New ask Hacker News story: Ask HN: Why do we need moderators at all?
Ask HN: Why do we need moderators at all?
5 by fnovd | 14 comments on Hacker News.
Apologies for the title, it's the closest short question to the long one I'm about to ask. I understand that every message board needs some kind of content filter, both for ToS/legal reasons as well as for community norms. However, one question I have not been able to get out of my head, as Reddit loses favor and federated clones gain favor, is this: for what reason does a given community have only one set of moderators? For those of you who use Reddit frequently, imagine this: you subscribe to a large subreddit about a topic that interests you. You enjoy memes about the subject, but other users do not, and it has become a subreddit rule that no memes can be posted. Not happy with that reality, you go to the moderation tab and see the default moderator group at the top of the list. You hit unsubscribe. Now, everything posted to that subreddit is visible to you, with no evidence of moderator activity. You go back to the subreddit and see a bunch of politically-charged comments you don't like. You return to the moderator group list, scroll down, and find a very minimalist group that says they only remove politically-charged comments. You hit subscribe. You now have the feed you want for the topic you want without needing to create a separate subreddit or motivate a huge userbase. If users provide the content, then moderators provide the filter. They curate. So why, in all conventional models, do we only allow one set of curators? Doesn't the digital nature of the content make this entirely unnecessary? Is it even a technical challenge to provide a different view into the same slice of nested content? The big problem I've had with the federated Reddit-likes is that, while your userbases can merge, and you can join your list of communities with other instances' lists, you can't ever merge communities. You will either end up with a bunch of fractured communities on the same topic, or one instance (or one community) will eat the others and become its own centralized location for the content you're looking for, with the same moderation problems. You haven't at all escaped the problems people have with Reddit as a platform, you've just moved them somewhere else. If moderation (or, rather curation) was simply a filter on an existing dataset of content, there would be much less of an issue with merging communities. You could actually merge the programming board of one federation with another board. Maybe your instance mods hold all federated posts & comments for review, maybe they allow them by default, it doesn't matter because if you don't like how it's done, you can find another group doing it. Is there any real reason why we only allow one singular set of curators to control a dataset of content created by users? What purpose does the marriage serve? Would it bother a community if there were more than one view of the content they create? Is it a technical challenge? Or is it just the way it always has been?
5 by fnovd | 14 comments on Hacker News.
Apologies for the title, it's the closest short question to the long one I'm about to ask. I understand that every message board needs some kind of content filter, both for ToS/legal reasons as well as for community norms. However, one question I have not been able to get out of my head, as Reddit loses favor and federated clones gain favor, is this: for what reason does a given community have only one set of moderators? For those of you who use Reddit frequently, imagine this: you subscribe to a large subreddit about a topic that interests you. You enjoy memes about the subject, but other users do not, and it has become a subreddit rule that no memes can be posted. Not happy with that reality, you go to the moderation tab and see the default moderator group at the top of the list. You hit unsubscribe. Now, everything posted to that subreddit is visible to you, with no evidence of moderator activity. You go back to the subreddit and see a bunch of politically-charged comments you don't like. You return to the moderator group list, scroll down, and find a very minimalist group that says they only remove politically-charged comments. You hit subscribe. You now have the feed you want for the topic you want without needing to create a separate subreddit or motivate a huge userbase. If users provide the content, then moderators provide the filter. They curate. So why, in all conventional models, do we only allow one set of curators? Doesn't the digital nature of the content make this entirely unnecessary? Is it even a technical challenge to provide a different view into the same slice of nested content? The big problem I've had with the federated Reddit-likes is that, while your userbases can merge, and you can join your list of communities with other instances' lists, you can't ever merge communities. You will either end up with a bunch of fractured communities on the same topic, or one instance (or one community) will eat the others and become its own centralized location for the content you're looking for, with the same moderation problems. You haven't at all escaped the problems people have with Reddit as a platform, you've just moved them somewhere else. If moderation (or, rather curation) was simply a filter on an existing dataset of content, there would be much less of an issue with merging communities. You could actually merge the programming board of one federation with another board. Maybe your instance mods hold all federated posts & comments for review, maybe they allow them by default, it doesn't matter because if you don't like how it's done, you can find another group doing it. Is there any real reason why we only allow one singular set of curators to control a dataset of content created by users? What purpose does the marriage serve? Would it bother a community if there were more than one view of the content they create? Is it a technical challenge? Or is it just the way it always has been?
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