Arbitrary decisions from idiot mods have been around as long as there have been online communities. This same dynamic played out in 8-member IRC chat rooms back in 1995.
It comes down to a question about the purpose of moderation and the moderators. Do they want to nurture and encourage a community, or are they there to act as lobotomized rule-followers with bad attitudes and no cultural norms to weed out the arbitrary bad decisions?
Reddit, like all the big social companies, has opted for the latter. It's not a problem of moderation in itself (as you say this is necessary), but having dull and capricious people with their hands on the levers.
You’re clearly right that these problems exist in small communities too, I don’t think you can ever disentangle authority with abuse of authority, and no moderation system can ever be perfect.
But the claim I’m making is somewhat different - I claim that these sorts of negative tendencies become the dominant cultural force at a certain group size, and give a very hand-wavy estimate of that size to be 300,000.
This is a really interesting idea! The exponent of 2.5 is a little non-rigorous but the idea, I think, is fundamentally very good.
As a lower bound, you can probably say you can trust your friends-of-friends to have good faith discussions and as an upper bound, you can probably expect that friends-of-friends-of-friends is when you'll start to need to handle scaling issues, which gives a range of about 20k to 3M.
It'd be interesting to see if there could be some way of testing what this number is empirically.
Feb 9, 2023·edited Feb 9, 2023Liked by Dylan Black
Small subreddits want content, because without content, they die. Mods want to "succeed", so content creators are welcomed, and metrics going up represent a good job done by the mods.
Large subreddits want content, but being the kingmakers in terms of who gets to benefit from the traffic means that the moderators maintain their position of power within the community. The natives to the subreddit already respect the power structure; outsider traffic-seekers don't, and threaten it. Again, you're not "drive bying", but insecurity/fatigue on their part can make them assume otherwise.
It's frustrating, because I think that sometimes they assume that ONLY the community should benefit from the content; approved content-makers have proved their commitment to the community, and by extension, the power structure. Those approved creators don't want to lose their traffic line, so the mods get their power.
After originally writing this comment I feel like I need to come back to give the mods some defense; on the other hand, no one's entitled to a subreddit's traffic. You're allowed to complain about it, and they're allowed to disagree with your protest.
A traffic raider might get *so* successful that when they contribute enough to "actually be spam", the native population might clash with the mods, who want to remove it. Playing kingmaker at least gives them the feeling of control; they want you to kiss the ring.
You can argue I'm doing the same thing right now; I think that it's a good topic to talk about from a social psychology perspective, but I'm arguably advertising my own writing at the same time. If you think I'm being too smarmy or self-serving, you get the chance to ban me. It might not change the validity or utility of my comment, and might reduce your readers' experience (please don't take this as me insinuating that, because I'm an idiot), but you're the one maintaining your power structure.
Interesting. I’ve kept my Reddit account subscribed only to smaller communities with lower post volume - I think post rate also plays into whether you’ve got a community or a firehose. That’s a bit different than subscriber count since many might be lurkers or abandoned accounts, but it is probably close enough that I’m focusing on the same size communities you’ve found facilitate good interactions.
I sometimes dip into busier ones or search them, but subscribing would swamp my feed.
(The usual approach to scale interaction in the face of a high post rate has become some sort of algorithmic timeline, and that seems to bring a lot of problems of its own.)
Arbitrary decisions from idiot mods have been around as long as there have been online communities. This same dynamic played out in 8-member IRC chat rooms back in 1995.
It comes down to a question about the purpose of moderation and the moderators. Do they want to nurture and encourage a community, or are they there to act as lobotomized rule-followers with bad attitudes and no cultural norms to weed out the arbitrary bad decisions?
Reddit, like all the big social companies, has opted for the latter. It's not a problem of moderation in itself (as you say this is necessary), but having dull and capricious people with their hands on the levers.
You’re clearly right that these problems exist in small communities too, I don’t think you can ever disentangle authority with abuse of authority, and no moderation system can ever be perfect.
But the claim I’m making is somewhat different - I claim that these sorts of negative tendencies become the dominant cultural force at a certain group size, and give a very hand-wavy estimate of that size to be 300,000.
A read of Tocqueville's Democracy in America is in your future.
Haha I’ve never gotten around to reading it, but I probably should. Thanks!
This is a really interesting idea! The exponent of 2.5 is a little non-rigorous but the idea, I think, is fundamentally very good.
As a lower bound, you can probably say you can trust your friends-of-friends to have good faith discussions and as an upper bound, you can probably expect that friends-of-friends-of-friends is when you'll start to need to handle scaling issues, which gives a range of about 20k to 3M.
It'd be interesting to see if there could be some way of testing what this number is empirically.
I can imagine basically a longitudinal case study in Internet forums being tractable… Idk how you’d do a controlled experiment.
Small subreddits want content, because without content, they die. Mods want to "succeed", so content creators are welcomed, and metrics going up represent a good job done by the mods.
Large subreddits want content, but being the kingmakers in terms of who gets to benefit from the traffic means that the moderators maintain their position of power within the community. The natives to the subreddit already respect the power structure; outsider traffic-seekers don't, and threaten it. Again, you're not "drive bying", but insecurity/fatigue on their part can make them assume otherwise.
It's frustrating, because I think that sometimes they assume that ONLY the community should benefit from the content; approved content-makers have proved their commitment to the community, and by extension, the power structure. Those approved creators don't want to lose their traffic line, so the mods get their power.
After originally writing this comment I feel like I need to come back to give the mods some defense; on the other hand, no one's entitled to a subreddit's traffic. You're allowed to complain about it, and they're allowed to disagree with your protest.
A traffic raider might get *so* successful that when they contribute enough to "actually be spam", the native population might clash with the mods, who want to remove it. Playing kingmaker at least gives them the feeling of control; they want you to kiss the ring.
You can argue I'm doing the same thing right now; I think that it's a good topic to talk about from a social psychology perspective, but I'm arguably advertising my own writing at the same time. If you think I'm being too smarmy or self-serving, you get the chance to ban me. It might not change the validity or utility of my comment, and might reduce your readers' experience (please don't take this as me insinuating that, because I'm an idiot), but you're the one maintaining your power structure.
Interesting. I’ve kept my Reddit account subscribed only to smaller communities with lower post volume - I think post rate also plays into whether you’ve got a community or a firehose. That’s a bit different than subscriber count since many might be lurkers or abandoned accounts, but it is probably close enough that I’m focusing on the same size communities you’ve found facilitate good interactions.
I sometimes dip into busier ones or search them, but subscribing would swamp my feed.
(The usual approach to scale interaction in the face of a high post rate has become some sort of algorithmic timeline, and that seems to bring a lot of problems of its own.)