Reddit has always taken a hands-off approach to moderating the content on its website, which meant that people could more or less do whatever they wanted. This was an easy policy to maintain back when the Reddit community was still small, but now that Reddit has become one of the most popular websites in the world, this kind of rampant free speech is drawing a lot of negative attention to Reddit. Unfortunately, its attempts ti remedy this are also drawing tons of criticism, so what the hell is Reddit supposed to do?
Reddit is broken. Plenty of words have been written about that fact. Plenty of words have also been written on the opposite side, all to defend accusations that the giant social network is a big cesspool of unpleasantness at times. And yet, more and more pundits are starting to wonder how Reddit could be fixed—especially in the wake of “Paogate,” or whatever other silly term you might want to assign to the somewhat abrupt departure of Reddit’s recent, interim CEO. Some of the suggestions are a bit more challenging and far-reaching than others. And, yet, some are so deceptively simple: Enact a strong policy to eliminate racism, sexism, and other horrible subreddits; stick to it; and wash the site clean of some of its more (incredibly) offensive elements. Doing that likely requires a greater investment from people than even Reddit’s copious volunteers are possibly willing to make. Chuq Von Rospach, a Cisco community manager, has a few incentives in mind, however. “Identify your top 25 community mods and your 50 most popular/largest/busiest subreddits with topics you plan on supporting in the new Reddit. Hire them and make them your core community team, with a charter of working with and training talking to and listening to all of your other mods. This is the crew you need to build a strong communication and camaraderie with you unpaid mod teams,” he writes.
