I.

I had dinner with 5days and kickme444 about 6 months before Reddit bought RedditGifts. They'd gone to SXSW, on their own coin, because there was a panel there about "internet moderation." 5D told me that it was a surreal experience because RedditGifts was, back in the halcyon days of 2009, two orders of magnitude larger than any other entity that presented, let alone showed up. Facebook? Not there. Reddit? Not there. 4Chan? Not there. Youtube? Not there. Twitter? Not there.

II.

About two years later I had a chat with krispy wherein I had to explain what "doxing" was. She was Reddit's community manager at the time, the third in a line of 5 I had personal meetings with, skype meetings with, iChat meetings with. They were always deeply interested in my ideas and always utterly powerless to do anything about the status quo. Another year after that I signed on to moderate /r/politics, then resigned four days later when the "collective" decision was to re-admit Mother Jones but to keep David Corn banned because he was a "spammer." When I pointed out that he was a distinguished columnist with a 20-year career and a Polk Award, I was told "all columnists are spammers."

III.

Friend of mine is an islamic scholar. Working on his dissertation for George Washington University. Posted a videocast of himself discussing a chapter of the Koran in Arabic to Facebook. Facebook took it down - he couldn't even see it in his timeline. I opined that it had probably been reported, and since it was Friday, he probably wouldn't see it again until Monday morning because the people who review content have no training, an impossible backlog and a terrible shifting set of guidelines. Sho'nuff, it was back up on Monday. But somebody was able to get back at "the terrists" for the weekend by clicking a button.

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Not mentioned in the article is that there is no incentive for better moderation. Youtube needed things to go okay until they established their brand, now everyone gives them the benefit of the doubt. 4chan is a shithole and everybody knows it so the content can keep going there. Reddit? Still gets its clicks. The reason it took forever for them to take down /r/Jailbait is it was their biggest inbound search term.

There is no internet award for quality, only for quantity, and there's no such thing as bad traffic. So moderation will continue to be this thing that everyone pays lip service to... until something truly horrific happens and someone is sued out of existence.

Having spent far too long in the belly of the beast, it's gonna be bad. You'd think Twitter would have done something when the trolls chased Robin Williams' daughter off Twitter but nothing ever came of that.

10,000 retweets.