First, I’m sorry for how we handled communicating change to the AMA team this morning. I take responsibility for that. We should have made a post to r/DefaultMods announcing the transition and contacted the affected mods teams right after it happened and clearly articulated how there would not be a disruption with scheduled AMAs and those communications would now happen via [email protected] as we find a full-time replacement.

That said, I would like to accomplish two things immediately:

Get the blacked out subreddits back online

Your message was received loud and clear. The communication between Reddit and the moderators needs to improve dramatically. We will work closely with you all going forward to ensure events like today don’t happen again. At this point, however, the blackout has served its purpose, and now it’s time to get Reddit functioning again. I know many of you are still upset. We will continue to work through these issues with you all, but redditors don’t deserve to be punished any further over an issue that is ultimately between Reddit and the moderators.

Work out a plan for going forward

In the short-term, we will use this forum to discuss how we will improve being a moderator on reddit. I’ll personally be in here asking and listening. There are a couple of changes we can make immediately to improve our relationship:

• u/krispykrackers, a well-trusted employee and community member, is now going to be point person for moderator issues. This should help alleviate the immediate pain, and we’ll continue to evaluate how it's working going forward.

• We will continue to dedicate resources to AMAs specifically to help manage the workload. Moderating AMAs are a uniquely heavy burden because it requires a lot of coordination between the external guests and the moderators, and Reddit will always be involved. Our process won’t be perfect overnight, but we will refine it over time with the moderators (especially r/IAMA, r/science, r/books the most prolific communities for AMAs).

Longer term, we are building tools to help you all do your jobs more effectively (anti-brigading and better modmail/tools are already in progress). We will build these with your input and incorporate more transparency. We have many ideas, and we would like to hear yours. We will keep you all in the loop as our plans crystallize into actual tools.

Seriously, sorry to be blunt, but this is just insanity.

We've had multiple conversations about this on slack. In these convos the only responses we could get were something along the lines of "not in my power" or "no comment."

When are you finally going to act? Is it going to take another shooting where the shooter specifically says "the_donald inspired me"?

Copypaste from my AHS thread

Dear admins, please finally do something.

islam is a death cult founded by a sociopathic pedophile, and should be eradicated from this planet root and branch. Change my mind. Upvoted on the_donald

Edit: one of their mods posts a meme about the shooting

edit: i apologize. this user is not a mod. i fucked up there.

https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/b1toxf/nigerian_muslims_kill_120_christians_in_three

https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/b1t0xh/the_mosque_in_christchurch_was_a_hotbed_of

https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/b1nbiv/after_calling_for_whites_to_be_thrown_in_the

https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/b1tfz9/god_this_is_so_cringey_nz_pm_wearing_a_jahb

https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/b1m86j/this_is_ebba_%C3%A5kerlund_she_was_killed_by_a_muslim

https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/b1npc0/on_the_rare_occasion_when_it_happens_the_west

https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/b1s8qh/aparently_the_nz_mosque_has_connection_to

https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/b1op5i/i_will_not_stop_speaking_truth_just_because

https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/b1simi/semiautomatic_weapons_let_me_get_my_lever_action

https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/b1czmd/aussie_pede_checking_in_my_senator_fraser_anning

https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/b1kifm/a_psa_for_all_of_the_donald_there_is_an_active

https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/b1h6hp/40_christians_killed_in_attacks_by_muslims_in

https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/b1nbiv/after_calling_for_whites_to_be_thrown_in_the

https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/b1mtww/new_zealand_shooting_typically_politicized_by_the

https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/b1kq48/from_the_manifesto_of_the_nz_shooter_beware_of/

https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/b1jgge/anyone_else_feel_it/

https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/b1d65o/islamic_terrorism_accounts_for_91_percent_of/eil1hc3/

https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/b1ec5f/ebba_akerlund_was_the_youngest_victim_in_the_2017/

https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/b1dw2e/my_warmest_sympathy_and_best_wishes_goes_out_to/eil9w80/

https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/b1dw2e/my_warmest_sympathy_and_best_wishes_goes_out_to/eil6kf6/?context=3

https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/b1dl17/dont_give_the_pos_nz_shooter_what_he_wants_dont/eilbi5f/

https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/b1dl17/dont_give_the_pos_nz_shooter_what_he_wants_dont/eilbi5f/

https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/b1dl17/dont_give_the_pos_nz_shooter_what_he_wants_dont/eil45lw/

https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/b1dw2e/my_warmest_sympathy_and_best_wishes_goes_out_to/eilj7e2/

https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/b1dw2e/my_warmest_sympathy_and_best_wishes_goes_out_to/eiliyfx/

https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/b1dw2e/my_warmest_sympathy_and_best_wishes_goes_out_to/eili2py/

https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/b1dw2e/my_warmest_sympathy_and_best_wishes_goes_out_to/eil7lfd/

https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/b1dw2e/my_warmest_sympathy_and_best_wishes_goes_out_to/eil3dzh/?context=1

https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/b1dw2e/my_warmest_sympathy_and_best_wishes_goes_out_to/eil1ki8/

https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/b1fjyu/islamophobia_its_natural_to_fear_a_religion_who/eil8idj/

(this entire submission) - https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/b1fjyu/islamophobia_its_natural_to_fear_a_religion_who/

https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/b1eukq/if_islam_would_stop_its_247_decapitation_murder/eil6yhg/

https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/b1eukq/if_islam_would_stop_its_247_decapitation_murder/eil52a0/

https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/b1eukq/if_islam_would_stop_its_247_decapitation_murder/eil62oj/

https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/b1eukq/if_islam_would_stop_its_247_decapitation_murder/eil6bfo/

https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/b1eukq/if_islam_would_stop_its_247_decapitation_murder/eil73my/

https://www.removeddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/b1czmd/aussie_pede_checking_in_my_senator_fraser_anning/eil7nqb/?context=3

https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/b1cst9/what_happened_in_new_zealand_is_atrocious_and/eikzc0k/?context=3

(this and the following top comment) https://www.reddit.com/r/The_Donald/comments/b1czmd/aussie_pede_checking_in_my_senator_fraser_anning/eikz1nj/?context=3

This is why I'm bent on exposing absolutely nothing... right guys?

If you are looking for moderators to add to any subreddit (not just defaults), please post here!

If you would like to volunteer your services and become a moderator for additional subreddits, you can post here too!

We're exploring the idea of banning sites that have paywalls from being posted in /r/technology. We'd implement a blacklist of domains that use paywalls. If users are posting links to places, we believe everyone should be able to access that content if posted.

Do any of you ban paywalled sites? Did you start with hard paywalls and move to sites with a soft paywall?

Looking for some experience on this topic. Thanks!

I've recently slowed down a lot with moderating, mostly because of how large and active the /r/books mod team has become. It's also due to the fact that I'm finishing up college and have to get my real-life stuff in order. The biggest piece of that puzzle is employment, and my moderation on reddit is what helped the most in landing my dream right-out-of-college job.

I've put real thought and effort into my work with /r/Books, so I'm wholly comfortable with putting it on my resume. Otherwise, I wouldn't have been moderating this long and done so much work for the community. It was soon after having /r/books dropped in my lap that I hunkered down and treated the position as though it were an internship. I'm giving up free work in exchange for experience and networking, so to speak.

What kind of experience can you get from moderation?

Well, here's what I put on different resumes that I sent out:

• community management (watching over entire subreddit)

• community feedback (answering modmail)

• press releases (announcements/sticky posts)

• content distribution (making sure content goes to appropriate channels, i.e. subreddits)

• Web analytics (using goo.gl links for path analysis and campaign evaluation)

• Graphic design (CSS and shit)

• PR campaign development (setting up AMAs with authors - indie and famous)

I put this all under my "Volunteer work experience" section, you don't want to put reddit under "work experience" as it suggests that you got hired by reddit and actually work there. It makes it much easier to explain what moderation is if you label it right away as volunteer work.

What kinds of jobs can I apply to with reddit on my resume?

I am looking to go into a marketing career, more on the side of web analytics and market research than full-on PR or advertising. Moderator experience is most useful for those career fields, as you're dealing with content and cultivating a common ground between content creators, companies, and community.

Apart from marketing, you can definitely get managerial experience out of moderation. Delegating responsibility, keeping records, optimizing the work flow, and most importantly: the hiring process. It's extremely difficult to gain experience in the hiring process, having this moderation experience will set you apart when applying for manager positions. "I went through 500 candidates to fill 5 roles" sounds very good in an interview.

There's also graphic design. It gives much more of an impact when you have a real-world example to give in your portfolio, and subreddits are real-world things. If you are proud of your design work or your bots, you should be proud to show them off in a job interview. Tell them "go to /r/AskReddit, I designed that" and they'll be impressed. I'm serious - reddit is "in" right now, and it's also hard to understand. You can impress people with this shit.

What kind of networking can I do in moderating?

For this I will give an example of classic networking I did on reddit that ultimately landed me a job. One time, when browsing /r/Boston/new, I noticed a familiar local site that was quite blatantly spamming their content. I've learned that a lot of spam is due to the person just not understanding reddit, so I sent them a pm explaining why their submission style was spam and how they were doing themselves a disservice.

We then had a long conversation in pm's that led to emails being exchanged. This company is quite young, and they were still figuring out their social media strategies.

So here's me, a college kid looking for an internship, and I've just made this connection with a Boston company that obviously needed some help with social media. I was the one that put out the offer: I come and intern for the summer. It was easy as that to get an internship: suggesting it. I'd proven that I had an understanding in social media, so my foot was fully in the door.

Now, I gotta be honest, I do not want to be in any marketing position that deals with social media. I helped this company with their social media strategy, got them to stop spamming reddit, and worked my way out of the social media responsibilities. Instead, I taught myself to do web analytics research. This is my true interest - optimizing websites based on how they are used, identifying the site's weaknesses, optimizing the content for sharing, stuff like that. I kept pushing this company to let me try out more A/B testing, ad tweaks, and removing whole parts of the site.

And hey, wouldn't you know it, but the company hired me. I'm leaving college with a steady, 9-5 everyday job. It's not the highest paying job, but it'll pay my rent and will (hopefully) be a good jumping off point for my career. And I wouldn't have gotten the job without reddit.

I don't really know why I made this post, but in any case, I hope it helps someone. If you find yourself wanting a switch in careers and you enjoy this moderation stuff, you can definitely find a real paying job that is very similar. Community management is actually a growing career field, as more people become active in social media there's more need for companies to have someone overlooking their online community.

If you are looking for moderators to add to any subreddit (not just defaults), please post here!

If you would like to volunteer your services and become a moderator for additional subreddits, you can post here too!

If you are looking for moderators to add to any subreddit (not just defaults), please post here!

If you would like to volunteer your services and become a moderator for additional subreddits, you can post here too!

I'm kind of speaking to the anti-mod mentality that often occurs in many subreddits. I've noticed that it's been WAY harder for me to get posts in /r/AdviceAnimals to take off. I did some testing a couple weeks back.

Posted something on this account. Went negative, and ended up deleting it.

Reposted the same link under an alt account at the same time a week later with the same title. It frontpaged. Huh.

http://www.reddit.com/r/AutoModerator/comments/2olykv/automoderators_flair_and_karma_have_been_wiped/

tl;dr long term band-aid for shitty mod tools literally breaks site.

Lately, /r/NeedAMod has been overfilled with subreddits that have been created within minutes of being posted there, and with way too many people offering their moderating "services". I am sick and tired of the lack of quality stuff there, so I created /r/ModSearch.

Key Points of /r/ModSearch:

• We require that subreddits have 250 subscribers before they do a ModSearch. This requires creators to build their community before having others do the work for them. This also prevents someone from being lazy and just squatting the top mod spot while a subreddit is new.

• Before someone can make a post offering their services as a moderator, they have to already be a mod somewhere else. This should cut down on the people who want to become moderator just for the status, or something along the lines of that. This will also work to the benefit of the posters of ModSearches, since it be a way for inexperienced mods/new mods to actually get jobs.

If you have any feedback at all regarding /r/ModSearch, feel free to share. If you are doing a modsearch soon, consider crossposting it or running it in /r/ModSearch.

Hey!

We just had a little bit of a awkward situation on /r/videos.

Someone reported this post: http://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/2y0ukw/raccoon_does_the_heimlich_maneuver/ and linked this as proof: http://imgur.com/OiqclFB

Now, that looks pretty standard, right? It was a little bit suspicious since a Jukin Media verified member reported it but, altough I thought it was suspicious, I ignored it and removed the post.

After awhile the OP messaged us in our modmail asking how he/she was sollicitating views. The user explained that the linked twitter page with the 'proof' wasn't used by him/her at all. The user was able to proof that and we reinstated the post.

After a little more investigating by /u/TheMentalist10 we found out that twitter account belongs to a Jukin Media private employee. This obviously rang a lot of bells and we immediatly took action. We banned the person who reported it in the modmail and we'll be discussing what else we can do.

So in short, this is what we think Jukin media tried to do:

1. Fabricate proof for a post removal.

2. Report it to us and make us remove the post.

3. Repost said video and get moneyz.

Please, be very carefull of Jukin Media. They are a sneaky bunch and I honestly feel like they shouldn't be on reddit anyway

Greetings,

xlnqeniuz

P.S:

I am RyanSoper. And I see a whole army of my fellow moderators, here in defiance of tyranny! You have come to fight for free as mods. And free labour you are! What will you do without mod powers? Will you fight?"

"JukinMedia against 37?" - the veteran mod shouted. "No! We will run - and live!"

"Yes!" "Fight and you may die. Run and you will reddit at least awhile. And dying in your bed many years from now, would you be willing to trade all the days from this day to that for one chance, just one chance, to come back here as young mods and tell our trolls that they may take our votes but they will never take our freedom!

Made by /u/Ryansoper because he has a lot of freetime.

One tactic of racists I've seen more than once is to simply copy and paste all or part of /r/CoonTown's "Big List of Nigger Facts w/Sources" (sic).

In /r/news, I saw a user had commented this. It seemed pretty suspicious that a person who "detests CoonTown" would post their cherry picked propaganda. A quick check yielded that that same user had copied and pasted it elsewhere on that same thread. The user also posted it three weeks ago on /r/Europe, but the comment appears to have been removed by the mods there.

Shockingly, this user who "detests Coontown" and thinks that "it is a hateful and bigoted sub, filled with many white supremacists and jew haters" is actually a coontowner. I'm tempted to put this on /r/quityourbullshit, but it would be much more effective to encourage people to automod commonly cited aspects of the list. If someone wants to write up a quick filter (or I can try, but I'm not really good at automod) I can post it here.

First off, I'm sure I'm gonna get slammed for this. I debated with myself for a long time before even making this post, but YOLO amirite? Please read and reply in good faith and don't bury my dissenting opinion in downvotes. :(

So, I've been online for a long time. The internet I know is a wide open forum for opinions of all kinds. I started in Usenet and BBS and chat rooms and graduated to the chans and, eventually, mainstream forums like digg and reddit.

When I first discovered reddit, it was eye opening. The idea that there was a mainstream website that allowed anyone to create any forum for any topic was revelatory. Of course there were racist subreddits. Along with subreddits for everything else you could imagine. Rule 34, furries, bronies, amputee fetish, occult, satanism, Islam, Christianity, cutting, trans kin, goru, hentai etc etc. These alongside the more "vanilla" offerings like video games and clothes and tv shows and what have you.

Someone will always find something offensive.

This is precisely why I loved reddit. It was an amazing throwback to the wild west days of the old internet. It was glorious. And that is why I became so invested in the site. I believed in it. Yeah, I'm a nerd.

There are all kinds of people in the world, and they hold all kinds of opinions and viewpoints. This is a good thing. I don't agree with all of them, and you don't have to either. But what we do have to do is respect their right to exist.

Nb4 reddit is a private company. Yeah, I get that. They can do whatever the fuck they want. Fine and dandy. But reddit has always been committed to free speech online, and that has always been understood to mean taking the good with the bad. This has always been one of the guiding principles of reddit. It's hypocritical to pretend otherwise.

I'm not sure when it happened, but we've moved from a culture of acceptance that valued people's ability to express their opinions, even shitty opinions, into a culture of smug outrage that feels entitled to stamp out anything we disagree with. And that devalues reddit's community.

We have private communities where admins collude with power users (DiscussTheOpenLetter, DefaultMods, this place). We have large groups of influential moderators who are crying for certain subs to be removed, even after they've been "reclassified". (Man, there's no pleasing some people.) We have entire subreddits (SRD, circlebroke) devolving into outrage cultures of smug bitching and whining.

Well, I may be in the minority, but I don't like it. Whenever I see people going on about "Ugh I wish the admins would just ban coontown, these people are awful" I cringe a little bit. Because there but for the grace go I. Yes, I'm invoking the stupid slippery slope argument. Idk why people think it's funny to invoke that, because it's potentially true. We're on a path to complete sanitization of this website. Reddit has never been a site wide echo chamber, but we're well on the way to creating one. I get that it's politically expedient to align oneself with the "correct" viewpoint (as the site attempts to reposition and monetize, but I won't go into that), but is that what we really want?

Everyone, on all sides of the argument, is so fucking sure that they're right and everyone on the other side is wrong. There's no discussion. There's no conversation. It's completely polarized and factionalized. There's zero debate. We remove every single comment that may be construed as distasteful, we global ban people who say things we personally disagree with, we ban people who haven't broekn rules because they're affiliated with other viewpoints, we use bots to police and censor comments and language... This just seems wrong to me. I don't want a website where a handful of people control the tone and content of discussion. If a racist wants to say his or her piece in a comment thread, let them have a voice. We are seriously overstepping our roles as moderators and doing a serious disservice to our communities in not allowing all participants to have a voice.

There are limits, ofc. Some things need to be removed. And there are certain environments where some things are obviously not allowed (you don't allow racists to come into racial support subs to spew hate, obviously. Duh.). But we're quickly moving towards an environment where a handful of influential people are telling a handful of non-influential people what they can and can't say. And that's distasteful to me. I'd rather have a site where controversial people can express controversial opinions than one in which a cadre of politically correct people control the discourse.