> Do you feel the moderation over there is enough though, even on the "nicely moderated places" that you mention?
There's a huge range in how hands-on moderators are, and it varies dramatically by subreddit. Some subreddits are notoriously draconian; others permit pretty much anything. I don't think it's possible to make a statement about moderation on reddit overall, across subreddits.
I think the logic of user-moderation is quite cunning though. It lets thousands of different moderators try what works. A strategy of throwing mud at the wall. So the frontpage stuff is pretty janky, but perhaps that's because the lowest common denominator always is. It's true that when a subreddit gets popular it faces new challenges, and many fail. But that might be true for any forum.
I like strong moderation even when it sometimes catches, as it has, topics that suit my biases and leanings. Just as with the more strongly moderated reddits, it's the price of achieving a decent factual discussion. Without it there's a predictable race to the bottom. Without it HN would be just another barely moderated reddit with little appeal.
I'm not sure moderation is that much better. Some moderators strive to be fair but the majority will still vote and moderate based on preferences. There's also the quantity issue, most low-value comments don't break any rules but also aren't very insightful.
IME, places (or forums, or social networks, etc.) with good moderation tend to fall into 2 camps of putting that into play:
1. The very hands-off approach style that relies on the subject matter of the discussion/topic of interest naturally weeding out "normies" and "trolls" with moderation happening "behind the curtain";
2. The very hands-on approach that relies on explicit clear rules and no qualms about acting on those rules, so moderation actions are referred directly back to the specific rule broken and in plain sight.
Camp 1 begins to degrade as more people use your venue; camp 2 degrades as the venue turns over to debate about the rules themselves rather than the topic of interest that was the whole point of the venue itself (for example, this is very common in a number of subreddits where break-off subreddits usually form in direct response to a certain rule or the enforcement of a particular rule).
More than moderation, I think it's just an artifact of their ranking system. It basically guarantees that the only stuff on the front page or top of large reddits is going to be stuff that's shallow and easy (not to mention quick) to consume.
Could also mean "No controversial subjects", sort of like Tik Tok where any kind of political conversation, Covid related subject, etc. is taken down or ignored by the algorithm. Lots of people already think of reddit from a content consumption POV instead of a forum
I wouldn't attribute it solely on moderation though. The HN audience isn't very big and thread discussions never last too long because there's almost always something on the frontpage. Not saying it's a bad thing though.
Moderation really used to be just removing spam or abuse. At some point it became enforcing topics.
While yes a subreddit about trains should stay in topic space about trains, mods have overstepped that. Take for instance the Star Trek subreddit. Criticism of Star Trek discovery is banned, despite being clearly on topic.
Moderation is soft power. People think we have the power to be heavy handed, and a lot of users think that's what we do (just look at threads like this one), but we don't and we aren't. Mostly we just try to please the community, while doing our best to foster the mandate of the site. Of course this is impossible; the community can't be pleased, because different people want different things and many are incompatible. But if there's a way to keep it least-unpleased, that's what we're going for.
The posts you're asking about are in the vexed category where parts of the community feel they absolutely belong on HN while other parts believe they don't. Not only that, but the topics themselves have contradictory qualities: they're partly intellectually interesting, partly sensational gossip, partly a political slugfest. Unfortunately the slugfest is dominating everything else right now. I wrote about this here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33992824. That's also why I pinned https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34010948 and https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34010908 to the top of the two threads last night.
I don't know if that answers your question. It's hard to talk about this briefly. I've written a lot about how we moderate politics on HN, and some of it may make sense in this context. Examples:
The line between moderation and censorship is rather subjective to the moderator's own biases, don't you think? I'm not saying we should be free of moderation, just that it's very difficult to keep it completely objective, especially if there's any politics involved.
The quality of the subreddit is directly proportional to the moderation. The Ask subreddits (/r/AskHistory, /r/AskScience) are consistently cited for having high quality due to actual, transparent enforcement of the rules.
That said, moderation works as long as it doesn't modify the sentiment of content. Moderation for positive content only leads to groupthink which helps no one. (case in point, Product Hunt, where commenters get upvoted just for saying "cool!" with no additional insight)
Sorry, but any self-moderated forum is going to have content you don't like and lack content you like. That subreddit has the community's self-moderation, which scales, and moderators who don't. The moderators' aren't going to spend their day making judgment calls, they write clear rules[0] and let things take their course. “Must be peer-reviewed research” is pretty clear cut and the signal to noise is better than without it. Who cares if it's too strict; you have other subreddits.
That kind of moderation works under those environmental conditions - similar how some drugs work on certain types of body types and fail in others.
Other topics which are broad and have little general boundaries tend to get a lot harder to define.
Classic example would be where does porn stop and art begin?
In forum terms - politics, general opinion topics have more subjective moderation.
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Overall though, I agree - manual moderation is pretty much the best way to go forward.
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