Reddit’s 2020 Year in Review
December 18, 2020 2:04 AM Subscribe
Reddit interviewed moderators of r/coronavirus, r/blacklivesmatter, r/weddingplanning, r/frugal, r/applyingtocollege, and r/amitheasshole about how their communities faced some of 2020's most unprecedented moments.
Reddit moderators are often influential without saying a great deal in public, so it's really interesting to hear them talking about their motivations and principles, as well as all the anecdotes.
Very tangential, but Ellen Pao saying she sought out advice from Metafilter mods while running Reddit caught my attention a few days ago. I'd never heard that before - had anyone else?
posted by Busy Old Fool at 6:19 AM on December 18, 2020 [10 favorites]
Very tangential, but Ellen Pao saying she sought out advice from Metafilter mods while running Reddit caught my attention a few days ago. I'd never heard that before - had anyone else?
posted by Busy Old Fool at 6:19 AM on December 18, 2020 [10 favorites]
AITA in particular has become such a weird phenomenon...I had to block mentions on Twitter because I got tired of Terrible Abusive Man Stories, and also debates about if any of it was real. I'm glad the moderators are being thoughtful, and really glad I'm not them.
posted by emjaybee at 7:03 AM on December 18, 2020 [3 favorites]
posted by emjaybee at 7:03 AM on December 18, 2020 [3 favorites]
It's really striking how many dudes are champing at the bit to unfurl their assholery in the harsh light of day on AITA this year. It's really the recurring theme there for 2020.
It's as though, robbed of their normal echo chambers of other awful dudes, they send their stories into AITA expecting similar validation only to have a less homogeneous audience immediately let them know in no uncertain terms that they are indeed the asshole.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 7:32 AM on December 18, 2020 [12 favorites]
It's as though, robbed of their normal echo chambers of other awful dudes, they send their stories into AITA expecting similar validation only to have a less homogeneous audience immediately let them know in no uncertain terms that they are indeed the asshole.
posted by DirtyOldTown at 7:32 AM on December 18, 2020 [12 favorites]
Ellen Pao saying she sought out advice from Metafilter mods while running Reddit
She doesn't say what advice they actually gave her. I'd like to think it was 'Run away as fast as you can, screaming and waving your arms around'.
posted by Cardinal Fang at 7:38 AM on December 18, 2020 [16 favorites]
She doesn't say what advice they actually gave her. I'd like to think it was 'Run away as fast as you can, screaming and waving your arms around'.
posted by Cardinal Fang at 7:38 AM on December 18, 2020 [16 favorites]
To me it always comes back to the fact that reddit is so large and the mods are unpaid.
You will never, ever get the kind of moderation you need on a site like reddit without a discussion about how the mods are effectively modern versions of newspaper editors, and they do have massive impact on discourse, and as such should be 1. Trained to do the job and 2. Paid to do the job.
This just feels like so many of those "wholesome uplifting" memes where we're so happy the community got together to build crutches for this boy who couldn't afford any while not discussing the dystopian reality that the community had to band together for basic medical necessities at all.
We're praising them for being sweet for doing an unpaid job of the sort that puts Facebook moderators in the position of needing professional mental health help. I mean, some reddit communities functionally exist as mental health support for people who can't afford it or simply don't have access.
It just doesn't feel that uplifting anymore for reddit to be profiting off of the unpaid labor of these people.
I also can't imagine what kind of advice Pao could have gotten from MeFi other than hightail it for the hills.
posted by deadaluspark at 9:51 AM on December 18, 2020 [15 favorites]
You will never, ever get the kind of moderation you need on a site like reddit without a discussion about how the mods are effectively modern versions of newspaper editors, and they do have massive impact on discourse, and as such should be 1. Trained to do the job and 2. Paid to do the job.
This just feels like so many of those "wholesome uplifting" memes where we're so happy the community got together to build crutches for this boy who couldn't afford any while not discussing the dystopian reality that the community had to band together for basic medical necessities at all.
We're praising them for being sweet for doing an unpaid job of the sort that puts Facebook moderators in the position of needing professional mental health help. I mean, some reddit communities functionally exist as mental health support for people who can't afford it or simply don't have access.
It just doesn't feel that uplifting anymore for reddit to be profiting off of the unpaid labor of these people.
I also can't imagine what kind of advice Pao could have gotten from MeFi other than hightail it for the hills.
posted by deadaluspark at 9:51 AM on December 18, 2020 [15 favorites]
I have a lot of regrets about not being born at least ten years later, but the biggest one is how much more help is available online for kids getting into/going to university. I was in that last generation of kids who came from the middle of nowhere in families with no history of university education, who had to rely 100% on shitty gatekeepers and the tidbits of information they lowered themselves to dole out.
posted by The Underpants Monster at 10:19 AM on December 18, 2020 [12 favorites]
posted by The Underpants Monster at 10:19 AM on December 18, 2020 [12 favorites]
I don't have access to Reddit's detailed financials but my understanding is there are still losing a lot of money per year. It would probably be very difficult to convince the financial people in any company to start paying for positions that people volunteer to do for free, and that would open them up to more liability and complication.
I think the actual point of this piece is to make reddit users empathize more with moderators and think of them as human beings. In general reddit users complain about moderators a LOT and seem to view them as omnipotent forces. This even happens in communities I follow where the moderators post regularly and try to explain their process in detail. Users constantly grumble about how the moderators are in collusion with the company to persecute them, and making them official employees might make that worse if it's not done well.
As far as I am aware there isn't really any good source for training moderators, it's a bunch of disparate bits of knowledge gained from moderating forums and places like here. If there is some sort of "moderator association" or contracting group that collects this knowledge into something that could actually be used for corporate training please tell me about it. From what I can tell Reddit is the only major company that is even remotely trying to have humane moderation policies that are community-specific. Most other companies are moving away from moderation completely, trying to rely on machine learning and one off decisions by individual customer support employees with little experience. Google will cancel dozens of products and invent new forms of AI before they will admit how important moderators are.
Newspaper editors have actual group support structures to rely upon and can use their network connections to punish companies that try to exploit them. They also have a good apprenticeship model where individual journalists can learn how to be an editor while working. As far as I can tell moderators don't really have that because most companies refuse to acknowledge they should even exist, and there's no real apprenticeship pipeline. At this point the reddit moderators probably have the most collective power so maybe they will find a way to band together and build some support structures, if they don't all quit because of the constant death threats. There must be some way forward that benefits everyone, but I don't know what it is
posted by JZig at 10:50 AM on December 18, 2020 [3 favorites]
I think the actual point of this piece is to make reddit users empathize more with moderators and think of them as human beings. In general reddit users complain about moderators a LOT and seem to view them as omnipotent forces. This even happens in communities I follow where the moderators post regularly and try to explain their process in detail. Users constantly grumble about how the moderators are in collusion with the company to persecute them, and making them official employees might make that worse if it's not done well.
As far as I am aware there isn't really any good source for training moderators, it's a bunch of disparate bits of knowledge gained from moderating forums and places like here. If there is some sort of "moderator association" or contracting group that collects this knowledge into something that could actually be used for corporate training please tell me about it. From what I can tell Reddit is the only major company that is even remotely trying to have humane moderation policies that are community-specific. Most other companies are moving away from moderation completely, trying to rely on machine learning and one off decisions by individual customer support employees with little experience. Google will cancel dozens of products and invent new forms of AI before they will admit how important moderators are.
Newspaper editors have actual group support structures to rely upon and can use their network connections to punish companies that try to exploit them. They also have a good apprenticeship model where individual journalists can learn how to be an editor while working. As far as I can tell moderators don't really have that because most companies refuse to acknowledge they should even exist, and there's no real apprenticeship pipeline. At this point the reddit moderators probably have the most collective power so maybe they will find a way to band together and build some support structures, if they don't all quit because of the constant death threats. There must be some way forward that benefits everyone, but I don't know what it is
posted by JZig at 10:50 AM on December 18, 2020 [3 favorites]
We're praising them for being sweet for doing an unpaid job of the sort that puts Facebook moderators in the position of needing professional mental health help.
I've been a mod of a fandom subreddit that's got over 200k users for three years now and I definitely agree with this. Since becoming a mod I've had everything from casual insults to full on personalised death threats directed at me and my fellow mods because of assumed slights in either our moderation policy or our personal conduct on the sub. Angry users will go through our profiles to find things to use against us. Sometimes they follow us to other subs to fling insults and slurs. We get that sort of stuff (usually mild, sometimes not) pretty much every day at least.
We're currently dealing with a group of users who have set up their own subreddit after being banned from ours where they share screenshots from our sub and discuss how much they hate us, how we're paid shills and various other offensive things. From what I can tell from the /modhelp and /modsupport subs, this is a pretty commonplace occurrence once a fandom subreddit gets to a certain size. We report their comments and sometimes the reddit admins take action, but most of the time they don't or won't.
We've also dealt with users who, for various reasons, have used our sub in order to vent some sort of mental health or other personal crisis. Thankfully we haven't had to call the cops or get involved IRL yet, but it's difficult to know what to say when your moderation requires you to close the door in the face of someone who needs help, because they can't express themselves without being disruptive.
None of us are paid. All of us got into it because we love the fandom and want to create a safe, inclusive, fun space for fans.
I'm kind of surprised Reddit hasn't given the moderators the bare minimum of compensation.
At the start of lockdown, Reddit teamed up with Calm and offered moderators a year's free access to the app. For the first thousand or so who applied. As long as you didn't already have a Calm account.
The admins send us frequent newsletters where they praise our hard work and talk about how reddit wouldn't exist without us. But when we come to them and ask them for tools to, for instance, make it so that angry users can't spam our report queue with anti-Semitic slurs, or help us block the troll who has so far made over 50 different reddit accounts in order to post racist comments, things suddenly become "difficult".
But, you know, we're the front page of the internet! Oh well.
posted by fight or flight at 10:52 AM on December 18, 2020 [24 favorites]
I've been a mod of a fandom subreddit that's got over 200k users for three years now and I definitely agree with this. Since becoming a mod I've had everything from casual insults to full on personalised death threats directed at me and my fellow mods because of assumed slights in either our moderation policy or our personal conduct on the sub. Angry users will go through our profiles to find things to use against us. Sometimes they follow us to other subs to fling insults and slurs. We get that sort of stuff (usually mild, sometimes not) pretty much every day at least.
We're currently dealing with a group of users who have set up their own subreddit after being banned from ours where they share screenshots from our sub and discuss how much they hate us, how we're paid shills and various other offensive things. From what I can tell from the /modhelp and /modsupport subs, this is a pretty commonplace occurrence once a fandom subreddit gets to a certain size. We report their comments and sometimes the reddit admins take action, but most of the time they don't or won't.
We've also dealt with users who, for various reasons, have used our sub in order to vent some sort of mental health or other personal crisis. Thankfully we haven't had to call the cops or get involved IRL yet, but it's difficult to know what to say when your moderation requires you to close the door in the face of someone who needs help, because they can't express themselves without being disruptive.
None of us are paid. All of us got into it because we love the fandom and want to create a safe, inclusive, fun space for fans.
I'm kind of surprised Reddit hasn't given the moderators the bare minimum of compensation.
At the start of lockdown, Reddit teamed up with Calm and offered moderators a year's free access to the app. For the first thousand or so who applied. As long as you didn't already have a Calm account.
The admins send us frequent newsletters where they praise our hard work and talk about how reddit wouldn't exist without us. But when we come to them and ask them for tools to, for instance, make it so that angry users can't spam our report queue with anti-Semitic slurs, or help us block the troll who has so far made over 50 different reddit accounts in order to post racist comments, things suddenly become "difficult".
But, you know, we're the front page of the internet! Oh well.
posted by fight or flight at 10:52 AM on December 18, 2020 [24 favorites]
At this point the reddit moderators probably have the most collective power so maybe they will find a way to band together and build some support structures
The tough thing about that, in my experience, is that since anyone can become a moderator at any time, the fact that we're all mods is often the only thing we have in common. I have no interest in teaming up with, for instance, the moderators of the many alt-right or hate subs that still exist on the site, some of which have a significant amount of users. What one moderator considers to be a good outcome differs greatly across subreddits.
I just went to check what's going on in the /modsupport sub (the main support space for moderators, set up by the admins as a space where they can interact with us) and one of the top threads is a request for the admins to help us out with the chronic abuse of the suicide watch bot (a bot that sends an automatic message when someone flags that they're concerned about a user -- we get a lot of these messages sent to us as a form of harassment). This has been an issue for months. The admin response so far has been "report it when it happens" and that's it.
Honestly, even if mods banded together and asked for proper support or compensation, I doubt we'd get anything besides the platitudes and empty promises we've been receiving up until now. But I don't necessarily blame the admins for that. They are, if anything, getting an even worse deal. It's a shitshow all the way down (or up) at this point.
posted by fight or flight at 11:02 AM on December 18, 2020 [3 favorites]
The tough thing about that, in my experience, is that since anyone can become a moderator at any time, the fact that we're all mods is often the only thing we have in common. I have no interest in teaming up with, for instance, the moderators of the many alt-right or hate subs that still exist on the site, some of which have a significant amount of users. What one moderator considers to be a good outcome differs greatly across subreddits.
I just went to check what's going on in the /modsupport sub (the main support space for moderators, set up by the admins as a space where they can interact with us) and one of the top threads is a request for the admins to help us out with the chronic abuse of the suicide watch bot (a bot that sends an automatic message when someone flags that they're concerned about a user -- we get a lot of these messages sent to us as a form of harassment). This has been an issue for months. The admin response so far has been "report it when it happens" and that's it.
Honestly, even if mods banded together and asked for proper support or compensation, I doubt we'd get anything besides the platitudes and empty promises we've been receiving up until now. But I don't necessarily blame the admins for that. They are, if anything, getting an even worse deal. It's a shitshow all the way down (or up) at this point.
posted by fight or flight at 11:02 AM on December 18, 2020 [3 favorites]
Once again, scale plays into this. reddit added subreddits and volunteer user moderation of said subreddits in 2008, when they boasted just over 2 million users to 330 million today.
When they rolled out subreddits, they were already getting kind of too big for those kind of communities to be functional (tell me, how can one person effectively moderate 3000 people? plenty of small subs like that), especially when the only requirement to make a sub was to have an idea and be the first to use a popular name. There are zero democratic controls over who has control over subreddits, and often, due to burnout, subs change hands frequently. My local city sub has changed numerous hands over the last several years, and one of the most despised local mods who took off when he no longer lived in the city, was doing a far better job than those who came before or came after.
Unfortunately, as of yet, there aren't trade associations about being a good moderator, because we haven't gotten to the point socially where we have accepted they do the traditional job of newspaper editors, and given that power, need to be properly vetted, not to be handed out to whoever "shows up first" because they felt like it.
reddit isn't building out mod tools, they're busy buying video companies to attempt to be the next TikTok. I have very little faith they will do more for their volunteer moderation teams past platitudes.
Compensation for this job would not work in reddits current iteration. They would have to burn down the moderation style and rebuild everything from the ground up. They have no intent to do that, not do their investors, as people have rightly pointed out. None of them will pay for labor they've gotten up to now for free without a fight.
posted by deadaluspark at 11:34 AM on December 18, 2020
When they rolled out subreddits, they were already getting kind of too big for those kind of communities to be functional (tell me, how can one person effectively moderate 3000 people? plenty of small subs like that), especially when the only requirement to make a sub was to have an idea and be the first to use a popular name. There are zero democratic controls over who has control over subreddits, and often, due to burnout, subs change hands frequently. My local city sub has changed numerous hands over the last several years, and one of the most despised local mods who took off when he no longer lived in the city, was doing a far better job than those who came before or came after.
Unfortunately, as of yet, there aren't trade associations about being a good moderator, because we haven't gotten to the point socially where we have accepted they do the traditional job of newspaper editors, and given that power, need to be properly vetted, not to be handed out to whoever "shows up first" because they felt like it.
reddit isn't building out mod tools, they're busy buying video companies to attempt to be the next TikTok. I have very little faith they will do more for their volunteer moderation teams past platitudes.
Compensation for this job would not work in reddits current iteration. They would have to burn down the moderation style and rebuild everything from the ground up. They have no intent to do that, not do their investors, as people have rightly pointed out. None of them will pay for labor they've gotten up to now for free without a fight.
posted by deadaluspark at 11:34 AM on December 18, 2020
Unfortunately, as of yet, there aren't trade associations about being a good moderator
AFAIK, Metafilter is the only online community that actually pays moderators of this type, where it's sort of a combination of moderation and community management. Facebook pays contractors to get PTSD, and deliberate keeps them out of the community; Reddit exploits peoples desire for community in order to avoid paying for community management. This is why you don't have trade associations.
Based on my experience, MF moderation should be the model for online communities. But Reddit has VC money and a massive user base, and Facebook has helped decimate advertising revenue while cannibalizing community groups and training the world to think that being on the web has no personal cost, so...we can't have nice things.
No wonder Pao asked MF for help. It's still kind of galling, considering, but where else was she going to turn?
posted by schadenfrau at 11:49 AM on December 18, 2020 [6 favorites]
AFAIK, Metafilter is the only online community that actually pays moderators of this type, where it's sort of a combination of moderation and community management. Facebook pays contractors to get PTSD, and deliberate keeps them out of the community; Reddit exploits peoples desire for community in order to avoid paying for community management. This is why you don't have trade associations.
Based on my experience, MF moderation should be the model for online communities. But Reddit has VC money and a massive user base, and Facebook has helped decimate advertising revenue while cannibalizing community groups and training the world to think that being on the web has no personal cost, so...we can't have nice things.
No wonder Pao asked MF for help. It's still kind of galling, considering, but where else was she going to turn?
posted by schadenfrau at 11:49 AM on December 18, 2020 [6 favorites]
Thank you for the insiders view fight or flight. From what you say it sounds like Reddit is failing at pretty basic ways to support mods, which is disappointing. If they're not willing to listen to their most influential users when they ask for basic technical tools that means the current management structure also does not see moderators as valuable. Ugh. I've been on the software development side of this and argued for more community tools, it's always an uphill battle vs exciting new features.
I guess I'll go with a "thank you for all your support!" to all the mods out there, some of us do really appreciate your work.
posted by JZig at 12:29 PM on December 18, 2020
I guess I'll go with a "thank you for all your support!" to all the mods out there, some of us do really appreciate your work.
posted by JZig at 12:29 PM on December 18, 2020
It's worse than that, JZig, they're actively making it harder.
Take for instance the Reddit chat feature they rolled out a while ago. This chat feature was opt-in, so subreddit mods could choose whether or not to have a chat. We decided to try it out. We had only the most basic moderation tools for that chat -- we could kick and ban users when they cause trouble, but we couldn't, for instance, see their history in the chat. We couldn't pre-emptively ban problem users. We had to have one of our mods sitting in the chat (which has a terrible UI to round it off) 24/7 to keep an eye on it. We couldn't set up an automod to automatically remove messages with certain words.
Thankfully, the chat feature in general was such a crap idea that hardly anyone used it, so it mostly just burbled along in the background (and eventually got shuttered last month, which was on us to warn our users about, some of whom had been using the chat every day as a space to hang out). However, our chatroom has now become a private group chat, which we can't moderate at all.
As if that's not bad enough, earlier in the year the Reddit admins decided to test a new chat feature where visitors to the sub could click a button to start chatting be randomly dropped into group chats, omegle style. This was NOT opt-in, even subreddits who had pointedly opted out of chats (an important thing for the many subs where this would be inappropriate, for instance NSFW, support and mental health subs) weren't given a choice. Though these chats would technically be part of our sub, we would have no control over them, and no ability to moderate them. They would be moderated by the Reddit admins (sorry, "Safety Teams"), who notoriously take up to three days to reply to a report -- not great in a time sensitive chat situation. We wouldn't be able to stop someone (who might be a minor) getting put into a chat with, say, a predator or a nasty troll.
The Reddit admins didn't consult mods before rolling this feature out, it was just thrown at us with no warning. They apparently tested it on 30(!) communities before rolling it out. There was massive backlash across the mod support subreddits, to the tune of major subreddit mods saying they'd shutter their subs if it wasn't taken down. After a few days, the Reddit admins rolled the feature back and apologised.
I have no doubt they'll try to bring it back again eventually. Over the last year or so the support from the admins has become more and more reliant on automated responses, with certain words triggering an admin intervention over a moderator's call. It's clear that while they rely on us to maintain their platform, they have no faith or trust in moderators to actually run our communities, and they will continue to push changes to the site that are geared towards advertisers first and users and moderators last.
posted by fight or flight at 1:05 PM on December 18, 2020 [3 favorites]
Take for instance the Reddit chat feature they rolled out a while ago. This chat feature was opt-in, so subreddit mods could choose whether or not to have a chat. We decided to try it out. We had only the most basic moderation tools for that chat -- we could kick and ban users when they cause trouble, but we couldn't, for instance, see their history in the chat. We couldn't pre-emptively ban problem users. We had to have one of our mods sitting in the chat (which has a terrible UI to round it off) 24/7 to keep an eye on it. We couldn't set up an automod to automatically remove messages with certain words.
Thankfully, the chat feature in general was such a crap idea that hardly anyone used it, so it mostly just burbled along in the background (and eventually got shuttered last month, which was on us to warn our users about, some of whom had been using the chat every day as a space to hang out). However, our chatroom has now become a private group chat, which we can't moderate at all.
As if that's not bad enough, earlier in the year the Reddit admins decided to test a new chat feature where visitors to the sub could click a button to start chatting be randomly dropped into group chats, omegle style. This was NOT opt-in, even subreddits who had pointedly opted out of chats (an important thing for the many subs where this would be inappropriate, for instance NSFW, support and mental health subs) weren't given a choice. Though these chats would technically be part of our sub, we would have no control over them, and no ability to moderate them. They would be moderated by the Reddit admins (sorry, "Safety Teams"), who notoriously take up to three days to reply to a report -- not great in a time sensitive chat situation. We wouldn't be able to stop someone (who might be a minor) getting put into a chat with, say, a predator or a nasty troll.
The Reddit admins didn't consult mods before rolling this feature out, it was just thrown at us with no warning. They apparently tested it on 30(!) communities before rolling it out. There was massive backlash across the mod support subreddits, to the tune of major subreddit mods saying they'd shutter their subs if it wasn't taken down. After a few days, the Reddit admins rolled the feature back and apologised.
I have no doubt they'll try to bring it back again eventually. Over the last year or so the support from the admins has become more and more reliant on automated responses, with certain words triggering an admin intervention over a moderator's call. It's clear that while they rely on us to maintain their platform, they have no faith or trust in moderators to actually run our communities, and they will continue to push changes to the site that are geared towards advertisers first and users and moderators last.
posted by fight or flight at 1:05 PM on December 18, 2020 [3 favorites]
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Thank you for sharing this.
Also, you are on fire with these great FPPs! Thank you!
posted by kimberussell at 6:16 AM on December 18, 2020 [6 favorites]