[sellyme]

> Moderation is an important job. It's needed. But I can't think of any other social site that has such a bad rep for moderation.

Pretty much every other social site of note doesn't have a rep for moderation, on account of not having moderation at all. A solid 20% or higher of the YouTube comments I see are straight-up phishing scams, Facebook and Twitter are complete cesspits where only content that's literally illegal to post ever gets removed, and the less said about imageboards the better.

Wikipedia is the only even remotely comparably large site I can think of that actually has anything resembling moderation, and you'll find the exact same crowd criticising them for enforcing their rules as well.

[pixl97]

>on account of not having moderation at all

I think you may be making a mistake....

Years ago I had to manage SMTP servers. Of course a huge part of that is dealing with spam. Users were mad about how much spam they got and asked if "I was even doing my job". In one particular users case, they did get a lot of spam, and it was a pain in the ass to deal with and they always had lots of complaints. So I showed them for ever 3 messages they received I blocked somewhere near 1000 messages to their address.

If you've never been on that side of the system you don't know what 'not having moderation at all' looks like, but I can tell you it looks far, far, far worse than YT psts.

[sellyme]

What you're describing is administration, not moderation. Very similar concepts, but there's an absolutely gigantic difference in the feel of a community with active moderation versus a site like YouTube where the overwhelming majority of all user-submitted content is never looked at by a single human with the ability to remove it. Often by design - an SMTP server does not have the same use cases as a forum board, and doesn't need the same kind of hands-on attention that a social service requires to be enjoyable.

In theory channel owners have the ability to handle that for YouTube specifically, but in practice the tools and incentives aren't there to make it actually happen.

[kedean]

Facebook groups have them as well.