With Reddit set to report third quarter earnings on October 30th, here are some suggestions to improve the site.
One, doing something about the excessive use of automated filters. On many popular subs, it’s close to impossible to prevent your posts from being filtered. What is the point of having moderators when the actual job of moderation is outsourced to algos or filters? If these people do not wish to actually moderate, they should be replaced by moderators who will take a more active role.
Second, too many subreddit rules. This is also out of control. Each subreddit has a list of ‘sidebar’ rules, delineated much like the Ten Commandments, that one is expected to follow to a ‘T’ or risk being banned permanently, in addition to Reddit’s own site-wide rules. It’s like you need to read an instruction manual just to participate on r/giftcardrecommendations or some stupid crap like that. We’re not talking a checklist for a space launch, but something as inconsequential as posting on an online community.
It’s like, again, the whole point of having moderators is to actually moderate, not outsource the job to a giant rule list or algorithms. Making matters worse, many of these rules are hidden and only obvious if you break them, such as ‘minimum karma requirements’ or ‘minimum account age’. Or having to include a certain prefix in a post submission.
Third, allowing an option for users who are banned from subreddits rejoin even if the ban is permanent. Many mods abuse this power to prevent people from ever participating for no justifiable reason. A lot of lazy moderators will just default to the ‘perma ban’ option for rule breaking instead of warnings and incremental bans. This was common in 2020 during Covid, in which users reported they were automatically banned from certain subreddits after expressing skepticism of mainstream Covid narratives or participating in certain communities.
For many niches, often there is only a single dominant subreddit, and getting banned means no good alternatives. Good luck creating an alternative to the hugely popular /r/economics, for example. The second-most popular economics-related subreddit, r/economy, has only a fraction of the activity. This is a further argument for changing how bans are handled to allow users to reenter later even if the ban was permanent.
A decade ago you could just create a new account, but the loophole was closed and will get your accounts all banned at once. This is how it was in the ‘old’ days of v-bulletin or AOL: you would just reset the modem/router, get a new IP, and be careful to not be banned again. It was implicitly understood some previously banned people would re-enter on good behavior, which was a good compromise.