Reddit mods and scaling problems in social control

Sorry, I'll back up a bit. I thought you were arguing that Reddit has the Constitutional/inalienable right to not have its speech compelled by the government. I agree, but I think the motivation behind that right has to be considered. Freedom of speech from governmental control is important, but the reason it is important is that open discourse is an important part of society. The pipes we use to perform that discourse are arguably a sort of "commons." I would argue that, that being the case, maybe we should think hard about leaving it to the control of private enterprises.

This really seems like a case where the existing categories in the law created hundreds of years ago are no longer adequate to capture present realities, similar to how they didn't have AR-15s in mind when they wrote 2A. If you ask whether Reddit is a public or private company, sure, it's private. But if you look at what intuitions back then were around "public" and "private", and for that matter around what "speech" was, it seems like the real answer is that (in regards to this debate) Reddit is a third type of thing that doesn't have a name yet.

> Get a blog! The very worst people on Earth have managed to keep blogs running.

This might illustrate my point better. I assume you don't support people getting banned straight off the internet. Is it simply because no one owns the internet, but Reddit is owned by Reddit (the company)? Maybe it's time for that boundary to be reexamined.

You are just telling me what the current state of the law is and how society is currently run. I agree that is the world we live in. I am making a prescriptive argument about how I think we ought to do things. Maybe my argument is weak; I’ll keep trying.

My take is that the word "just" is doing a lot of work in that sentence. I'm not super interested in debating alternate constitutions; personally, I for the most part like the one we have. I might not be your best discussion partner on this.

I'm a Reddit moderator of a medium-sized sub. We're talking more than 100k, but less than 300k.

The amount of bullshit we need to filter out is tremendous. There's constant spam every day, and it's hard to catch all of it. We allow self promotions of original content, but only once per account and per topic, otherwise the whole sub turns into a spammy, boring mess. Automoderator helps, but Reddit does not. All of our content is in a different language and Reddit either ignores most spam or overreacts on a report and bans a user who was using local lingo to perform a joke. There is no in-between. The seniority of anyone's account doesn't mean a thing to Reddit. A simple botched GoogleTranslate-like action on a comment can get you banned fully from the platform, even as a moderator.

Do we delete discussions? Yes, yes we do, when the situation calls for it. You don't get to cause a ruckus or ad-hoc insult people. You also don't get to spread rumors, obvious disinformation and pseudo-science. Save it for FB. You also don't get to threaten anyone or claim person X is of lower value due to their nationality, creed or religion. If there is too much content related to one topic, we'll delete your post and ask you to join the already submitted one. If we sense that your tone is causing a flame war, we'll nuke the whole thread. It's called moderation, not free speech. Banning is a last resort. If you feel we've wronged you, you can always send us a polite message explaining what's up. If you feel we suck, there's always the option to create a different subreddit.

Why do I do this? I normally wouldn't, but this subreddit is very important to me because it's one of the last few places left to freely discuss about the politics and daily life of a certain geographical region we live in. Homegrown forums are no longer easily visible on Google, cost money to host and have a worse interface. Facebook groups can't fill the void because people's full names are visible. So, in spite of the government crackdown on dissenting opinions, we somehow thrive under anonymity. Do people curse us? Hell yes, some do. In fact, people from HN on here are somehow managing to act holier than thou and paint us as power hungry basement dwellers. Fun.

I'll let you know, I would rather not deal with your shit and would rather do something else, but for now it's my moral duty to stick to what I'm doing and put in all the effort I can to ensure a safe, free zone for discussion.

But at some point, most moderators will leave. We can get banned just as easily as our users, there is little to no protection awarded to us, people hate us for deleting their content and then they try and dox or attack us. And now you get what you asked for: fully automated moderation. A poorly made translation layer pushing content to an ML trained dataset indicating whether something is hate speech or a threat, overseen by underpaid 3rd world workers who will eject you from the whole platform at their leisure.

>we're not talking about the failure modes of moderation when moderators are incapacitated, we're talking about moderatorial discretion.

I saw the conversation as one about the structure of moderation. Paying a mod that you meet with every week to sync up with is very different from someone making some small sub themselves and enaccting any rules that don't break the sitewide rules. Likewise, a mod has no vested interest in the site nor its policies.

That mod-admin relationship is special on reddit, in a mostly bad way since admins ignore many mod issues. Dang is more like a moderator and an admin rolled into one.