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comment by kleinbl00
kleinbl00  ·  2844 days ago  ·  link  ·    ·  parent  ·  post: Reddit mods are so terrible, they are making national news.

Reddit functions on gamification. The rules were written for Asteroids. The game has become Eve Online. The bridge from one to the other is open-source. The results are predictable.

Moderating a large sub is akin to policing Mardi Gras with a wiffle ball bat, except nobody is even giving you beads. /r/movies had 6 million subscribers when we decided we needed to be more "public-facing" and I decided life was too short. /r/news has to be apocalyptically bad.

Don't blame the moderators. Fundamentally, their platform has been overstretched past the point of uselessness and has crossed over into malignant obstruction. There is nothing in mod toolbox that would have prevented this; the moderators exist in this instance simply to be the scapegoats of an architecture that is fundamentally incapable of the performance its users require of it.





thundara  ·  2843 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    Reddit functions on gamification.

Do you think this is true of /r/the_donald & co? This week had them completely covering the front page (Or at least, I had ~10/25 posts left on my front page after RES blocked the rest).

I find it somewhat hard to believe that they are really that popular a sub and not just gaming / mass-upvoting every post. But then again, if they were doing something obvious, I'd imagine the admins would be quick to shut them down, given the amount of shit / drama the cause on the rest of the site.

kleinbl00  ·  2843 days ago  ·  link  ·  

By "gamification" I mean "you get points for behavior." This is true of every subreddit and every account.

Reddit makes a lot more sense when you realize that a moderator's ability to influence a subreddit is the same as an individual user's ability to influence a subreddit... plus CSS and scripting. Combine that with the fact that their hires make piss-poor money and deal with a wretched internal communications culture and you soon realize that even the "admins" have little control over the process.

johnnyFive  ·  2843 days ago  ·  link  ·  

    their hires make piss-poor money and deal with a wretched internal communications culture and you soon realize that even the "admins" have little control over the process.

I haven't heard about this specifically, but it would certainly explain a lot.

But I have noticed how awful the admins are at communicating with users. They have one of the most skeptical userbases around (or maybe better said is big enough to still have lots of skeptical people), yet they still act like bland corporate press releases are going to satisfy those users. Invariable people call them on their nonsense (and these get pushed to the top), so it becomes a shitshow.

Honestly I don't think they know what to do with what they have better than anyone else.