https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/10x7un9/the_reddit_mod_council_year_end_review_2022/
created by tiz on 08/02/2023 at 19:11 UTC
113 upvotes, 25 top-level comments (showing 25)
Hey everyone, itz me u/tiz, I work on the Community team here at Reddit, where I head up the Reddit Mod Council along with Adopt-an-Admin (our next round is starting soon, you should totes sign up[1]). I wanted to give y'all a little update on what we’ve been up to, share some data, and be a little transparent on what we even do over at the Reddit Mod Council. We’ll start off by outlining what we do, follow up with a bit of data, and end it off by sharing how you can get involved.
1: https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/108i0o7/adoptanadmin_is_back_for_2023_sign_up_asap/
The Reddit Mod Council[2] is a program where we invite select Reddit moderators to a private space, with the intention to hold discussions and share experiences on how to make a better Reddit. We include a diverse set of mods from different topics and varying sizes of communities to ensure we’re hearing from a broad perspective when discussing impactful changes to Reddit.
2: https://mods.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/4415446939917-Reddit-Mod-Council-
We host various ways to discuss topics related to upcoming products, policies, and programs. In these discussions, we share details and designs on what we’re working on and welcome feedback, both negative and positive (as long as it’s constructive), on what we share. Mods also offer their own perspective and create their own discussions to talk about experiences moderating on Reddit.
On a weekly basis, we hold a discussion thread about a variety of topics, posted on a Monday followed by a call that Thursday to break the subject down even further. During the weekly discussions, we may include AMAs from different teams or people within Reddit. On a more intermittent basis, we hold calls with all sorts of teams within Reddit to discuss what they are working on and listen to feedback. The council is also the catalyst for all the mod shadow sessions you’ve seen mentioned in other r/ModNews posts.
We like to add a handful of people every month depending on how we’re looking to grow for that quarter. When adding people we make sure we are including mods who are involved in a variety of communities; size, topic, nsfw, content, location, etc. We are inclusive of all the different types of communities Reddit has. If we see we are lacking in a specific category we shift our focus to the people who have applied that offer those categories as areas of expertise.
At the time of writing this post, there are **136 members** on the Reddit Mod Council, covering a whopping **2,193 communities**, each with more than 1,000 subscribers. Please note, we accept mods who moderate 1 subreddit, small subreddits, multiple subreddits, large subreddits, and varying activity levels.
The bullets below reflect the first 9 months of 2022 and we excluded subs with less than 1000 members. Some values may not match up with the current total member count reflected above.
Below is a graph of our topics and the amount of representation in each topic. We continuously update our topics to cover what we may be missing or consolidate topics as we adapt to the representation.
In 2022, within our private subreddit, we had **7,316 comments** and **365 posts**. Let's break that down to *Mod vs Admin* participation within the subreddit.
In the chart below: teal = mods & orangered = admins.
We also hold off-subreddit calls over Zoom. In 2022 we had **20 calls** covering different products, projects, or policies and of those calls, we had **74 unique mods** and **73 unique admins** attend, with a total attendance of **150 admins** and **239 mods** across those 20 calls. I don’t have a nifty chart to share for calls though :/
We send out a ‘pulse check’ form to help capture satisfaction (among a few other questions) around the council. We average about a **70% satisfaction** rate from 248 form responses. In this question we ask “*How do you think the Reddit Mod Council is going?*” on a scale of 1-10, 10 being best. There’s some room for improvement but here’s the breakdown per quarter.
Phew, that was a lot! But you made it to the end, yay you! I said “mod” (or a variation of mod, like “moderator”) in this thread, except for this last section here… wait now I said it, oops. How many times was “mod” written here?
Well, guess what, applications are always open, and we add new members all the time, on a rolling basis, depending on what representation areas we may be missing. On top of the topic areas mentioned above, we also take into consideration a number of different aspects. This can include things like upcoming internal initiatives or we might be interested in having people with a deep understanding of different aspects of the site or certain subject matters.
Everyone who applied before this date, don’t fret, we just did a heap of reviews of all the applications and will be sending out messages with your status in the near future (we hear you[3]). If you’ve been accepted, we may not add you immediately – we don’t want to flood the place and get overwhelmed with all the wonderful new faces, however, we may send you a message about being on our waitlist.
If you wanna apply again because you love filling out forms, feel free to do that too, this form has been updated a tad to add a few more questions to help us understand you more.
We’ll be talking more about the council in the future and how we can make them even more impactful for all redditors.
Comment by InitiatePenguin at 08/02/2023 at 20:02 UTC
38 upvotes, 2 direct replies
* 31 members who moderate 6 -10 subs
Is there any reasonable explaination for this to be feasible?
Comment by Isentrope at 08/02/2023 at 21:23 UTC
23 upvotes, 1 direct replies
I appreciate the update, but what exactly is the point of this? The people whom I’m aware have been selected are not big on actual moderation, and it seems like the input that’s being provided back to their actual mod teams is spotty at best depending on who is selected by the opaque procedure for selection. How does the process ensure that the people selected are actually moderating instead of just collecting subs, and that it’s actually representative of the median Reddit moderator experience? For instance, the block feature seems like it was forced through despite repeated criticisms of how it worked which ultimately transpired in how it works. If your council was disproportionately stacked with mods who are more into activism on the site, to the extent they this council actually had input, it was probably much different from the experience that most mods have actually had with the feature. The mod notes feature, which has been pretty great as a concept, is also essentially unusable since it only records 1K actions which are inclusive of comment/post removals - most large subs that would actually use this feature would probably only find it useful if it recorded bans and mutes, though I’m sure if the input came from mods of smaller communities where removing a comment is a big deal, it might actually hold value there.
Comment by wickedplayer494 at 09/02/2023 at 00:02 UTC
6 upvotes, 0 direct replies
At the time of writing this post, there are 136 members on the Reddit Mod Council, covering a whopping 2,193 communities, each with more than 1,000 subscribers. Please note, we accept mods who moderate 1 subreddit, small subreddits, multiple subreddits, large subreddits, and varying activity levels.
The bullets below reflect the first 9 months of 2022 and we excluded subs with less than 1000 members. Some values may not match up with the current total member count reflected above.
* 12 members who moderate only 1 subreddit
How does this break out to total addressable subscribers? You can definitely infer on the top and bottom ends that the 1-subreddit mods have at least 1000 addressable subscribers and the 3 >100 subs have at least 100,000 addressable subscribers between their subs, but it'd be more interesting to see what that breakdown looks like particularly in the mid-range.
Comment by TheChrisD at 08/02/2023 at 20:25 UTC
14 upvotes, 0 direct replies
I see your representation of the TV and sports categories is quiet low — probably explains why you had no qualms about removing event threads 😠
18 members who moderate 11 - 15 subs
7 members who moderate 16 - 30 subs
3 members who moderate 31 - 100 subs
3 members who moderate over 100 subs
And how many of those actually moderate that many...?
Comment by PepsiColaMirinda at 08/02/2023 at 19:22 UTC
8 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Interesting, I didn't even know this was a thing. Then again I'm always oddly out of the loop for most mod events lol.
This was a good write-up and read though! Thanks for the information^^
Comment by llamageddon01 at 08/02/2023 at 19:18 UTC
11 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Thank you for the insights! I know the sub I mod (r/NewToReddit) has found it very beneficial to have a member on the council - even if they refuse to share its secrets lol.
Comment by skeddles at 08/02/2023 at 20:26 UTC
29 upvotes, 1 direct replies
sorry but if you moderate over 100 subs you aren't a moderator, just a collector
Comment by Watchful1 at 08/02/2023 at 19:27 UTC
8 upvotes, 1 direct replies
The mod data is definitely interesting. Could you share some examples of features that the mod council helped shape or push for? How about some features that were planned, but you decided not to implement because of the feedback from the councils?
Comment by c74 at 09/02/2023 at 15:09 UTC
7 upvotes, 1 direct replies
i do not think you want the people who apply for this. you will get some bright eyed kids who think this is like a job or resume worthy... probably a couple people working in social media... and a big boat load of the narcissists. i think you would be better off sending mod mail to a variety of subs and see what comes back.. even ask people to complete a survey for some reddit coins or whatever the gold is nowadays. people with over say 10 subs or more are what you do not want.
Comment by Angel_Valoel at 08/02/2023 at 19:17 UTC*
5 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Honestly one of the best mods i know is part of the council.
Im happy you shared these stats! Its great to see the vareity of mods you have and the amount of subreddits they moderate. I feel like its perfect considering the ratios.
Comment by MajorParadox at 08/02/2023 at 19:20 UTC
7 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Thanks, tiz!
Comment by PM_MeYourEars at 08/02/2023 at 19:40 UTC
5 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Can we apply if we are unable, or wish not to, join zoom calls and voice calls?
Comment by MKCULTRA at 08/02/2023 at 20:44 UTC
5 upvotes, 0 direct replies
If we want to make Reddit better, how about opening it up to Reddit users so we can get their feedback?
Comment by [deleted] at 08/02/2023 at 19:26 UTC
6 upvotes, 1 direct replies
[deleted]
Comment by TheOnlyVibemaster at 09/02/2023 at 00:16 UTC
2 upvotes, 0 direct replies
I applied about a month ago, should I apply again or is my application still being considered for the upcoming selection?
Comment by Shachar2like at 09/02/2023 at 06:46 UTC
2 upvotes, 0 direct replies
What are the main differences between moderating one sub & moderating a couple of dozen?
Comment by ryanmercer at 09/02/2023 at 11:24 UTC
2 upvotes, 0 direct replies
As I've said, every time you mention it, you need more (any?) religious community moderators on there but your application doesn't even have a good category for moderators of a religious sub. Are we advice and support, culture, lifestyle, human moments, none of those?
That's messed up...
Comment by shivaswrath at 10/02/2023 at 00:42 UTC
2 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Amazing
Comment by impablomations at 09/02/2023 at 03:59 UTC
2 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Can you produce a text version of those graphics for the visually impaired/blind?
Comment by truecommentor69 at 09/02/2023 at 20:50 UTC
2 upvotes, 0 direct replies
I extremely appreciate the transparency here. Massive respect!
Comment by born_lever_puller at 08/02/2023 at 19:47 UTC
2 upvotes, 0 direct replies
But the really important question, grow any new pineapples lately?
Comment by CaptainPedge at 08/02/2023 at 21:40 UTC
3 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Why is the mod council secret?
Comment by Endercheif at 08/02/2023 at 22:48 UTC
-12 upvotes, 1 direct replies
tiz you are so hot. please date me 🥺 👉👈
Comment by [deleted] at 08/02/2023 at 21:19 UTC
-13 upvotes, 0 direct replies
As mod of /r/familyman, I approve
Comment by SpicyBeefChowFun at 09/02/2023 at 05:52 UTC*
1 upvotes, 1 direct replies
According to my math, if each bullet mods its max subs in the category (ie. 31 mods mod 6-10 subs = 310)
12 members who moderate only 1 subreddit 40 members who moderate 2 - 5 subs 31 members who moderate 6 -10 subs 18 members who moderate 11 - 15 subs 7 members who moderate 16 - 30 subs 3 members who moderate 31 - 100 subs = 1302 subs
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
3 members who moderate over 100 subs = Average ~300 subs each.
Then the mods that mod 100+ subs each average about 300 subs each of 1,000+ subscribers? And this is only a small sampling of that belong to the mod council members?
How many subs can one effectively and fairly moderate? Lets be real here.
EDIT: I immediately did the math without reading that some other commenters also cringed at this,
