Reddit is reaching out to moderators after tensions rose over recent policy changes and API pricing. A Reddit admin acknowledged the strained relationship and outlined new weekly feedback sessions and other outreach efforts to repair ties. However, moderators remain skeptical of Reddit’s efforts given mixed results from past initiatives. Many mods feel Reddit has been unwilling to make meaningful changes to address their concerns like more accessible API pricing or exemption for accessibility apps. After a tumultuous few months, moderators have very low expectations that Reddit’s latest efforts will result in real changes.
Forum management 101
Lesson One:
1% of your readers produce 99% of your content.
Only about 1% of the population producing content is interested in enduring the shitshow of toxicity that comes with moderation.
Don’t piss them off.
End of Lesson
Honestly it’s amazing they even stayed around at all even before the site itself started fucking around. They start shit as a hobby, probably not even imagining it blowing up and becoming popular. Dealing with all the garbage and bullshit people on the internet have to offer. Then again, that’s thinking they made the community to have discussions; not control them.
Yeah - I ran a public forum as part of a publishing non-profit for about 12 years, so I’ve got nothing but sympathy for the mods.
Feel like telling a bit of what it was like, so here goes.
We got a fraction of the traffic Reddit did and the moderation was without a doubt the most difficult and least rewarding part of the effort - took up between 50% - 90% of our time, depending on how pissed off particular users were.
I finally gave up after the third wave of Turkish hackers (who were pissed that we had posted pictures of a broken window from a riot in Cyprus) hit us in a wave of spam accounts, ddos attacks, and finally hacked our shared service provider (I was soooo pissed about this, as I’d spend months hardening our site from their previous attacks, and I’d been relying on our hosting provider to have their backend secure) to hijack the website. I’m pretty sure they were Edrogan funded with a mandate, as the picture was really innocuous and their response to it was completely over the top. We were a small art & literature website. I can only imagine what mods on Reddit go through on a daily basis.