Comment by ThalesX
15 hours ago
I recently activated my account on there and went to the forum for my country. It was already taken over by moderators. Then I looked at the mod and he took all real estate that is already available on Reddit that is related to said country. So in a way, he was probably the first account on there and became god-king for eternity for the subreddits related to the country. I had no idea who he was, what he stood for, what his plans were for his newfound digital real estate etc.
I feel like the moderated subforum is a fundamentally broken system for dealing with content. I much prefer the Federated / X / Instagram approach where I can deal with users and have the tools needed to curate my own content, instead of relying on some ideologically captured no-name account that chooses what I can or cannot see based on whims.
Your country wouldn't be Norway by any chance? I remember that on Reddit there was one powermod who was dead-set on owning every Nowegian-language forum, and every name that could potentially be a base for people trying to escape him.
wow, is there more on this?
Also, honestly, with AI/LLMs now, do we even need human moderators anywhere anymore
You need both. LLMs can, I think, do the bulk of removing posts that break community guidelines, but you need moderators to define and adjust the guidelines. Most would also like to have a human to escalate a dispute to.
Google is famous for having almost solely automated support, at it absolutely sucks at doing almost anything. AI only moderation would go the same way.
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The absolutely broken moderator system of Reddit made me leave it forever after being a regular user for more than a decade. The “god-king” thing simply doesn’t work.
Same here. The power-tripping of mods ruins reddit. Most don't care about the community as much as they care about exercising their absolute power over users.
And even if it does, the mods don't have real control to moderate communities either, so you get the worst of both worlds. I don't go to most queer reddit communities anymore because a lot of them have bots that downvote trans-positive posts, even if the community is specifically meant to be inclusive. There's nothing to couple active participation to voting weight or anything of that kind and voting is not considered "brigading" by reddit if the coordination happens off-site (at least not in a way that'd lead to any enforcement action).
It's makes a great propaganda machine though, given humans have a tendency to measure their own opinions on social clues.
I still haven't been able to figure out how to make an account without it being immediately shadowbanned or normalbanned. Tried again the other day, it was something in between where logged-out users could see it was banned but I couldn't.
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>They banned the_donald (which, yes, was spammy, but it seemed to be organic
I used to frequent /r/t_d when it was created, before the Republican primaries for the 2016 election. I visited every day because I was absolutely astonished at the gigantic marketing effort behind it. I had never seen anything like that before, and haven't since. It probably had a team of dozens or hundreds of Russians behind it, creating memes and shitposting on a payroll. And it obviously was 100% inorganic.
I'm actually ok with reddit banning it and taking sides in political conflict. I just wish they didn't pretend to be unbiased when it's made it a useless site for discussing current reality.
Edit: to be clear, I'm more concerned about how russia was basically banned from the site but worldnews itself seems like the primary fountain of western astroturfing on the internet. No matter your opinion of putin, that is extremely unhealthy for productive discourse. I don't care about american domestic politics.
I don't think the problem was spam content it was hate content. Hate can be organic
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It's either some personal unquenched thirst for power or he thought that new digg will be as popular as these ~20 years ago, and that he'll be able to control content submitted and get paid for "promoting" it.
I've seen something similar over the last ~17 years: a bunch of same terminally online accounts uploading content from our local media outlets on country-related subs and local digg-like sites - both active and long defunct for 10 years now. Some of those users even appeared on mastodon and bsky.
The social link aggregators were created for people to share their favorite links, places from the Internet so others could see these and have fun, expand their knowledge and so on. For me it was the cherry on top of the web2.0 period where everything was fresh, beta and innocent. That lasted for a while up until other people, entities figured out that such sites can be used to promote their content, insert ads. The next stage was and remains till today opinion control by "curating" the content and/or reactions in discussions - still done by humans but more prevalent presence of convincing bots.
Reddit itself lost its impartial and independent status a while ago. Big subs related to media franchises or big corporations are heavily controlled to the point it's impossible to submit content that's critical. It's all happy world seen by pink glasses, or as some say toxic positivity. There are still niche places where moderation is limited but as I said last time, from my own experiences: such subs were targeted by bad actors who by submitting forbidden content tried to impose lockouts so later they could take these in their control.
hn isn't free of some of these issues either. while discussions still remain on good levels (tho degradation to reddit levels already happens), there's no control over content: there are accounts who do nothing but upload links every few minutes, hours.
I'm not sure if it's possible to have link aggregators or multi-thematic forums that could be free of such... issues. The similar problem with establishing "real estates" happened on lemmy when some part of userbase decided to abandon reddit due to controversial changes.
An outstanding summary of the most important trends on the web, yes, it's being turned into a one-way propaganda-pushing machine much like the mass media before it. AI and bot-farms made that transformation cheap and ubiquitous, the profit motive, aka bribery, takes care of the rest.
I don't think it's an unsolvable problem although new legislation is continuously being considered in order to make the solution harder. Still, not impossible.
A well moderated forum (like HN) is great. I don't have time for the signal-to-noise ratio of X.
IMHO Reddit would be better if it had AI moderators that strictly follow a sub's policies. Users could read the policies upfront before deciding whether to join. new subs could start with some neutral default policy, and users could then propose changes to the policy and democratically vote on those changes.
> users could then propose changes to the policy and democratically vote on those changes.
Which, in fact, would open up the same rat race with determining which accounts are real and so forth.
Not disagreeing with you, just circling around this same problem. Feels like the world still isn't ready yet.
If the policies are public, there's a lot more transparency. eg my city of millions of people has a subreddit. The head mod bans people for criticizing a certain dog breed. This "policy" is pretty opaque, but if the AI enforced subreddit rules say "thou shalt not mention the dog's breed when commenting on articles about someone being mauled to death", more people would be familiar with the rule (and perhaps there would be more organized discussion).
I was on a subreddit for a while that voted on rules and had a rotating dictator to facilitate them. It worked decently well, although it never got to the point where the sub was brigaded. This was also pre-LLM so moderation was still a big time sink and the sub eventually fizzled out
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Try criticizing Apple or China or other sacred cows and see how quickly your post gets flagged.
I've always thought than on Reddit (or Digg, or Lemmy or others) common words, brands, names... should be broad "topics" or categories that nobody can claim (first come, first served). You should be able to add a sub/community under a topic, but just like everyone else, and then users interested in said topic could add and exclude different subs to taste.
Has any popular site tried an approach where you dynamically select your mods as more of a content filter than global moderation?
Most places can hide posts and block users at the user level, so why not select which mods can do that for you?
Yes, this is the way. Moderator actions should just be another feed that you can subscribe to (or not). The same approach solves "the discovery problem" for an incarnation/subset of the fediverse that can be bootstrapped with static nodes. Previously: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30862781>
On discovery: if Alice is subscribed to updates to Bob's profile, then she'll for sure see any posts he directs at her (unless her client is broken), though she may not see any messages by Bob's friend Carol, since Carol just signed up and started following Alice but whether or not Alice knows Carol, her client knows nothing about Carol's profile. Alice has two options: use a client that's configured to recursively pull in the feeds of friends-of-friends (up to a configurable depth N) so then it can surface the replies that she wouldn't otherwise see under the naive filter (alternative: Alice relies on her friend group (read: their clients) to do the equivalent on their end—automatically nudging her with a "metamessage" they spot someone within their circle who has mentioned Alice but who can be seen not to be in the list of profiles that Alice is following; or: Alice can subscribe to Fedibook's Fantastic Feedsource, which maintains a panoptic view of everyone's public profiles and will do the same sort of nudging—Alice's client doesn't know that Carol's profile even exists, let alone the fact that she posted a reply to Alice's message, but Fedibook knows about Carol's profile and sees that mention, and Alice has "friended" Fedibook, so there's a path for Fedibook to promulgate a metamessage to Alice and call her attention to it.
Once you have the notion of metamessages in the protocol, you can also use them for (a) curated timelines, i.e. recommendations of stuff from profiles that you're not following, and (b) moderation actions, i.e. recommendations of feed items that your client should ignore.
This also allows you to subscribe to multiple curation sources, so if both Fedibook and Fedibuzz want your usership/attention, then they can both let you "friend" them, and you (read: your client) can decide what to do with what they return to you.
How do you make sure each human gets only one vote?
It's not a vote. You select your own set filters/ mod lists
Yes. Subforums should elect mods democratically.
sadly, a nice idea that is painfully naive with how computers are used in reality.
One need only remember how easy it was to take over IRC channels with a few hundred bots to see the endgame of this rationale… it cannot be patched out, it’s inherent to the internet.
That which would make a vote valid; can (and will) be gamed.
> it’s inherent to the internet.
Who said the election needs to take place on the internet?
A paper ballot-style election, while not perfect either, works well enough in practice.
It could work depending on how it is set up. Maybe only accounts with n-number of years get 1 single vote, and maybe don't let any random 2-day old account get a vote.
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As long as sub forums can be created easily, users may pick their sub forum and thus indirectly moderator.
In this setup having users elect the moderator leads to cases where small groups create their special interest group and then some trolls challenge the moderator.
Their may be some oversight on the large sub forum, but not all.
Necessary for this is that subforums can't have unique names. If a bad mod can squat all the words like "computers", "programming", "coding", newcomers aren't going to know the best subforum is called "RealProgNoBadMod"
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You see this in city-focused subreddits. But the reality is the name is power. New users type in their city and join the original one. The hostile mods suppress mention of the new one. It never manages to get critical mass.
Stack Overflow does this and it works far better than arbitrary tyrant style moderation.
Crucially, SO's election system needs to be bootstrapped: users aren't eligible to vote until they have a history of participation. The level of participation is fairly trivial, but it provides enough signal to allow a reasonable detection (and elimination) of bot / sock puppet networks without resorting to crude measures like blacklists or "bot tests".
For new sites, this meant that the bulk of moderation was done by employees, followed by employee-appointed temporary moderators. This dramatically reduced abuse, but also reduced the explosion of new sub-communities that sites like Reddit thrived on.
Stack Overflow is dead now.
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Why? Genuinely curious.
I am a big proponent of (direct) democracy in general.
Internet is way behind on democracy. In general everyone likes democracy until they're in charge, then they realise they're the best person to be in charge and the idiots who vote don't have a clue, and should probably be banned if not beheaded for speaking out of turn.
You'd have to weight votes by some kind of participation metric to solve the problem of very little authentication of the voters
A democratic election requires that the elected be your employee, where you work with him on a regular basis to direct him in his job. That works (ish) in government where people doing the hiring have heavily invested life interests in it succeeding.
Does a subforum offer the same? Once the mod is elected, are you going to sit down with him each day to make sure he is doing the job to your wishes and expectations? I say (ish) in government because it often doesn't even work there, even where people have heavily invested life interests, with a lot (maybe even the vast majority!) of people never getting involved in democracy. A subforum? Who cares?
If there were to be elections, it is unlikely they could be anything other than authoritarianly, with the chosen one becoming the ultimate power.
Same for italian forums. I don't believe bot and spam are to be blamed fully.
It was just a copy of reddit. How useful?
This is why moderation choice should be based on metrics, not first cone first served.
>> I recently activated my account on there and went to the forum for my country. It was already taken over by moderators. Then I looked at the mod and he took all real estate that is already available on Reddit that is related to said country.
Are you sure? My understanding is that accounts were only allowed to create two communities.
On Reddit? It's horribly intransparent but there seems to be a special class of people to whom the normal rules don't apply.
That limit wouldn't stop you creating more communities with more accounts anyway.