Maybe the burden of moderation makes them this way, I don't know. But reddit is worse off with them.
If you have ever moderated a subreddit you'd understand why mods wind up with heavy handed approaches.
Even moderately sized subreddits are a lot of work, especially of a post gets to the front page. You can't have gourmet experiences at fast-food scale. When you have a long list of reports to go through, and you have been moderating long-enough, your decisions are based on heuristics rather than nuanced explanation or checking the post history of some (non-subscribed guest) snowflake Redditor who think their spicy take is insightful and/or you're taking away their 1A rights when they haven't bothered to read the rules of the subreddit they are commenting in. Subreddits are not a townsquare open to all-comers, they are very large clubhouses with distinct rules and norms - mods exist to enforce those rules.
There's no time for - nor an upside to splitting hairs on whether a commenter is a transphobic nazi[1] or merely matches the archetype. When modding, false positives are vastly preferable to false negatives since mods value their time more than the individual commenters who get caught up, and I don't see this changing even if you were to become the mod
1. Or is a "woke brigader" on the conservative subreddits.
They're somewhat less so to those who end up being the false positives.
If your hobby's main forum on the internet dried up and withered away 12 years ago because the only place to discuss it is reddit, then it's not as if such a person can just go elsewhere. You have a monopoly on the conversation and you're clearly not interested in justice anywhere near as much as you're interested in kicking out people you just don't like well enough to care about justice for them.
Anybody that thinks Reddit is fascist should spend 60 days moderating a popular sub. Your attitude might change.
This isn’t to say that there aren’t mods with power trips. Reddit has essentially outsourced their trust and safety department. It isn’t going to be perfect.
I have little in the way of opinions about Reddit, but this strikes me as the wrong approach on general grounds.
It might be true that anyone who spends time running a subreddit will change their mind about moderation. However, the only point of a subreddit is for people to talk to each other and to read what others are talking about; moderation is nothing but incidental overhead. That doesn’t mean it’s easy or unimportant, but it does mean that the burden is on the moderators to prove themselves reasonable to participants who don’t and shouldn’t have to, by default, understand their work going in.
There can be different approaches to that, and in some of them the participants will come to understand and care about how moderation works—I’m not saying that they shouldn’t. But I am saying that if they don’t see why they should but the moderators wanted them to, generally speaking it’s the moderators who failed.
There is no natural law that says that there’ll always be a way to succeed, though. Perhaps in some communities, in some political environments, etc. there just can’t be a good discussion forum. In such cases, maybe it really are the users who suck. But the fact remains that if users get annoyed about the moderation and leave, then the moderators have built a forum that’s wrong for those users.
(This is of course the standard argument against every instance of “the users just don’t understand how complex the backoffice is” ever. But this instance might look a bit unfamilliar because it doesn’t involve computers.)
The balance seems impossible. If your moderation is "light touch" the forum ends up like 4chan. If your moderation is heavy handed, you're a power-tripper control freak lording over your site. You can't win.
I don't know how dang does it here. He's some kind of wizard.
Even 4chan has stronger moderation than what you advocate
(There are moderation practices that I disapprove of and are not coincidentally outright incompatible with the view I expressed. Like the advice to just ban the user if you dislike interacting with them or if they’re complaining about suppression—especially in a small community like that advice was targeted at, I know I’d be more or less unsalvageably bitter after witnessing this in practice, let alone being its target. But it’s still not the strength that upsets me in this hypothetical, it’s more the perceived arbitrariness. Which, if the moderator is not in fact being arbitrary, is again a communication problem, not a policy one.)
Moderation is overhead, but so is Postgres. Both are very useful solutions to real and difficult problems. Both still have to pay for themselves with some mix of user-visible shinies and keeping out of the way instead of grumbling about how difficult the problem is. The correct choice of that mix is highly situational and I don’t pretend to have the panacea in that respect.
Except in this case the ones in the “back office” are volunteers and not staff.
I’m amenable to your argument in most other contexts. But it strikes me as an awful argument to apply to volunteers.
In that context, if you don’t like it then you have to step up and do it yourself. If someone is doing work for free, you don’t get to complain about the quality. Instead, you pick up a broom and do the sweeping yourself.
Which isn’t to say that Reddit mods are beyond question or reproach, but if there’s a concern shared by all moderators, it strikes me as wrong to say “that’s a backoffice issue”. If you don’t like it, go back into the office.
The bright line for me is whether they can handle direct criticism. Everything else is window dressing - is your ego strong enough to handle someone saying they don't like you? If not, you won't make good decisions.
You never used IRC, have you?
