Comment by marcuskane2
5 days ago
There should be a public service campaign telling users something like "Even in the best case scenario, the moderators are weirdos. Most likely they're shills".
People with careers, families, friends and hobbies are mostly not going to spend their limited free time being a digital janitor for an anonymous online community.
People sitting alone in their apartment with nowhere to go and nothing to do and no one to spend time with, however, might find that being a Reddit moderator gives them a hobby, a sense of purpose, and feelings of power, importance or significance that they otherwise never get in real life.
Someone should make a social media site with inverted dynamics- users who only spend a few minutes per day on the site and post once every few weeks should be treated as the influential power users, while the people lurking and scrolling for 10 hours per day are deprioritized.
> Someone should make a social media site with inverted dynamics- users who only spend a few minutes per day on the site and post once every few weeks should be treated as the influential power users, while the people lurking and scrolling for 10 hours per day are deprioritized.
The problem is most users are the "casuals", by a wide margin, in general; and a lot of them are also "weirdos" in different ways. Some of them will be obsessed with a different site; others have serious issues in spite of all the forms of social proof you describe.
I think it's a bit tougher than that. On top of what zahlman said, a lot of "casuals" don't really bring much value to a social media site. If you comment once a year you're not really offering much to the conversation. That's what makes this problem so tricky. The most motivated users are usually motivated by something more than intrinsic motivation. The least motivated users just aren't very good users of the platform. A better incentive structure would help incentivize the "moderately motivated" user.