Sunday, July 19, 2009

Green Mods and Spam

As you have probably noticed, a few days ago we started highlighting not just your friends, but also the submitter of a link and the moderators of the reddit you're reading. We had been getting numerous requests for submitter highlighting due to the recent popularity of reddits like AskReddit and IAmA, and we had also gotten occasional requests for moderator highlighting, so we pushed out what we thought was an innocent change: friends get an [F] next to their name, moderators get an [M], and the submitter gets a [S]. (If you're all three, the tag would say [F,M,S].)

Well, I'm not ashamed to admit that we made a terrible mistake. The backlash was immediate and forceful, and I'm happy to announce that as of the latest code push we are bowing to overwhelming demand and changing the order to [F,S,M]. I had no idea people on reddit were such big fans of finite state machines. I expect this should remove all objections and make everyone happy, so I'll just-- huh? What? Oh, was there something else?

Right, right, the green moderator highlighting. Contrary to popular conspiracy theory, we weren't trying to create a caste society or intimidate anyone or lay the groundwork for a new moneymaking scheme based on corruption and bribery. We just thought it would be neat for people to know when a post is official, since there can sometimes be confusion. Unfortunately, an unexpected effect of this was the appearance that moderators were in some ways superior to regular contributors or could crush them like a gnat. They're not. Their powers / duties are few and unspectacular. To paraphrase Wikipedia administrivia, being a moderator doesn't mean you wear a crown. It means you carry a mop.

Nonetheless, we realized that there was the appearance of favoritism and the potential for resentment, so we're now going to make moderator highlighting optional and off by default. In the rare case where a moderator really does want to speak officially, they will have the ability to "turn on the [M]" for a particular post or comment.
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