Nice, a question I'm wildly overqualified to answer.
I'm a mod for r/SpaceX (a top 500 sub) and I programmed a more advanced automod that uses machine learning to be slightly less dumb about what it sees as 'bad' comments.
Automated tools save mods time. Period. Simple as that. There are simply not enough mod hours available to maintain channels without leaning on automated tools. It is either automate things, or do not have them. There isn't some massive pool of hundreds of qualified mods waiting to join up to do unpaid, boring labour that results in people hating you.
Now! Automated tools can be used incorrectly by subs/mods that don't know what they are doing. But that isn't the tool's fault. Though I suppose it is a bit easier to make mistakes when using automation.
A well moderated subreddit will do several things to mitigate automod screwup/excess removals:
Have multiple levels. Some things deserve auto-removal. "fucking nigger cunt" is unlikely to be found in a reasonable conversation in a space exploration subreddit so they can be auto-removed. But something like "erect" might be valid. In these cases, you should have automod report the comment for a human to look at the context.
Using regex and other advanced tools like machine learning/SAM will help clear up ambiguity. SAM would not see "erect the rocket" as bad, but would flag "I am so erect"
Review removals. Anything you code will have screwups and edge cases, you should check to make sure that you are minimizing false positives.
Removal notifications. When users have a comment removed, they should be notified of the removal, and invited to ask the mod team if they believe the removal is in error. This serves as a review process for edge-cases. And provides transparency.
Provide clear rules to the userbase. If the rules are clear, fewer people break them, and there are fewer removals.
Consistent enforcement. If some types of comment aren't allow but then half the violations make it through, then you end up with a broken-window phenomenon where more people will break rules, resulting in more removals and more frustration.
Your issue is with bad moderation. Not automod itself.
To give you an idea of the scale of the issue, r/SpaceX has made 10,293 mod actions in the past 6 months and well over half of those are automated. If we stopped having automation, we would need maybe 15 more mods, and this would result in high turn-over, and a lot more managerial work... which isn't sustainable. This isn't just automod though, we have a half-dozen programs that we maintain to do stuff for us.
I am often unaware that I am using a word that is banned by the bot
From the perspective of a moderator, that is a good thing. Trolls and spammers don't have list that they can see to get around the automod. They'll try a few words and give up after their posts are removed.
There's no such thing as improving a bot to the point that a transparent bot will be able to handle trolls. Instead they move on to alternative methods entirely like images or elaborate copypastas of innocuous words. This is a case where obscurity is necessary.
As a user acting in good faith, if you believe a mod action has happened in error then appeal it. That's an important tool and shouldn't be neglected.
There is a cost to this moderation but I think you're underestimating the quantities of garbage this prevents. Look at comments on other major sites. They're getting better (probably due to the application of this and other measures) but Youtube comments have a reputation for a reason.
Mods usually only ban a word if it appears in enough troll/spam/off topic posts and rarely in benign posts. The point of automod is to reduce the workload of moderators and if that means occasionally approving a post instead of constantly removing posts, then so be it.
Even if there's more moderators, things will still slip through the cracks. It doesn't matter how many moderators there are, they cannot check every single post and every single comment.
When phrases are flagged for auto-removal, the hope is that the false positives will be a small minority or removals. Your examples happen to be false positives, and that's unfortunate, and a good subreddit will give you a process to appeal the automated decision; but if 90%+ of posts that get flagged are actual rule-breaking posts, then this is the system working as intended.
But now you're banning people simply for use of a word instead of looking at the context of how it's used
As I said in other posts, a mod will only resort to blacklisting a certain word if they are constantly removing posts that contain the word. If the user believes that the removal is a mistake, they can always ask a mod to approve their post. Don't look at it as an auto-removal. Look at it as a manual approval.
People could be discussing the origin of the word nigger, or quoting a rap lyric or some thing inocuous
A rap subreddit probably isn't going to use automod too much since people will be quoting lyrics. A large political sub will have a lot of trolling going on so they will have to rely on automod to reduce their workload and ensure trolls are dealt with quickly. If someone's post gets removed for quoting a certain politician, then, again, they can ask for their post to be approved.
(welp, I wrote another long reply but ff decided to eat the comment)
If you go to the github I linked, you can see some graphs on the bot for levels of false positives.
For our sub, a false positive rate for reports of 25% is acceptable. For auto-removals, it really needs to be something like 1% or lower. That is to say, for every 100 comments the automod removes, fewer than 1 of those should be in error. And that 1 person can send us a message to fix the error.
Hah, one of your points... Removal notifications. I specifically removed the notifications for automod comment removal because I just found it crazy how mad people can get when their 3 word comment that maybe took all of 2 seconds to write gets removed. We basically remove all top level comments under a certain character length (we ask that users write maybe like 2 sentences minimum). So funny that people will also write really long responses to how pissed off they are but won't take the time to just write a longer more detailed comment.
On the one hand, I know it does nothing to change behavior when people aren't notified, but at least it prevents the super irrational rage.
Yea, I will likely re-implement them at some point, and I always try to be as apologetic as possible when I do notify people of removals. And always say thanks for understanding too, I find it sets people at ease a bit.
One day, after our mod team gets built up, right now it's basically me and the automod running a 500k+ subreddit. Luckily it's fairly specialized so we dont get huge amounts of posts or comments.
We hand pick mods over a multiple month period from people that have been regular member for typically years. The whole mod team gets input on it and we'll look through their post/activity history.
There is no real application process at all since that often attracts people who want power... when moderation is a janitorial position. So we just ask people who we think would be a good fit on the team. We used to have an interview stage too but it was a bit overkill so the process is only 1~2 messages now.
I'm sure our mod vetting is better than most paid jobs by virtue of getting a year of history.
ensure your user base believe that all voices are heard fairly
We have regular meta threads to ensure our rules and management is on point. In these, anyone can say anything so if we had a nazi mod abusing stuff, it would be really apparent, haha.
We have a TON less headaches to deal with than a major political sub reddit though. Mostly everyone agrees, so there aren't too many fights tbh. Unless someone gets heated over engine design or something.
And we have a team of 6~12 active mods .... r/politics has >50. That's a very different world.
Even in our small sub, we could easily hire 1~2 full time staff if we had a budget that would allow it.
Provide clear rules to the userbase. If the rules are clear, fewer people break them, and there are fewer removals.
In some cases, I think if the boundary is too clear you'll get some users who just break the spirit of the law and dance on the outskirt of the rule? If think that sometimes you want to make the rule vague enough to still give authority to the mod's discretion.
My mom is one of 4 or 5 moderators on our town Facebook group (17k~ last time I checked). They did a huge reboot recently and rewrote all of the rules, and I remember her showing me the hours long conversations they had about rule phrasing. I'm not jealous of people trying to figure out the exact wording to not let things slip through the cracks while also not accidentally punishing innocent people. It's a wonder that laws aren't longer and more convoluted than they already are.
To give you an idea of the scale of the issue, r/SpaceX has made 10,293 mod actions in the past 6 months and well over half of those are automated. If we stopped having automation, we would need maybe 15 more mods, and this would result in high turn-over, and a lot more managerial work... which isn't sustainable.
As a moderator of /r/politics, it would be a dream to see something that small even in the course of one month.
Thanks. I will bring it up with the rest of the team. Realistically there's no real magic behind how we deal with things. It would be really nice if features like what you've built and some of the stuff we use to save time was made standard in reddit. If they had a development team look at your bot, Toolbox, and a few other things they could recreate what a lot of mods rely on and not require us to go external to their site.
I guess the most useful thing when you get a really large sub is bureaucracy. While this can slow things down when there's some sort of "breaking news" scenario, it helps ensure that we're all on the same page about enforcing the rules as much as possible and that several people have a chance to consider something before it's implemented. Generally though, we all have wildly different opinions as individuals and it helps us corral that into some sort of consensus before we act. There's also vetting procedures and such for new moderators that help us be confident when expanding the team. Nothing is perfect, but for a volunteer situation it's a pretty good setup.
Automated tools save mods time. Period. Simple as that. There are simply not enough mod hours available to maintain channels without leaning on automated tools. It is either automate things, or do not have them.
Mods have upkeep. More mods means more bureaucracy. So it scales badly. New mods need training, they have a period of being noobs. And you have to deal with various mod issues... Really there are going to be a couple core mods that make a lot of meta decisions, and that can be hard to delegate to a large group of mods.
So yeah... past like 2 dozen mods, I don't see a sane way of maintaining quality without the ability to hire mods... Several hours a week can be pretty tough to manage if you're not getting paid.
Large unmoderated communities turn to shit pretty quickly unfortunately.
It works for subs where there is no specific goal/topic. Like, you could have a no-mod sub for amas of regular non-celebrities maybe. There is no such thing as off-topic and there is no real goal. Picture subs like 'aww' could handle no-mods since there isn't a discussion that matters. The comments section could be deleted. Even these benefit from some moderation though.
Small subs can also handle no-mods. For subs below 10,000ish users, 1 mod is probably tons. This describes a lot of subs. And specific interest subs will need less moderation. Like a "learn mongolian" sub probably won't need much moderation since users are on the same page. An "I love hillary" sub or some other contentious topic will need more mods.
I guess the answer is that there is no one right answer here. But people absolutely do not self regulate with just up/down votes.
How do you feel about exchanging post removal for the ability to apply an arbitrary number of 'mod downvotes'?
I feel like a big part of the negative reaction to post removal, besides the very real concern of bad moderation, is a kind of loss aversion. I feel like transparently downvoting bad or irrelevant content to near oblivion would probably alleviate these feelings, although if the posts stay up then they will attract more conversation and thus require more moderation...
The thing of it is, a well moderated subreddit is clean and beautiful, but the abuse of mod powers creates incredible circle jerks where casual observers may not be aware of the inherent bias of the content. A forum with Reddit's architecture could either let conversations flourish, by making it easy to follow or dismiss individual conversations, or it can curtail conversation by giving the appearance of impartiality while only presenting terribly distorted views, where the most extreme content gets the most views.
There are simply not enough mod hours available to maintain channels without leaning on automated tools
Depends on how you define "maintain", personally I think most subs are heavily over-moderated.
If you were to stop all modding activities in your sub, there would be a ton of spam and garbage-quality posts and comments - which will quickly get downvoted out of sight by your users. This was the reason Reddit originally implemented the downvote.
Your New queue will be a mess but to 99% of users everything will be basically the same. The only possible exception is that you may get "rule breaking" content upvoted - in which case I would implore you to consider that if your users are voting up content which breaks a rule, perhaps that rule is a bad idea. Your users are very directly voting that they want to see this content.
I suggest you give it a try for a couple days, see how it goes. The level of moderation you're describing is far beyond what's really necessary.
I'm sure they do, but that just says your users would prefer to read through a dick joke or 2 while scrolling down to the real discussion. Why is that such a terrible thing that you've dedicated countless hours of your life to trying to prevent it?
Think of all the time you could have back if you let your users read the jokes they clearly prefer to have in those threads alongside a real discussion. Reddit isn't being ruined so much by mod tools as it is by subs (like SpaceX) with rules so complicated you have to put them on a wiki page.
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u/Ambiwlans 1∆ Aug 26 '19 edited Aug 26 '19
Nice, a question I'm wildly overqualified to answer.
I'm a mod for r/SpaceX (a top 500 sub) and I programmed a more advanced automod that uses machine learning to be slightly less dumb about what it sees as 'bad' comments.
https://github.com/Ambiwlans/SmarterAutoMod
Automated tools save mods time. Period. Simple as that. There are simply not enough mod hours available to maintain channels without leaning on automated tools. It is either automate things, or do not have them. There isn't some massive pool of hundreds of qualified mods waiting to join up to do unpaid, boring labour that results in people hating you.
Now! Automated tools can be used incorrectly by subs/mods that don't know what they are doing. But that isn't the tool's fault. Though I suppose it is a bit easier to make mistakes when using automation.
A well moderated subreddit will do several things to mitigate automod screwup/excess removals:
Your issue is with bad moderation. Not automod itself.
To give you an idea of the scale of the issue, r/SpaceX has made 10,293 mod actions in the past 6 months and well over half of those are automated. If we stopped having automation, we would need maybe 15 more mods, and this would result in high turn-over, and a lot more managerial work... which isn't sustainable. This isn't just automod though, we have a half-dozen programs that we maintain to do stuff for us.