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How funny, this is right around the 4 year anniversary of my banning from Reddit. I genuinely don't miss that place, but it was never, ever clear as to why they nuked a high-karma account with 9 years of history and no actual misbehavior on record.
The way bans are handled was probably my least favorite part of Reddit moderation and administration, because as you state:
People were banned despite not violating the rules, or violating rules that usually go unenforced, or for violating rules that changed regularly and without much notice. And they always deflect from any responsibility to explain. And the appeal process is nonexistent.
There was a very shifty tactic I noticed where if the admins or some other group wanted a particular sub banned, they'd go about targeting that sub's mods for bannings, and then when there are no mods left, ban the subreddit itself for being 'unmoderated.' Which is a nice, clean reason for banning... but there's no effective route for the members of such a sub to jump in and save it! They can only spin up another one and hope it doesn't catch the eye of Sauron right away.
The other option, of course, was to let one of the admin's allies onto the mod team, which then meant they could take it over almost any time they wanted. Moderation is a difficult job especially when done for free, but if the moderation job has too much power that can be exercised arbitrarily, it will inherently attract the exact types who should never ever be entrusted with it.
Hence why I think the 'killer feature' of TheMotte is the explicit moderation policies that make banning a very much last resort, and give warnings, with explicit identification of what offense is being punished, and generally proportional punishments, that can be scaled up or down based on other moderators or users' input.
That's hard to do at scale. Maybe easier if you allow some AI assistance.
So when you talk about scaling, I'm somewhat less worried about the codebase (not my area of expertise), and I think you could just point Fable at it and get all that fixed up. I'm worried about the part that requires a high-conscientiousness human-in-the-loop to apply the rules with an even hand, even when they're personally offended.
Those types of people are rare. Their time, valuable.
You'd need to be able to handle the massive influx in reports that come when normies get into a space where mere consensus isn't enough to get someone booted, and they are constantly trying to invoke moderator power to get rid of people they disagree with. The endgame is that moderators are forced to spread their efforts thinner and we see more false positives and false negatives, which reduces trust in the moderators, or moderator burnout.
I'm just looking into my crystal ball here, I trust your judgment with regard to this places' future. But if you ever decide to step down (as said elsewhere, you're a true Cinncinatus, I understand if you want to return to farming), do please try and give the users a chance to step in and keep it running.
Reddit has somehow, for some reason, banned /r/random "due to being unmoderated". That makes the "Random" button in https://old.reddit.com no longer work. That fairly represents the more general state of the site today.
L M A O
See, there's even a subreddit that purports to allow one to claim banned/abandoned reddits and I've not once seen it work.
Apparently about six months ago it was used to hijack /r/puppets. On behalf of some private business. Yeah that about sums up the state of the site.
I've used it successfully, for what it's worth!
Like eight years ago, but still.
My brain immediately went "8 years? Oh so circa 2013 Reddit wasn't so bad back-ohhhhhh."
But yeah, Pre-Covid. The_Donald still had a strong foothold at that point. That was before Huffman intentionally editted that one guy's comment.
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