411–420 of 482 posts
Just five months ago users were getting permanently suspended from Reddit for mildly criticizing GallowBoob. You can see it here: https://old.reddit.com/r/AgainstKarmaWhores/comments/eb146l/... 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…
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…
Same platform, but the experience couldn't be more different: we spend almost all our time dealing with "shallow" problems at a high scale. For us that means flamewars, brigading and (usually political) astroturfing, and to a lesser extent commercial spam. We don't even remotely have time to go looking for deeper problems such as ban evasion, because the volume is so high. We know it's probably happening but it's almost impossible to police because it disappears against the everyday noise.
One thing that I think helps us a lot is heavy use of automoderator rules and the spam filter to remove the most obvious problems automatically.
I think smaller and more local communities breed a very different class of problems than big ones -- it's much more personal for the participants, and their retaliation is more personal as well. Also, a single abusive user can do so much more damage in a small community because they don't just blend into the background noise.
One constant though is that we do see some really troubling things as well.
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> I want to participate, but I lack impulse control, so I'm excluded. That's not fair. Yes, it is, because the problem is not the garden, it's you. You want to participate, but you don't have a basic skill (impulse control) that is required for participation. It's like saying you want to be a concert pianist, but you don't know how to play the piano, so you're excluded and that's not fair.
Stop making this personal. > so you are excluded from what, playing the piano? Do you maybe see a connection here to why somebody might not know "how to play the piano"? Or in other words: A garden without "you" is not really a garden, except in theory, if the proverbial tree makes a sound when nobody can hear it fall. That's a slippery slope argument. Many people may lack impulse control, but preemptive judgement ca…
I didn't; the person I responded to did, by using the word "I". They were specifically talking about themselves.
> from what, playing the piano?
From being a concert pianist. Read what I actually wrote.
> It's fair to those that have "impulse control", maybe, but it is perhaps unfair that they get to decide what that is, when a moderator might act out of impulse, or experience, all the same.
My statement that impulse control is a basic requirement for participation applies just as much to moderators as to any other participants.
Who gets to decide what the forum rules and norms are is whoever owns the forum. That's as fair as it gets.
There are some forums where lack of impulse control isn't much of a problem, because nobody else on that forum has it either. So strictly speaking, I should have restricted my comments to forums where that is not the case. I don't think that makes much difference in practice for this discussion, since as far as I can tell the forums where lack of impulse control is the norm don't have moderation problems since they don't have moderation at all.
> who's aspiring to become a concert pianist in this day and age?
Googling "how to become a concert pianist" gets plenty of hits, so it looks like plenty of people are trying to help aspiring concert pianists. Perhaps they're all speaking to an audience of zero, but I doubt it.
> unless you meant to imply that the reddit moderator cabal were playing the readers like an instrument
You're going way off into left field here.
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> I have had to tolerate obviously toxic but helpful people before I understand where you are coming from here. I struggle with this. I think there is a legit theory for it, usually given in the context of how to reconcile shitty behavior of geniuses (Picasso comes to mind: legendary artist, shitty human.) Even if toxic people have something good to say once in a while, do the ends justify the means if they stomp all…
> I want to participate, but I lack impulse control, so I'm excluded. That's not fair. Yes, it is, because the problem is not the garden, it's you. You want to participate, but you don't have a basic skill (impulse control) that is required for participation. It's like saying you want to be a concert pianist, but you don't know how to play the piano, so you're excluded and that's not fair.
I think your argument mixes up things you can control (skill) with things you cannot control (impulsivity), if the latter could be controlled it wouldn't be impulsive.
And I admit that is a big gray area. There's a continuum of toxicity online, and there are going to be some moderation rules that are subjective.
Unlike a pianist, I see the argument as more akin to web developers choosing not to implement alternate or semantic constructs which in turn excludes blind people. A visitor can't get better at not being blind. Of course, the analogy breaks down because blind people aren't adding noncritical discourse (aka what one mod may consider "flamebait"), but now we are back to subjectivity and affordance as to what is noncritical. We clearly know how to make the web accessible to blind people, but we don't have a universally clear way to make discourse available to people who sometimes suck at it.
However, I can create as many accounts as I want, so I got that going for me.
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Because the continued existence and quality of the subreddit brings value to them. It’s no different than volunteering. The fact that Reddit is for-profit doesn’t really enter into the equation. I don’t get it for relationship subreddits because it’s so mentally exhausting but for fandoms and niche communities the experience is super cool.
I don't think I've ever volunteered for a profit-maximizing private venture. Is that a thing people commonly do in real life? I mean, I've done internships, but the quid-pro-quo there was quite clear.
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> Trying to police too much is likely why moderators get such a backlash when they employ heavy-handed tactics like outright bans. This logic doesn't follow. If you don't police enough , then users have an expectation that anything goes. When you do decide to moderate behavior, you experience a backlash because you've changed stances. If you moderate too much , then you get accused of being heavy-handed, fascistic or…
> If you don't police enough, then users have an expectation that anything goes. When you do decide to moderate behavior, you experience a backlash because you've changed stances. 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 i…
Have you acted as a moderator before? What are some communities which you believe have the idealized form of moderation? Because even Stack Overflow as you've referenced has issues with high toxicity among users chasing off moderators all the same.
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?
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> But then some topics veer into domains that make me angry (hello politics), or I find a comment inappropriate or unfair, or mod behavior hypocritical. And I share that in a post that gets flagged or downvoted, and I get banned. Kurt Tucholsky gave great advice on how to write a letter to a government agency that is applicable to all potentially heated discussions: * write letter. * put letter in drawer. * wait thre…
Hey, that's a great idea! Instead of getting warned or banned, a user is placed in a timeout box where all of their posts get a three day lag and remain editable, and when the user logs in, they must re-read their posts before proceeding to the site. Kind of an 'in-your-face' reminder not to be a troll. It wouldn't stop the insane trolls, but maybe it would give the borderline trolls time to think.
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I'm not sure what point in time you're referring to, but I've been subbed there for years and I find the content to be above average in quality (although not great) relative to other subs. If I had to rank it, a very rough ranking would be somewhere between r/diy and r/technology in terms of quality. Shit-posting is on just about every sub, so I don't think it's fair to base it entirely off of the handful of trolls r…
> just noticed you mentioned "liberal city", so if it's political stances you're referring to then yes a more conservative-leaning person may not feel welcome on r/portland funnily enough, I'm referring to the sub often times having a more conservative audience, often coming in from the suburbs (Vancouver being a big one there).
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I firmly believe that the only way an online forum, particularly an anonymous one with free signups can remain relatively civil is very heavy handed moderation. This is not a free speech zone (it's a privately owned space), and the only way to prevent bad actors is to be very liberal in applying heavy moderation. If a few "medium" actors get banned by accident, that's the price to pay for the rest of us getting to en…
I strongly disagree. Bad actors thrive just as well if not better in places with moderation and even sign up fees. 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 an…