Chris Partridge

I genuinely don't understand - if you can explain, that would be helpful? I can work with the author of the post to get this corrected as it seems folks are getting a different idea about what the announcement is than was intended.

Why I'm confused: That post I linked is approved, that post will always be approved, we will be approving similar posts in the future about the ongoing security incidents that are happening w/ non-cleared access to sensitive government systems in the US (etc. etc.). These must be centralized into megathreads and not spammed, per rule #9, as any other ongoing security event would be. From the announcement:

✅ Allowed: Discussions on Cybersecurity Policy & Impact

• Changes to US government cybersecurity policies and how they affect industry.

• The impact of new government leadership on cybersecurity programs.

• Policy changes affecting cyber operations, infrastructure security or data protection laws.

The examples given in the post are not about cybersecurity. Ex.

🚫 "Wasn’t there an amendment for this situation? A second amendment?" 🚫 "Do you really think they will allow a fair election after gutting the government? You have high hopes." 🚫 "Whenever any form of government becomes destructive to its people, it is their right to alter or abolish it. Maybe it's time." 🚫 "In 2020, [party] colluded with [tech company] to censor free speech. In 2016, they worked with [government agency] to attack their opponent. You think things have been fair?"

Not about cybersecurity. I agree with a bunch of these! But none of these comments are about cybersecurity, and therefore, this isn't the subreddit for them.

If there's something we can clarify, please let me know. Is it the global community portion that's making this unclear?

It's not easy to convey sincerity on the internet and I've been snarky to you in earlier replies, but hand on my heart, I'm being serious. The offer is in good faith and I'd happily talk to the other mods today if you want to jump in to moderating. Obviously we'd have some questions about prior experience moderating, your availability (ex. timezone), your goals, etc. etc.

Anyway, I'll explain, hopefully this helps show my sincerity.

As for why we're not ranking anyone up today/on this post: the active moderators have said they want to wait until things calm down before making any changes to ensure that people who volunteer are mods for the long run. We don't want anyone jumping in out of anger or anyone planning to make a statement by defacing the community, approving/removing posts to further their own agenda, etc. It's hard to moderate a community, it's harder to moderate a rogue moderator (...we have tools to audit this anyway, but we don't want to risk someone damaging the community as the impact can be higher as a mod).

Because of that, the general call to action for "who wants to help moderate" will likely go out in a couple weeks, and there are some Reddit-provided tools that could result in specific members being asked to moderate (ex. a high ratio of valid reports over a long period of time) on top of the expected request to the general community.

As to why I've been snarky: I think you've missed the scale of the problem. I know this thread's been heated and I empathize with your concerns about 1. robots making decisions and 2. how people could exploit robots making decisions. This is a cybersecurity sub, after all. :)

I'm not particularly active in operations anymore - having taken about 6k mod actions taken in the past year. Back before I was a Sr. Eng (...and before that forced me to break the Reddit habit...) I took nearly 4k actions per month keeping spam off this subreddit. My role today is more "keeping certain bots healthy" - u/alara_zero is one of the reasons this subreddit is readable. You would not believe the amount of r/techsupport questions the subreddit gets - the majority of posts to this subreddit are actually removed, before anyone sees them, for that reason. Check that bot's comment history for context.

You can see a quick breakdown of "who's most active" and how many actions they take here (1 action could be anything from resolving a report to writing a response in modmail). A conservative estimate might be 1 minute per action (quickly reviewing a report is usually less, sending a message or researching possible brigading/guerrilla marketing might be minutes or hours), but if 1m is anywhere the right average that means uid is spending ~380h/year even after all the automation we've put in place. It's not a small committment, and spreading out the load among people only works if they're consistently online to help cover gaps left by each other, since posts/comments/reports/etc. are constantly being made - ex. if we had 10 active mods, but all of them are only active once a week, the community suffers.

I am looking forward to the key moderators getting more help - uid and Oscar both need to take a bow, tbh, they're the only reason this subreddit is not loaded with spam and misinformation (and they're on every day, many times per day, to keep up). But it is overdue and we should have put out feelers earlier, I think everyone could see the pending shitstorm and we could have been more proactive in seeking out new moderators. Despite our differences in opinion, I'd be very happy for you to join and give it a try.

If you bring evidence, you tend to get more credit for your ideas. So far you haven't provided a single example (and to be honest, completely misunderstood how Reddit's reports work), so yeah, I don't really see how I'm supposed to take you at your word that The Algorithm supposedly heavily deprioritizes any post that's been reported or held by AutoMod.

Many major subs, frontpage subs even, hold many (or all) posts until explicitly approved through the same mechanism - yet they're on the front page all the time. We have never observed a meaningful penalty - and our spam/brigading fighting tools, which we've custom built after years of marketing and influence ops, track these metrics.

Reports are anonymous, we only see that a post was reported, we can't see who reported it. Platform decision at Reddit's level. We report all suspected report bombing, brigading, etc to Reddit admins and expect them to take the appropriate action (banning users or restrictng their ability to report).

If you can explain how someone would "shut down" discussion that would be great. As I've explained, posts cannot be made restricted by report bombing after a moderator approves the post - so at most, it's a minor, temporary restriction.

Explain how anyone is "ignoring it." If you're seriously volunteering to be available 24/7, the job's yours, I'll make the case to add you as a mod to review reports.

Edit: Though given you haven't responded in a couple hours it doesn't seem like that's a serious offer. Hopefully you can start to understand where people are coming from - we have jobs, families, lives. Nobody is going to seriously sit on Reddit checking for the next post or comment every 30 seconds. Automation is necessary and the benefits outweigh the detriments. If you have other solutions with better benefits, we're always open to feedback.