Comment by sedatk
2 years ago
Reddit's subreddit structure and the underlying moderation system is quite scalable: site admins only deal with the things that subreddit moderators have failed to. And, in case they keep failing, admins can shut down the subreddit or demote moderators responsible for it. The work is clearly split between admins and mods, and mods only work on the content they're interested in.
Now, with this model, I don't see such a scalable structure. You're not really offloading any work to moderation, and also, all mods will be working on all of the content. No subreddit-like boundaries to reduce the overlaps. I know, mods can only work on certain feeds, but, feeds overlap too.
It's also impossible to scale up mod power with this model when it's needded: For example, Reddit mods can temporarily lock posts for comments, lock subreddit, quarantine subreddit to deal with varying degrees of moderation demand. It's impossible to have that here because there can't be a single authority to control the content flow.
How do you plan to address these scalability and efficiency issues?
>Reddit's subreddit structure and the underlying moderation system is quite scalable: site admins only deal with the things that subreddit moderators have failed to.
All that happens is mods just lock any post with any hint of a problem. It's become or rather started out as being ridiculous. They just lock instead of moderate.
True. Mod power is abused a lot. But that’s a different problem, not necessarily mutually exclusive with scaling.
The strict moderation you hinted at is quite okay from a legal perspective, it’s just suboptimal for community building and healthy conversations.
> it’s just suboptimal for community building and healthy conversations
By design Reddit's moderation model is a tool incentivizing unhealthy, one sided conversations and echo chamber-y communities. Reddit moderators have to go the extra mile to avoid those.
> all mods will be working on all of the content. No subreddit-like boundaries to reduce the overlaps
Not necessarily, that's up to the moderator.
Today, I subscribe to the #LawSky and AppellateSky feeds because I am interested in legal issues. Sometimes these feeds have irrelevant material: either posts who happened to use the "" emoji for some non-legal reason or just people chatting about their political opinions on some legal case.
Someone could offer to label JUST the posts in these feeds with a "NotLegalTopic" tag and I would find that filter quite useful.
> You're not really offloading any work to moderation
I think everyone at some stage has been burnt by top-down moderation (e.g., overzealous mods, brigading, account suspensions, subreddit shutdowns, etc.) and generally everyone finds it lacking because what's sensitive to one person, might be interesting to another. Community driven moderation liberalizes this model and allows people to live in whatever bubble they want to (or none at all). This kind of nit-picky moderation can be offloaded in this way, but it doesn't obviate top-down moderation completely (e.g., illegal content, incitement to violence, disinformation, etc.) Though a scoring system could be used for useful labellers, and global labels could be automated according to consensus (e.g., many high-rated labellers signalling disinformation on particular posts)