at is that I don't think there will ever be a world where moderators will not be dealing with some sort of spam.
This is what the description of the feature says:
'Mods of communities you participate in and redditors whose profile posts you engage with can still see your full profile for moderation'
It doesn't say 'can see your posts within their subreddit' it says 'they can see your full profile'
Hrm, might have read that wrong then.
Heh, this a new narrative to me, one I am not sure is correct. I know a fair amount of mods left on their own volition.
iBleeedOrange (who is now on Tildes) and AwkwardTheTurtle were among the two most active power mods who were banned.
Right, I suppose they count as some of the prolific powermods. Awkward for sure was a subreddit collector with a tendency for drama.
I suppose I have a different idea of powermods in my head that is somewhat broader and not just folks like awkward. For all the subreddits they had under their belt they actually didn't do all that much (except for the final drama). While there were mods with fewer subreddits under their belt who were much more active.
I also believe that the impact of powermods on reddit has been overstated in many situations. To be clear they also caused plenty of issues. But tue fast majority of issues reddit as a community platform did face and is still facing has little to do with powermods.
Then again, I have my own clear biases having been part of this meeting and also left over the entire thing.
Why were they banned?
Blacking out their subreddits.