Stumbled across this screenshot. Now, instead of judging people for yourself, the computer can do it for you!!! This will in no way be used negatively by Reddit nor people who are arguing with each other. Original post is here, if anyone still has Reddit maybe go spread the good word of Lemmy and Piefed to these users :P
Huh. That's actually not a terrible idea.
I wouldn't automate moderation attached to that (yet), but to give people a tool to gauge if a responder is just disagreeing or is a frequent troll? Yeah, that could work. Better than having to dig through the literary works of some rando stuck in an argument with you when deciding whether to block or report them.
Worst case the summary isn't particularly accurate, but for the reasons you'd be digging through someone's post backlog that's not that big of a deal anyway.
Are moderators this lazy?
I don't know that you can accuse a volunteer of laziness, just on principle.
I'll say that moderation is the single hardest problem of the Internet. Corporations being lazy and cheap about it, plus deliberately neglecting it because lack of moderation drives engagement, has led to... let me check my notes... ah, yes, the end of democracy and civil society as we understand it.
So... you know. There's that part.
I don't know that AI is a silver bullet for it, you get lots of problems if you cut humans off that loop, and a lot of the issues are deliberate corporate choices. But, you know, we hadn't already messed this up beyond repair, any tool in that toolbox would have been welcomed.
I have an account on Gab and when the website was new, they created a New Zealand group. It had no moderation from about 2019 until 2024. The only problem we had was this one guy who was using software to automate posts all the time. He flooded the group for months (years maybe) until my friend paid for a Pro account and was allowed to become the administrator. We banned the bots and that was it.
We've never had to delete anyone's posts because we aren't trying to artificially steer conversations or ban people for having the wrong opinion. If someone posted a couple of times a day, strongly disagreeing with us and calling us names, we wouldn't even bother to ban them. Maybe block on our individual accounts but we can still click to read their posts even if we're blocking them. Surprisingly, our group is public but we don't need to moderate it. Not with humans or automation. After the CEO of Gab banned "third world" IP addresses from the website, it pretty much stopped spam. Reddit uses all of this tracking technology to give people a social credit score but Gab just bans third world countries and has people who can take a joke.
The image of the hard-working, burnt-out reddit moderator is a joke to me. If there's too much moderation needed, it's probably a control-freak issue or maybe they need to ban certain countries where a significant amount of spam comes from.
See? It took me two posts and a depressing dive into this guy's posts this time.
There's definitely room for tool assistance here.
Or you could have thicker skin and get away with basically zero moderation.
Nah.
I was a moderator once. I didn't want to be, but was asked to help. It's incredibly boring, unfulfilling, and a chore. You are the supervisor of the playground during recess and there's always some moron eating sand or a fight breaking out over which dinosaur is best.
Though, if there's concise rules, job's easier.
"Miiiiiss! Daniels being mean again!"
"I don't care you little shits." Taps rule board and sips more wine from a World's Best Teacher mug
and there is always someone who is pissing off other users and tip toeing on the edge of the rules. Then if you ban them they get mega mad and start a campaign against the mods.
I banned someone for using automated software to flood a group on Gab once. Apart from that we don't have rules in the New Zealand Gab group. Nobody can tip toe on the edge of rules when there are only about three rules: don't doxx, don't threaten violence and don't post pornography. Someone either does these things or they don't, there's really no toe tipping here. The guy we banned did complain - his bot software must have warned him that the posts were failing. He didn't start a campaign against us.
ban evaders on reddit some of accounts, and people who post links will do this, but reddit filters them out quite fast, so they dont do it often.
Sounds like the sewer of the internet. If there's so much trouble then people need to make private clubs where users have to apply to join and only a handful get in per week. I moderate a couple of groups on Gab and I've never banned anyone except people who used automated software to flood the groups. Arguments are actually funny and we don't stop them. Just because someone's "hot take" offends someone it doesn't mean we ban. Even if half the users were offended we wouldn't ban. We are adults on Gab unlike reddit. I don't log into Gab looking to moderate and patrol for trouble because it'd make the website less fun for everyone. We aren't a bunch of sissies but neither are we an image board for pornographers and freaks. I think the problem is reddit and the idiots it attracts. Once people get out of their twenties they will discover other websites and stop using reddit. The problem is that there are always new children being born, then they're allowed to post online and suddenly the problems you describe appear.
Yeah, that's the attitude I took. If I don't care, it can't be that bad.
Honestly, the vast majority of reports come from one's ego going "tink" because someone tossed a pebble at it. Rarely did a report actually have serious merit to it.
I've always been of the opinion that if you need a mod to sort something out for you, it's not the nook and cranny of the internet for you and just move onto one of the infinite more. The only things that should be reported and actioned on are those that threaten the nook and/or cranny itself—malicious shit against it's integrity, basically.
Regardless, I never want to mod an online social space ever again. Oh! I did two, but the other one was just a forum and it too had it's 1 in 200 bad eggs.