In light of the article in the New York Times (When the Internet’s ‘Moderators’ Are Anything But - The New York Times), I’m wondering about the roles of the moderators on this message board. It seems, to this naive and unaware visitor, that the essential purposes of the boards may mean that the moderators have essentially different roles here from those one might find on Reddit or other sites of that nature. Is the NYT article irrelevant and unrelated to the moderation done in the SDMB forums? IOW, how does the information in that article apply here?
I just read the article and I’m not certain I understand what you’re asking. As a moderator here I enforce the rules laid down. We do discuss things privately amongst ourselves but there’s a strong sense of consensus in my experience.
Yup, “angry lions” just about sums up our role here.
I know nothing about Reddit, but from the article it sounds like the moderators there have far more administrative power than we do. We certainly couldn’t “shut down our forums,” as they are described doing.
Does it go beyond that? Is there ever discussion of the “if X walks or gets bounced, I’m leaving too” type of thing that hit Reddit? I haven’t kept stats on it but it does seem like changes/resignations happen in clusters here almost like cliques all leaving together.
Not in my experience, no. It’s all been fairly collegial. We disagree from time to time but I’ve never seen in not get worked out.
I’m not a regular reddit user but I have read some of the articles about the recent kerfluffle. I think it’s safe to say there are huge differences between the way moderators are used on there.
While the mods here have made me angry at times, they are nothing like the mods at Reddit. In some of the smaller subs, they will actively troll you in mod mail. They make a lot of comments about how any suggestion is “too much work,” while choosing to moderate over 100 different forums. (One mod I got into an argument with moderates 900 forums.)
While the mods here are volunteers, they are vetted by the administration. On Reddit, you just create a forum and you are automatically a mod. Then you choose who else can be a mod. If your forum becomes popular enough, it becomes a part of the main page. The mods even come up with the rules for their “subreddits,” i.e. forums. The administration has nothing to do with it, other than some very broad rules–like “no doxxing,” a.k.a. revealing private information about a user.
The reason why a mod can shut down a subreddit is that Reddit is a forum host, not a message board. And they allow you to host private forums there. So what most really did was set their forum to “private,” meaning you’d have to be invited there to use it.
A few used a commonly used bot to simply automatically delete anything posted. These were the ones that were locked but stayed visible, as Reddit doesn’t have a read-only mode.
In Reddit you can start your own sub forums and you become the mod of that forum, giving you lots of control over something you are very vested in. Imagine being allowed to mod your own thread, with little oversight.
It’s very different here, especially since we are vetted beforehand and multiple mods oversee each forum.
The SDMB is, at its heart, one single community, governed by a common set of rules, enforced by the staff.
Reddit is extremely different. It’s more of a platform that hosts hundreds or thousands of independent communities, each almost entirely independent of the others and the overall site as a whole. Moderators there don’t just enforce the site’s overall rules; they create their own rules, enforce them (or not) as they see fit, and essentially rule over their own fiefdom. You could go over there right now and in five minutes set up your own subreddit over which you have absolute power, apart from a very small number of very general rules that apply to the entire Reddit site. You’re comparing apples to aircraft carriers here.
Now I’ve read the article: it seems slanted against Reddit. It’s got just enough truth to be misleading. I’ll try and give a more fair picture, from the perception of someone who actually uses the site.
The moderators shut down their forums because the firing of this employee happened without warning, and she had been very instrumental to the workings of several forums. She was the one who arranged contact with people for the very popular AMA series, which is actually a part of several subreddits. She also verified that they were who they said they were. Some subreddits literally couldn’t function because that employee was no longer there, and they had not prepared any way of dealing with this.
And this was not a single issue, but the last straw of many. The mods claim that it’s very difficult to get in contact with the administration about anything. They talk about how they’ve been promised tools to make it easier to moderate the larger and larger subreddits, yet not received them. I mentioned the bot they use to close thread? Yeah, because there is no actual means on the site to shut them down. They actually moderate people by marking them as spammers. It’s a mess behind the scenes.
Furthermore, FatPeopleHate was not banned for being disgusting. They were banned for harassing users outside their subreddit, as well as a targeted harassment campaign against the administration of Imgur, the most popular host of images for reddit.
(The way Imgur works, it is both an image host and a community, but these two things are separate. The FPH people had been publishing images in the community section, and those were getting flagged as not following the community rules, and thus were deleted. Imgur tried to explain this to them, but they refused to listen. Instead, the users started bombing the site images that broke their rules, and the mods of FPH put up an image of the Imgur staff up as their banner picture, showing they condoned all the attacks.)
And while there were people who did not agree with what happened with FPH, they were a small but vocal minority. Some people did get upset because new FPH forums also got banned, but the argument was that they were trying to evade the ban.
But the point is, it was never about the content. There are other subreddits that continue to just consist of mean things being said about fat people. There was no topic ban. While the individual subreddits are allowed to have their own rules, Reddit as a whole is against topic bans.
As for the harassment rules: those upset people not so much in concept, but because they didn’t actually say anything but “harassment is not allowed,” without defining what harassment actually was. The closest they got was “anything that doens’t make anyone feel safe to use Reddit and voice their opinion.” You can see how that’s still rather ambiguous?
The administration is also not very communicative with the users, and this has led to a lack of trust. One of the worst things is that the only tool the admins have is a shadowban, one where you are not aware you are actually banned. You aren’t told you are being banned, and it just looks like no one is replying to you. And none of the site-wide rules, which are also quite vague, are consistently enforced. It’s not uncommon for a user to have no idea what they did–and not impossible that they did nothing wrong, but got caught in the crossfires of people who were “brigading,” getting together and massively downvoting a post.
Thanks to the protest, a lot of this stuff is being fixed. Because the mods have the power they have, they have put their foot down and said that, either you fix the communication, get less vague rules, give them better tools, and stop secretly banning people, they will shut down Reddit all over again.
Now, I have left out one thing that is actually bad, and one thing that may be seen as bad. There was definitely an attempt to harass the interim CEO Ellen Pao. But this really had little to do with the event described above. The only thing that happened there was that a lot of people thought “maybe these people who hate Pao are right, even if they are otherwise horrible bigots.”
Ellen Pao was harassed for being a female and a feminist. And, while I would still call them a vocal minority, there are a lot of misogynists and anti-feminists on the site. There is this idea that feminists are enemies of the concept of free speech, which Reddit the community values heavily.
These people were eventually able to use the unrest with Victoria to get a ton of signatures to ask her to step down. And, as a scapegoat for the head of the board of directors who actually fired Victoria, she stepped down.
The thing is, she had been a huge champion for free speech. She had been asked to ban those bad subreddits and refused. She came up with the anti-harassment policies to try and deal with this, to get rid of those who were causing harm, while still letting those who kept to themselves to exist.
The new CEO is far more against this stuff. He is a co-creator of the site, and he actually automatically banned any of that stuff when he was previously in charge…He isn’t yet shutting these subreddits down, but he is isolating them, making it where they will not be available in search and their posts can’t make the list of top posts. Only if they can’t keep their stuff contained and it leaks out to the rest of Reddit will he move on to banning them.
Why is he doing this, instead of outright banning them like he would want to? That’s the second point. Like I said, the community of Reddit values freedom of speech. It is a forum host, not a message board. It’s supposed to be hands off. That’s how Reddit markets itself. And if Reddit is seen as shutting down freedom of speech, this can damage it. If they don’t handle this carefully, it may be more than the bigots who leave.
Now, I’ll point out that I don’t think freedom of speech should be considered a moral concept (at least, as most people use the term). So this isn’t a positive to me, but some people see it as one. And it is arguably the secret to Reddit’s success. So I can’t begrudge him this. I do suspect, however, that Coontown will get shut down soon. It’s only a matter of time.
I agree with what BigT has written here, but want to elaborate on this slightly. The person who was fired was one of the very few Reddit employees. There aren’t very many employees. 99% of the work at Reddit is done by volunteers. No one knows why this employee was let go. She & Reddit (as a private corporation) are, undoubtedly, contractually unable to comment on the firing. (As far as I know, Victoria’s only real comment has been, “you know everything I know.”)
The mods are right - they need an actual employee to fill Victoria’s post. It’s reasonable that they’re annoyed about her being let go without a replacement being hired. However, they were completely off-base in expecting that Reddit Corp should have warned them ahead of time that they planned to fire Victoria or what Reddit’s plans are for that position. It’s not anyone’s business why Victoria was fired and it’s certainly not something that was up for debate by Rando J. Redditor.
You are contradicting yourself. The reason they were annoyed is the very thing you say they don’t have the right to expect. If they had no right to expect that they would be told, then they have no right to be annoyed that they weren’t told. Those are two sides of the same coin.
If they didn’t have that right, why is Reddit now bending over backwards to give the mods what they want? Could it be because, since the mods expectations were not met, it causes the site to mostly shut down? It’s hard to say that the people responsible for whether your site continues to function don’t have a right to have their expectations met. In fact, if that position doesn’t get filled, there will probably be another shutdown.
Ultimately, the only way to determine if an expectation is valid in the business world is whether or not choosing not to meet that expectation will harm your bottom line. Reddit thought that the expectations of their moderators didn’t matter. They were wrong.
And no one is arguing that they had the right to be in on the decision. Just that you don’t get to leave the volunteers who run the most profitable part of your website in a lurch and expect them just to roll over.
No, no. I’m not being clear I guess.
-
Somebody has to fill the position that Victoria filled, and it’s reasonable for the mods to be irate about being left hanging because Reddit hasn’t hired/appointed anyone for that job yet.
-
That Somebody doesn’t have to be Victoria, however, and it was unreasonable of the mods to expect to be kept in the loop about the circumstances of her firing - something no rational business would discuss, publicly, with a bunch of volunteers.
-
Losing their shit at Ellen Pao was entirely bullshit because, again, we don’t know why Victoria was fired, therefore we can’t know who to blame (hell, it might even be Victoria to blame. Maybe she barfed on Peter Thiel’s cat. Who knows?)
Oh, there were plenty of people arguing this, on the grounds that the mods were the ones doing the work, therefore, they deserved fair warning and an explanation about what happened. It was all about demanding that Reddit justify their decision to let Victoria go.
They were blaming Ellen Pao for the lack of communication and for completing a (even justified) firing without a replacement plan.
Part of what upset the mods was a general lack of appreciation for the role mods played, how critical Victoria’s job was and a generalized lack of communication. Victoria’s firing was a last-straw event.
This is kind of like watching the Russians lose in Afghanistan in the 80s. I don’t remember losing any sleep over that either.
You should have, since it ultimately helped lead to the rise of the Taliban and Al Qaeda.
Cite please.
Really?
Helpful post BigT:
The CEO wants to monetize Reddit which is his perogative. The owner of Craigslist, who considers his work to be a public service, is more an exception than a rule.
Well there was a kerfluffle some years back regarding certain allegedly jackbooted regulations imposed from up high which led to the resignation of one mod and the creation of the Giraffeforum. IMHO, it’s not surprising that TPTB would want to regulate the Pit somewhat. It’s not exactly advertiser - friendly.
Here you go: History of Afghanistan - Wikipedia
Amazon.com: Afghanistan: A Cultural and Political History (Princeton Studies in Muslim Politics, 45): 9780691154411: Barfield, Thomas J.: Books
Also: http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showpost.php?p=18553331&postcount=19
Moderator Action
The SDMB aspect of this seems to have been asked and answered, and this is turning into more of a discussion about Reddit, which is not an issue with the SDMB. I am therefore closing this.
If anyone wishes to discuss what is going on over at Reddit, please feel free to open a new thread in a more appropriate forum (IMHO if you want to get people’s opinions on it, maybe the Pit if you want to bitch about it, etc).
Thread closed.