Since the dawn of the internet, it has surpassed many expectations and is prolific throughout everyday life. Though initially there was a lack of standards in website design and forum moderation, it has relatively stabilized with various and scientific approaches. A popular forum side, Reddit, use a human lead human-ai collaboration to help automatically and manually moderate the ever-growing comments and thread. Searching through the top 100 subreddits (at the time of writing), the team followed surveyed moderators from 5 varied and highly active subreddits. These moderators are majority Due to the easy to use API provided by Reddit, one of the most used moderation tools was a third party later incorporated into Reddit Automod. This is one of the more popular and common tools used by moderators in Reddit. Since it is very extensible, there is no common standard between all the subreddits. Moderators within the 5 subreddits use this bot in relatively similar but different ways. Not only the sole bot used by moderations, other bots can be used to further interact and streamline other bots in a similar fashion. However due to the complication of bots (technologically or lack of interest in learning the tool), some subreddits let a few people manage the bots, sometimes to damning results. When issues happen, instead of being reactive to various users’ reactions, the paper argues for more transparency of the bot.
I agree with the author of the original of automod, when he started off making the bot purely to automate several steps. Continuing this forward with the scaling of Reddit, I do believe it would be impossible for only human moderators to keep up with the “trolls”.
Though I do disagree with how the rules of the automod are spread out. I would believe the decentralization of knowledge would make the system more robust, especially since the moderators are voluntary. It is natural for people to avoid what they don’t understand, for fear of it in general or fear for what repercussions may happen. Though I don’t think putting all of the work on one moderator is necessarily the right answer.
- One of my questions is regarding one of the outcomes for Reddit; granting more visibility of the automods actions. Notably due to the scale of Reddit, extending this kind of functionality automatically could incur much more of a memory and storage overhead. Already Reddit stores vast amount of data however potentially doubling the memory capacity (if every comment was reviewed by automod) may be a downfall to this approach.
- Instead of surveying the top 60%, I wonder if surveying the lower ranked (via RedditMetrics) subreddit with a lower number of moderators would fit the same pattern of the automod use. I would imagine they would be forced to use the automod tool more in depth and in breadth due to the lack of available resources however this is pure speculation.
- A final question would be, to what percentage is there an over duplication of bots across the subreddits? If there is a big percentage it may lead to a vastly different experience across subreddits, as it seemingly is now potentially causing confusion amongst new or recurring users.
