上位 200 件のコメント表示する 500

[–]allthefoxes 62 ポイント63 ポイント  (29子コメント)

Obligatory repost from other thread:

Philippe, has there been any further discussion about breaking up the tools for admins?

(Only wikipedia kids will know that meme)


Seriously though, reddit suffers from a disconnect. Admins work hard and I recognize that..but there are only so many admins. Mods work hard too, and since they are more focused on smaller communities, they work faster - Mods work on instant results and quick, focused actions. Admins take a look at all these communites, and draw the big picture.

And that's great - That makes perfect sense to me.

The problem comes when issues arise above moderators, but aren't "big picture" - Don't get me wrong, everything is big picture when you think about it. Someone report spamming in /r/pics - they might be doing it elsewhere, or have issues elsewhere, or have an extensive history. I don't know. That's where the admins come in.

But as a moderator..I still need that quick, lightning fast action. Because that's how I operate as a moderator.

I can't possibly expect the admins to work on a mod's timescale while dealing what they have to deal with. Which leads to the whole issue that people face with "communication" - We work faster. We work on different timescales with different things. And since mods don't have the same powers, we have to go to admin. But admins don't work on our timescale. They work on admin timescale.

So. Do mods need more powers? Debatable. A few small things I would like, yeah. But, that isn't sustainable and will cause issues if mod powers scale too far.

Does reddit need more admins? Sure. Reddit has hired quite a few.. Response times are down. Reddit has been doing good.

So what is the gap closer here? I can't pretend to have the answers, but I've been a very large supporter of the idea of global mods. Higher than mods, lower than admins..people that can work at the speed of mods, while passing information to admin.

Does this solve everything? No. Does it come with it's own unique set of issues? Yes. Would it require a rework (code and mentality) of the operational standards reddit has run under for a long long time? Yes.

Is this the only solution? Definitely not.

But that gap will have to get closed one day, and I hope thought is being put into it.

Thanks

[–]glowingRadon 15 ポイント16 ポイント  (25子コメント)

I've been thinking about the idea of global mods - it's a tool which would solve a lot of the spam and abuse on Reddit on a quicker timescale. The difference between Wikipedia and Reddit abuse/spam is users can act globally on Wikipedia. Volunteer sysops and other groups can use blocking, CheckUser, and other tools to mitigate abuse without needing to contact the WMF. Heck, even the global edit filter can be edited by volunteers.

On Reddit, you need the cooperation of other mods for subs you don't have access to or the admins to be effective. Spammers don't see each sub as a separate community, they see it as just another place on Reddit to spam. They don't respect sub boundaries, while our anti-abuse tools do.

I believe a global mod group can be extremely helpful. We can limit global mods to acting on just new accounts and have policy restrictions which limit global mods to spam and serious abuse issues.

[–]LuckyBdx4 10 ポイント11 ポイント  (18子コメント)

/u/kylde has been doing that for years unpaid.

[–]davidreiss666 14 ポイント15 ポイント  (17子コメント)

They really do need to hire /u/Kylde. Nobody knows more about spam than he does. And I include every current and former admin when I say that.

If he says something is spam, it's spam.

[–]Kylde 22 ポイント23 ポイント  (7子コメント)

to those whom it may concern, I am NOT paying this man to say this :)

[–]DrinkMoreCodeMore 4 ポイント5 ポイント  (1子コメント)

Thanks for keeping reddit spam free dude! :)

[–]Kylde 4 ポイント5 ポイント  (0子コメント)

Thanks for keeping reddit spam free dude! :)

TRYING to (cough, icitech.org, [unrelated to you I know] one day I WILL take your spam-ring down), & cheers :)

[–]davidreiss666 9 ポイント10 ポイント  (4子コメント)

I do not work for Kylde. I am working for the good of all Redditors everywhere. And Mossad.

[–]Kylde 3 ポイント4 ポイント  (3子コメント)

And Mossad.

is that a clothing store :) ? Can I have a discount? Huh? Huh? Can I?

[–]ManWithoutModem 8 ポイント9 ポイント  (6子コメント)

If he says something is spam, it's spam.

oh hey /u/kylde said the quickmeme guy was a spammer when he first joined /r/adviceanimals when i was suspicious and no one believed me, hmmm...

[–]Kylde 14 ポイント15 ポイント  (3子コメント)

oh hey /u/kylde said the quickmeme guy was a spammer when he first joined /r/adviceanimals, hmmm

yes that is true, but YOU ferreted out the details that caused admin to take action (did you not even find a google street-view of him walking to the quickmeme offices or some such?), credit where credit is due :) IIRC I left /AA after a week or less, I simply can't handle memes, the sheer monotony of the same thing over & over again left me chewing my keyboard in frustration

edit: I was also responsible for /u/solivinctus being removed way back when:

https://www.dailydot.com/society/reddit-hire-spam-ian-miles-cheong-sollnvictus/

but at the time I took it discreetly to admin (back then it was /u/hueypriest), because I felt it was a little too sensitive to publish straight to /r/reportthespammers

[–]davidreiss666 7 ポイント8 ポイント  (1子コメント)

The admins just need to finally once and for all make you the Spam Fighter in Chef. Maybe they could make you CEO too.

[–]Kylde 6 ポイント7 ポイント  (0子コメント)

The admins just need to finally once and for all make you the Spam Fighter in Chef. Maybe they could make you CEO too.

"hot towels & hookers for all my men!" (Richard Jeni, RIP)

[–]jokes_on_you 3 ポイント4 ポイント  (1子コメント)

Not a single person?

[–]ManWithoutModem 3 ポイント4 ポイント  (0子コメント)

lol this was when kylde was originally added as a mod like 2 years before you believed me (before the circlebroke war i believe).

[–]verdatum 4 ポイント5 ポイント  (3子コメント)

While that's not a bad start to an idea, doing a feature like this well would easily require 6 man-months of development just for an initial rollout.

In order to allow volunteer global moderators or whatever they'd be called, it would be absolutely critical to set up some mechanism of transparency and meta-moderation.

This sort of development likely wouldn't happen until the major overhaul of the codebase our fearless CEO hinted at in a recent announcement.

[–]marquis_of_chaos 58 ポイント59 ポイント  (85子コメント)

Seems like you are trying to treat us more like employees than volunteer moderators and content creators. There seems a lot in there that is saying that we must mod in a way that reddit thinks is best and not how we as mods think a sub should be run.

I'm also very uncomfortable with "Reddit may, at its discretion, intervene to take control of a community when it believes it in the best interest of the community or the website." Why should I create and moderate a sub if at any time the admins could take it over, throw me out or put another user in charge?

[–]Yare_Owns 17 ポイント18 ポイント  (29子コメント)

It's Reddit's site, running on their infrastructure, managed by their employees, and filled with users from their marketing campaigns.

If you think Reddit's expectations are not in line with the benefits, competing sites with different rules exist.

Free market, and all that.

[–]marquis_of_chaos 8 ポイント9 ポイント  (2子コメント)

You're mostly correct in that it is reddit infrastructure and employees running the actual site, but that's not really the whole story. Reddit has always branded itself as a community hub. They provide the hosting, you make the subreddit. Its growth has been driven by volunteer mods who set up, grow, and nurture communities, not admin campaigns. In the same way that a city council may allow community gardens to be set up on city land. They own the ground but not the community that uses the site. The people running the garden are not city employees.

What the admins are now saying is that they not only run the site but will now take an active role as arbiters on how you run your community. While some may be fine with that, many who put a lot of time into growing their subs are not a little perturbed at what is being seen as a power grab to take control of the subs. Imagine if facebook suddenly announced that all popular pages now needed to be run in a certain way and if you disagreed they would simply remove you from the group and appoint some other random person to take over. Why even bother setting up a page or using the site at all if anything you create on the site can be taken away on the whim of a reddit employee.

[–]diversity_is_racism 4 ポイント5 ポイント  (0子コメント)

Reddit has always branded itself as a community hub. They provide the hosting, you make the subreddit.

Without mods and users, Reddit would be empty.

For me, it is the individual mods who create unique subs that offer value here, because many of the default subs are too much like Facebook to be fun.

[–]reseph 28 ポイント29 ポイント  (16子コメント)

Association to a Brand: We love that so many of you want to talk about brands and provide a forum for discussion. Remember to always flag your community as “unofficial” and be clear in your community description that you don’t actually represent that brand.

So this is going to be enforced I see. What if moderators of video game subreddits don't start doing this, or ignore this rule? Are you just going to shut down the subreddit if they refuse? Can you talk about how enforcement works?

On my subreddits I'm fine with throwing in "unofficial" or "fan community", just curious.

[–]AchievementUnlockd[S,A] 36 ポイント37 ポイント  (15子コメント)

So this is going to be enforced I see. What if moderators of game subreddits don't start doing this, or ignore this rule? Are you just going to shut down the subreddit if they refuse? Can you talk about how enforcement works?

Largely, this would be driven by a brand complaint. I think it's reasonable that if BobsGames says "hey, dude is saying he's from BobsGames" and you're not, we would reach out and ask you to add "unofficial" to the name. We'll talk to you, talk about the legalities, etc, but then if all else fails, I think we'd just add "unofficial" ourselves or something. I'm not inclined to ban a whole community over something like that.

[–]reseph 12 ポイント13 ポイント  (0子コメント)

Right okay, makes sense.

[–]verdatum 13 ポイント14 ポイント  (0子コメント)

That's perfectly reasonable. This is the sort of explanation that belongs in this sort of guideline, or in a satellite "more info" link attached to it.

[–]IdRatherBeLurking 5 ポイント6 ポイント  (12子コメント)

Are you requiring that the word "Unofficial" must be used? A few examples:

In r/DenverNuggets, we use:

/r/DenverNuggets is the only place on Reddit devoted to content, stats, news and facts for your Denver Nuggets. Part of the /r/NBA network.

In r/GiantBomb we use:

A website about a website about video games

[–]TheMentalist10 112 ポイント113 ポイント  (10子コメント)

This Moderator Guidelines for Healthy Communities represents a distillation of a great deal of feedback that we got from nearly 1000 moderators.

That's fairly disingenuous. /r/CommunityDialogue didn't exist for moderators to talk about what moderators were doing poorly and ask for the admins help to create rules around preventing those things from happening. It existed because the admins were being (quite correctly) taken to task about the dire state of communications, near-total lack of support, etc., and the overwhelming majority of discussions were geared towards addressing these concerns.

Instead, as a result of all this ostensibly fruitless back-and-forth, we get a list of guidelines which, to paraphrase a comment the last time they were announced, are broadly useless because anyone interested enough to read them is probably sticking to them already. Oh, and /r/CommunityDialogue is going away. Great.

I should stress that I don't think it's a bad thing that these guidelines exist. (And why they didn't before is totally beyond me; we've had about a thousand years to formalise these things in internet time.) But to present them as being somehow a response to the kinds of totally valid concerns which sparked the creation of /r/CommunityDialogue is, at best, misleading.

It all just comes across as very patronising, and I'm not really sure how you'd like us to respond to it. Are we supposed to be grateful that you're telling most of us to do what we're already doing rather than looking into the issues that are repeatedly raised?

There have, as you say, been massive improvements (by reddit's painfully slow standards) to the moderation experience. And we're all grateful for that. But these guidelines are simply not (edit: a meaningful) part of that progress.


/u/honestbleeps put it best in the last thread:

For what it's worth, I pretty much agree with most/all of the guidelines you've written up for moderators -- but why the hell after we've waited all this time is a list of guidelines for moderators what we're given in exchange for all the thoughtful dialog about what is hard about moderating communities? I'm fairly certain barely anyone here expected that after waiting all this time, we'd get "moderator guidelines"...

[–]Pakaru 30 ポイント31 ポイント  (4子コメント)

They also are mistaking the definitions of guidelines vs regulations/rules. Guidelines are essentially suggestions that should be used, while regulations/rules are required and enforceable.

This should be addressed to correspond with what the Admins are actually expecting.

[–]Alkser 13 ポイント14 ポイント  (1子コメント)

It's interesting though. The "heading" of the second part of the post says "guidelines", however, further down in the text it says "rules".

There's an obvious difference between those two (as you have said), so it'd would be really nice and appreciated which one of the two it is.

[–]creesch 45 ポイント46 ポイント  (71子コメント)

Alright, fair is fair. These are better than I expected and a bit more concise than the draft posted months ago. Not by much, but still every bit counts.

I am still not sure how or rather, why this route was taken. I mean:

  1. Over five months ago /r/communityDialogue is started.
  2. The first month is glorious with good discussions and at the end of the month a start of summaries from the previous summaries.
  3. Then all of the sudden... radio silence for almost two months with an incidental "not dead yet" post. No more discussions, no more summaries.
  4. Then two months later suddenly out of the blue the first draft of the guidelines that have almost no relation with what happened before. We get a few initial replies in the thread before after it becomes clear people are not happy... radio silence.
  5. Today, again a few months later we suddenly get a repeat of 4 with the message that the entire thing is shutdown.

What I really would like to know is... why? What happend, why the radio silence and basically non responses? All we got in the past two posts where joke responses to joke comments and few short responses to the more serious inquiries.

How is that supposed to make us have good faith in the community team?

[–]Redbiertje 5 ポイント6 ポイント  (1子コメント)

Alright, fair is fair. These are better than I expected and a bit more concise than the draft posted months ago. Not by much, but still every bit counts.

I just checked, and the difference is two lines. Not more.

https://www.reddit.com/r/CommunityDialogue/comments/5y2ae6/long_awaited_updates_and_the_future_of_this_sub/demy3kf/

[–]Meepster23 132 ポイント133 ポイント  (319子コメント)

It’s not appropriate to attack your own users.

What if the sub is an entire joke and that's part of it. This is a frequent occurrence and normal/expected in some subreddits.

Secret Guidelines aren’t fair to your users—transparency is important to the platform.

Do we have to declare everything we consider spam? Do we have to state how we catch spammers? Maybe this should be applied to the admins first. "Brigading" is one of those rules that seem to be wildly up to interpretation.

While not always needed, certain security tools may require use of email address so that we can contact you and verify who you are as a moderator of your community.

In before 2fa

Moderator responses to appeals by their users should be consistent, germane to the issue raised and work through education, not punishment.

So does that mean I'm not allowed to ban spammers any more? I have to hand hold these account farmers and repeatedly tell them why they aren't allowed to do what they do?

but we expect you to manage communities as isolated communities and not use a breach of one set of community rules to ban a user from another community

So I can't ban a spammer across multiple subreddits until they participate there?

In addition, camping or sitting on communities for long periods of time for the sake of holding onto them is prohibited.

This is yet another, vague, undefinable, "know it when we see it" rule that you are proclaiming that mods shouldn't be making a few bullet points earlier.

Finally, when the admins contact you, we ask that you respond within a reasonable amount of time.

Define reasonable. We are often lucky to get a response from the admins at all, bit hypocritical no?


What are the punishments for any of these "rules"?

These are completely left up for interpretation and actively contradict themselves since you are stating we shouldn't be making un-transparent rules.

These points were all brought up in /r/communitydialogue which you then abandoned for months, and basically said, "we hear you but aren't going to change anything".

this is another huge, self inflicted wound.


Edit: And apparently /u/AchievementUnlockd knew it didn't go over well and yet still pushed it through, essentially unmodified and ignoring all feedback..

[–]Alkser 36 ポイント37 ポイント  (48子コメント)

I'd actually like to hear answers on everything you've said on here.

Especially in regards to spam - as I myself deal with that quite a lot on /r/leagueoflegends.

[–]capnjack78 37 ポイント38 ポイント  (47子コメント)

Reddit has shown for 5+ years that they don't care about spam, so we might as well moderate it as we see fit.

[–]Sporkicide[A] 27 ポイント28 ポイント  (46子コメント)

We've changed a lot about how we deal with spam, to the point of spinning off another team (Trust & Safety) that deals exclusively with spam and content policy enforcement.

[–]thoughtcrimeo 16 ポイント17 ポイント  (0子コメント)

The /r/spam bot sucks. It doesn't pick up any Markov stuff, I guess because it only looks at the first page. The latest bots copy/paste normal messages then do a page of spam.

I still manually report things but it's a pain and it seems like we mods and users are doing your jobs for you.

[–]davidreiss666 9 ポイント10 ポイント  (5子コメント)

Hire somebody who knows what spam is and how to fight it.

Hire /u/Kylde.

Nobody on planet Earth knows better than he what it is and how best to fight it.

[–]Kylde 13 ポイント14 ポイント  (4子コメント)

you're trying to get me to send you my first-born, aren't you :) ?

[–]davidreiss666 5 ポイント6 ポイント  (3子コメント)

I don't have a lot of time. I've had something "big" planned for a little while. But I haven't had the time to pull the trigger yet.

In other words, just you wait. :-)

[–]Kylde 6 ポイント7 ポイント  (2子コメント)

I don't have a lot of time. I've had something "big" planned for a little while. But I haven't had the time to pull the trigger yet.

Now I'm COMPLETELY confused :D

[–]capnjack78 31 ポイント32 ポイント  (19子コメント)

First I've heard of it, and I ask for spam tools for mods in every announcement I see from the admins. What does this team do, exactly, and how do mods benefit from it? Are they actually reading /r/spam again?

[–]elfa82 40 ポイント41 ポイント  (16子コメント)

No, the /r/spam bot is pathetically limited in what it catches and no admins read that sub. Instead send a message to /r/reddit.com and use the rules subject. I typically get responses back for spam and vote manipulation within a day, sometimes even within an hour.

[–]PraiseBeToScience 23 ポイント24 ポイント  (3子コメント)

I typically get responses back for spam and vote manipulation within a day, sometimes even within an hour.

I never get a response to anything sooner than 3 days, including spam. I reported an account for spamming their website selling fake goods they didn't ban him. I stopped reporting 95% of what I normally would because /r/reddit.com modmail is completely useless.

[–]elfa82 10 ポイント11 ポイント  (1子コメント)

I guess they just like me. But for reals it really depends on time of day and it's a crap shoot.

[–]PraiseBeToScience 15 ポイント16 ポイント  (0子コメント)

3 day response times is not a time of day issue. I could see that for the difference between 1 or 12 hours. But 3 days means you've rolled over working hours a least twice. I get better service from Comcast.

[–]abrownn 12 ポイント13 ポイント  (2子コメント)

Can confirm, /u/MortalWomprat is my hero.

[–]greymutt 5 ポイント6 ポイント  (0子コメント)

Mine too. But their blank user page makes me itchy.

Say something, oh silent one!

[–]davidreiss666 8 ポイント9 ポイント  (8子コメント)

When I message /r/reddit.com about a spammer, about half the time they respond with "message the mods of /r/spam". Which I would be happy to do if the mods of /r/spam would actually respond.

[–]elfa82 7 ポイント8 ポイント  (1子コメント)

Seriously? That's dumb. Ever since the formation of the trust and safety team I've always had quick responses and always get a response of "thanks"

[–]Ocrasorm 5 ポイント6 ポイント  (0子コメント)

When was the last time you got a message like that? I want to check it out because for the last year or so it would not make any sense for us to send a message like that. We funnel things through tickets so it should not matter which modmail you use.

If you are getting that there is a communication breakdown somewhere and I want to fix it on our end. Thanks.

[–]purplespengler 2 ポイント3 ポイント  (0子コメント)

I pretty much always get a response when I modmail r/spam about somebody. Takes a while, but I get one.

[–]jippiejee 21 ポイント22 ポイント  (2子コメント)

We've changed a lot about how we deal with spam, to the point of spinning off another team

Yeah, they're such a joke that we ceased reporting spam at all. We hardban them ourselves instead. They're useless. "If it only happens in your sub, it's not spam". WTF? We're better at dealing with spam ourselves.

[–]AchievementUnlockd[S,A] 3 ポイント4 ポイント  (1子コメント)

I don't think they're useless - the numbers indicate that the spam that gets through is a small (single digit) fraction of the total spam submitted to the site. They're actually pretty effective, but I know there's no way you would know that, without seeing the full reports.

[–]allthefoxes 12 ポイント13 ポイント  (2子コメント)

Hey. Alternative point here. Blatant spam (seeeex) has gotten much better!! Thank you. I mean that.

But because of this, spam has evolved and T&S hasn't really caught up. Account farming is rampant and I've yet to see visible improvement :( pics doesn't bother to report most of this stuff anymore since by the time we do, they are 10 accounts away and keep coming back when we do. Hopefully the situation will improve in the future.

[–]glowingRadon 8 ポイント9 ポイント  (1子コメント)

But is the sex spam better because Reddit has gotten better at detecting and removing, or is it because the spammer has stopped to retool his methods? Given it was a dramatic sudden stop and not a gradual slow down, I'm inclined to believe the latter...

[–]DrinkMoreCodeMore 6 ポイント7 ポイント  (0子コメント)

or is it because the spammer has stopped to retool his methods?

Most certainly this

[–]ShaneH7646 10 ポイント11 ポイント  (0子コメント)

could you reboot them? they seemed to have stopped working

[–]capnjack78 20 ポイント21 ポイント  (47子コメント)

It seems to me that this was all written as a way to remove undesirable (read: those that affect Reddit's profit margin and marketability) subreddits. They're far too vague for any moderator to interpret in any way other than "Be excellent to each other". I plan to ignore it and keep doing what I do. Frankly, I'm not sure who asked for this, and it doesn't seem like anyone really needs it except for Reddit admins to use it against well known toxic subs.

[–]Meepster23 25 ポイント26 ポイント  (19子コメント)

Which they could just as easily, and more effectively handle, under "we own the site, we don't like you, piss off". Instead of trying to couch all of this in vague "rules" that will only serve to piss people off and cause more rule lawyering. I fully expect to be linked to these guidelines under threat of being reported to the admins, by someone screaming about me oppressing them after they've ban banned for screaming racial slurs at eachother.

[–]Sporkicide[A] 15 ポイント16 ポイント  (24子コメント)

It's more like a way to reinforce what most of you are doing right and giving guidelines to mods that might need the guidance. Anyone can create a subreddit, but we haven't done a lot to help new mods learn how to build and manage their community.

[–]capnjack78 24 ポイント25 ポイント  (18子コメント)

we haven't done a lot to help new mods learn how to build and manage their community.

In that case, I think you guys need to think through this a lot more. You've got long-seasoned moderators in this thread asking for clarification of these incredibly vague rules we should follow, "or else" (Is it "or else"?).

[–]Anomander 12 ポイント13 ポイント  (3子コメント)

It's more like a way to reinforce what most of you are doing right and giving guidelines to mods that might need the guidance.

So you're calling "here's some rules" support now? Seems a little hollow.

And like consenting to a search, of course only those shitty mods over there have anything to worry about.

but we haven't done a lot to help new mods learn how to build and manage their community.

I'm genuinely curious how you think that these are going to do that? Cause all they look like to me is a new way for shitty rules-lawyer spammers and abusive users to try and claim we're not doing our job for banning them.

Like, you're not supporting anyone with this, Admin is either just putting a veneer of structure on - or hamstringing your teams.

I don't understand how this is the grand result from Community Dialogue... it's pretty much the absolute last thing that community seemed to ever be asking for. And where it does line up with requests, it sounds like Admin expects us to either self-enforce, or see no change whatsoever.

Like, guideline 2.3:

"Stable and Active Teams of Moderators: Healthy communities have moderators who are around to answer questions of their community and engage with the admins."

Are you actually going to enforce activity? How? How do I get my inactive camper removed from my community, because that sounds like exactly what you're asking us to do, but it is something Admin have, for years, refused to touch unless the account itself is 'dead' and y'all ain't made any discussions of changing that policy.

[–]AchievementUnlockd[S,A] 3 ポイント4 ポイント  (1子コメント)

Yes. This is a change to how we operate. We are creating the systems and processes for this now, but there will be a mechanism to report, some reasonable time for us to attempt to contact the mod in question, and some published standards by which we will operate.

[–]green_flash 12 ポイント13 ポイント  (3子コメント)

I have to hand hold these account farmers and repeatedly tell them why they aren't allowed to do what they do?

"dear sir please, unlock my reddit, please sir! I am not spam. Thanks you so very much."

[–]Meepster23 8 ポイント9 ポイント  (0子コメント)

Literally this..

Also..

"post not showing new queue please help"

[–]AchievementUnlockd[S,A] 35 ポイント36 ポイント  (190子コメント)

It’s not appropriate to attack your own users.

What if the sub is an entire joke and that's part of it. This is a frequent occurrence and normal/expected in some subreddits.

We will certainly look at context. And we aren't taking enforcement actions without talking first, so you would have the opportunity to point that out.

Secret Guidelines aren’t fair to your users—transparency is important to the platform.

Do we have to declare everything we consider spam? Do we have to state how we catch spammers? Maybe this should be applied to the admins first. "Brigading" is one of those rules that seem to be wildly up to interpretation.

I don't disagree. Some terms are useful for their flexibility - that is, I don't want to get us into a position where a ban is argued because someone isn't "QUITE" the definition of something, but give enough freedom for things to grow and to evolve. But what that guideline is focused on is transparency around expected behavior. Your users should know clearly what is and is not appropriate.

Moderator responses to appeals by their users should be consistent, germane to the issue raised and work through education, not punishment.

So does that mean I'm not allowed to ban spammers any more? I have to hand hold these account farmers and repeatedly tell them why they aren't allowed to do what they do?

Absolutely not. What is DOES mean is this: if someone comes to you and says "huge misunderstanding. I didn't realize that was against the rules, and I promise that I won't ever be doing it again." and you can verify their good faith, you should be willing to talk to them about it.

but we expect you to manage communities as isolated communities and not use a breach of one set of community rules to ban a user from another community

So I can't ban a spammer across multiple subreddits until they participate there?

I think the ideal is that we are not being pre-emptive with bans. I would rather that people were only being banned from communities where they were active, and not from communities they have never visited. However, it's a bit different when we're dealing with a fully automated spambot. We don't want you pre-emptively banning 'people', but I don't have a strong feeling about protecting a bot's feelings.

In addition, camping or sitting on communities for long periods of time for the sake of holding onto them is prohibited.

This is yet another, vague, undefinable, "know it when we see it" rule that you are proclaiming that mods shouldn't be making a few bullet points earlier.

We'll be publishing guidelines for that prior to enforcing. This is not the detail, this is the statement of principle.

Finally, when the admins contact you, we ask that you respond within a reasonable amount of time.

Define reasonable. We are often lucky to get a response from the admins at all, bit hypocritical no?f

Reasonable is dependent on the situation. If we are asking you to respond about a child porn issues, reasonable is a whole lot faster than if we have a question about your community's css.

edit: OK, I fixed the damned formatting. :P

[–]thirdegree 56 ポイント57 ポイント  (33子コメント)

Absolutely not. What is DOES mean is this: if someone comes to you and says "huge misunderstanding. I didn't realize that was against the rules, and I promise that I won't ever be doing it again." and you can verify their good faith, you should be willing to talk to them about it.

So we need to start tracking users that have a history of breaking the rules? I assume you're working on a native way to do this then? I also assume this is only to limits of reasonableness, and that you're not expecting us to give second chances to people that come into our sub yelling racist slurs at everyone.

[–]Shagomir 59 ポイント60 ポイント  (19子コメント)

This is especially troublesome when people have a history of deleting their rule-breaking posts. Without some kind of way to track these sorts of things, this is going to open up whole new attack strategies for bad actors playing a "the mean mods banned me for no reason! Plz help admins!" role.

[–]thirdegree 24 ポイント25 ポイント  (12子コメント)

Absolutely. There are several bots that can do it but they really shouldn't be adding new rules that force mods to use more third party services.

[–]Shagomir 27 ポイント28 ポイント  (11子コメント)

It's unfortunate, but all the subs I moderate pretty much require Toolbox and participation in an external chat program like Slack, Discord, or IRC.

There is no way to manage something like this natively on Reddit, which is frustrating. It's nice to have tools, but not when they are 3rd party and could break at any time for any reason if Reddit decides to make a change.

[–]thirdegree 19 ポイント20 ポイント  (8子コメント)

Oh same. Toolbox is absolutely mandatory, and a slack makes everything so much easier.

[–]MajorParadox 11 ポイント12 ポイント  (2子コメント)

and a slack makes everything so much easier.

Also, animated emojis make modding fun!

[–]adagiosummoner 4 ポイント5 ポイント  (3子コメント)

And snoonotes. omg.

[–]thirdegree 4 ポイント5 ポイント  (2子コメント)

I'm sure /u/meepster23 is happy to hear that :D

[–]adagiosummoner 4 ポイント5 ポイント  (1子コメント)

There is literally no other practical and easy way to keep track of the amounts of people we keep track of on /r/leagueoflegends .

[–]Phallindrome 8 ポイント9 ポイント  (0子コメント)

I agree with Toolbox being a requirement and I definitely find external chat programs helpful, but I've actually had good results with Mod Discussions in the new modmail in one of my subreddits. All our active mods are also active in the mod discussions, and those discussions stay where they are, without being archived or scrolling up into oblivion. Modmail definitely needs improvements though. (For starters, in modmails from users, I should be able to see all the previous contacts we've had with that user, not just the last three.)

[–]thewidowaustero 8 ポイント9 ポイント  (0子コメント)

Toolbox allows you to put notes viewable only to mods on users and have that note link back to the rule breaking comment. We use it to track rule violations, it's very useful. Modding would be unbearable without Toolbox IMO, if reddit really wanted to show some mod support they'd incorporate Toolbox into the official platform.

[–]Precursor2552 12 ポイント13 ポイント  (5子コメント)

So I can't ban a spammer across multiple subreddits until they participate there?

I think the ideal is that we are not being pre-emptive with bans. I would rather that people were only being banned from communities where they were active, and not from communities they have never visited. However, it's a bit different when we're dealing with a fully automated spambot. We don't want you pre-emptively banning 'people', but I don't have a strong feeling about protecting a bot's feelings.

Ok so I'm a mod in two subreddits that are virtually identical (one different rule), one is far smaller than the other, but occasionally a user will get removed from one, and run to the other. Are you saying I can't ban from both when they attack users in the main one, or issue comments (racism/sexism/antisemitism) in one that are extremely rule breaking in both?

I have no desire to force my users to be attacked multiple times in order to fully remove a problematic user from both communities which given the size of the smaller I'm betting have close to 100% overlap in users.

[–]appropriate-username 9 ポイント10 ポイント  (0子コメント)

I mod /r/amiugly and /r/amisexy and would be kinda sad to not be able to ban people from both at once anymore but I'd be willing to sacrifice that if shit like what /r/offmychest is doing stops.

[–]AchievementUnlockd[S,A] 7 ポイント8 ポイント  (3子コメント)

I'm still working out the details, but I hear what you're saying, and I'm designing enforcement standards to take that into account. I haven't locked it in yet, but at the moment I'm thinking that we'll be looking at "close networks" of subs as a single sub for this purpose. So in your case, because the two are closely affiliated, likely share a mod team, etc, I wouldn't have a problem with a ban across the two. But two totally dissimilar subs, even if both are modded by you, would not qualify for that exception. How does that feel to you?

[–]purplespengler 10 ポイント11 ポイント  (1子コメント)

Your users should know clearly what is and is not appropriate.

This seems to be based on an utterly naive idea of how many users care at all about what is or is not appropriate when it's opposed to their own interests. If that number were as high as you seem to think it is, there would not be a need for moderators to the extent that there currently is.

What is DOES mean is this: if someone comes to you and says "huge misunderstanding. I didn't realize that was against the rules, and I promise that I won't ever be doing it again." and you can verify their good faith, you should be willing to talk to them about it.

Do you have any actual idea how many threads moderators have to remove in a day, and how many people contest them? Mandating that unpaid volunteers should be willing to talk to every single person who lies about not having read rules that we've made plainly visible to them is an absurd.

[–]kyew 7 ポイント8 ポイント  (0子コメント)

if someone comes to you and says "huge misunderstanding. I didn't realize that was against the rules, and I promise that I won't ever be doing it again." and you can verify their good faith, you should be willing to talk to them about it.

"Good faith" isn't quantifiable. Isn't this just going to encourage sea-lions? I can already picture all the messages asking how dare I stop people from JUST ASKING QUESTIONS?!

[–]jb2386 8 ポイント9 ポイント  (1子コメント)

I don't have a strong feeling about protecting a bot's feelings.

Uh oh... /r/botsrights/ is NOT going to like that.

[–]AchievementUnlockd[S,A] 6 ポイント7 ポイント  (0子コメント)

Uh oh... /r/botsrights/ is NOT going to like that.

Yup, I knew that would likely get me hauled before r/botsrights when I posted it. I was correct.

[–]capnjack78 25 ポイント26 ポイント  (66子コメント)

Absolutely not. What is DOES mean is this: if someone comes to you and says "huge misunderstanding. I didn't realize that was against the rules, and I promise that I won't ever be doing it again." and you can verify their good faith, you should be willing to talk to them about it.

There's no way to verify their good faith. When we ban people at /r/youtubehaiku, it's typically for one of a few reasons:

  • They're toxic and starting flame wars, which is not the point of a sub for funny videos.

  • They've a redditor for years, and suddenly make multiple rule-breaking posts.

  • They're a spammer.

In all of these cases you can verify that they don't deserve any show of good faith at all.

I think the ideal is that we are not being pre-emptive with bans. I would rather that people were only being banned from communities where they were active, and not from communities they have never visited. However, it's a bit different when we're dealing with a fully automated spambot. We don't want you pre-emptively banning 'people', but I don't have a strong feeling about protecting a bot's feelings.

So then shut down T_D, and communities like it, and then the people who do preemptive bans won't have much of a reason to anymore.

If we are asking you to respond about a child porn issues, reasonable is a whole lot faster than if we have a question about your community's css.

More vague rules. You might get a response in 12 hours or so. I have no idea what you expect, so you'll just have to accept this level of service from unpaid volunteers.

[–]AchievementUnlockd[S,A] 16 ポイント17 ポイント  (20子コメント)

More vague rules. You might get a response in 12 hours or so. I have no idea what you expect, so you'll just have to accept this level of service from unpaid volunteers.

It's worth pointing out that we know you're unpaid volunteers. We even had that in the previous draft, but cut it because people told us that it sounded like we were talking down to mods.

[–]capnjack78 23 ポイント24 ポイント  (0子コメント)

Well, I appreciate that, and I don't mean to come off totally combative. But, like other mods here in this thread, I'm alarmed at how half-baked some of these guidelines seem to be. I know you said details are coming, but just about everyone here is totally confused about the purpose, application and enforcement of these rules. It seems very much unpolished/unfinished.

[–]ShaneH7646 16 ポイント17 ポイント  (6子コメント)

Do admins have to follow the 'respond in a reasonable amount of time' guideline?

[–]appropriate-username 4 ポイント5 ポイント  (4子コメント)

There's an internal effort to respond in less than 72 hours mon-fri, according to ocrasorm.

[–]AchievementUnlockd[S,A] 6 ポイント7 ポイント  (0子コメント)

That's for the Trust and Safety team. The community team has a goal of 12 hours.

[–]LittleMissP 2 ポイント3 ポイント  (2子コメント)

I'm not in the USA. I routinely have to wait days for a response, if one comes at all. Why did an international website make it so their admin team only work in one time zone?

[–]purplespengler 21 ポイント22 ポイント  (0子コメント)

It's worth pointing out that we know you're unpaid volunteers.

Then why are you trying to treat us like employees in the Reddit Call Center instead of continuing to appropriately allow us the autonomy tradeoff that comes with keeping Reddit afloat for no compensation?

Last time I worked in a call center my pay was $15/hr. Once I receive my ~$109,500 in back pay and the first two bi-weekly checks, I'll be happy to adhere to whatever standards of behavior beyond "don't allow or promote illegal content" that you want to dictate to me . Thanks.

[–]Drigr 2 ポイント3 ポイント  (3子コメント)

You know we're unpaid volunteers, but you seem to expect more of us than we are able to expect from you. I'm still waiting to hear back from a message I sent to the admins a week ago. It would also be nice if you'd actually GIVE us those guidelines, because as it stands now, they're about as helpful as /r/redditrequest and 10 times more vague. I can't have the top mod of /r/blackdesertonline removed because they're active in reddit, even though they haven't made a mod action in the sub in enough time that they aren't in the mod log anymore, and they show up a week after some drama to ask why when they log in they're slammed with complaints, then go back to ignoring me when I called them out for being absent. What you've laid out does nothing to show situations like that will be better handled.

[–]AchievementUnlockd[S,A] 7 ポイント8 ポイント  (2子コメント)

I just checked for your message and responded to you. You got caught in a filter. My apologies. Any time that happens, please feel free to write and nudge us.

Once we have details on exactly how we're going to use these Guidelines to deal with mod removals from squatting or the like, I'll be sharing them.

[–]Anomander 13 ポイント14 ポイント  (2子コメント)

Absolutely not. What is DOES mean is this: if someone comes to you and says "huge misunderstanding. I didn't realize that was against the rules, and I promise that I won't ever be doing it again." and you can verify their good faith, you should be willing to talk to them about it.

Can you really clarify what you mean about that? Like, in hard-written policy, architectural, not just explain personally to me here.

Because I don't think y'all pay me enough to do emotional and marketing-advice handholding with every small cafe owner that wants to spam my communities. Our rules are pretty clear and transparent that "not knowing" is not an excuse. Nobody gets a freebie just because they're new. Then everyone just keeps making new accounts and calling each new post that account's freebie, I've done that dance before.

We have developed our rules and our community's culture in large part in response to the environment that Reddit has built for us, and this sounds like you'd really like mods and our communities values to fundamentally change so that we can better welcome spammers on your behalf.

I don't think it should be up to mods to deal with the user consequences of the lack of tools you've given us. We're already dealing with the community part.

Admin needs to put vastly more effort into appropriate indoctrinating new users and new accounts, and get them used to actively checking rules, as well as taking responsibility for their adherence. Making rules "easier to access" doesn't count, faintly, if you're not stuffing them down the gullets of the unwilling.

Everyone who was going to play nice already reads our rules, and everyone who isn't never will no matter what new format they're stored in.


I'm here to build cool communities, to nurture and develop spaces and groups around topics I care about.

I'm not customer service, though.

I'm here for the people that are behaving well, and I put my spare time on reddit towards improving things for them. The people who are shits are the sad downside to the role, and I really don't like how much of these guidelines are about asking mods to be nicer & devote more effort towards pandering to the outliers that refuse to try and fit in on their own - rather than the vast majority of normal, sensible, people who'd really rather that the other guys just fuck off entirely.

[–]AchievementUnlockd[S,A] 3 ポイント4 ポイント  (0子コメント)

Admin needs to put vastly more effort into appropriate indoctrinating new users and new accounts, and get them used to actively checking rules, as well as taking responsibility for their adherence. Making rules "easier to access" doesn't count, faintly, if you're not stuffing them down the gullets of the unwilling.

FWIW, I agree with this, and have been having conversations about it internally.

[–]english06 10 ポイント11 ポイント  (2子コメント)

I think your formatting got goofy.

[–]Norci 10 ポイント11 ポイント  (3子コメント)

It’s not appropriate to attack your own users.

What if the sub is an entire joke and that's part of it. This is a frequent occurrence and normal/expected in some subreddits.

We will certainly look at context. And we aren't taking enforcement actions without talking first, so you would have the opportunity to point that out.

I hope this doesn't mean mods will be held to any kind of higher standard of behavior than users, because we are users too. If someone is talking shit, we should be able to respond by talking shit. Unless you mean modabuse, because that is an actual issue where some mods are too quick on delete/ban button.

[–]AchievementUnlockd[S,A] 4 ポイント5 ポイント  (1子コメント)

Under no circumstances would I ever suggest that a mod should have to take abuse from a user. I simply won't. I don't think anyone should have to take abuse like that. I hope that nobody starts the battles, but if someone DOES, I hope that the mod is the one who's clear headed enough to use the tools that you are given to de-escalate the situation and calm things down.

[–]Vlerss 4 ポイント5 ポイント  (2子コメント)

You quoted your own replies. Just a heads up.

[–]imnoidiot5 22 ポイント23 ポイント  (12子コメント)

Admins can't format confirmed. First spez, now you. SAD!

[–]AchievementUnlockd[S,A] 19 ポイント20 ポイント  (11子コメント)

Gimme a break, it's all I can do to avoid going into wiki-code. Seven years of habits are hard to break.

[–]Meepster23 20 ポイント21 ポイント  (25子コメント)

We will certainly look at context. And we aren't taking enforcement actions without talking first, so you would have the opportunity to point that out.

So, it's not a rule, it's something that "you'll know when you see". Sounds.. vague.. which brings me to:

I don't disagree. Some terms are useful for their flexibility - that is, I don't want to get us into a position where a ban is argued because someone isn't "QUITE" the definition of something, but give enough freedom for things to grow and to evolve. But what that guideline is focused on is transparency around expected behavior. Your users should know clearly what is and is not appropriate.

This answers none of my question and just dances around it. Do I have to spell out that you aren't allowed to create 50 new YouTube channels and upload monetized and stolen videos to them and how I detect that? I sure as hell better not be otherwise there's no point, I can just turn off the bots and send all spam reports to you to deal with instead.

THIS is an unclear, non-transparent rule. It's not even ironic because I expected this after reading the drafts, but this is the epitome of hypocritical.

Absolutely not. What is DOES mean is this: if someone comes to you and says "huge misunderstanding. I didn't realize that was against the rules, and I promise that I won't ever be doing it again." and you can verify their good faith, you should be willing to talk to them about it.

Yet that's what it states. And you determine good faith how exactly? What is your measuring stick for "good faith"? Do you remember the whole discussions in /r/communitydialogue about how to make good rules? Ya know the ones that said they should be specific and quantifiable as possible? Especially around sitewide rules.. like this whole thread

I think the ideal is that we are not being pre-emptive with bans. I would rather that people were only being banned from communities where they were active, and not from communities they have never visited. However, it's a bit different when we're dealing with a fully automated spambot. We don't want you pre-emptively banning 'people', but I don't have a strong feeling about protecting a bot's feelings.

That, again, doesn't answer my question. These are largely people behind these spam accounts that I deal with at least. Am I or am I not allowed to ban someone across multiple subs when they start posting stolen videos, re-uploaded to their own channels to try and make money?

We'll be publishing guidelines for that prior to enforcing. This is not the detail, this is the statement of principle.

I just... I can't even... How many times are we going to do this dance. How many times are the admins going to rush something out the door without thinking it through or talking with us (or in this case talking to us and ignoring us) and put out some half baked idea promising to fill in the dots later.

To put it bluntly. I don't believe you.

Reasonable is dependent on the situation. If we are asking you to respond about a child porn issues, reasonable is a whole lot faster than if we have a question about your community's css.

Why on gods green earth would you ever be asking MODS to deal with CP issues? That's something we refer you in the first place. And, good, more vague guidelines.. I'll add those to the list of things to hold my breath for..

[–]AchievementUnlockd[S,A] 12 ポイント13 ポイント  (11子コメント)

Why on gods green earth would you ever be asking MODS to deal with CP issues? That's something we refer you in the first place. And, good, more vague guidelines.. I'll add those to the list of things to hold my breath for..

Yeah, CP was a terrible example. I more intended to show that there are varying levels of urgency.

[–]AnSq 15 ポイント16 ポイント  (0子コメント)

I more intended to show that there are varying levels of urgency.

But you didn't provide a baseline for what “reasonable” means for any level of urgency.

[–]Phallindrome 4 ポイント5 ポイント  (0子コメント)

Yeah, if you see CP on one of my subreddits, and I haven't seen it, removed it, and reported it to you already, I 100% expect you to deal with it yourself that instant. I'm not a lawyer, but I think not doing so might actually open you up to legal troubles.

[–]Meepster23 15 ポイント16 ポイント  (6子コメント)

Well, I can't think of an example of anything that an admin would need from mods that "urgently", but if you come up with a realistic example, I'm all ears.. Maybe, ya know, an actual timeline too instead of "soon".

Also I'm hoping you hit submit too early and are planning on responding to the rest of my post.

[–]code-sloth 5 ポイント6 ポイント  (0子コメント)

I don't have much hope of the admins ever getting their crap together on this.

[–]davidreiss666 5 ポイント6 ポイント  (1子コメント)

There was a time when I needed to get an admin to deal with some of that crap..... and Krispy then gave me the usual line about "we can't always get to your requests right away" blah blah blah.

I replied with "I don't want to say look at the link, but look at the link." She then dealt with it right away.

It is very sad that it pops up occasionally.

[–]wishforagiraffe 6 ポイント7 ポイント  (0子コメント)

Yeah, I was dealing with a recurring revenge porn issue a few months back, and /u/chtorrr was super on the ball every time I contacted them.

[–]Halaku 4 ポイント5 ポイント  (2子コメント)

I would rather that people were only being banned from communities where they were active, and not from communities they have never visited.

There goes my dreams of notoriety by writing a bot that autobanned all T_D posters...

[–]othellothewise 3 ポイント4 ポイント  (0子コメント)

I think the ideal is that we are not being pre-emptive with bans. I would rather that people were only being banned from communities where they were active, and not from communities they have never visited.

What about when members of one community actively target another community? For example I know the blackladies sub has had to automatically ban posters of certain other subreddits because trolls from those subreddits have repeatedly gone into blackladies to make racist comments?

Like if you're going to remove that option you need to have far better moderator tools to make it easier for mods to deal with these kinds of problems.

[–]MajorParadox 3 ポイント4 ポイント  (0子コメント)

but we expect you to manage communities as isolated communities and not use a breach of one set of community rules to ban a user from another community

So I can't ban a spammer across multiple subreddits until they participate there?

I think the ideal is that we are not being pre-emptive with bans. I would rather that people were only being banned from communities where they were active, and not from communities they have never visited. However, it's a bit different when we're dealing with a fully automated spambot. We don't want you pre-emptively banning 'people', but I don't have a strong feeling about protecting a bot's feelings.

So, there should be no issue if we ban a user for a small infraction, but base that decision on viewing their user profile and seeing a pattern?

[–]ucantsimee 6 ポイント7 ポイント  (1子コメント)

I think the ideal is that we are not being pre-emptive with bans. I would rather that people were only being banned from communities where they were active, and not from communities they have never visited.

So will certain communities "ban by API" policies be prohibited now?

[–]bryntheskits 10 ポイント11 ポイント  (3子コメント)

but we expect you to manage communities as isolated communities and not use a breach of one set of community rules to ban a user from another community

This happens a lot, if you post in kotakuinaction or tumblrinaction you are banned from a lot of subs, even if you have never posted in them.

[–]Meepster23 11 ポイント12 ポイント  (2子コメント)

Right, and I'm sure that is probably the behavior they are trying to curb, but their wording is completely ambiguous and that's my point. It's a poorly written, unclear rule, which they themselves say rules shouldn't be written poorly...

[–]AchievementUnlockd[S,A] 4 ポイント5 ポイント  (6子コメント)

What if the sub is an entire joke and that's part of it. This is a frequent occurrence and normal/expected in some subreddits.

We won't be evaluating this without looking at context. We're not trying to take out subs where people opt in knowing what they're getting into.

Do we have to declare everything we consider spam? Do we have to state how we catch spammers? Maybe this should be applied to the admins first. "Brigading" is one of those rules that seem to be wildly up to interpretation.

No, you don't need to give up the methods for spam fighting. What you can't do, though, is have a secret rule among your modteam to ban everyone who posts to r/onionhate.

So does that mean I'm not allowed to ban spammers any more? I have to hand hold these account farmers and repeatedly tell them why they aren't allowed to do what they do?

I'm not sure where you get the idea that you can't ban spammers. Of course you can.

As for the question about punishments - I think we lay that out in the document. We hope to never have to enforce these. For most communities, this is S.O.P.

But if we do, the sanctions are laid out in the doc:

Where moderators consistently are in violation of these guidelines, Reddit may step in with actions to heal the issues - sometimes pure education of the moderator will do, but these actions could potentially include dropping you down the moderator list, removing moderator status, prevention of future moderation rights, as well as account deletion. We hope permanent actions will never become necessary.

[–]nt337 8 ポイント9 ポイント  (4子コメント)

True or false: the onion lobby has infiltrated reddit's administration.

[–]Meepster23 4 ポイント5 ポイント  (0子コメント)

We won't be evaluating this without looking at context

So maybe calling these "rules" is a bad idea. They aren't rules, they are guidelines.

No, you don't need to give up the methods for spam fighting. What you can't do, though, is have a secret rule among your modteam to ban everyone who posts to r/onionhate.

Then you should re-word that because that's essentially what you are currently saying. That's really been the whole bone of contention here and exactly what was brought up (and you ignored) in CommunityDialogue.

I'm not sure where you get the idea that you can't ban spammers. Of course you can.

You are saying in these "rules" that it should be about education and I have to hand hold these account farmers. I can't just ban and ignore them when they are clearly just there to sell an account or trying to make a quick buck..

What you seem to be failing to understand is that this document is going to be actively used against us while moderating. This doesn't make our life easier in any way, and will give something for people to point to while butthurt that they couldn't follow the rules and were rightly banned.

A selfish reason for you to make these guidelines (and yes they should be called guidelines not rules) more clear is that any time someone drags these up in modmail complaining about why they got banned for calling someone else a racial slur, I'm going to mute them, and tell them to take it up with the admins. That's going to cause more work on your end which you've been complaining about/using as an excuse as to why this post was so delayed in the first place.

[–]lingrush 4 ポイント5 ポイント  (3子コメント)

Hm, what do you think of the idea of a moderator bill of rights?

The relationship between moderators and platform here reminds me of the Worker's Bill of Rights for Mechanical Turk workers. Two researchers asked/paid turkers to write a bill of rights to articulate their perspectives and frustrations. This document, then publicized fairly widely, ended up concretizing those grievances for advocacy and better research around digital labor. Those researchers also ended up creating Turkopticon as a result.

[–]jakkarth 48 ポイント49 ポイント  (12子コメント)

Improvements to subreddit rules

We'll have to agree to disagree on that.

Remember to always flag your community as “unofficial” and be clear in your community description that you don’t actually represent that brand.

What about subreddits that are officially run by a brand?

Please provide an email address for us to contact you.

This needs clarification. Does this mean use the Verified Email piece of the user preferences? Put an email address in one of the 500-character rule descriptions? PM it to reddit.com?

when the admins contact you, we ask that you respond within a reasonable amount of time.

Remember that we're volunteers, not employees. We don't get paid to sit in front of a computer to deal with reddit stuff. How long is "reasonable" given this reality? Is there an expectation of parity between moderator responses to admins vs the (previous several weeks? wow) admins to moderators?

Where moderators consistently are in violation of these guidelines

As far as I can see, aside from possibly the content possible and cross-sub ban points, every single one of these entries is extremely subjective. "It’s not appropriate to attack your own users" could be interpreted by a user as "a moderator removed my post and I don't agree with their decision." If we're going to talk about behavioral guidelines, could you explain about the guidelines admins are going to use to enforce these subjective rules?

In other news, why is there a sub to discuss this but it's invite-only? Never mind, sounds like other commenters here were participants there and it was the usual policy of admins not bothering to talk to anyone for months at a time.

Edit2: looks like the admins are done "discussing" this. What's the spread on how many months of silence before they release the next "feature"?

[–]deviouskat89 12 ポイント13 ポイント  (2子コメント)

What about subreddits that are officially run by a brand?

This is concerning to a lot of gaming subreddits I think. Many of us have game developers coming in to answer questions "officially" and we (/r/hearthstone) are even linked on their website along with their own company-run Facebook and Twitter pages as an official social media page. It's still all volunteer run, but we have a close relationship with the company that can't quite be called "unofficial."

[–]jakkarth 7 ポイント8 ポイント  (0子コメント)

I mod (among others) /r/gamedev, and one of the things frequently discussed in advertising topics is whether people should create official subreddits for the games they make. I'm sure there's plenty of other similar situations as well.

[–]AchievementUnlockd[S,A] 2 ポイント3 ポイント  (0子コメント)

As I said earlier, we're going to be looking to complaints to drive enforcement on this one. If the brand doesn't complain, we're not likely to get involved.

[–]verdatum 4 ポイント5 ポイント  (0子コメント)

It honestly did start out very nice and promising. Working with a small group of mods to try and hash-out some long standing concerns was a lovely idea. Then a fire happened (right around spezgiving), and it sounds like people got retasked.

[–]green_flash 14 ポイント15 ポイント  (4子コメント)

Improvements to subreddit rules

We'll have to agree to disagree on that.

Care to elaborate? I think the rules feature is a great thing. Reports are actually useful now. And showing the rules on mobile is certainly an improvement as well.

[–]jakkarth 17 ポイント18 ポイント  (3子コメント)

This thread is about the "moderator rules", so I'd rather not dive back into the subreddit rules thing powerlanguage announced recently. You can check the post here (I think? or modsupport?) to see why I feel like it's a step in the wrong direction.

[–]AchievementUnlockd[S,A] 3 ポイント4 ポイント  (0子コメント)

What about subreddits that are officially run by a brand?

Then that's obviously different. Enforcement around this will likely be driven by brand complaints. So tell your legal team to not write a trademark complaint, and you should be fine. :)

This needs clarification. Does this mean use the Verified Email piece of the user preferences? Put an email address in one of the 500-character rule descriptions? PM it to reddit.com?

User prefs, please. If you need to do it somehow else, for some reason, reach out to us and we'll see about some other way.

[–]ShaneH7646 21 ポイント22 ポイント  (3子コメント)

Finally, when the admins contact you, we ask that you respond within a reasonable amount of time.

I had a good laugh at this particular part. do you have to follow this?

[–]AtomicEleven 16 ポイント17 ポイント  (1子コメント)

Their definition of reasonable is 4+ months from what I've gathered, don't worry.

[–]aedeos 12 ポイント13 ポイント  (8子コメント)

I own /r/aedeos, but never use it. Does that mean if someone wants it, they can request it out from under me even if I'm active?

[–]Shagomir 7 ポイント8 ポイント  (5子コメント)

if it's not an active community, I doubt they would do anything about it.

If it's a community with 15k users and they are suffering from a lack of moderation, then yes, they should take it away.

[–]aedeos 8 ポイント9 ポイント  (4子コメント)

I'd love to see actual rules on that instead of guesswork by users yet again on how admin actually carry things through.

[–]analogboy56 5 ポイント6 ポイント  (0子コメント)

I would like to officially request /r/aedeos

[–]Tim-Sanchez 9 ポイント10 ポイント  (0子コメント)

I've got to admit I am seriously disappointed...

I'm glad you followed through and updated us, but I'm seriously disappointed that /r/CommunityDialogue fizzled out like this. I was genuinely looking forward to it leading to improved moderator/admin relations, and it seemed like you were taking our concerns seriously. For it to end like this is a real kick in the teeth.

I won't go into why because I think other people have expressed that very well, put simply it's not at all what we expected when we entered that project.

It seems like a never ending cycle. The admins screw up, they introduce some new initiative, mods are pleased, the initiative fizzles out, the mods are displeased, then the admins screw up etc etc. I commented this before it started as well.

If I can end this with two questions:

  1. Are you satisfied with how /r/CommunityDialogue ended up?

  2. Is this all you expected /r/CommunityDialogue would lead to when it started?

/u/redtaboo as the admin who started this, and someone who seemed genuinely excited and passionate about the project, I'd like to extend the above two questions to you as well.

[–]MarioneTTe-Doll 10 ポイント11 ポイント  (1子コメント)

In addition, camping or sitting on communities for long periods of time for the sake of holding onto them is prohibited.

I'm just looking for a small bit of clarification on this one.

How does this sort of thing work out, so far as the admin are concerned? For example, I have /r/marionette, which I've used for quite a few years as a sort of "save" clipboard (before it became available on vanilla Reddit and before I knew that RES had it [or even existed]).

It's just a private sub that I post links and comments on for my own use, do testing on, and post things that I frequently reference on Reddit, but I occasionally receive mails asking what the sub is for, if it's for Marionette JS, or if any of the mods are active (I always reply to mails about it).

Does this qualify as camping / sitting / squatting, or is this an acceptable use of a sub?

In a completely unrelated thread, is there any rule about usernames that are sitting unused? I would do a healthy amount of just about anything to get my hands on the apparently-unused /u/marionette.

[–]UnsubstantiatedClaim 4 ポイント5 ポイント  (0子コメント)

Also, is it considered squatting if the subreddit shares the same name as your username?

[–]Ghigs 9 ポイント10 ポイント  (1子コメント)

not use a breach of one set of community rules to ban a user from another community

So all those "safe space" subs are going to stop banning people for just posting in other subs now? Is that what this means?

[–]sethstorm 3 ポイント4 ポイント  (0子コメント)

Given that more than a few of their mods have posted here already, I doubt it highly. But one can always hope...

[–]spling44 19 ポイント20 ポイント  (0子コメント)

So when do you guys cut me my first paycheque?

[–]iBleeedorange 25 ポイント26 ポイント  (13子コメント)

So you're expecting mods of subreddits to be more transparent than the admins on everything listed.

Actions speak louder than words, if you're going to make mods be set to a higher standard perhaps the admins should lead by example... After all, we're not paid to be here. We do it out of the goodness of our heart, and the shit we take from it makes it really hard to understand why we're set to a much higher standard when the reasonable things (not everything asked for is reasonable, I understand) we would like seem to be placed on the back burner for everything else. It really feels like the reddit direction is almost never in common with what the mods need to better moderate reddit.

[–]elfa82 31 ポイント32 ポイント  (34子コメント)

In the vein of transparency, are there any plans to actually do anything about brigading, like even define it? For instance, this thread was brigaded by voat's fph with tons of assholes harassing the OP causing him to delete his account. It took days to get a canned response of "we'll look into it." Seemingly no action was taken as we still get modmails from people that we banned that were obviously part of the brigade.

In regards to timely responses, why is it that reports of ban evasion (case in point) or report abuse take days to get a response?

Again with timely responses, why is /r/redditrequest not run by a bot? Having a week, to month to never to get a response there sucks.

Do the new guidelines mean that inactive squatters will finally be removed from subs? Or if they pop in once every month and do a single mod action do they get to keep their spot?

If we don't think a user is part of our community, nor do we want them there, does that give us free reign to be dicks to them?

[–]sodypop[A] 24 ポイント25 ポイント  (28子コメント)

I'll take a stab at "brigading" and clarifying a definition, though I may regret this later...

We define brigading as intentional community interference, which typically plays out via comments or voting enacted by a group. This includes targeted group behavior that maliciously interferes with or encourages interference in the operation of an existing and separate community. This does not include organic and non targeted cross-community participation or simple discussion of other communities. Simply linking to a post where people follow and participate on isn't always considered to be interference.

That said, there are a lot of instances where something may seem "brigaded" but actually weren't. We are also always improving how we mitigate improper voting with automated systems to discourage or prevent this type of behavior without impacting organic voting. That isn't to say the example you provided did not incur some interference, that certainly does seem to be the case.

Another source of confusion regarding this topic is that when actual brigading occurs and is reported to us, we don't typically issue permanent suspensions to users for vote manipulation. Since our aim is to educate rather than punish, we will usually give users a warning message or issue a temporary suspension. Since there is no visible indication that an account was temporarily suspended, often times mods or users will assume we never took any action.

In regards to timely responses, why is it that reports of ban evasion (case in point) or report abuse take days to get a response?

This is certainly something that can be improved. Scaling the Trust & Safety team to handle these in a more timely is a big part of it, however with regards to the overall scheme of rule enforcement, these types of issues have a lower priority than more critical issues such as inciting violence or other more time-sensitive tasks. It's not that we don't think they are important to deal with, it's just that other more pressing matters often require these to take a back seat.

Again with timely responses, why is /r/redditrequest not run by a bot? Having a week, to month to never to get a response there sucks.

This actually is assisted by a bot (/u/request_bot) that I wrote several years before working here. I'm totally not a programmer so there are several places where this script could be improved. However, there are numerous factors we have to take into consideration to determine activity on the site. As the guidelines in this post indicate, there will be some reworking of the criteria for what constitutes being an active mod with regards to how requests are evaluated. There should be some opportunities to improve the bot along with whatever criteria we land on.

If we don't think a user is part of our community, nor do we want them there, does that give us free reign to be dicks to them?

Being a dick to someone is not something we'll ever advocate for as remembering the human is one of reddit's core values. If you don't want someone in your community my advice is to ban them and explain why they were banned if it's not clear. If they come back with a new account, then report them to us for evading.

[–]elfa82 17 ポイント18 ポイント  (7子コメント)

Thank you for the answer. While ban evasion is not something that is a priority for you, it is to us as mods. For example, in the message I linked above, that user has repeatedly ban evaded on multiple subs and multiple accounts. They are well aware of the rules and don't care because at worst you guys just ask if he'll please stop. Meanwhile he's already on a new account ban evading again.

We define brigading as intentional community interference, which typically plays out via comments or voting enacted by a group. This includes targeted group behavior that maliciously interferes with or encourages interference in the operation of an existing and separate community. This does not include organic and non targeted cross-community participation or simple discussion of other communities. Simply linking to a post where people follow and participate on isn't always considered to be interference.

So basically unless the OP specifically says go vote or comment, then it's not considered brigading? Does that mean that subs like /r/subredditdrama should no longer enforce their no commenting or voting in a linked thread rule? It's a pain in the ass to enforce or even catch and it always brings in people that are above the rules because they "should be able to comment and vote as they please." I guarantee if I open the the top thread I will find it full of people that are soveriegn citizens of reddit that follow links from our sub to comment and vote even though it used to be against the rules. Oh look, here's one right here Has never commented in that sub before, is banned from SRD for "brigading" and is only there to argue in a 2 day old thread. But since OP in SRD didn't specifically say go vote or comment, it's not brigading.

[–]sodypop[A] 10 ポイント11 ポイント  (3子コメント)

For example, in the message I linked above, that user has repeatedly ban evaded on multiple subs and multiple accounts. They are well aware of the rules and don't care because at worst you guys just ask if he'll please stop. Meanwhile he's already on a new account ban evading again.

We definitely do more than just asking people to stop. In most cases these are treated with temporary suspensions which, again, can be confusing since it is not indicated on their account. In other situations, there are some instances where we cannot determine whether someone is evading, however alt detection is improving and we've made some recent strides in that category that should help. Continuing to report these persistent users to us will help us improve our detection in the future as well.

So basically unless the OP specifically says go vote or comment, then it's not considered brigading?

In some cases, yes, this would constitute brigading, but in many situations it would not. Context is always taken into consideration, as is intent. Some things that are intrinsic to how social sites work are often labeled as brigading. Sharing links, viewing and participating in conversations are all inherent to social sites, and this behavior is generally considered to be organic. Causing interference in a deliberately coordinated manner, however, is what we'd consider to be brigading.

[–]elfa82 7 ポイント8 ポイント  (2子コメント)

In most cases these are treated with temporary suspensions which, again, can be confusing since it is not indicated on their account.

How many times does someone need to be caught breaking the rules before you actually ban them and their alts? I know I've reported that user above many times under many different accounts, yet they are all still active accounts.

Causing interference in a deliberately coordinated manner, however, is what we'd consider to be brigading.

So back to my example of SRD. Should we not enforce the no commenting/voting rule anymore. After all it's not coordinated if we are only having a laugh at the drama and making sure that we don't tell people to vote or comment. What about people like the guy I linked who informed us in modmail when he was first banned that he would purposely continue to comment and vote in threads linked by SRD just to prove that it's okay to brigade? The only reason we ask people not to comment in linked threads is so the sub doesn't get banned, because back in the day it was considered brigading. If that's no longer something we need to worry about, it would be nice to know so that we don't waste our time trying to educate people with incorrect information.

[–]sodypop[A] 8 ポイント9 ポイント  (1子コメント)

In the case of that evader, I can see that the issue hasn't been closed yet so I'll follow up on the status.

Regarding SRD's rule, I actually think that is a good rule to have because it helps keep users further away from crossing the blurry line that is brigading. I think people who intentionally piss in the popcorn, to use the parlance of our time, are enacting a behavior we want to discourage. In most cases that are reported to us there are only a few people actually who do this, however there have been instances of actual brigading originating from SRD in the past so I'd advocate for keeping that rule around.

[–]hansjens47 2 ポイント3 ポイント  (0子コメント)

Advocate for or require?

There's a huge difference.

I'd hope you as an admin team would require it and do so of all other meta-subs and be clear on whether its a rule or not (it should be).

Vague messaging like the above "advocate for keeping the rule" essentially is a non-answer because that's convenient for admins. It absolves them of formal responsibility because it's sort-of in the hands of mods.

The community management team shouldn't be scared of doing community management.

[–]purplespengler 6 ポイント7 ポイント  (5子コメント)

If they come back with a new account, then report them to us for evading.

How are we going to know someone has returned on a new account? We have no tools for detecting ban evasion. We frequently have people tell us that they're just going to come back after they've been banned, but the response is always the same when that is reported - "Let us know when they actually do it".

[–]thoughtcrimeo 3 ポイント4 ポイント  (0子コメント)

We define brigading as intentional community interference, which typically plays out via comments or voting enacted by a group. This includes targeted group behavior that maliciously interferes with or encourages interference in the operation of an existing and separate community. This does not include organic and non targeted cross-community participation or simple discussion of other communities. Simply linking to a post where people follow and participate on isn't always considered to be interference.

You pretty much described SRS, SRD, and Drama to a T. Oh they'll ban you if they see you doing funny business, maybe, yet they have no way of telling whether you're brigading or logging into alts for vote manipulation. Unless they have awesome tools I don't.

[–]Niezo 4 ポイント5 ポイント  (0子コメント)

Another source of confusion regarding this topic is that when actual brigading occurs and is reported to us, we don't typically issue permanent suspensions to users for vote manipulation. Since our aim is to educate rather than punish, we will usually give users a warning message or issue a temporary suspension. Since there is no visible indication that an account was temporarily suspended, often times mods or users will assume we never took any action.

Quite some time ago in /r/CommunityDialogue I mentioned this:

I'm only a small time mod, and have only been for about a year, so I might not understand the frustrations completely but...

The frustrations I notice from the moderators towards the admins remind me a bit of the frustrations from users to moderators. That is, they feel like the moderators are either doing to much or nothing. And it's only a pretty recent thing that people are really noticing the difference between proper moderated and improper moderated subreddits.

So, if(and that's only if) admins really doing their best to help moderators, I suspect its because we can't see it. For us, moderators, the company Reddit is something we can't see. We don't see what's happening inside. Are admins really doing their best to battle ban evaders? Are admins really trying to stop brigading? Spam? There are still issues that the admins clearly need to work better on(communication for one thing, the karma for self posts being an obvious example), but it's impossible for us to tell if admins are really working for us, or just see us as lapdogs. And when appreciation is rarely shown it's easy too see how it can lead to distrust with those circumstances, even if the admins are trying their best.

I remember that someone mentioned it would be a good idea if admins would work as moderators as well, and I think that that would be a good idea. Especially considering that almost all frustrations originate from the lack of communication.

I know that this isn't the thread for a reply like this, but I wanted to say this before I forget.

After my recent collaboration with Achievement I talked about in my other comment, I'm inclined to believe that even more, as I've seen a bit 'behind the scenes' as a result.

I've been thinking; is it perhaps an idea to give moderators and users what roughly a 'day of an admin' is? Of course, many of you fulfill different roles for Reddit. But I think that besides admins talking more to moderators about their problems, the reverse is also important: what kind of challenges admins face. What the biggest frustrations of their job is, and what the best is about their job.

I imagine that that might be difficult as not everything can obviously be said; but figured I would share my thoughts.

[–]originalforeignmind 5 ポイント6 ポイント  (0子コメント)

Since there is no visible indication that an account was temporarily suspended, often times mods or users will assume we never took any action.

It would be really nice to be informed when a certain action was taken or not afterward, even if it does not state the detail, so that moderators at least see where the admins draw the line to take an official action. Then we will learn which cases should be something worth contacting an admin and which cases are not, so as not to waste both of our time.

Many users who have never moderated expect moderators to know all the results of reporting while we're uninformed just the same as others, and we still need to keep on repeating the same or similar actions without knowing if it's even effective or not. Some moderators just believe it's no worth contacting an admin and take a rough route instead. Some users even believe subreddits are each top moderator's toys and that's how Reddit is officially run and decide to leave Reddit for another platform.

[–]davidreiss666 2 ポイント3 ポイント  (0子コメント)

Okay, I'm going to post this here.....

Are you guys ever going to take abusive users really seriously? For example.

Really, this is a very old issue (and that link in tun links to stuff even older) that still hasn't been fully addressed.

If you guys want mods to be actual employees, then I'm awaiting payment. But right now, the Admins seem to want the best of both worlds here..... Don't pay us, and make us responsible for everything. All while making sure we aren't properly defended from from very disturbed idiots.

The later might not be everyone, but there are some real pieces of work out here and the Admins need to help mods deal with them on occasion.

[–]Niezo 8 ポイント9 ポイント  (4子コメント)

In the vein of transparency, are there any plans to actually do anything about brigading, like even define it? For instance, this thread was brigaded by voat's fph with tons of assholes harassing the OP causing him to delete his account. It took days to get a canned response of "we'll look into it." Seemingly no action was taken as we still get modmails from people that we banned that were obviously part of the brigade.

I personally agree on that point, even though I've argued heavily against the auto-ban. Anti-brigading tools for mods have been overdue.

Again with timely responses, why is /r/redditrequest not run by a bot? Having a week, to month to never to get a response there sucks.

So on this note, I have to strongly disagree. I can't give you the exact details... but I had requested a very vulnerable(selfharm-support oriented) community a while ago and asked for a special exception to make it a bit quicker.

Turns out, the whole situation was a bit more... messy and it involved someone very toxic and had to cooperate with /u/AchievementUnlockd for an entire week to settle what could have gotten much worse. (seriously, shoutout to you Achievement, I'm really happy that I pinged you back then)

As such, I disagree about running with it with a bot. Subreddit transferal should be done carefully, or it can go wrong. Very wrong.

[–]purplespengler 39 ポイント40 ポイント  (11子コメント)

This feels a lot like Reddit holding unpaid volunteers to standards that are more appropriate for customer service employees, and it's kind of insulting. I don't appreciate the attempt to meddle so heavily in the way we moderate, nor do I appreciate that I had zero opportunity whatsoever to participate in the construction of these naive guidelines. I especially don't appreciate how little respect I see in this for the fact that every single moderator on this website is keeping it afloat on a completely volunteer basis with no compensation.

It’s not appropriate to attack your own users.

This is ridiculous and divorced from reality. Moderators should not have to be concerned that not putting up with the rude shitheads that make up the majority of our interactions will result in an Admin swooping down to remove them from their position. Until I see a paycheck from Reddit in my bank account, it is not appropriate for Reddit to dictate my behavior as a moderator to this degree. Moderators are not customer service and you should not expect us to be.

Secret Guidelines aren’t fair to your users—transparency is important to the platform.

This is ridiculous and divorced from reality. Reddit is full of both legitimate users and spammers that are constantly fishing for ways to get their posts where they don't belong. "Secret Guidelines" are one of the strongest weapons we have to combat it. Should we start publishing our entire AutoMod ruleset now to comply with this nonsense?

Furthermore, sometimes "Secret Guidelines" exist just by virtue of the fact that listing every single restriction that we have would not only be tedious and absurd, but create even more arguments that are a complete waste of time by Rules Lawyers.

Even furthermore, please tell me more about the importance of transparency when you crafted behavioral rules for unpaid volunteer moderators based on conversations in a secret, invitation only community.

Appeals to your actions should be taken seriously.

This is ridiculous and divorced from reality. Until I see a paycheck from Reddit in my bank account, it is not appropriate for Reddit to dictate how seriously I take the hundreds of arguments and appeals I receive, the overwhelming majority of which are from people who have zero interest in following or understanding rules - only in getting their way.

Reddit may, at its discretion, intervene to take control of a community when it believes it in the best interest of the community or the website.

Respectfully, it's been my experience that Reddit the entity knows absolutely nothing about what is in the best interest of any community. Forgive me if I have very little faith that this will be exercised appropriately.

Finally, when the admins contact you, we ask that you respond within a reasonable amount of time.

Bluntly: Get better at holding yourselves to this standard first, and then we can have a dialog about moderators doing the same.

Bottom line: The only thing you accomplish with most of this nonsense is increase your own workload and give shitheaded users another button they think they can push to get their way.

[–]imnoidiot5 16 ポイント17 ポイント  (7子コメント)

How would any hypothetical enforcement work? What if moderators have a different understanding of words in the guidelines than users?

[–]AchievementUnlockd[S,A] 11 ポイント12 ポイント  (6子コメント)

As it says in the document itself, we hope that enforcement won’t be necessary. For most of you, it absolutely won’t, because this is how you already run your communities; these guidelines were inspired by what you are already doing right and what you told us. But if it is necessary to enforce, we will approach it the same way we do with our sitewide rules. Our first goal is to talk and educate, to make sure that the mods and users we’re working with understand the rules and why they’re there. Then we’ll work with them to come into compliance. We really believe this heads off most problems before they become overarching issues.

[–]Phallindrome 13 ポイント14 ポイント  (3子コメント)

In addition, camping or sitting on communities for long periods of time for the sake of holding onto them is prohibited.

What are my responsibilities for the subreddits I currently hold privately? (/r/kissing, /r/CBC) In both cases, I would like to take them public, but they'll involve a lot of work. What's a long period of time? Does this rule count equally for subreddits that are inactive/private/only a few subscribers, and subreddits with active communities?

(Also, if anyone in this thread reeeeeallly likes the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, or making out, please contact me.)

[–]awkisopen 8 ポイント9 ポイント  (5子コメント)

Appeals: Healthy communities allow for appropriate discussion (and appeal) of moderator actions. Appeals to your actions should be taken seriously. Moderator responses to appeals by their users should be consistent, germane to the issue raised and work through education, not punishment.

I have had a literal schizophrenic follow me around subs and re-create accounts over and over again to try and disrupt the community. It got so bad that I asked for admin help a few months in and never got it. If I didn't ban him on-sight after the many other times he appeared in the community I would have spent all my time just dealing with the "appeals" and "reappeals" of his alt accounts instead of doing, y'know, other mod stuff.

You make the assumption that the people we ban or exclude are always rational actors. They are not. There are some crazy people out there on the Internet. Some of them aren't worth the red tape when you know they're hanging around your community for bad reasons.

[–]devperez 6 ポイント7 ポイント  (20子コメント)

I know I won't get a response, but it has to be asked. Are you all finally going to put a stop to the bots that ban people from one to hundreds of subs based on where they comment?

[–]AchievementUnlockd[S,A] 24 ポイント25 ポイント  (19子コメント)

I do not want to comment on particular situations, but to keep it general: if I ran a subreddit that runs a bot that issues bans to users that have never commented on that subreddit, I would begin drafting my response to the inquiry that I'll likely be seeing at some point after April 17th.

[–]darkpowrjd 10 ポイント11 ポイント  (0子コメント)

The one sub that gets targeted by these bots without any real evidence to backup their reasons is r/KotakuinAction (because it was and is the main Gamergate sub). I'm not going to get into any details on how often that sub, its members, or what it represents has been misrepresented for years by those with an ax to grind against it, but when a sub has to warn people on its front page that a simple post in reply to a thread included in it triggers a ban on at least 5 or 6 other subreddits, even when you didn't have a bigoted bone in your body or a vitriolic or racist word in your posts, there is a major problem.

[–]TotesMessenger 6 ポイント7 ポイント  (0子コメント)

I'm a bot, bleep, bloop. Someone has linked to this thread from another place on reddit:

If you follow any of the above links, please respect the rules of reddit and don't vote in the other threads. (Info / Contact)

[–]wickedplayer494 12 ポイント13 ポイント  (22子コメント)

In addition, camping or sitting on communities for long periods of time for the sake of holding onto them is prohibited.

I'm not sure how I feel with this one. /u/qgyh2 himself has stated when asked about why he still remains king on many popular subreddits that the only reason he does so is so that he can step in if something goes really, really, REALLY wrong, but otherwise leaves things to lower mods. One such example of that in action being a few years ago with /r/Canada, where he stepped in and held an impeachment vote when people were protesting against a single mod, and they got ousted as a result.

With that said, qgyh2's activity does seem to have fallen off compared to when he did that /r/Canada impeachment, so there may still be a point to this (if the intent is to obsolete it as a reason, though that spawns a new problem of "what if they're being bad while still skirting the 'guidelines'"), but I think his reasoning was sound.

[–]Shagomir 17 ポイント18 ポイント  (5子コメント)

I saw this pointed at moderators who are just sitting on a mod list and don't do anything. One of my subs has an inactive top mod - he's active on Reddit so we can't really reddit request him away, and he's actively told users NOT to contact him with moderation-related business, because he is "not active as a moderator on the subreddit". When I contacted him and asked him to step down, he refused.

However, because he's the top mod, he could at any time unseat the entire mod team and take over the subreddit unilaterally.

During one of the Community Dialog calls, I spoke with Phillipe about this iisue and he assured me that Reddit would be taking steps to give moderators an avenue for resolving these types of issues. To me, this is an expression of that.

[–]GammaKing 26 ポイント27 ポイント  (22子コメント)

Respect the Platform. Reddit may, at its discretion, intervene to take control of a community when it believes it in the best interest of the community or the website. This should happen rarely (e.g., a top moderator abandons a thriving community), but when it does, our goal is to keep the platform alive and vibrant, as well as to ensure your community can reach people interested in that community. Finally, when the admins contact you, we ask that you respond within a reasonable amount of time.

I see the "ban on blackouts"/"we can take over any community at will" rule stayed. It seems pretty obvious that there's been very little consideration for the objections raised in CommunityDialogue, just who are you trying to fool here?

[–]zslayer89 5 ポイント6 ポイント  (7子コメント)

Will there be a way to add removal reasons to the wiki pages of a subreddit, and that can be accessed by the mobile/APP team so that when we do mobile moderation we are providing concise feedback to our users regarding rule violations?

[–]AchievementUnlockd[S,A] 6 ポイント7 ポイント  (6子コメント)

That's an interesting point. This feels to me like a very good reason to use the structured rules that u/powerlanguage is advocating for so strongly lately. With those in place, I think many challenges like you point out will be elegantly handled.

[–]brucemo 5 ポイント6 ポイント  (0子コメント)

You guys are doing a poor job of responding to admin mail, and as a mod I treat you like emperors living in a far off city, who don't know that I exist, and to whom I should be grateful if I receive a crumb of anything.

My last admin mail has been fermenting for 9 days. Since it contains a question regarding policy, I expected this. It's really hard to get an answer to questions regarding your rules.

The reason I'm saying this here, is where else should I say it? You guys can't make a meta community for two-way conversation that doesn't immediately die.

[–]davidreiss666 12 ポイント13 ポイント  (2子コメント)

Appeals: Healthy communities allow for appropriate discussion (and appeal) of moderator actions. Appeals to your actions should be taken seriously. Moderator responses to appeals by their users should be consistent, germane to the issue raised and work through education, not punishment.

We already take appeals seriously. That said, this isn't going to become the People Court. I am not going to answer the same question over and over again. I'll answer a trolling racist once, and that's going to be it. Period. The fact that the trolling racist doesn't like the answer should not be viewed as a license for people to abuse moderators.

Cause right now, a good number think that about things.

[–]davidreiss666 10 ポイント11 ポイント  (9子コメント)

Management of Multiple Communities: We know management of multiple communities can be difficult, but we expect you to manage communities as isolated communities and not use a breach of one set of community rules to ban a user from another community. In addition, camping or sitting on communities for long periods of time for the sake of holding onto them is prohibited.

A good number of my subreddits have the same exact rules. For example, both /r/History and /r/HistoryPorn do not allow Holocaust deniers, Nazis, racists, etc. Same goes for /r/PoliticalDiscussion, /r/Progressives, /r/Liberal etc.

I'm not going to wait to ban idiots from each subreddit cause I catch them in one subreddit. Especially since a good enough of them take the first banning as notice to follow a mod around and be racist idiot in all their subredidts. I'm not going to wait to ban these idiots. They will be 100% unwanted and these are important rules to those communities. We don't want racist holocaust deniers. Period.

We shouldn't have to play whack the racist one by one.

[–]MajorParadox 3 ポイント4 ポイント  (5子コメント)

FYI, number 1 is italics and the rest are bold. Was that a typo?

[–]The_Asian_Hamster 5 ポイント6 ポイント  (0子コメント)

Something that would be great is the ability to search modmail, either for conversations with a certain user in the past, or keywords

In fact the search system on the whole site isnt great, but thats another matter

[–]AndyWarwheels 3 ポイント4 ポイント  (2子コメント)

I know I am late to this party. But their is an issue that one user has created a subreddit that is someone elses user name. That user is just squatting on these subs, i.e. not using them and preventing the person who has the user name from having their subreddit.

Would it be possible under rule 4 of mod guidelines to request and gain access to these subs?

(I am specifically talking about one user who has hundreds of subs that are all other users, usernames. I can give examples if needed)

[–]AchievementUnlockd[S,A] 7 ポイント8 ポイント  (0子コメント)

That is the sort of situation that I would expect to see under Guideline 4, yes.

[–]kerovon 11 ポイント12 ポイント  (0子コメント)

Management of Multiple Communities: We know management of multiple communities can be difficult, but we expect you to manage communities as isolated communities and not use a breach of one set of community rules to ban a user from another community. In addition, camping or sitting on communities for long periods of time for the sake of holding onto them is prohibited.

Until communities are actually isolated (which means robust antibrigading tools), this is not possible. As it currently is, you are asking us to manage them as something they are not.

[–]Mispelling 3 ポイント4 ポイント  (0子コメント)

So, these are more what you would call rules than actual guidelines then?

[–]gameboyzapgbz 5 ポイント6 ポイント  (2子コメント)

Clear, Concise, and Consistent Guidelines:

Secret Guidelines aren’t fair to your users—transparency is important to the platform.

r/nintendo is going to need to make some changes.

[–]Andis1 3 ポイント4 ポイント  (3子コメント)

Hello, hopefully I'm not too late to the party to have my question answered, but before I ask I just want to say thank you. As one of the participants in Community Dialogue, I can say that despite the ups and downs, I think this is an acceptable outcome. I just hope efforts to improve the quality of moderation on Reddit continue to occur.

My question is this: If I identify a community that is violating these guidelines, what is the process that needs to be followed to have the admins intervene? Do I need to post to a special subreddit asking the admins to take action similar to /r/redditrequest? Or do we send a message to the admins?

Additionally, what happens if I take the proper course of action to alert the admins to a violation of these guidelines, and the offending community/moderator does nothing? Will the admins continue to follow up on the status of this community or do I need to continue to contact the admins if no improvements occur?

[–]AchievementUnlockd[S,A] 4 ポイント5 ポイント  (1子コメント)

Hello, hopefully I'm not too late to the party to have my question answered, but before I ask I just want to say thank you. As one of the participants in Community Dialogue, I can say that despite the ups and downs, I think this is an acceptable outcome. I just hope efforts to improve the quality of moderation on Reddit continue to occur.

Frankly, I hope that (and believe) that after April 17th people will realize that their worst nightmares are not coming true, will note the complete absence of horns, tail, and cloven hoofs on admins, and will see that we're acting in good faith to do what we think is in the best interest of the site and its users - including mods.

My question is this: If I identify a community that is violating these guidelines, what is the process that needs to be followed to have the admins intervene? Do I need to post to a special subreddit asking the admins to take action similar to /r/redditrequest? Or do we send a message to the admins?

A fair question. We're still getting those pieces in place. As an interim measure, if we haven't rolled out the mechanics of this by then, I would suggest sending modmail to r/reddit.com.

Additionally, what happens if I take the proper course of action to alert the admins to a violation of these guidelines, and the offending community/moderator does nothing? Will the admins continue to follow up on the status of this community or do I need to continue to contact the admins if no improvements occur?

Admins will evaluate each situation within its own context and will consider the best form of intervention, if we determine it is needed. We will likely not take a ton of actions that are visible to general users - most of our actions would be invisible (along the lines of messaging the mods, helping them to work through difficulties, etc). Only rarely would enforcement become public.

However, if the situation did not cure itself over the long term, it would be reasonable to let my team know so that we can investigate again.

[–]adagiosummoner 5 ポイント6 ポイント  (2子コメント)

Yeah, i'm gonna have to wonder here. What if you do everything that's on there, but your users just don't LIKE it and feel like they get to make the rules?

Where is the moderator autonomy and choice in how they want their community to function?

Are admins ever going to clarify to users that the voting system works AFTER mod rules are followed? And that the moderators of a subreddit do get to decide how they want their community to function?

[–]slyder565 2 ポイント3 ポイント  (2子コメント)

With regards to #6. Appeals.

Many subreddits have adopted models which encourage a higher level conversation and specifically steer away from educating at 101 levels.

These days it is very popular for political subreddits, but r/LGBT has been doing this for years. The goal is specifically to provide an environment where Reddit users can escape the demands of non-minority users to educate and inform (and in large part troll) them. We act swiftly to revoke posting privileges of users who do not follow our guidelines and this is with the aim of protecting users from continued efforts of bad actors (intentional or not) to interrogate and destabilize them.

At first this tactic was controversial, and we spent untold hours in modmail trying to educate these bad actors. Most of the mods from that time burned out. Eventually, out of necessity, we began moderating only at the basic levels and deliberately avoided engaging. This was viewed as anti-free speech and transparency (a view influenced by rampant cross posting to outside communities) and a sister subreddit was born. Since then we have come to an equilibrium and while many people are offended by receiving a ban message, we have largely achieved a productive environment maintained in drama free peace.

I am concerned to what level this guideline on "education" will be enforced and what it will require of our team. We already have two alternative communities where banned users are specifically invited to go, a meta subreddit for public appeals, and myraid of LGBT communities who will tolerate even the most persistent concern trolls. We went through years of growing pains and self education on our own abilities within the Reddit website to arrive at our current state.

The moderators are also gender and sexual minorities ourselves and we currently don't require them to spend their time educating users, although they are encouraged to when they see an opportunity that will be productive. However, in short, we are moderators only, and our only goal is to maintain a LGBT positive space as best we can with the tools we have. When we disengage with users who refuse to "learn" why they were banned, we do so both out of the necessity due to work load and out of self care.

If by "education" the admins mean "a note to explain why an account was banned" then we are in compliance. If it means education on the violation vis a vis the subject matter which resulted in the ban, then I believe you are simply asking too much of people who are donating their volunteer time and you will be encouraging burn out and disengagement.

Can you clarify the intent of this rule and how you will enforce it?

[–]AchievementUnlockd[S,A] 3 ポイント4 ポイント  (1子コメント)

If by "education" the admins mean "a note to explain why an account was banned" then we are in compliance.

This. I'm not asking you to give them a treatise on the LGBT experience and its application here - just to take seriously appeals from those who (in your judgment) sincerely want to be a part of the community and may have reformed their ways.

[–]Twitbookspacetube 4 ポイント5 ポイント  (2子コメント)

So under these guidelines, insulting/abusing and muting people asking for an explanation of their ban would be a bad thing, correct?

[–]AchievementUnlockd[S,A] 4 ポイント5 ポイント  (1子コメント)

I don't want to comment on hypotheticals, because they're usually used as weapons later. :-) I will say this: I think that reasonable inquiries, politely phrased, should be answered in kind.

[–][deleted] 1 ポイント2 ポイント  (9子コメント)

Question.

There are a few very old reddit users that simply are the top mods of subreddits they rarely if ever post in. For example, in /r/greece, the top mod is /u/qgyh2, who is neither Greek, can't speak Greek and (I don't think) has ever posted in /r/greece.

I have no problem with the dude, seems like an ok guy who acts sort of a 'security measure' in case the mods go whacky. However, does the new policy mean he will have to voluntarily leave the subreddits or does it mean he can start actively moderating these subs and stay despite not having done so in ~7 years.

[–]Piconeeks 10 ポイント11 ポイント  (1子コメント)

This is a pretty bold move away from the "anything goes" lassies faire Reddit of the past.

I'd just like to say that I really appreciate this step towards a little bit more of an active management stance from the admins. I acknowledge the concerns raised by the other mods in this section, and I'd just like to add that I believe that these guidelines are fundamentally a step in the right direction—even if this isn't a perfect iteration in and of itself.

[–]TheDroolinFool 6 ポイント7 ポイント  (1子コメント)

I applied to join r/communitydialogue but didn't get added as I was late to the party. Any chance you can add me?

In addition, camping or sitting on communities for long periods of time for the sake of holding onto them is prohibited.

This is excellent news - I've come across communities in the past which have been practically destroyed by moderators who simply "sit on" them and do nothing but are "active" enough that the r/redditrequest process fails, allowing them to hang on to said community despite the fact it should be handed over to someone else. I'm very happy to see this is something the admins are looking into.

[–]verdatum 5 ポイント6 ポイント  (0子コメント)

Not likely. In so many words, they've said that they have no plans to continue using it, and instead plan to deal with the community as a whole on /r/modsupport. Besides, the dialogue went from very active to almost-but-not-completely dark back in November.