This article is falling on me as tone deaf. Most people who frequent the site dont care at all about the plight of the moderators. Moderators are not elected, they arent forcefully drafted, they dont step down when the community dislikes them. They are landowners who got there first, followed by a lot of cronyism/nepotism. It's an old boys club. They do a lot of hard work for the site, but they would be easily replaceable if the site rules didnt protect them. The moderators think they are special, the admins see them as interchangeable. Moderators are largely faceless human spam filters. It is a task that could be crowdsourced better so more people are doing less work. Slashdot had better moderation tools than reddit. When I see the moderators throw tantrums demanding more respect, it reminds me of Reagan firing every air traffic controller who went on strike, people who thought they were above being replaced. The reddit admins should fear the power they have given the moderators, and are probably brainstorming ways to reduce it.
The "woe is me" cry of the moderators doesnt resonate with the majority of the userbase, because the moderators volunteered. The apathetic majority doesnt comment in situations like this, so you wont hear their voices. In the immortal words of southpark, if you dont like America, then you can get out. But everyone knows they wont actually step down, because they crave the power they have accumulated, and are using the veneer of "we do this because we love the community" to generate a populous outcry that they know will gain them even more power. Theyre not fooling me.
> Most people who frequent the site dont care at all about the plight of the moderators.
They care about the quality of the comment they see on the subreddits they follow. That transitively means they really care about the plight of the moderators. They just don't know it.
> Moderators are largely faceless human spam filters.
On the well-moderated subreddits—which are increasingly the largest ones—they do a hell of a lot more than spam filtering. Moderators at subreddits like /r/NoStupidQuestions, /r/science, or many of the "Ask ___" subreddits are responsible for instilling the voice and culture of the subreddit.
> When I see the moderators throw tantrums demanding more respect, it reminds me of Reagan firing every air traffic controller who went on strike, people who thought they were above being replaced.
I'm not saying they couldn't be replaced. But if you do that, those subreddits will fundamentally change. And, in many cases, the userbase may go elsewhere before the subreddit finds its feet again.
> In the immortal words of southpark, if you dont like America, then you can get out.
I don't think reddit needs to worry much about moderators leaving. But they should really worry about content contributors leaving. The Digg v4 exodus happened virtually overnight. There's nothing magical about reddit that ensures that can't happen to them.
"Moderators at subreddits like /r/NoStupidQuestions, /r/science, or many of the "Ask ___" subreddits are responsible for instilling the voice and culture of the subreddit."
I don't see how this is the case. Replace spam with 'off-topic' and you have it. It really isn't an earth-changing thing to filter spam/off-topic/rude/offensive commentary (and it could be argued that even on the larger sub-reddits, that a good job isn't necessarily being done of that).
"Instilling the voice and culture" sounds like self-aggrandizement to me.
As a counter-example I give /r/AskHistorians. I am not a historian and not affiliated with the site. It is very tightly moderated and it works. Questions and comments that are off-topic or low-quality are removed. Answers must meet quality standards. The repondents take more time and effort in the answers than your average university teaching assistant. If you want to tell jokes or puns there are many other subreddits to go to. The result is one of the best forums I've ever seen on the internet. I'm not even a history buff but I admire that subreddit.
I will agree that few subreddits reach this level. The moderators of AskHistorians put in the effort. The responders put in even more.
askhistorians is one of the only counter examples to my point, specifically because moderators have domain knowledge. they are nowhere near as easily replaceable. iama mods are not expert interviewers, they are trash collectors and coordinators.
something else you will notice about askhistorians is that it doesnt have the usual guard. you dont see greatyellowshark, britishenglishpolice, klyde, krispykrackers, manwithoutmodem, maxwellhill, agentlame. the same reoccurring 100 people have taken control of a large portion of reddit (measured by subscriber)
I think part of the reason askhistorians works so well is because it exists outside the influence of that cabal. They come to their own decisions instead of blanketing policies over hundreds of subreddits at once.
>they really care about the plight of the moderators
no they dont. its like henchmen in a movie. if some fall more will take their place. its a thankless task. they dont care at all about the individual, they just care that the group functions. the group will function without the individual as long as there are reenforcements.
>in many cases, the userbase may go elsewhere before the subreddit finds its feet again.
probably to another subreddit, like when /r/trees replaced /r/marijuana (thats still a win for reddit corp)
>no they dont. its like henchmen in a movie. if some fall more will take their place. its a thankless task
I find most people who say things like this have 0 moderating experience, or at least no experience handling communities larger than 100 (or even 1,000) people.
Administration connection with moderators is important. If it's lacking, people willing to moderate will go to sites with better tools and better access to administration. There are "alternative Reddits" popping up, such as voat.co, to fill that position.
Mods aren't as easy to replace as people think they are. Finding someone who fits and follows the community culture, is able to act as a mediator in case of community conflicts, and enforce the rules with as little bias as impossible is actually quite hard and a moderator unable to do this can easily kill a community.
There is a fine balance in the relationships between lurkers::creators::mods::admins.
There was a post on reddit by a user emphasizing your reasoning but reaching a different conclusion. The user argued that he didn't not care about the plight of the moderators or content creators in one bit, he just wanted to selfishly consume his content.
He recognized the importance of the people that do care in creating the community that provides the quality of experience he desires and he was quick to emphasize that the second the quality drops he will find a new community.
The quality in subreddits are a direct function of the capabilities of their moderation staff.
> The Digg v4 exodus happened virtually overnight. There's nothing magical about reddit that ensures that can't happen to them.
I'm tired of that false comparison being repeated over and over again.
* reddit traffic surpassed Digg traffic well before the Digg v4 launch [0]. Digg was already in decline [1] while reddit was growing [2], and the Digg v4 exodus just made it happen faster. If anything, Digg v4 can be looked at as a failed last-ditch effort to stop the bleeding. Honestly, reddit can't die yet because there's nothing there to kill it. It's the same reason Facebook is still the king of social media even though everyone hates it.
* Digg had a number of other problems, as well. People had lambasted Digg for years due to power users and a culture of vote manipulation. I remember from that period, almost every post on Digg's front page was from the same 4 people or so. Digg also allowed and encouraged vote brigades: they had a site feature allowing you to send vote requests to anyone on your friend's list, and the power users mostly operated by using pyramid-like organizations where they'd send a link to a group of people, each member of that group would pass the link on to another group, and so on (this was mostly done through offsite tools like AIM and IRC, not the site's vote request feature). Digg was A-OK with that: their only rule was against automated voting using bots (Mark Cuban's brother got banned twice for violating that). At Digg, there was a widespread (and true) belief that if you weren't one of the fabled power users, you'd never get anything on the front page. This is one of the reasons reddit has a site-wide rule against vote manipulation. If you notice, reddit still has a wide variety of posters making the front page.
* Digg was all about the front page, and there was no real community aspect. Digg had a small handful of admin-created categories (which launched with v3), and you could browse the new queue, and that was it. The whole site was about mindless link propagation. On the other hand, reddit's signature feature is its user-created subreddits. Rather than just being a place for people to share links, redditors organized into communities based on things like shared hobbies (think places like /r/makeupaddiction and /r/blacksmith), fandoms (everything from /r/comicbooks to /r/mylittlepony to /r/kamenrider), and support groups for marginalized communities (e.g., /r/asktransgender, /r/actuallesbians). Digg had nothing of the sort. That's a fundamental incentive for people to stay on reddit: even if the front page goes to shit, you're not going to see something like the trans community or any of the numerous fandoms that have a presence on reddit pack up and leave. With Digg, wrecking the front page wrecked the whole site.
* Digg v4 drastically changed the site functionality. They stripped out a huge amount of site features, including downvotes on posts, friend pages, and categories (none of which HN has, by the way), and articles by mainstream publishers were weighted over other links. Nothing reddit has done has changed site functionality like that.
The digg exodus didnt happen overnight, I agree. But the v4 was the final nail in the coffin. It really started around the time digg banned anyone posting the DeCSS key. A lot of users started trickling away or splitting their time between reddit and digg. Reddit promoted itself as a free-speech platform at the time. Reddit self posts got posted to digg more often and more digg users came to reddit. After v4 there were some new accounts but actually the trickle had been going on for some time.
Whilst digg changed functionality reddit is trying to change its ethos, something that is much more dangerous than changing functionality. its ethos is what brought users in and people are more likely to leave because of changes to the fundamental ethos of a site rather than the functionality of the site.
I don't think most of reddit's content creators care one iota about freedom of speech.
Most people are used to vBulletin/phpBB/etc. forums that are strictly moderated. Besides, while the admins might have previously held a hands-off attitude, the subreddit moderators don't. Most subreddits have strict requirements for what can and can't be posted to them; go look at the sidebar of a big default like /r/pics or /r/askreddit. In this sense, reddit is far more restrictive than Digg, which just had a handful of site-wide admins (again, Digg had nothing like subreddits) enforcing a small amount of rules.
I can tell you right here that most of the people posting cat pictures to /r/aww, memes to /r/adviceanimals, discussions on /r/askreddit, etc. couldn't care less about their freeze peaches. They're not posting their cat pictures to /r/aww because of some mythical commitment to free speech; they're posting their cat pictures to /r/aww because that's where people post cat pictures. And the same goes for people who post to smaller, community-oriented subreddits: they're posting to these subreddits instead of various forums because they can reuse their existing reddit account and the subs are easily discoverable (Are you a fan of something? Then put an /r/ before it and you'll probably find a subreddit dedicated to it!). Probably the single biggest barrier to posting on forums is having to register a new account for each forum, and you don't have to worry about that on reddit.
In fact, "free speech" can be a detriment. Lots of people were turned off to reddit when Anderson Cooper brought /r/jailbait to the public eye. People who could've been posting cat pictures to /r/aww instead hesitated and said "nah, I'm not gonna post this to the same site where people post sexualized pictures of children". I'm active in some IRC channels, and whenever reddit comes up, I always have one or two regulars saying things like "reddit is a shithole because they allow /r/coontown and /r/picsofdeadkids" (VERY VERY NSFW do not browse at work).
For every freeze peaches zealot lost when /r/jailbait was banned, they gained a dozen more users who didn't want to be associated with borderline child porn. If most people cared about freedom of speech above all else, 8chan would be the most popular site on the Internet. But instead, 8chan has a reputation for being a cesspool, and admitting to being an 8channer is a good way to become a pariah.
I think a fair amount of people were perfectly fine with the company promoting free speech, while also encouraging heavily moderated subs like /r/askscience. the two preferences dont conflict at all.
> reddit traffic surpassed Digg traffic well before the Digg v4 launch [0].
I'm not sure exactly what that graph is showing. Is it just referrals to the author's own site? If so, that's likely biased.
It doesn't seem to line up with the numbers in your second link.
> Digg was already in decline [1] while reddit was growing [2], and the Digg v4 exodus just made it happen faster.
Digg had started to dip, but I think that was mostly from removing the DiggBar and Google's ranking changes. It had definitely plateaued before v4, but I think v4 was the tipping point where the critical mass of users abandoned Digg and (for better or worse) arrived at Reddit.
> On the other hand, reddit's signature feature is its user-created subreddits.
Yes, this is the smartest thing Reddit has done. I remember at the time people saying subreddits were totally broken because you had to submit a link to multiple subreddits separately. They argued that you should submit a link once and "tag" it to be in multiple subreddits.
I knew that they were deliberately decentralizing their communities so that each could develop its own personality and culture. It was an incredibly smart move.
At the same time, there is a lot of interaction between subreddits, and reddit still has a front page that is viewed heavily by lurkers. This means "global" things can still affect reddit as a whole.
> That's a fundamental incentive for people to stay on reddit: even if the front page goes to shit, you're not going to see something like the trans community or any of the numerous fandoms that have a presence on reddit pack up and leave.
That's only true for users that actually have accounts and tune their front page. I think a surprisingly large number don't do that.
Also, the social reputation of the site as a whole affects how people use it. 4chan also has a few nice subcommunities, but you don't want to tell your friends how much you like 4chan because they associate that name with its most toxic elements.
Moderators are not elected, they arent forcefully drafted, they dont step down when the community dislikes them. They are landowners who got there first, followed by a lot of cronyism/nepotism. It's an old boys club
Many reddit moderators have caused many subreddits to feel like webforums from the early 2000's. Many are heavy-handed and feeling their power a bit. There are some subreddits where a newbie can carefully read all of the instructions about posting, try their best to comply, then still have their post removed or down-voted, then be told that all such posts should be in a certain weekly discussion.
Part of the challenge with that is the available tools.
If there were more tools for re-parenting, editing and revising, or otherwise going through an editing process for submissions, the process could be far less confrontational. Medium operates in this manner, from what I understand.
On Reddit, there's no such cycle. There's no concept of an editorial submission queue (though some subs can and do hold all submissions for approval via AutoModerator hacks). Moderators cannot edit self-posts, even to correct obvious issues (misspelling, broken formatting, broken links). Not even the submitter can correct errors in titles, for which the only option is to delete and re-submit content (losing, of course, all discussion). I'm OCD enough that I do this, though my own subs are small enough that the content loss isn't overly significant.
In other words: many of the apparent limitations of Reddit moderation are the result of poor and or outgrown moderation tools.
Though even at best, the editorial process is brutal, and for newbies can be quite frustrating. Take a look at Wikipedia, where even with collaborative editing, revision history, controls, etc., I'm told that conflicts occasionally occur.
Reddit's moderator system isn't perfect, by a long shot. As with its voting systems, it's subject to abuse: calous moderation, power-tripping, and a lack of integrity, if not outright corruption. Reddit's own rules make ensuring quality moderation difficult -- admins cannot remove moderators unless they violate site rules. This leads to situations such as /r/xkcd being overtaken by a group of neo-nazi holocaust denying anti-semitic MRA promotors. Eventually resolved (see the subreddit's wiki for details).
But: Reddit absolutely relies on moderators. Which means that it's putting power in the hands of an unpaid workforce.
I actually find Reddit's moderation tools and systems pretty useful and better than most, though I manage only two small subs (each <300 subscribers)
So, no, individual Redditors may not individually care about the personal plights of moderators, much as you probably don't put much thought into the working conditions of the person who installed and adjusted the brakes of the car heading toward you. But you absolutely have a vested interest in the consequences of their work.
More on what does and doesn't work well at Reddit, from about a year ago:
> it reminds me of Reagan firing every air traffic controller who went on strike
Unionized laborers collectively bargaining for more money from the company they work for is almost the exact opposite of unpaid volunteers maintaining the profit making infrastructure of a for profit corporation.
Sure, I wasn't trying to be disingenuous. The difference I was illustrating was that asking for respect and communication is different than money and benefits.
They are certainly replaceable, but they just as certainly not fungible.
Reddit management clearly made a mistake here, not because it annoyed some moderators, but because they showed poor understanding of a fundamental part of their business (i.e. this is a lot of avoidable bad press, if nothing else)
They seem to have realized this, and are working on amending process. Nothing wrong with that, this is how things can improve.
They seem to have realized this, and are working on amending process.
I'm not holding my breath. Reddit has promised moderators better tools and users better transparency and more features for months and years. So far, all those promises have been completely empty, and I see nothing to suggest things will be different this time.
Put more crudely, at least two people on the reddit staff, Ohanian and Pao, are completely full of shit.
I agree with this. Many social networks (friendster, myspace, Digg, etc) die of community collapse. If someone funded voat.co so they could keep their servers up and the mods and community jumped ship reddit's business would take a serious hit.
Fair points, but the comment "because the moderators volunteered" made me cringe.
I have a great deal of respect and sympathy for mods because I've helped moderate other forums and the task is both rewarding, unrelenting, and filled with ceaseless drama. Even though they volunteered I still give them a lot of credit if they're running a successful board. It takes a lot.
I'm really intrigued to see if you're correct and we will eventually see mechanisms to replace mods. StackOverflow has moderator elections yearly, but the company has a tight control on the direction of the product. Mods have a lot more freedom to dictate the course of a board so I don't think elections would work for every board. Would be interesting to see though.
I totally agree that Reddit is an old boys club. But this is how all online communities seem to work: age = power and respect. How would you solve this problem? It's been like that since newsgroups. It seems to be just a human tendency.
slashdot randomly assigned the task of moderation to logged in users. that moderation was then metamoderated. it was just part of your duty as a logged in user to contribute a little metadata about content. http://slashdot.org/faq/mod-metamod.shtml
Not sure why this got downvoted. IMO this was probably one of the best ways I've seen moderation done on comments online. When you got a chance to metamod you took it seriously since there was no guarantee that you would consistently get it.
That worked great for a vertical focus. Not sure how it would work with as big of horizontal focus as reddit.
Not really. Reddit's system is a pale shell of Slashdot's system and doesn't have any kind of "watching the watchers" features.
Imagine how Reddit would be if you could pick reasons for votes, and then, say, filter posts so you see things which were upvoted for being insightful, rather than being merely funny.
Slashdot's sortition was reasonably decent. Its moderation system, based on finite bounded votes (-2 - +5) though was inherently cripling, as well as the lack of convergence. Any one moderator could shift votes by a full step, regardless of how many others had moderated.
Despite a low (<6 digit) userID, I abandoned moderation a long time ago.
More recent developments have further deteriorated the site... Oddly enough, also utlimately trust-related.
And, it turns out, based on trust violations of another Dice property, SourceForge.
The negative tone of this comment may be off-putting for some, but aside from that, this is very insightful. Calling "we do this because we love the community" a veneer especially makes a lot of sense to me, based on what I've seen of Reddit mods.
> But everyone knows they wont actually step down, because they crave the power they have accumulated, and are using the veneer of "we do this because we love the community" to generate a populous outcry that they know will gain them even more power.
I was a moderator and I left...
Also League of Legend mod left not too long ago, he had other responsibility and being a moderator was taking a toll on him and LoL is a big subreddit compare to my subreddit.
So you're argument doesn't hold for all.
It also ignore the fact that Reddit is partly run by volunteer people, moderators. You can't just handwave this fact by saying people are power hungry. The fact is if people leave like Digg then Reddit would be screwed.
I've had the same thoughts through this ordeal. If it's such a burden go ahead and stop being a mod. There's plenty of users that would gladly take your place. Yet I've not heard of any doing so.
Letting Victoria go probably sucks since she helped coordinate so much. But that kind of chaos or disorganization happens in any company I've worked for when a key employee is let go. Large corporations with paid employees don't always get this right. So to me Reddit's actions were no surprise, once the decision is made the employee is notified and shown the door.
Most companies will make plans to deal with associated problems, though, particularly when the company dictates the timing. I would expect problems if an employee suddenly quit without notice or became somehow incapacitated, but reddit seems to have made no effort to cover her job. It's as if they didn't realize what she was doing.
I guess the only concern I can think of is that if the majority of content submitters are angry, they may become less involved, switch to being commenters/lurkers, or move on to another site entirely. If the content diminishes, then the users might frequent the site less or look elsewhere.
I'm not trying to make any predictions of doom or anything (frankly, I think this kerfuffle is just a flash in the pan), but an unstable community can have an impact on the majority of users if enough people get fed up.
actually there have been plenty of rebuttals to this sort of statement, so I will briefly paraphrase the general content for you. Most users dont care, they dont care about reddit, they dont care about the mods, they dont care about the drama, all they want is their new content. They have no loyalty and would jump ship to an alternative site quite easily if the content was appearing elsewhere first. So if those mods/content creators to go to voat.co, or whatever alternative is being suggested, so will apathetic users who dont care where they get their fix.
Redit wasnt the first social media sharing site, digg.com was way pout in front for a long time, then came along v4 and killed the site dead in its tracks. Users fled because they changed the way stories were submitted and who submitted them. All those apathetic users jumped ship to mainly reddit and whilst reddit was growing and catching digg in term sof page views etc, Digg's failure is what boosted reddit to the number 1 position and the same thing can happen again.
But that's exactly why the moderators are important. Overwhelmingly most redditors are lurker content sponges. As soon as the people who invest in making the content and maintaining the content sources leave, so will the vast majority of users who consume it.
The "woe is me" cry of the moderators doesnt resonate with the majority of the userbase, because the moderators volunteered. The apathetic majority doesnt comment in situations like this, so you wont hear their voices. In the immortal words of southpark, if you dont like America, then you can get out. But everyone knows they wont actually step down, because they crave the power they have accumulated, and are using the veneer of "we do this because we love the community" to generate a populous outcry that they know will gain them even more power. Theyre not fooling me.
https://www.reddit.com/r/announcements/comments/3cbo4m/we_ap...