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Comment by birdsbirdsbirds | Hacker News Reader

How come moderators don't fall for those 'theories'?

Or more precisely: Why is there a majority of people who upvote those theories but moderators can identify them as what they are and remove them? What has happened to moderators that they can handle the 'theories' that hasn't happened to regular forum members?

Whatever that is, can't this be handed out to new members before they are allowed to vote?

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Moderators are there to ensure the community thrives, not to respond to 50 restatements a day of "COVID-19 is a hoax" by people "just asking questions".

Part of that is very much ensuring that the front page is not wall to wall conspiracy theories, and members don't have every thread inundated with the same junk.

So each time a post "just asking questions" is posted, close it with a link to the explanation of why the idea has already been debunked. Just like a Bugzilla dupe or a StackOverflow dupe.

For a long time, Reddit moderators did not have the tools to do this. Regardless, whenever bad-faith argumentation is removed, the person whose comment was removed paints the event as censorship which just backs up their conspiracy argument more

Now do this 1,000 times. Now 10,000 times. It is trivial to suck all the air out of a forum by repeatedly posting this.

Spam detection has been a feature of email clients for a long time. I'm sure even a rudimentary automated detection mechanism could prevent a significant portion of the dupes.

Is that not censorship then?

In order to have a good community, you need a form of censorship, whether through moderation, spam detection, voting systems, and so on. Otherwise, the community as a whole becomes a mess.

Somebody "just asking a question" is not being censored. Somebody "just asking a question" will be happy for the quick response.

(Good) moderators consider it their job to keep nonsense off their boards. They spend the commensurate time and effort to do so. Normal forum members aren't there for that.

Time and effort. The two things that cannot be handed out.

What makes you think mods don’t suffer ?

From the evidence of outsourced moderation, they started being influenced by conspiracy theories and suffering from PTSD

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