Reddit's top user leaves platform after harassment

You experience a backlash from some users, sure. If most users consider it a positive change, then no big deal.

> When you're a moderator, there's often very little that you can do that won't generate backlash unless the user in question is so toxic that the community as a whole agrees they need to go.

This seems to be assuming ban-like tactics. They're a poor option and I don't favour them.

> Your idea of random promotions to mod status w/ limited mod terms is an incredibly bad idea as well, because the moment a bad faith actor gets promoted to mod your entire community will quickly go up in flames.

You're making a lot of assumptions:

1. There's an innate equilibrium between the cardinality of the mod set, the probability that it contains a bad actor, and the probability that actor can cause appreciable disruption. The larger the mod set, the less likely a bad actor can do anything meaningful. You can likely make this probability arbitrarily small if that's a likely threat model. Tandom appointments work quite well to increase efficiency in various consensus-driven systems [1].

2. Mods shouldn't have absolute power. There is simply no way that a single mod should be able to destroy a whole community, any more than a bad judge in the legal system, or a single bad politician could destroy a city, county or state.

3. A transparent appeals process is always needed, in which other mods and community members review mod decisions. It took us millennia to develop our robust legal systems. Technology can eliminate some of the bureaucratic inefficiencies of the legal system in this setting, but it still contains robust patterns that should be copied.

4. You're assuming an open signup process which is vulnerable to DoS/brigading tactics. Maybe there's a way to allow open signups too (with reputation systems), but it's not strictly necessary.

5. Various reputation systems can be overlaid on this, and this interacts well with transparent judgments/appeals process, ie. someone with a long record of violating conditions and losing appeals would be less likely to be given mod power (but never 0%).

In general, today's moderation systems are intentionally vulnerable to a number of problems, because sites optimize for growing a user base rather than fostering community, because that's how they raise money.

Consider something akin to stack overflow, which randomly shows you messages to review or triage. Every now and again you get 5 messages or mod decisions to review, and you vote your approval/disapproval. This narrows the gap between traditional mod status and users status, where true mods would be relegated to reviewing illegal content that places the whole community in jeopardy.

Of course, there might also be considerations for avoiding the tyranny of the majority, but my point is only that the space of possible moderation strategies is considerably wider than most seem to think.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S037843711...

Speaking solely on behalf of myself: we see a notable volume of fantasy and fetish posts as well as legitimate pleas for help that veer into extremely disturbing territory. The result is a situation where mods may well find themselves feeling substantially troubled with extended exposure.

I'm not about to impose that on someone else, and as a result of inevitable scope creep from the sub gaining readers, we've now got to sustain an environment that people use as either a first- or last-resort option while at the same time turning away significant populations of people (a subset of followers from influencers such as https://twitter.com/redditships/) who appear to relish creating drama from people calling for help. Great example: https://twitter.com/eganist/status/1263534755045412870

When staying imposes a burden on myself but leaving heightens the risk that people may be harmed, it's a lose-lose, and the trauma arises from this.

I'd show you some of the stuff we've had to mod out, but it's too dark for Hackernews.

Metafilter is a forum which used to be very diverse in opinion and is now basically captured by a small vocal minority. How did they do this? The minority produced a large amount of content for the forum and was very active. 95% of that content was high quality and on topic but the remainder is biased and very opinionated. As a result of their interaction with the site they were closer to the mods, regarded more highly, given the benefit of the doubt in "bad actor" conversations.

Now today Metafilter is a dying community of territorial users who eviscerate anyone who doesn't know how to play the game. The minority won and created their little clubhouse corner of the internet. Metafilter as a forum though is a shell of its former self. There are fundraisers to keep the site alive and formerly paid mods and devs are now either retired or do it for free. Not only did it drive away old and new users but the minority also seems to have become bored without constant drama and moved on (as seen by new posts and commenting activity falling of a cliff).

I know the common refrain on HN and in general is "on a private platform there is no such thing as free speech" but be careful. Don't let blatantly toxic users run your platform but beware of users who are quick to call everything toxic.

There's no benefit to banning the bad folks, since, like your guy, they just create a new account.

    author:
        name: [baddude1, baddude2]
    action: remove
    action_reason: "Troll / Spammer"