automod filters made reddit an absolute nightmare. pouring my heart out on the depression sub and getting it removed because it didn’t have 300 characters or it was image post saturday or god knows what. you basically just don’t get to post on any sizable sub — before it was at least a lottery! post, see if people will like it! but now you can’t even get a post through!
there are 50 automod filters on everything, forbidden words or topics, perfectly good questions cast away to megathreads no one reads!
it’s a dire, awful landscape, and really terrible user experience, having something on your chest and wanting to post, but oh hey this won’t be posted until our ‘mod team’ ‘reviews’ it. isn’t that what voting is for? please stop treating me like a spambot or troll by default!
Yea bad rules for automod (ex. Each day of the week only a particular type of post is allowed) aren’t really a good justification for not having automod at all.
As Lemmy grows, we’re either going to need automod or the feeds are going to be filled with spam. Even if you add an unreasonable number of mods to every community (which comes with its own issues), you’re relying on users reporting the problem and some mod seeing it.
It’s fine for now because there’s just not that many people, and so there’s not as much incentive to come in posting ads/spam/malicious/horrifying content.
I did moderate on Reddit and while we had discussions about which rules were useful or bad for discussion, we didn’t consider turning it off completely because of how much bad stuff it took care of.