The analogy is really insightful, but also makes me slightly uneasy. When a moderator gets it wrong, you can't comment on an internet forum. When a police officer gets it wrong, you're dead.
> When a police officer gets it wrong, you're dead. Or, as often happens, they're dead. I don't envy members of a profession that have to get every life-and-death decision right in real time on a daily basis.
That's a fair point, although statistically the job of police officer doesn't crack the top 10 in most dangerous careers.
Someone should start a competing service then. My recommendation would be to have a "maximum karma" limit, at which point the account (mod or not) and all of its activity are deleted, and the owner has to sign up again and work their way back up from zero.
The idea being that you'd punish those users who generate most of the content for your platform? How does that make sense?
People do that in games all the time. Finish the game -> restart
As long as the ride is good, people don't mind having to step down and queue again
I'm distinguishing it between the "intended" way of using the site by making posts and then the community organically votes on it, and some unintended "manipulated" way where content is artificially voted upon or otherwise given an advantage over other posts.
And when someone posts OC, a photo, for example, to a small subreddit or at a low-trafficked time of day and a "karmawhore" screenshots the photo and posts it to several highly trafficked subreddits would you consider those upvotes organic or manipulated? It's my understanding that this is a common tactic used by people who are "karma farming" on an account. I can certainly understand how the karmawhore feels the upv…
The _votes_ aren't manipulated though. The content is exactly the same even if the person "stole" it. It's immoral and scummy, certainly, but I wouldn't consider it vote manipulation by my definition.
I am a freshman moderator of /r/portland. I had thought working as a moderator would be a great way to help grow the subreddit's base. Offer more useful real world interaction points and basically have a big impact on Portland. Instead what I've found is that 99% of the time the moderators are dealing with bad actors and that has to be the primary focus to keep the sub from falling apart. It isn't just dealing with t…
/r/portland is definitely a challenging place to moderate. Frankly I've never seen a local city sub quite like that one.
I downloaded Reddit Enhancement Suite and it has a feature that marks the cumulative amount of upvotes you've given a user when you see a post of theirs. It is absolutely eye-opening just how much content is posted by the same few dozens of usernames. GallowBoob is the most infamous but to focus on him would be a mistake. It's pretty clear to me that the vast majority of content on Reddit is heavily manipulated and a…
Most of the discussion about any products such as coffee makers, bikes, etc are manipulated and placed there by the companies selling those products. The front page is also heavily manipulated, political posts often end up there artificially.
I doubt that he would walk away from the website even though a number of users would be happier.
There are hundreds of fantastic moderators on Reddit that genuinely help people and there are also a few people who want to feel powerful by manipulating others.
I am a freshman moderator of /r/portland. I had thought working as a moderator would be a great way to help grow the subreddit's base. Offer more useful real world interaction points and basically have a big impact on Portland. Instead what I've found is that 99% of the time the moderators are dealing with bad actors and that has to be the primary focus to keep the sub from falling apart. It isn't just dealing with t…
> stepping into stopping out of control discussions.
I mean, if your goal is to "control" conversations, yeah, that's going to be a lot of work. What's the point of that anyway?
I downloaded Reddit Enhancement Suite and it has a feature that marks the cumulative amount of upvotes you've given a user when you see a post of theirs. It is absolutely eye-opening just how much content is posted by the same few dozens of usernames. GallowBoob is the most infamous but to focus on him would be a mistake. It's pretty clear to me that the vast majority of content on Reddit is heavily manipulated and a…
Or... maybe they just post good content? You yourself said the extension marks the cumulative amount of upvotes you've given a user. So, unless you yourself are engaged in this conspiracy to inflate GallowBoob's upvotes, then all this is evidence of is that GallowBoob seems uniquely skilled at finding and posting viral content.
Some people follow the big accounts directly, so their posts are guaranteed to get early traction then build off exponentially and make the front page all the time.
"Five people moderate the 92 largest subreddits." If that's true, why? How could an individual possibly have enough time and attention to moderate more than one subreddit with millions of users?
NodeRed or Apache NiFi can help a great deal with that. Both are great at posting and reposting (on and off Reddit, or between FB, Reddit, Twitter, etc), along with controlling botfarms. edit: Seriously, why the downvotes? We had a NiFi post a week ago. And those of us who do OSINT and investigative work also use deanonymizing techniques. We automate our defenses as well using similar.
Probably because it kind of ignored my point. For example, r/pics has thirty-six moderators. Some of them are undoubtedly inactive, but it's still obvious that moderating a single massive subreddit is an order of magnitude more work than can be done by one person and therefore giving one person moderator rights over multiple does not increase the amount or quality of moderation. One person cannot use that power to do more good for the site, so the question is what are they using that power for and why do they deserve it?
I stopped being an active user of Reddit about 5 years ago. I felt that it wasn't a forum that was conductive to interesting discussion. But also, I know it's a cliche to talk about the eternal September effect, but somehow it feels like the discourse in the site is even more stupid today. At least to me it seems like it's just useful as a problem and answer site you Google on. But now it seems like to some of users…
I think most people take issue with the fact that reddit, one of the most trafficked websites in the world, has some of their biggest subs controlled by a few people. You can easily use this power to shape/influence public opinion of a large number of users.
More worrying to me is the great effects that botnets can have on reddit post. If you can get a post off and running early, it will appear on hot and then get to the front page, and grow exponentially. I mean, the internet research agency is no big secret and this sort of work is their bread and butter 1.