Reddit’s replacement mods may be putting its communities at risk
www.theverge.com
Removing institutional knowledge means real risks for Redditors.

Reddit’s replacement mods may be putting its communities at risk — With institutional knowledge seeping out of the site, poor moderation could have real-world impacts as more misinformation is allo…::Reddit’s moderator purge could have real impacts on reliability and information safety as it rushes to replace mods with inexperienced and poorly vetted volunteers, shows a new report.

  • JeenaEnglish
    79•10 months ago

    I don’t know, every time I read a headline with the word “could” in it I’m not interested, because there are no facts in it it’s just speculation.

    • If my grandma had wheels, she could have been a bike
    • Aliens could change Trumps hair color
    • Reddit could destroy itself
    • Lemmy could be the greatest thing since sliced bread
    • China could collapse
    • Russia could collapse
    • The US could collapse

    the list goes on and on.

    • @ominouslemon@lemm.eeEnglish
      44•10 months ago

      Then read the article and not just the headline. There are various examples of why that’s happening.

      There’s a canning recipe that’s been allowed to stay up despite the potential to make people sick. A moderator with zero 3D-printing experience joined as a “joke” to replace a mod whose expertise included identifying functional gun printing recipes. A new home automation moderator insists expert knowledge is unnecessary in a subreddit where bad advice can lead to electrocution or compromised cybersecurity.

      Your examples are just funny, but when (good) journalists write “could”, it means that they have analyzed something and they are predicting its outcome based on the data they have collected. It’s not like they’re just making stuff up

      • @_number8_@lemmy.worldEnglish
        -10•10 months ago

        fuck reddit; isn’t this just what voting is for? i don’t want mods at all, ideally, i want to see what other people posted without anyone getting authority to say ‘achshully’

        • @Kachilde@lemmy.worldEnglish
          12•10 months ago

          Clearly competent moderators have some sort of effect, or these stories would not exist. If self-moderation worked, then the dangerous canning post mentioned in the article wouldn’t have gained any traction.

          Without competent moderation, the ability for users to manipulate or derail communities grows. A voting system is entirely subjective, and a bad or dangerous idea can set roots if enough unaware people give it the votes. I am aware that moderation is also subjective, but competent, knowledgeable mods can help guide a community, or protect it from targeted harassment.

          Also, they’re the ones with no life who can devote their time to monitoring the community. Most people spend a few minutes at a time visiting a community. That’s not enough time to verify every post in the last 24 hours, and vote for them all accordingly (depending on the size of the community of course),

    • @Aceticon@lemmy.worldEnglish
      7•10 months ago

      Well, that’s the same as saying “I don’t believe in Science because it’s just theories”.

      Argumenting-by-dictionary, about the words selected for the title - i.e. the form of only the title - says nothing at all about the quality or lack thereof of the actual content of the article itself.

      Or to put things another way, you put forward a theory (the article is just speculation) and then tried to support it by argumenting about appearences (the presence or not of a very specific word) on something (the title) barelly related to the actual article much less the article’s contents.

      Not only is arguing that “the presence of a specific word in the title means the whole article is speculation” incredibly reductionist (mindbogglingly so), it’s not even logical.

  • @shectabeni@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
    22•10 months ago

    Whether it’s Reddit or the average workplace institutional knowledge is so commonly looked over that I truly (like) to believe that sometime in the next years society will realize how important it is and shift to caring way more about it.

    • @Corkyskog@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      9•10 months ago

      You could replace “reddit” with the internet. FB, disinformation. Twitter, disinformation. Most online “news” outlets, disinformation. Google search results, links to various disinformation.

      It’s actually getting hard to find places on the web that aren’t flooded with disinformation.

  • AutoTL;DRBEnglish
    12•10 months ago

    This is the best summary I could come up with:

    Reddit’s moderator purge could have real impacts on reliability and information safety as it rushes to replace mods with inexperienced, poorly vetted volunteers, according to Ars Technica.

    With testimony by both expelled former moderators and some of those who replaced them, Ars Technica’s report shows the trouble with the company’s push to quickly replace the mods who sent their subreddits dark, marked them NSFW, or turned them into jokey John Oliver fan forums earlier this year.

    Reddit began removing protesting moderators in June and said it would continue doing so until morale improves unless subreddits opened back up.

    A moderator with zero 3D-printing experience joined as a “joke” to replace a mod whose expertise included identifying functional gun printing recipes.

    A new home automation moderator insists expert knowledge is unnecessary in a subreddit where bad advice can lead to electrocution or compromised cybersecurity.

    Stevie Chancellor, a computer science and engineering professor from the University of Minnesota, is quoted as saying she was concerned that mods wouldn’t be able to stop malicious users from encouraging people in mental health support forums “to hurt themselves for their own perverted desires.”

    The original article contains 381 words, the summary contains 188 words. Saved 51%. I’m a bot and I’m open source!