Yeah, Reddit's weakest link is its moderation tools or really, lack thereof. The mod tools were really written for a much smaller site, and hopefully this infusion of cash will let them hire devs who can make it their mission to make the mod tools useful.
Granular abilities - like the ability to give someone only the power to delete comments, or only the power to tag titles or something.
Restrict posting from new accounts - force accounts to be X days old before they're allowed to comment in a given subreddit.
Exposing the IP's of users to the mods - Most trolls/spammers aren't going to with proxies/whatever to get that many IPs, so exposing this is the first step to bans, which leads to...
Better bannning tools - even 4chan has good banning tools, why can't Reddit?
I spent all of 5 minutes on this so I'm sure a good developer can come up with a super useful list of tools, and them write them.
"hopefully this infusion of cash will let them hire devs …"
They shouldn't need additional developers for these features (unless all the existing ones left?), seems to me that these things should be doable fairly quickly.
These days I'm no longer shocked at the number of times I hear "this should be easy" from someone who has absolutely no experience in programming whatsoever. At this point I just smile, nod my head, and attempt to drag the discussion back to reality.
It makes me the "negative" one in meetings.
Makes me wonder how often this phenomenon happens in other industries.
I can say from experience it does happen in the design world. Back in my design days I can say I heard variations of the thought from time-to-time but not as often as I do now being a developer.
Granular abilities - like the ability to give someone only the power to delete comments, or only the power to tag titles or something.
Restrict posting from new accounts - force accounts to be X days old before they're allowed to comment in a given subreddit.
Exposing the IP's of users to the mods - Most trolls/spammers aren't going to with proxies/whatever to get that many IPs, so exposing this is the first step to bans, which leads to...
Better bannning tools - even 4chan has good banning tools, why can't Reddit?
I spent all of 5 minutes on this so I'm sure a good developer can come up with a super useful list of tools, and them write them.