3 upvotes, 3 direct replies (showing 3)
View submission: An update to Mod Push Notifications
What I hear from you is that to effectively mod you need all these critical tools/space and that the mobile moderation experience is inefficient today. Is that right?
Certainly for large communities or users that mod multiple communities, the experience is undeniably harder. I don’t think mobile as a platform for moderation is hopeless. We’re coming closer to a day where mobile moderation will overshadow web moderation and we’re trying to prepare for that future (fun fact: the majority of users with mod permissions are on mobile -- about 35% more). Also worth mentioning we’re continuing to invest in web as well with a slew of improvements to modmail recently.
Comment by dequeued at 18/05/2021 at 22:59 UTC*
23 upvotes, 1 direct replies
What I hear from you is that to effectively mod you need all these critical tools/space and that the mobile moderation experience is inefficient today. Is that right?
That's not quite what I am trying to say.
It's 90% that mobile just isn't the right platform for certain activities and only 10% about the Reddit app (or any app, this also goes for unofficial apps like Apollo). Just like you wouldn't try to write a novel, analyze complex data, or write Python on your phone, moderating from your phone is just always going to be significantly harder and slower even with some hypothetical super-duper moderation app.
I'm not saying there aren't things that wouldn't make moderation on mobile easier, but most of them are pretty basic things that would be helpful in general. Just one example: if you need to ban an account for being abusive or spamming and you're doing it "right", that means archiving and documenting what happened so we can later handle an appeal in modmail. We depend on third party tools like archive sites, Toolbox user notes, and our subreddit bot (which automates some of that for submissions, at least) to make that feasible. It's less about mobile and more about stuff that would make moderating easier on any platform: old, new, mobile, bot-based actions via the API, etc.
(fun fact: the majority of users with mod permissions are on mobile -- about 35% more)
I'm not sure how much weight I would put behind that statistic.
1. Yes, many moderators spend too much time on Reddit.
2. Moderators using mobile are often doing that out of desperation or necessity. When we're out and about, a lot of us would rather not be moderating.
3. Moderation actions (including modmail activity) are a better measure than the number of moderators (especially considering communities with very large moderation teams where the vast majority don't moderate much).
4. I don't doubt that a lot of smaller and newer subreddits have a lot more moderators using mobile, but those are also the communities that tend to be overrun with spam.
If I was only moderating /r/Debt (one of the smaller subreddits where I am a moderator), it'd be feasible and easy to do it from mobile. I only have 40 moderator actions (not counting modmail) in the last month on /r/Debt.
Contrast that to /r/personalfinance where the number is 1,500 actions (and my numbers are unusually low the last month on /r/personalfinance because I've been handling most of the modmail and busy working on our subreddit moderation bot, our AutoModerator, and other projects like BotDefense). Two other PF moderators had about 5,000 actions in the same period.
Comment by HTC864 at 18/05/2021 at 23:20 UTC
14 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Moderating just isn't something that should be done from the app. I will quickly check to see if something is in the queue, if I know I haven't checked in a long time. But true moderation needs a full workspace to research and keep up with what's happening.
Comment by Autoxidation at 19/05/2021 at 02:39 UTC
3 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Having this functionality built into reddit would really help the awkward parts of using it.
In another subreddit I moderate, we use mod reports on comments for a bot to act on. This works from mobile reasonably well, but something like this built into reddit would go a long way making moderating on the fly or from mobile a much better experience.