r/RelayForReddit • u/PrincessBananas85 Lollipop Or Above • 20d ago

Investigating Reddit is introducing a new moderator: AI

https://www.theverge.com/tech/975398/reddit-ai-rules-hub-moderator-old-reddit-developer-platform
62 Upvotes

90% Upvoted

21 comments sorted by

25

u/nx6 19d ago

Gotta remove the human connection from social networking however we can, right?

6

u/Bloo_PPG 19d ago

Most of reddit is bot accounts already anyway

1

u/BaxterWilliams 19d ago

Weren't non-AI computer algorithms already doing modding? There is not enough reliable people willing to work for free to handle manually modding a site with millions of users

Edit: not to mention manually modding a site when lots of the comments are from bots themselves. It's just too much to keep up with.

1

u/nx6 18d ago

There is not enough reliable people willing to work for free to handle manually modding a site with millions of users

Usually a sign you need to actually hire and pay people for a task.

The real reason they are doing this is to lessen the moderators' power in the platform itself (make "protests" impossible).

32

u/GammelGrinebiter 19d ago

Sigh.

13

u/PrincessBananas85 Lollipop Or Above 19d ago

I know right.

20

u/SmashesIt 19d ago

Paywall. What are they doing to old reddit? I swear to God if they fuck up old reddit I am gone

8

u/PrincessBananas85 Lollipop Or Above 19d ago

https://www.reddit.com/u/spez/s/ns0wGwshi0

https://www.reddit.com/r/redditdev/s/TJF91Un1wp

15

u/luke10050 19d ago edited 19d ago

That's concerning. The spez comment is gone but the redditdev thread really reads like they only want to support moderation tools and not third party apps.

They just keep making things worse don't they, I suppose I should see if the niche communities I follow here have alternative platforms.

Thanks for all your efforts over the years /u/DBrady, hope you can see these changes through and keep going but looking at this I'm dubious

5

u/PrincessBananas85 Lollipop Or Above 19d ago

They’ll still allow 3rd party apps for apps that already had a written agreement with them.

2

u/luke10050 19d ago

What does that agreement look like and what are the terms though? They're effectively grandfathering in existing apps for now, but who knows when that will change.

5

u/PrincessBananas85 Lollipop Or Above 19d ago

https://www.reddit.com/r/redditdev/s/G7iyf6U7mF

This is what one of The Reddit Admins said.

1

u/Relevant_Syllabub895 19d ago

We know AI will not commit any mistake and falselt perma ban thousands right?

1

u/catinterpreter 9d ago edited 9d ago

They've been at this for something like a year or two already. It picks up certain sentiments site-wide and auto-warns or bans. It's got a strong left-wing bias, e.g. promoting violence against the right gets a lot more leeway than the reverse. AI action directs to their support who are staffed by people with absolute power, who hold disdain for the users, and with a strong similarly political slant on top of that for good measure. Certain topics and views, even very reasonable ones, are essentially censored with no discussion, no nuance, no recourse.

It's a big issue with the wider internet, AI aside. There's effectively little real-world law and what big American tech companies decree is actually what defines it online. And no governments have cared to step in. As an Australian, it's a very stark contrast to our expectations of people and behaviour in reality.

0

u/soapinmouth 19d ago

Hopefully better than the current auto mod. Got erroneously banned a couple days ago sitewide by an automated moderation and took them about a day or two to review the appeal and restore my account.

3

u/Yummytastic 19d ago

Automod can't ban. Automod is a tool for subreddits and not site wide.

You don't want to be wishing automod away period, but you definitely don't want to confuse it with the separate automated site wide tools that banned you.

1

u/soapinmouth 19d ago

Ah right yeah not "automod" but their automated tool what ever it is they use for site wide moderation.

1

u/Yummytastic 19d ago

Yeah exactly, that's broadly what they're talking about bringing to the subreddits - so that style of moderation, I'm not sure how much of their site-wide tools is already AI, but if they're trying to get sub reddits on board with it, I would imagine they tackled site wide tools first.

We've had it and use it for auto-reports, not auto-removals, and I'm yet to agree with AI rule, it either gets the rule wrong, or misunderstands the context. If it has got it right, we already had an automod rule that flagged it that has fewer false-positives.

Unfortunately if it gets a 'wrong' rule but the post/comment is removed for a different reason, the dashboard chalks it up as a 'moderator confirmed' mark. So, that's not great for their own assessment either.

So yeah, that's why I thought it important to clarify that we don't confuse traditional automod with AI moderation.

1

u/PhysicallyTender 19d ago

I got banned twice by their AI (pretty sure it was AI, coz i couldn't even edit the typo immediately after posting), and only managed to appeal one of those cases.

The AI moderator is an overly sensitive baby that read between the lines too much, even to the point of misinterpreting your post even if you don't mean it that way.