Reddit mods and scaling problems in social control

Author has no clue what they're talking about and it shows. Moderators are under absolutely no obligation to enforce Reddits anti-spam policy and I am aware of zero instances of a moderator being removed or warned for failure to remove spam.

Now moderators ARE held accountable for some things, they can't just turn a blind eye to global rules like no child pornography without being removed, and in general they're expected to keep their communities under control. If their community in particular starts harassing other communities either on or off of Reddit, or it brings Public disrepute to reddit in some way (/r/jailbait), generally the admins will get involved. However the admins don't care if you don't remove spam for your own subreddit for a very simple reason - it only affects users ON YOUR SUBREDDIT so why would they care or be involved? The commonality between all the cases I just mentioned is you're causing trouble OUTSIDE your community and causing Reddit as a whole problems, THAT'S when the admins get involved. They are like the federal government of reddit they're not supposed to care about internal affairs of states they're supposed to care about inter-state affairs and international affairs.

Another important thing to realise about reddit is most of the moderation isn't done by moderators or admins, there are way too few of them to moderate effectively. The author is correct about one thing - were those Reddit's only moderation tools even with automation scaling moderation would be impossible, but they're not the only moderation tools Reddit has. Most moderation is done through the influence of users soft-censoring posts through downvoting and reporting posts to draw the attention to the mods. Something the author didn't even write about or seem to think about is the fact the mod probably only looked at his post BECAUSE a user reported it.

In general though, Reddit at a global admin level has long blocked users for self-promotion and they even have a writeup about it. I have seen countless users, even ones generally well received by communities banned for self-promotion, even ones whose posts I kept promoting after the original posters account got banned because I liked their posts so much (and I know how to not get banned for spamming on Reddit), because one mans useful post is another man's spam and to be fair you have to just ban all self-promoters. Reddit has writeup about this: https://www.reddit.com/wiki/selfpromotion/

FTA: "But my article is not the type of spam these rules are meant to exclude" FT rules: "We're not making a judgement on your quality, just your behavior on reddit." "10% or less of your posting and conversation should link to your own content"

So I would say if anything, the scalability problem Reddit has is that authors like the OP can't read the fucking rules, break rules, get banned, and cry about it while citing a misinformed view of how Reddit moderation works which isn't surprising given he didn't even bother to read the rules before publishing this crap.

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Sure, but that further bolsters my point that HN is in fact different.

I don't think it would work

- Most people never touch which ublock filter they use, so moderators probably wouldn't care too much about maintaining a decent behavior

- People would have no idea what mod to pick and just pick the first few top ones, resulting in even more centralization, these people would have insane monetization options

- You also have the problem that if a top mod "retires", the combination of extreme centralization + a large portion of users who can't be arsed to go into the settings would mean that a fair portion of the userbase would durably get unmodded content

- I believe that reddit doesn't want their users to be able to "turn off" moderation, even just for themselves, which you would be able to do by removing all filters. Think of people posting child porn, etc.

I'd have just gone for an appeal system. Your ban message has an "appeal" button inviting you to make a post on /r/banned, once you've posted reddit notifies a certain number of recently active users at random, send them a DM telling them they've been selected for drama duty, and give them a special upvote/downvote for your post in /r/banned or something. The results determine if your ban gets overturned. With some thought put for edge cases (what if nobody gave a crap, do you get another chance, ...) but, hopefully, it's kept simple.

You track how many overturns per ban the average mod gets, single out the outliers, and allow the community of the /r/banned sub to give these mods the boot or not

>a single set of rules being applied as the mods intend.

Perhaps you haven't had as much moderator interaction as I have, but this is not the case whatsoever. Some subs will have 30-100 mods and each will apply the rules differently per their own interests or pet peeves.