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
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.