Item — HN Reader

A better example would be what happened with /r/ukpolitics and Aimee Challenor I think, it was a truly shameless display of how incompetent Reddit has become in recent years. The whole episode was an omnishambles, and a perfect microcosm of everything that's wrong with Reddit at the moment. It featured awful hiring practices, awful moderation practices, awful crisis management, awful PR management, and highlighted the piss-poor relationship that paid Reddit staff have with both the platforms's users and the volunteer moderators running what are in many cases enormous online communities in their own right.

Regardless of where they're at as a company, as a platform from the user's perspective Reddit been on a downhill trajectory for years. They manage to cock up moderation time after time, and every single UI change they make somehow manages to make the site even less usable. They'll double down on their crappy decisions in an enormously user-hostile way until literally the point users are in open revolt against the platform's staff which sometimes triggers a U-turn with all the grace and agility of an oil tanker.

This bad relationship between owners, moderators, and users often seems to kill smaller platforms (anyone remember Yik Yak?) but Reddit has so much inertia it's been taking literal years for this disease to become terminal. It will happen one way or another though, one day they'll make a decision too user-hostile and Reddit will have its very own "Digg V4" moment.

2 comments

> A better example would be what happened with /r/ukpolitics and Aimee Challenor I think,

Would you mind expanding on this? I don't follow Reddit dramas any more.

> It will happen one way or another though, one day they'll make a decision too user-hostile and Reddit will have its very own "Digg V4" moment.

I highly doubt that. Reddit has far too much non-techie people, which tend to know less alternatives and don't punish bad design as directly as "we" would. More likely it will be a slow fade to unimportance, like MySpace or Facebook (the platform, not the company).

>Would you mind expanding on this? I don't follow Reddit dramas any more.

No worries! Aimee Challenor is a very minor political figure in the UK who's mostly known for the fact she hired her father to act as her election agent after he was charged with (and was later convicted of) truly horrendous crimes against a ten year old child. Later on she left politics entirely and began working for the Reddit Public Access Network, after which she was eventually hired as a site-wide administrator.

On /r/ukpolitics (a fairly large subreddit) a moderator posted an article from the Spectator that mentioned her indirectly, I believe simply naming her as a candidate at the time and not mentioning her background at all. This moderator was banned without warning from Reddit and it became known that Reddit had been systematically censoring any mention of Challenor whatsoever and worse, banning the commenter. It was claimed by Reddit this was through an automated system but it's been alleged that Challenor herself was carrying out the censorship personally*. /r/ukpolitics temporarily closed itself in protest of this behaviour as they (correctly, in my opinion) felt that it was absurd to ban legitimate discussion of a British political figure on a forum dedicated to British politics simply because they're also a Reddit administrator and at any rate they wanted to support their banned fellow moderator.

This started a chain reaction across the site in protest of Reddit's administrator team in which many subreddits with millions of subscribers set themselves to private in solidarity with /r/ukpolitics. I don't have any figures to hand but participation was very wide and I can't imagine it did that day's advertising revenue any favours at all! Eventually the administrators relented after intense criticism from almost all angles, fired Challenor and re-instated the banned /r/ukpolitics mod. The moderators of /r/ukpolitics handled the situation excellently in my opinion, their competence was in stark contrast to the incompetence of the administrators.

It's worth pointing out that it was the censorship on Reddit's part and Challenor's questionable conduct as a political figure that triggered such a strong reaction, not Challenor's political stances. From what I understand her political activism was mostly centred around environmentalism and LGBT rights, both very laudable causes in my opinion! I think the issue everyone had was that while harassment is never okay (and I don't think it's controversial that people often do suffer atrocious harassment on platforms like Reddit, especially transgender people) the reaction to it was extremely disproportionate and further complicated by the fact Challenor is a public figure - even if a very minor one. There were also apparently a lot of complaints around the issue of safeguarding minors on Reddit which followed on from their obviously inept hiring practices, although I don't know enough to comment further on that.

>More likely it will be a slow fade to unimportance, like MySpace or Facebook (the platform, not the company).

This could be a more likely outcome than what I suggested, although given how volatile politics on social media are these days I could definitely see Reddit tearing itself apart over moderation drama. Having said that this isn't always terminal, a good case study would be 4chan which has had several incidences over the years of parts of its userbase starting their own platforms with the same format.

*I'm still not sure about this, as a web developer I can't imagine Reddit with their enormous volume of traffic would seriously follow every outgoing link and scrape the page for mentions of Challenor. I think it could be done, but I don't think it could be done with good value for money! I'd appreciate someone with more experience than me weighing in on this.

You seriously going to gloss over the fact that Aimee Challenor is transgender? Like that has no relevance to their "questionable conduct"? Is this just the massive chilling effect of cancel culture?

Why would I mention it? It’s not relevant, the issue is about inappropriate censorship and incompetent moderation. What difference does it make if they’re transgender or not? There’s no aspect of Challenor’s personal identity that makes a difference to the fact Reddit’s hiring and moderation practices are apparently utterly substandard.

I’m not interested in fanning what’s rapidly spiralling into the inevitable flamewar that this topic creates, but I will say that there’s never anything to be practically gained from making a fuss over other people’s (and particularly stranger’s) personal identities whatever they may be. I’m not saying that for the sake of a “chilling effect”, I’m saying it because in most cases personal identity genuinely isn’t relevant and only serves to distract from the issues at hand as has clearly happened here. Why would I include an irrelevant fact about Challenor’s identity that instantly derails any thread it comes up in?

You are right, being a moderator is a lot of pain once the subs grow beyond a certain point. Furthermore as a moderator you are almost forced into using new reddit as well as the tools are not all there in old. Painful experience.