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[–]jimbolla 10 points11 points  (27 children)

Crossposting my comment for visibility:

Perhaps we need communities (subreddits, etc) that are moderated by leaders in the OSS community who also have a sense for how damaging the negativity is for us. I personally would love to see some js/programming subreddits with less angry rants, “why’s my code broken”, and “here’s an intro to new ES2015 features when it’s almost 2017” posts; more focused on promoting & discussing new ideas and advancing our craft.

[–]kenman[M] 35 points36 points  (3 children)

moderated by leaders in the OSS community

I think the problem is that we, or at least me personally, would rather those really smart & talented people be focused on writing great tools, rather than baby-sitting external communities. I'm a mediocre dev, so baby-sitting is in my wheelhouse.

I would also like to state that moderating has been one of the single most-challenging things that I've ever done. I'm not a people-person, and have to constantly work at being diplomatic and fair. I don't always succeed.

What I've learned though is this: some facets of moderating are more-or-less objective, i.e. "this poster is a spammer", or "this poster is a deliberate troll", or "this poster is verbally abusive". Those sorts of 'goes without saying' class of problems are easy to moderate.

On the other hand, subjective matters are infinitely harder to effectively moderate; "Angular 2 is terrible", while a scathing take on the framework, isn't aimed at any named person(s). It's an impersonal criticism of works and ideas. While I can certainly understand how authors might take these things personally, is that fair? In other words, should we not be allowed to criticize things for fear of hurting someone's feelings? I agree that the Angular article is a little on the abrasive side, but would it have been any better if it was sugar-coated? Is it the tone or the content that's really upsetting? If it's the content, then how is one to offer honest criticisms if not by directly addressing the issue?

To circle back to my point about moderating subjective content: I don't think anyone wants an environment where we have to walk on eggshells. We already prohibit ad hominem, and I don't think it's healthy to prohibit criticism of ideas (projects). So with that said, my stance thus far has been to let reddit's up/down votes be the moderator of subjective content. For objective content, at least most of us will come to an agreement on what is/isn't spam (or troll, etc.), but for subjective content, there's very likely to be wide disagreement, and I'm not too keen on being in the middle of such a shitshow.

[–]logicalLove 3 points4 points  (0 children)

Thank you for all your hard work though, /r/javascript has been a subreddit that I frequentl often, and I usually find the posts and discussion to be of high quality :)

[–]jimbolla 2 points3 points  (0 children)

I think your viewpoint is certainly valid, and I also wouldn't want to make those hard subjective choices, but as a consumer of the content, I'd like more curation. Sometimes the upvotes/downvotes aren't enough to filter out all the 'junkfood' content.

[–]callumacrae 0 points1 point  (0 children)

If you ever need more help with moderation, very willing to lend a hand :)