At this point, LW is mostly self-policing. I’m the moderator and I don’t have a whole lot of work. This doesn’t mean LW would be in good shape after (I’m guessing) a year with no moderator.
Sites with a lot of traffic tend to have multiple moderators. When Ta Nehisi Coates used to have an excellent comment section on a blog about mostly controversial topics at a national magazine, he eventually had sub-moderators. Coates was the only one who could offer articles. Making Light has at least three moderators, possibly as many as five. That is, there are only five people who can write top-level articles, but only three of them seem to be active moderators.
Does reddit have the ability to offer moderated fora? That would be a good compromise. People would even have a handy place to post rejected articles in other fora.
I would say mostly social pressure, with downvoting into invisibility functioning as a heavy blunt object to persuade people not amenable to social pressure :-)
Thanks for the information—I just assumed that the original post was describing a real problem. Perhaps the next question is why there aren’t fora with better information about some of those popular subjects.
The reason why there aren’t sub-reddits is discussed in the article. You either need an exclusive niche or strict moderation. The areas described are both general interest and hard to strictly moderate because of the difficulty in defining objective article quality.
Politics isn’t banned here, just discouraged.
At this point, LW is mostly self-policing. I’m the moderator and I don’t have a whole lot of work. This doesn’t mean LW would be in good shape after (I’m guessing) a year with no moderator.
Sites with a lot of traffic tend to have multiple moderators. When Ta Nehisi Coates used to have an excellent comment section on a blog about mostly controversial topics at a national magazine, he eventually had sub-moderators. Coates was the only one who could offer articles. Making Light has at least three moderators, possibly as many as five. That is, there are only five people who can write top-level articles, but only three of them seem to be active moderators.
Does reddit have the ability to offer moderated fora? That would be a good compromise. People would even have a handy place to post rejected articles in other fora.
By this I assume you’re referring to the karma system, correct?
I would say mostly social pressure, with downvoting into invisibility functioning as a heavy blunt object to persuade people not amenable to social pressure :-)
I agree.
And there’s also social inertia, where people who aren’t interested in an LWish sort of community aren’t likely to post.
Moderated fora? Each sub-reddit has its own moderation team.
Thanks for the information—I just assumed that the original post was describing a real problem. Perhaps the next question is why there aren’t fora with better information about some of those popular subjects.
Lol, I am OP.
The reason why there aren’t sub-reddits is discussed in the article. You either need an exclusive niche or strict moderation. The areas described are both general interest and hard to strictly moderate because of the difficulty in defining objective article quality.