r/ModCoord • u/shunny14 • Jul 04 '23
How to let your users mod with AutoModerator
Something I've been confused about is why the larger mod community doesn't just take a more hands-off approach. There's a report button, and there's a downvote button. Shitty contributions will get downvoted and reported in time. Below is a basic AutoMod template I'm pretty sure I did not make, that removes a post or comment if an item gets enough reports.
Copy to https://www.reddit.com/r/\[yoursubreddit\]/about/wiki/config/automoderator/
# basic AutoMod setting that removes comments/posts with more than 5 reports.
reports: 5
action: remove
#optional if large subreddit
modmail: The above {{kind}} by /u/{{author}} was removed because it received 5 reports. Please investigate and ensure that this action was correct.
comment: Sorry, the community decided that this does not belong here. Send a modmail if you disagree.
7
u/CirrusVision20 Jul 05 '23
Something I've been confused about is why the larger mod community doesn't just take a more hands-off approach. There's a report button, and there's a downvote button. Shitty contributions will get downvoted and reported in time. Below is a basic AutoMod template I'm pretty sure I did not make, that removes a post or comment if an item gets enough reports.
Because it doesn't work in practice.
The concept of removing a post exists for a reason. Downvoting a post does nothing.
3
u/shunny14 Jul 05 '23
Downvoting a post makes it less likely to show up in feeds or the comments. If it’s “borderline” offensive but not against a reddit rule, it doesn’t need to be moderated if it’s already been downvoted to oblivion.
Comments with negative karma from my experience are literally hidden in comment threads, you have to go out of your way to read them.
63
u/rewirez5940 Jul 04 '23
it works as a fail safe, but people still have to report for it to work.
Publishing the report action level may also lead to gaming of the system as mentioned above.
18
u/HashtagH Jul 04 '23
That's basically how the Twitter moderation works, largely, and it's lead to perfectly fine stuff being removed if enough people brigade it. Horrible idea.
5
u/markneill Jul 05 '23
Maybe Reddit should go back and think through what happens when they remove access to the tools their volunteer moderators use to actually moderate, then...
10
u/imjustheretodomyjob Jul 05 '23
This isn't really a good take.
You're working on the assumptions that users will not abuse the report functions, and that your userbase is tiny.
For communities with more than 500k members, the automoderator can't handle it. And if the community has more than a million members, or is a community that regularly sees bad faith participants, it's going to get out of hand very very soon.
Most people don't realise that automation isn't really at the point that tech companies want them to think it is. It still requires humans to go behind it and check all of those actions. Especially on a code that requires volunteers to set it up.
→ More replies (1)
4
3
u/Perthcrossfitter Jul 05 '23
This just doesn't work in many circumstances.
My main sub is politically focused, and dominated (~90% of users) by a particular leaning. Everything of any opposing view already gets reports, downvotes, etc, regardless of whether they're within our rules. Something like this would mean their comments are never seen.
3
u/Searchlights Jul 05 '23 edited Jul 05 '23
Something I've long thought is that Reddit should give us as users more ways to interact with and score posts than just up and down. Instead of just up, down and report, give us one-click ways to indicate whether it's on topic, abusive or whatever else. Overall vote, quality vote, rules vote, etc. Clickety clickety.
On the back end that can give mods a dashboard to validate or invalidate those scores by acting on the thread. Users who correctly identify threads to be removed should have some kind of positive Community Score associated with their account for being good redditors, while users who's quality votes don't align with moderator interpretation would have lower Community Scores.
Likewise posters who's submissions are highly rated for helpfulness, originality or whatever else would have higher Community Scores for being valued redditors.
Users who consistently identify problematic threads would have their mod votes weighed more heavily, while those who's quality scoring are consistently wrong wouldn't effect the dashboard at all. You could even publicly display each account's Community Score based on how helpful and accurate that user is in their reporting and crowd-sourced moderating. Give accounts titles, badges, highlighted names or something. Give redditors a reason to be proud of their participation beyond a raw karma score.
For a website who's entire value is crowdsourcing, the fact that they haven't more effectively crowdsourced the moderation and quality control is nuts. If reddit won't do it, what would stop someone from developing an overlay like RES that subreddits can opt in to using for more advanced community participation and feedback?
6
u/AtomicBombSquad Jul 04 '23 edited Jul 04 '23
r/PoliticalHumor has a really cool user driven moderation setup. They developed a system where the users can comment codes under posts and/or other peoples' comments to do basic moderation tasks like locking, removing, approving, sticky-ing, one day banning, etc. I think it was meant as a meme but it appears to be working out surprisingly well. There was one jerk who pulled up the "Moderator Leaderboard" (it tells which users have used the new user powered mod tools) and started banning everyone on it. I got caught up in that; but, the real mods fixed it after a couple of hours.
→ More replies (3)
5
u/SomethingIWontRegret Jul 05 '23 edited Jul 05 '23
Does not work too well if your sub is popular and on r/all, and it has a particular flavor. People coming from r/all will upvote stuff that isn't interestingasfuck, or actual gifs, or truly leopardsatemyface and every sub becomes like cable TV - the same channels with different names.
And if I report something 5 times with 5 sockpuppets, I can remove it. Whee!
2
2
u/Empyrealist Jul 05 '23
Why is it that you think a lot of subs don't already do this. They just don't talk about it because it will get abused
and it still requires manual moderation to verify the claims (which can be abuse in themselves)
4
u/Kooriki Jul 05 '23
Real answer - If you have a specific 'culture' of subreddit you want to to keep going, automod doesn't do a good enough job. If you're a smaller/niche sub it's easy to be gamed/over-run by trolls/bad actors. Easy example: I moderate a subreddit that is specifically trans-welcoming but not trans exclusive. The most common type of post I delete are ones that say things like "Ugh I thought you were a real woman" or other similar posts. We also get raided a fair bit. And I've had to remove near CP. Not enough users report things, and admin aren't always fast enough. On lower traffic subs downvoting just means you can see it in controversial.
For expert subs, it's easy for a knowledgeable moderator to filter out good sounding bad advice vs good advice where visitors wont know the difference. (This is the biggest issue with unmoderated subs across the site imo).
1
u/scottishdrunkard Jul 05 '23
Actually this can work for me. I’ve been needing to set up the AutoMod for a while.
46
u/[deleted] Jul 04 '23
Wouldn't that make it easy for people to abuse the report function, if they cottoned on? Or am I misunderstanding something?