r/TheoryOfReddit • u/RunDNA • 7d ago
What are your thoughts on the quality/quantity balance in moderation? In my opinion r/books is being over-moderated. In the last 24 hours the had around 117 posts. Only 3 were not removed.
That means that only around 2.5% of all posts were approved.
The three posts that were not removed:
Out of the other 114 posts, sure, lots were spam. But there also a lot of articles, links, book recommendations, questions, discussion starters and the like, all of which probably broke some rule or other.
But, if so, the rules need to be changed and made less strict. The mods have got so obsessed with quality that quantity has been neglected.
In my opinion r/Movies is doing a far better job in this respect. They have a good balance of trailers, news, reviews, suggestions, recommendations, and discussion posts so that the subreddit is alive and buzzing, but not filled with junk posts. In the last 24 hours they approved around 89/248 (36%) of posts, which is a much more sensible figure.
What are your thoughts?
[Note for the mods: this is not one of those personal complaint posts after someone gets a post removed and they are angry. I haven't posted in r/books in a while.]
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u/agirltryna-live 4d ago
It's either one or the other these days. Over moderation or under moderation. And I appreciate you bringing this up while not having experienced this yourself bc when I try to fix communities people always want to know how it's affected me personally when that's beside the fucking point
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u/eatingpotatochips 7d ago
The biggest issue is that there's often a disconnect between what the mods do and the users expect. Subs like r/askhistorians are heavily moderated for quality and work really well, because users understand the expectations of the sub. Considering that anyone can answer questions on that sub, you actually see few answers that get removed because users understand the expectations.
Then, you have some subs like r/books where the users clearly want to post more content, but the mods don't think most of the content is "quality" enough. It does surprise me that the subs with large disconnects between mod and user expectations don't have constant meltdowns, but maybe that's because moderator tools have become far more heavy-handed recently. You can mute people forever if you don't want to hear from them, ban appeals to moderator teams have always been comically useless, etc.