Reddit's top user leaves platform after harassment

Something Awful also has a number of other moderation features that I think more sites should emulate:

1. Temporary bans from posting ("probation") of variable length, to allow for punishment short of a full ban. Usually 6 hours to a couple days, depending on the offense, occasionally a week or longer.

2. A nominal registration fee ($10, one time) to register an account, to cut down on bad actors just making new accounts.

3. Normal bans for being a dick are reversible by paying $10 (same cost as registering a new account), unless you get "permabanned" for either repeated bad behavior or posting illegal content. If you get permabanned, any new accounts you create get permabanned as well (assuming the admins can find them, which they do remarkably effectively using IP and I think payment info).

That last point sounds like it incentivizes the mods to ban users, so that the forums get more money. But it doesn't seem to actually have that effect, possibly because most of the mods are not paid.

There have also been a few interesting experiments in moderation that were less useful, but are definitely entertaining, such as the ability to limit an account to a single subforum (usually the one for posting deals, or one of the ones for shitposting). It's also possible to view a user's "rap sheet" of moderation actions from any of their posts.

[0] https://forums.somethingawful.com/banlist.php

As a moderator on another forum (not reddit), I disagree. Many of the moderation actions I take are visible to ordinary users, and that's on purpose. For community norms to be maintained, they have to be visibly enforced: enforcement is not just for the particular bad actor, but also for the ordinary users who genuinely want to respect community norms, so they know what the boundaries are (and therefore know how to respect them), and can see that people who violate those boundaries are dealt with (so they have confidence that the norms are meaningful).

> Ordinary users think the that moderators are power-mad bullies who ban and delete as they see fit, with no accountability.

Again, I disagree. If moderation actions are often visible, as above, ordinary users who genuinely want to respect community norms can see what is actually being enforced, and over time, if the moderators are doing a reasonable job, ordinary users will see that the pattern of enforcement reasonably matches the stated norms that are supposed to be enforced. Most ordinary users are reasonable and don't expect perfection, but they do expect consistency and reasonable judgment.

The biggest problem I see facing good moderation is that moderators can't be everywhere at once. One way to address that is to give ordinary users a way to report problematic posts, to bring them to the attention of the moderators. That also gives ordinary users another way to see how moderation is being done, because they can see what is or is not done in response to their reports.

There will always be some people who are never satisfied, and who will find something to complain about no matter what moderators do. But I don't think most ordinary users fall into that category.

Also, about "no accountability": ultimately, as a moderator, I'm accountable to the owner of the site. Similarly, the HN mods are ultimately accountable to the owners of HN. So the corresponding question for reddit would be, who owns reddit?

I had a funny incident, where I misunderstood a comment, thinking that "all your answers are negative" was very true, because I often disagree and try to be contrarian. SE has a policy that discourages discussion, so if users find it uncomfortable having their views challenged, when they really wanted an easy answer, howbeit simplistic, that may be lawful.

The situation is different when discoussion is the aim of the game. And it's a bit disingenious to say that SE doesn't have "discussion"; rather, they avoid controversy, heated arguments, or open ended debate.

Anyhow, regarding your comment that downvoting is terrible for civil discours, I agree inasmuch as it's often hard to tell what the downvote signalizes, as it might lump up many different opinions into one false agreement. Say, five different opinions compete, but only one takes on all of the answers and will accrue downvotes for the attacks, whereas the others get basicly ignored by competitors for being irrelevant, but yield feedback so that the vote is really one of popularity, as opposed to ...

Really says something about diplomacy. And I hate it so much.

> I wouldn't consider it vote manipulation by my definition.

I suppose that's kind of my point. Your definition and perspective come from your experience on reddit as someone who posts that way. But there are other people who don't play the game of karmawhoring who might see things differently.

It seems to me it's a very blurry line that is difficult to define and largely a matter of perspective. The people who have mastered the system feel it's a matter of merit while the rest feel its a matter a manipulation. Reality is probably somewhere in the middle.