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Weaponized reporting: what we’re seeing and what we’re doing(self.ModSupport)
Hey all,
We wanted to follow up on [last week’s post](https://www.reddit.com/r/ModSupport/comments/...
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No, it's an on point response, because:
...as a result of screwups that were completely avoidable had greater care been taken in training and tools development.
The most effectively implemented policies will still get mistakes that weren’t entirely thought out. It’s very easy in hindsight to think that it was obvious from the start that something was going to happen, and I’m not going to say this was a perfect system either. But the admin is here communicating updates to us because they feel like we ought to have one, and they’re working to build a system that’s meant to address both moderation and user concerns across an entire site that sees hundreds of millions of users a day. We brought this issue to them and they worked to fix it. Do I think it sucks that some mods were erroneously banned? Sure I do. That doesn’t mean it’s productive to complain in every thread about the admins having this policy though.
A bug reaching production that results in the user sending in a report being suspended, rather than the reported user, is not defensible. Support agents closing suspension appeals with no response is not defensible. Suspensions being issued for months and years old comments is not defensible. All of these are the result of failures at the process level. These things went inadequately vetted to an utterly careless degree.
So no - it is perfectly productive to repeatedly point out that what caused their problems comes from a deeper level than the band-aids they keep telling us about. We are not talking about bugs and bad decisions surrounding edge cases. We are talking about screwups at a very basic and fundamental level, and it is not appropriate to handwave them by saying "nO sYsTeM iS pErFeCt".
Even when you have multiple series of checks in place, mistakes still happen. Let's also keep in mind that reddit is a social media site, not an aviation software company, and so they should very intentionally avoid many layers of checks in order to maintain speed of change (I think most people here would agree that we want changes quicker than they're happening).
I'm not saying that shipping bugs is not bad, but you're presenting things in a very black and white manner, and even when your entire job is about reliability, as mine is, the reality is that more reliability is not always a good thing and there's a lot of context and nuance to every discussion.
What you said is correct as a broad philosophy. I do not purport to write code which is free of all possible bugs. But it does not apply to these specific instances.
A software development pipeline that allows a bug of the kind and magnitude of "people who report can get banned instead of people who were reported" to reach production is fundamentally broken. That Reddit is not developing aviation software is not an appropriate hand-waving for the level of negligence it takes for that bug to be missed at every possible level. I am presenting this in a black and white manner because these specific instances are black and white. There's no nuance.
The layers of checks I described are industry standard for professional software development - Peer review, automated testing, human QA testing. This is incredibly basic, and ultimately they facilitate faster iteration by reducing the amount of developer time that has to be allocated to fixing bugs that reach production, where they have greater impact. Google does these things. Facebook does these things. Rinky dink companies with 4 person dev teams I've worked for do these things.
I’ve reported hundreds of things with the report feature and haven’t been banned accidentally before. A comod of mine did but it was reversed in very short order. You are making these issues out to be far more prevalent and damaging than they are. I do wish the admins would give us more channels of communication, but your experience with them is really not like my own. We’ve always been able to chat with them about technical issues that impeded our moderation. It hasn’t always been a very fast turnaround, but they aren’t just stonewalling on every issue or error either as you seem to intimate. It’s trivially easy to complain that something isn’t working well, especially if you didn’t like it in the first place. But whether you like it or not, it’s unproductive to think that complaining in every thread about this system and making every error an unforgivable red line is doing anything to advance that position. It’s not helpful for trying to get them to care about your concerns, and it’s definitely not helpful for the rest of the people who mod who would like the admins to communicate with us more.
I have never gotten any response at all about my 3 day suspension from May of last year despite many messages, sending relevant links to one admin or another and begging for an explanation in posts such as this. Yes, it may be an uncommon problem but the lack of any sort of response at all speaks to reddit's contempt for the people who volunteer to keep the site from turning into voat. It's disheartening.