I. I had dinner with 5days and kickme444 about 6 months before Reddit bought RedditGifts. They'd gone to SXSW, on their own coin, because there was a panel there about "internet moderation." 5D told me that it was a surreal experience because RedditGifts was, back in the halcyon days of 2009, two orders of magnitude larger than any other entity that presented, let alone showed up. Facebook? Not there. Reddit? Not there. 4Chan? Not there. Youtube? Not there. Twitter? Not there. II. About two years later I had a chat with krispy wherein I had to explain what "doxing" was. She was Reddit's community manager at the time, the third in a line of 5 I had personal meetings with, skype meetings with, iChat meetings with. They were always deeply interested in my ideas and always utterly powerless to do anything about the status quo. Another year after that I signed on to moderate /r/politics, then resigned four days later when the "collective" decision was to re-admit Mother Jones but to keep David Corn banned because he was a "spammer." When I pointed out that he was a distinguished columnist with a 20-year career and a Polk Award, I was told "all columnists are spammers." III. Friend of mine is an islamic scholar. Working on his dissertation for George Washington University. Posted a videocast of himself discussing a chapter of the Koran in Arabic to Facebook. Facebook took it down - he couldn't even see it in his timeline. I opined that it had probably been reported, and since it was Friday, he probably wouldn't see it again until Monday morning because the people who review content have no training, an impossible backlog and a terrible shifting set of guidelines. Sho'nuff, it was back up on Monday. But somebody was able to get back at "the terrists" for the weekend by clicking a button. __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Not mentioned in the article is that there is no incentive for better moderation. Youtube needed things to go okay until they established their brand, now everyone gives them the benefit of the doubt. 4chan is a shithole and everybody knows it so the content can keep going there. Reddit? Still gets its clicks. The reason it took forever for them to take down /r/Jailbait is it was their biggest inbound search term. There is no internet award for quality, only for quantity, and there's no such thing as bad traffic. So moderation will continue to be this thing that everyone pays lip service to... until something truly horrific happens and someone is sued out of existence. Having spent far too long in the belly of the beast, it's gonna be bad. You'd think Twitter would have done something when the trolls chased Robin Williams' daughter off Twitter but nothing ever came of that. 10,000 retweets.
It is odd that 5days and kickme444 would be so interested in that subject matter as neither really moderated except at the very beginning. And 5days often would not even respond to questions from other moderators or communicate changes or issues to front-line moderators. On another note, I recently saw that /u/ChristineMcConnell, an amazing OC poster, was banned from /r/food because her posts always got tons of comments and, literally, a mod said it simply produced "too much work" for them. Banning an excellent poster because you do not want to do the job you signed up for. WTF
Didn't you notice that with everybody that went internal, though? It's like they suddenly joined a secret order of head-in-sand ostriches that ceased to communicate, as if their very job security were dependent on their non-responsiveness to most issues. Like I said - this was back before they worked for Reddit - this was "the very beginning." They'd done one exchange at that point, and were gearing up for the second. I haven't so much as opened Reddit in a tab in a week. Theoretically I still moderate some shit but I'm about to pull out of that, too.
Absolutely. It was astounding how it changed once redditgifts was purchased. And they would both absolutely agree. Even weffey stopped being on my side when I had constructive criticism. The culture went from being all about the community to where, I was told, redditgifts upper echelon's responsibility was not to the community or moderators but now solely towards the CEO. That is not a message that any of those people would come up with on their own. I just opened secretsanta and noticed that the only external mod that was there before me quit sometime after me as well. Well, I did not actually quit, I was demodded and banned after I would not stop bitching about the lack of communication. Dante is still there though!
In hindsight, a better way to have worded my original comment would have been: It is great to hear that D & J had so much interest in the topic when they were getting into it. Too bad that interest was slowly pushed aside as they were assimilated into the culture.
It started maybe a year before the sale but then Boom. I would guess they started talks about then, some ground rules were relayed and that is when the transition began.
I like to think of the question of moderation as the same question people have been asking themselves for ages: How do we organize ourselves. In this situation, the moderators have power, and the system people interact within does as well. A place like reddit is a world where infinite nations may exist, but all nations are ruled by dictators who, in theory, have absolute power. Don't like your nation, or think reddit deserves to be a place for free speech, make a new sub and don't moderate it. 4Chan is organized around an idea similar to reddit but with no ability to spawn infinite boards, and with selected moderators. Hubski/twitter/facebook/pintrest is a world where things work similarly to how they work in real life. People connect to one another or isolate themselves from one another by voluntering to see the things another says. Hubski is a bit of an oddball here thanks to a lot of it's reddit like elements, but I think it belongs in this category more than anything else. Perhaps you could say it is facebook, but if facebook wanted to encourage people to form a hivemind. It's capitalism vs socialsm. The free market vs the shared-responsibility. Companies vs Unions. The dictators with power over others vs the mob rule where those who aren't agreed with get shunned. Really, to me it seems like reddit-like places are far better at generating ideas, for having discussion, and so on. Facebook-like, meanwhile is good for those who just want to see new content without dealing with stress or the ability for people to publicly disagree with them if the user doesn't want them to.