Why Reddit works
Yesterday I read this Twitter thread by /r/AskHistorians mods. A few points from it stuck out to me:
One of Reddit's USP's at the moment is that it's the last major concentration of the 'human' internet – if you want a front page google result written by an actual person, you add “reddit” to the end of your search!
The reason has nothing to do with Reddit's site architecture, and everything to do with community moderation. Reddit isn't moderated by a small army of outsourced employees in a warehouse dealing with an endless stream of decontextualised reports.
Rather, Reddit's frontline work is done by people who see issues in context and intimately understand that context. It makes us far, far better than, say, Twitter moderators at dealing with spam and bad faith users spouting carefully-coded hate.
This is an important point. Reddit isn't moderated like Twitter or Facebook, who hire warehouses of underpaid workers to moderate content in an assembly line-type fashion. Instead, it's done by thousands upon thousands of volunteer mods from the community.
These volunteers do not work for free. Sure, they're unpaid. But volunteers require motivation in lieu of cash. They need a reason to come back, a feeling of growth and progress that keeps them from burning out. There are a few main types of this motivational 'currency' that Reddit provides to its mods:
- Power and trust. Mods are given a suite of tools normally reserved for site admins. Instead of having to reference a handbook or go through rigorous training on the site's rules, Reddit allows these mods to do anything they want with these tools.
- Resources for community building. Reddit pays for and maintains the hosting of these communities, allowing the moderators not to worry about scaling concerns. They handle legal concerns for moderators (DMCA takedowns and compliance with laws). They provide a user base constantly on the hunt for the next big subreddit, allowing these mods to quickly grow communities.
- Social capital. Reddit's volunteers aren't nameless or faceless. There are tools that make them visible. This lets them form a relationship with their community, gaining trust, admiration, and thanks. Instead of being nameless and faceless low-paid employees, they're thanked by users for the work they do, becoming the subject of memes and inside jokes in their communities.
These forms of compensation keep volunteers doing the work for free, but that doesn't ensure high quality moderation. We don't have perfect moderation on my Mastodon server. We're reactive instead of proactive: we moderate content after it's been seen, not before. And we restrict interaction with a boatload of servers in order to reduce our general moderation load.
Throwing bodies at a problem doesn't guarantee that it'll be solved well.
A few key principles allow Reddit to retain its high quality of moderation at scale:
- Mods moderate their subs efficiently because they're users of the sub and members of the community. They don't have the loss of context that comes with the Facebook-style approach. If there's an argument, they can diffuse it because they can talk to users directly. And they can converse back and forth with their users to adapt moderation policies.
- Users co-moderate content with mods. The upvote and downvote buttons hide unpopular or low-quality content. They can help restrict harmful content before a mod is able to remove it.
- Mods look at a subset of content on Reddit. They're not looking through a firehose of information like on Twitter or Facebook. There is a clear context they moderate, which lowers their workload and allows them to become more efficient over time.
- It's clear where a moderator's power ends and begins. A moderator has control in their subreddit, but nowhere else. This reduces the amount of trust users of Reddit need to have in moderators. Moderators can't control what you post on other subreddits, they can't see your private messages, and they're listed to all users. This makes users less uneasy about using the platform, compared to Mastodon where admins can see all content.
These principles have allowed Reddit to scale to unimaginable content levels while retaining high-quality moderation.
Hmm I was going to make this a lot longer but I think I'm going to split this up into parts. I want to use this blog to post what normally would be a Twitter thread in the form of something that can be shared. So I think I'll expand more on this in a future post.