>Reddit is the upvote, not the moderator, isn't it?

In theory. In practice, strong moderators become more important the larger the community gets. And reddit is a very, very large community.

>The whole driving premise of Reddit is the upvote, and that's an incredibly powerful concept.

It's powerful, but not always in a good way.

I think one of the better examples is looking at the difference between /r/gaming (light moderation) and /r/games (heavier moderation). While I am sometimes entertained by the content on /r/gaming, in general, it's a terrible subreddit that does a good job of soaking up most of the crap discussions surrounding gaming (5 threads a day of "Has anyone else ever played Zelda?"). Whereas /r/games actually has content worth reading a vast majority of the time and it's not just a filtered versions of /r/all for threads that have "game" in the title.

But don't you see how problematic your argument is? You more or less beg the entire question by saying, "/r/games actually has content worth reading" -- I mean this in a non-offensive way, but who are you to say that? What's "content worth reading" for you may not actually be content worth reading for anyone else.

That's how I see the design of Reddit -- it doesn't seem to me to be the place where every single link is supposed to be tailored specifically for you/the crowd. I think people come to Reddit expecting a finished product, where the front page is a curated listing of the most interesting things that the Internet has to offer, when in reality, the only way Reddit works is if YOU help push it in that direction.

You're not viewing a finished product, you're helping make the product! Push those up/down votes and use that voice that you've got to make your Reddit reflect more of what you want it to be. I think that's partially why Sam Altman is giving some of his shares to actual users, isn't it?

There are hundreds of thousands of voters participating on /r/all content. Your vote isn't going to matter whatsoever except in the critical time between when something is first submitted and when it falls off of the new submissions page (and rising page, and controversial page).

A ten minute conversation with the average voter will repel you from the idea that eveyone should want to listen to what 51% of most people would upvote, or should dislike what 51% of people would downvote. But your frontpage will be filled with the former, and you'll never be able to find the gems in the latter without serious time investment.

Upvote isn't enough. Hence, moderation.

Your vote isn't supposed to matter, not any more than anyone else's vote. That's the entire premise of democracy, in fact, a fact that's completely and utterly ruined by the arbitrary nature of moderation.

The idea that you'd ever go to reddit.com or reddit.com/r/foo and see nothing but gems is a pipe dream. You're asking other people to do your work for you. You are the one who's supposed to contribute your up/downvote.

>You're asking other people to do your work for you.

Yes, I am.

>You are the one who's supposed to contribute your up/downvote.

But that's the problem. My upvote / downvote doesn't matter. If I'm in r/funny it doesn't matter how often I downvote unfunny things - the sub will still be inundated with garbage posts - subjectivity of humor aside. I don't mean "That joke didn't make me laugh", I mean there is nothing within the content of the post that indicates it's even an attempt at humor. The only thing left for me to do in the face of such a situation is to leave and go somewhere else. The only way for my vote (on posts themselves) to mean anything is moderator action.

I'm not (and I don't think anyone else is) arguing that every sub should have strict rules and moderation. But strict moderation is a necessary tool for many of the subreddits that I enjoy to exist. A lack of moderation would turn r/askHistorians into a swamp of ignorant hearsay, answers based solely on what one dude read on Wikipedia, and general misinformation in no time at all. The only vote that I have that matters on reddit is the vote for which subreddits I subscribe to, not the posts within those subreddits.

Your vote matters exactly as much as it should matter. Why should you (or anyone else, including moderators) get any more of a say than anyone else? What have the moderators done to qualify themselves?

You're visiting a work in progress, not a completed product.

Most people go to reddit to hear about news or see what's popular, not to sift through new submissions for gems. If reddit cared only about democracy, it would solve the problem of an incredible submission being buried by a measly five to ten downvotes in its first twenty minutes regardless of how many people would have liked it overall. Personally, I have neither the time nor the incentive to try to influence groupthink. (I was very careful in my choice of "groupthink." A democratized frontpage that hundreds of thousands of people influence is almost equivalent to literal groupthink. And that's not terrible in and of itself, but if you're going to argue that mods should be stripped of their tools, then it becomes quite the dilemma.)

HN, on the other hand, seems much truer to the overall thrust of your argument, because there are no downvotes for submissions, and only two upvotes are needed for a story to reach the first or second page of HN. But HN only works because there are exceptionally smart and prudent moderators who are constantly curating the singular frontpage.

If Reddit had the moderators that HN had (and the proportional quantity), there simply would be no problem. HN mods are a group of people selected specifically for the task of moderation. They were appointed.

But Reddit doesn't have those kinds of moderators, because the moderation system is alarmingly broken on Reddit.

The folks who moderate the various reddits are there by no virtue other than the fact that they were either there first, or have some relationship to the person who was there first.

It keeps sounding like there's a crisis of identity happening over at Reddit HQ, and I really hope they come out the other side of it with an understanding of how damaging moderators have been to the website, as currently implemented.

  The folks who moderate the various reddits are there by no virtue other than 
  the fact that they were either there first, or have some relationship to the 
  person who was there first.

This is what I think the biggest problem with Reddit is. There needs to be a better system for picking moderators. I don't know what that would be but the current one is broken.

>I mean this in a non-offensive way, but who are you to say that? What's "content worth reading" for you may not actually be content worth reading for anyone else.

I don't find it that useful to argue for things that I don't like. And I am capable of making value judgments and having opinions.

That's a pretty self-centered world view, then. Why do you think your view should be the view as represented on any given Reddit page? Don't you see that everyone has views, just like you do, and should be allowed to express them, just as you do?

How would you design a system in which everyone had the same amount of influence over a series of submissions?

>Don't you see that everyone has views, just like you do, and should be allowed to express them, just as you do?

The problem is where it comes down to implementation.

By not allowing for moderation, all of the content in reddit will gravitate to the same standard you see on the frontpage, just broken up by category, where the only deviation will be in the smaller sub-sections of the community that aren't yet subjected to the rot of the more mainstream communities.

So, for someone like me who desires content beyond the same dozen memes reposted in various forms everyday, there is little content for me to view when only the mob rules. Which means I would have little use for reddit as a whole, aside from the occasional time wasting when I had nothing better to do.

Moderation is what allows for decent content to exist outside of the trivially small sub-reddits. There are plenty of places on reddit to view shallow content (in fact, I would say the vast majority of the content on reddit is of the shallow variety). The existence of more heavily moderated sub-reddits doesn't prevent these places from existing, but it does allow for sub-reddits to deviate from the norm.

So, to summarize, moderation is what allows me to view the type of content on reddit that I would like to see. Remove the moderation and I would have little use for the site.

But that's okay, because while you may stop visiting, many many more people will start visiting.

You're not grasping the concept that Reddit isn't a finished product, and you're not supposed to like everything you see.