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Reddit mods and scaling problems in social control

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Re: Reddit mods and scaling problems in social control

#71

Post by berjin »

mike_d wrote: post #33
knolan wrote: post #20

Interestingly enough there’s been some mod drama over on /r/AskScienceFiction today. This is a sub where people ask questions and get in universe responses. It’s very nerdy and can be fun. It also can attract a certain type of poster who can be lacking in say, self awareness and take it too seriously. The new Harry Potter game is generating a lot of posts and a particular mod who has personal reasons to dislike JK Ro…

[flagged]

Or you could accept that people have opinions that are different to yours and books are orthogonal to her opinions anyway. It's really concerning how authoritarian some people are while ironically claiming others are the bad actors. This is what the echo chamber voting system on reddit results in.

Re: Reddit mods and scaling problems in social control

#72

Post by digdugdirk »

nemothekid wrote: post #42
knolan wrote: post #20

Interestingly enough there’s been some mod drama over on /r/AskScienceFiction today. This is a sub where people ask questions and get in universe responses. It’s very nerdy and can be fun. It also can attract a certain type of poster who can be lacking in say, self awareness and take it too seriously. The new Harry Potter game is generating a lot of posts and a particular mod who has personal reasons to dislike JK Ro…

> a particular mod who has personal reasons to dislike JK Rowling I think it's disingenuous to paint what are likely political reasons as just personal quibbles.

If someone is trans, or cares about trans people, its entirely personal to them. The "issue" isn't always a political one.

Yes, the mod in question may be forcing their personal worldview on a subreddit, but the OC's phrasing of the overall situation seems completely accurate.

Re: Reddit mods and scaling problems in social control

#73

Post by goatlover »

mike_d wrote: post #33
knolan wrote: post #20

Interestingly enough there’s been some mod drama over on /r/AskScienceFiction today. This is a sub where people ask questions and get in universe responses. It’s very nerdy and can be fun. It also can attract a certain type of poster who can be lacking in say, self awareness and take it too seriously. The new Harry Potter game is generating a lot of posts and a particular mod who has personal reasons to dislike JK Ro…

[flagged]

How is spoiling a story for others doing that? It just makes the person spoiling it look like an asshole.

Re: Reddit mods and scaling problems in social control

#74

Post by abetusk »

People are focusing on the Reddit mod narrative but if you go down in the article further, there's some interesting ideas.

The author talks about Dunbar's number [0] and does a speculative approximation, saying that good faith communities are about the maximum size of the "friends-of-friends" and some of "friends-of-friends-of-friend" graph. That is, say you trust your friends to have good faith discussion (around 150 of them) and you trust your friends of friends to have good faith discussions (150^2) and maybe some portion of your friends of friends of friends (now we're at 150^2.5), then the community size is about 300k.

The data size is small and anecdotal but the idea is pretty interesting, at least to me. It at least tries to answer what the critical online community size is where good faith discussions break down, "scaling issues" start to creep in and at what point online communities change. A lot of folks here on HN talk about things like how to social media at scale (for example, Shirky's "Three Things to Accept [about online communities]" [1] has been no doubt featured on HN before). I also wonder if this ties into the "1000 true fans" idea somehow.

Whatever the community size is where scaling issues crop up, this leads to practical advice on which communities to focus on if you want to engage in a meaningful way, promote your work, or find a niche community for a business idea, say. That is, look for communities whose size is large enough to be impactful but small enough so that it hasn't gone through the scaling phase transition. This number is most likely in the range of 20k to 300k, maybe with an upper bound of 3M.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dunbar%27s_number

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20131130191257/http://www.shirky...

Re: Reddit mods and scaling problems in social control

#75

Post by knolan »

chungy wrote: post #68
knolan wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If I painted it as a political agenda someone else would complain. They are personally affected because they are trans. That seemed the most honest way to phrase it.

It's still political. It's extremely unlikely the mod in question and JK Rowling have ever met, which makes it impossible to be personal.

Personal as in their private life or identity is affected, not interpersonal as in a relationship between two or more people or groups. Political would relate to government policies, or how a country is run. I’m flabbergasted that I need to explain this.

Re: Reddit mods and scaling problems in social control

#76

Post by OrvalWintermute »

numpad0 wrote: post #34
operatingthetan wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>No, it's run by a few humans. Dang is employed by HN. >That's not why reddit is different. It's because a lot of the humans that run the subreddits are inconsistent. You're disagreeing and then saying something that isn't appreciably different.

Dang might be well-intended kind dictator, but he’s no machine. He’s just a very thoughtful and kind person with human limits and capacities.

Dang is a member of a specific community. Consequently, even if well intentioned, he is likely to share their cognitive biases and perspectives.

I think this is why we won't have great transparency around banning, shadowbanning, or a check on the censorious power of flagging.

Re: Reddit mods and scaling problems in social control

#77

Post by seydor »

sebstefan wrote: post #53
i_like_apis wrote: post #25

I find Reddit mods are particularly power crazy. Most of them seem to be doing it for power rather than for love of the content of their sub. There is so much personal bias and posts removed for personal reasons, or just to flex. I’m not speculating on the reason, but it’s definitely like that.

But if you pause for a minute, can you think of a place on the internet where there isn't a systemic problem with mods being power crazy? Genuine question!

yes, many. Subreddits are sticky and it s almost impossible for someone to start competing with the medium-to-big ones , because the 'obvious' names are taken . This is especially true for countries / cities / brand names. As long as the mods are not completely crazy, there is only one word for 'politics' or 'europe', and users will not go to a new sub just because the mods are better.

If they were individual internet forums, people would just leave instead. Reddit acts as big single-sign-on that heavily biases users towards its existing subreddits. The fact that reddit admins still allow a small group of people to moderate hundreds of subreddits for decade+ is proof of that. If they cared, they would mandatorily recycle them

Re: Reddit mods and scaling problems in social control

#78

Post by NotPractical »

OrvalWintermute wrote: post #76
numpad0 wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Dang might be well-intended kind dictator, but he’s no machine. He’s just a very thoughtful and kind person with human limits and capacities.

Dang is a member of a specific community. Consequently, even if well intentioned, he is likely to share their cognitive biases and perspectives. I think this is why we won't have great transparency around banning, shadowbanning, or a check on the censorious power of flagging.

I imagine that (thoughtfully) moderating a site as large as HN is no easy task, and though I'm all for more transparency, I think logs like that have the potential to open a whole can of worms and add much more burden on Dan. All of a sudden you get a bunch of HN posts that solely exist to criticize Dan's decisions which clog up the feed. If a rule is added against this it looks like even more censorship.

Lobsters [1] has mod logs, but it also has a much smaller community, and it's invite-only so there's less need for moderation in the first place.

[1] https://lobste.rs/moderations

Re: Reddit mods and scaling problems in social control

#79

Post by commandlinefan »

knolan wrote: post #62
nemothekid wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> a particular mod who has personal reasons to dislike JK Rowling I think it's disingenuous to paint what are likely political reasons as just personal quibbles.

If I painted it as a political agenda someone else would complain. They are personally affected because they are trans. That seemed the most honest way to phrase it.

> personally affected because they are trans

That's something I find surprising about reddit - I can't remember what the exact percentage is, but I think it's something like 0.1% of the world population is trans... but it seems like 90% of the moderators on reddit are. What is it about reddit that attracts them?

Re: Reddit mods and scaling problems in social control

#80

Post by commandlinefan »

airstrike wrote: post #2

Reddit mods are arguably the worst part of reddit. It's so refreshing to come to HN and see (community- and mod-powered) moderation done right

> Reddit mods are arguably the worst part of reddit

No, the actual administrators (the ones that work there are). They're the ones that can actually ban entire subreddits and entire users. I had my account permanently suspended for upvoting vaccine hesitancy. That wasn't done by a reddit moderator.

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