Some days, Mike Best feels like a spy. “You have to figure out who the bad guy is,” he says. “But the whole time, the bad guy is feeding you misinformation.” Like Bond in the last 50 years, or MI6 in recent months, Best deals with a lot of Russians. But instead of investigating poisonings or stealing state secrets, the 23-year-old Londoner has a rather more prosaic job: banning trolls from r/funny, Reddit’s self-professed “largest humour depository”.
Best is one of 20 people who moderate the comedy subreddit, which has 20.9 million subscribers (probably more by the time you’re reading this). It’s arguably one of the largest sources of comedy in the world, smashing Trevor Noah’s The Daily Show (1.43 million viewers a night) and the BBC’s Have I Got News For You (7 million viewers at its peak).
Like all subreddits, content is user-generated, but Best and the other moderators keep things in line. “A lot of people view r/funny as not being funny,” he says. At the time of writing, one of the top posts on the page reads, “Rename Communion Wafers to Jeez-Its” and has 70,000 upvotes. “It’s subjective, some people find us funny, some people don’t.”
Back to the Russians. While Best regularly has to deal with angry users yelling and cursing that a post the moderators did or didn’t remove is or isn’t funny, one of the biggest difficulties he faces when moderating the subreddit is identifying accounts that belong to Russian troll farms.
“In the same way people in India are paid to spam phones calls about fake insurance services, these ‘companies’ pay their employees to act the role of our super-users,” Best says. These accounts attempt to become incredibly popular so they can either be sold to the highest bidder or used to direct people towards certain websites. Last week, it was revealed that Reddit’s pro-Trump sub r/the_donald has long been infiltrated by Russian troll brigades spreading propaganda.
These trolls target r/funny because it’s a default subreddit, meaning new users are automatically subscribed to it when they sign up for the site. “The content is near always repetitive, bland, and incredibly low-effort,” Best says. “I find myself deleting garbage memes and old memes the like of which even 9gag doesn't bother with.”
After moderating r/funny for two years, Best says that he can spot a troll “in a matter of seconds”. He even wrote a paper on moderating that he presented to Reddit, and has met with the site’s CEO Steve Huffman, aka Spez. “I see a post, I check the profile,” Best explains. “Are they new? How much karma do they have? How often do they break rules and post content? Is their account verified? Do they comment or just post? What kind of comments do they post?” Spammers tend to have new accounts that post shoddy content to a set list of the most popular subreddits but never post comments.
“When we ban them, within minutes they message us, always incredibly polite with very uncanny English,” Best says. “Often something like, ‘Good day sir moderator, may I please request to understand why I have received this unfortunate ban?’ If we bother responding with ‘no’, or an explanation, it nearly always immediately degrades to them saying ‘suck a dick’.”
Bots and spammers aren’t the only people unhappy with the r/funny mods. “If we didn’t remove posts that weren’t even trying to be funny, the subreddit would just become a dumping ground of everything and anything,” says Ken Allison, a 40-year-old American who has moderated the subreddit for four years.
Around a year and a half ago, the moderators added a new “rule one” to the subreddit’s list of ten rules. “All posts must make an attempt at humour,” it reads. “‘Funny’ is subjective, but all posts must at least make an attempt.”
Best says the subjective nature of comedy is an “ongoing issue”. “We instated that rule because we had a post reach the front page and we’d get 50 or 60 reports saying, ‘This is crap’, ‘This is not funny’, ‘Why is this here’… so we had to sit down and decide what is the minimum bar. For the most part, we don’t enforce it so much as we use it as a reason to say, ‘Look, you have to put some effort in’.”
At just 16 years old, Austin Ward from the US is the youngest r/funny moderator I speak to. Is he too young to be one of the internet’s comedy arbiters? “I don’t really feel like I get to arbitrate what is and what isn’t funny, but rather what has an actual comedic intent,” he says. “For instance, we get flooded with posts taken from /r/aww all the time. People typically think that animals doing things are funny, but that isn’t always the case.”
As well as clamping down on trolls, Rule 4 (“No politics”) also means that moderators have to remove political posts. “While I laugh at them almost every time, I still have to remove them,” Ward says.
An anonymous r/funny moderator from Singapore, who is aged between 25 and 30, works in IT and has been moderating the sub for three and a half years, says that political “agenda pushers” are his biggest challenge. He says communities like r/the_donald and r/mensrights push racism, hate speech and sexism in comments on the sub. Again, as r/funny is one of the largest default subreddits, these communities see it as a good recruiting ground.
“The experience of normal users on the site gets significantly degraded,” the anonymous moderator says. “It becomes increasingly difficult to moderate.” He gives an example: a user may post a video of a black man playing a prank by pretending to rob his friend. The post gets linked on r/the_donald, where users encourage brigading. “Comments are made like ‘Of course they’re black’, ‘It comes naturally to black people’,” the moderator explains. “It’s similar stuff with men’s rights activists, except they target women. ‘She would’ve been arrested if she was a man’, ‘She was given the pussy pass’.” Sometimes, he says, it’s more subtle race baiting and dog whistling. “Many times it’s way out of control.”
Moderating is fraught with such difficulties, so why do the r/funny mods do what they do? Allison says he didn’t ask to be a moderator but was chosen for the role because he used to report r/funny rule-breakers to the mods. “I’m laid back, thick-skinned, have lots of patience, and I like to be helpful,” he says of his motivations.
Best, who spends two hours a day moderating subreddits, says “a job is a job at the end of the day,” and that “even if it’s not paying, it still helps with padding the portfolio”. He is currently a student hoping to work in either software engineering or computational linguistics. To get his moderator position, he had to send in an application form and do an interview with the existing moderators.
The Singaporean moderator is more candid about his motivations. “There’s a sense of power,” he says. “I won’t deny.”
Regardless of their reasons, it’s clear all the moderators I speak with love what they do, even though it is often a thankless task. Because good moderating work is essentially invisible, there is often a perception the mods aren’t doing very much at all. “With the subreddit being the size it is, we just assumed when we joined the team that we were going to be the bad guys,” Best says.
“You really have to want to do this,” he adds. “Personally, I love the ecosystem that’s brought about by sites like Reddit. The frequent communication between moderators and admins and users make it feel like a family.”
The Moderators is a new, semi-regular series in which we speak to the gatekeepers of different online communities to find out how they approach being the arbiter of what is and isn't allowed on the internet.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
