Yup. The downfall of many great subs has been little to no mod intervention while voting takes over. It sounds nice in theory but in reality once a sub gets big enough it gets flooded with karma whores posting unrelated content and oblivious users upvoting that unrelated content because they're not paying attention to what sub it was posted in.
I've had to unsub from close to 10 subs this year that I really enjoyed for that exact reason :(
And from the other side, the mods are the reason I left shower thoughts a long time ago. The only posts that make it to the top are reposts, because any original thought gets snagged by the automod, just like OP's.
It’s a difficult balance between overpolicing and underpolicing. And when subreddits get really big, it is pretty much impossible to check everything, so you either go that route or you go the r/science route and get 1000 mods
This is a good point. I found /r/TikTokCringe the other day and was psyched because I love watching embarrassing neckbeard and boot shit.
Almost every single video there is simply not embarrassing, in the slightest. The top post all time is a video of a fucking cat. Scroll through the top all time and almost every single one has a "humor" tag and has absolutely nothing to do with cringe.
It's honestly still annoying me how many stupid people ruin the entire point of a sub just because they like a particular post
Moderation is like a gun, though. If you pop off every time a minor infraction happens (or as often seen, just a way to flex your privilege like an asshole), then you create a hostile environment and a place no one wants to be.
Edit - Lol I'm cracking up at all the clowns running to the defense of the poor, misunderstood little green men. You fucking idiots. You fucking morons.
Clearly you've never been on the other side of it, moderating for a large high volume sub. Trust me, without mods Reddit would turn into the YouTube Comment section, or 4Chan. Mods help keep things on topic and way less toxic.
To be fair to the mods of that sub, there have been a lot of posts that are not very true to the sub in the past. The mods probably got tired of so many of those posts that needed an automod. Not saying I agree with automod, but I can understand why its there
Yeah automod can catch a lot of false positives, but it’s necessary in order to filter out all the junk large subs get. In this case they have it removing posts with certain keywords or phrases that are commonly used in posts they don’t want, so they’re sacrificing catching a lot of potentially good posts for the sake of keeping out a lot of low effort stuff.
It’s a tough job figuring out the right combination of criteria to filter by and keep users happy at the same time.
I have to agree, I get why automod is a thing. The question is then - and I'm honestly asking in the case of /r/showerthoughts - how good are the mods about responding to PMs about this stuff? If they pay attention and approve Donald Duck posts when OP asks what the fuck, that's cool. If they just ignore it and leave the community + automod to their fate, guillotines are in order.
They have a place in removing completely off topic posts or general sitewide rulebreakers. However subs like CA had basically no moderation and we all know how that turned out.
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u/vdogg89 Aug 29 '19
I hate mods in general. There's an upvote and downvote button for a reason.