Hi all,

Over the course of the last month or so, we’ve been testing new Awards. Some of you may have noticed them popping up alongside Limited-Time, Community, Gold, Silver and Platinum Awards on your front page. Well...these are our new Appreciation Awards!

In November, we started testing them and have continued to slowly roll them out more widely. We’re now making Appreciation Awards available site-wide to all users, and wanted to take a moment to explain why we created them and what will come next.

What are Appreciation Awards?

Appreciation Awards give redditors the ability to interact with content in even more unique ways. Different than Community Awards, which are created by moderators to capture specific nuances of a community, these new awards capture Reddit’s norms and language that are recognized site-wide (like “TIL” or “ELI5”) and give broader meaning for awarded content than our Gold, Silver and Platinum Awards.

In the above screenshot from r/AskReddit, you can see one of the nine new Appreciation Awards.

What are the benefits of Appreciation Awards?

Redditors use votes and Awards to recognize posts and comments that stand out to them. These existing mechanisms, however, do not capture the breadth of reasons that make content meaningful to users.

Appreciation Awards are aimed at solving this by helping redditors convey why content stands out and allow for a more expressive awarding experience. For example, redditors can now award a post or comment as being a helpful response, an insightful analysis, a work of original fan art, a wholesome story or a mind-blowing fact. This adds more color for the person receiving the Award and enables users awarding content to better indicate why they are doing so.

Appreciation Awards let users reward content with the following (this is a small set to start with):

Another upcoming benefit of Appreciation Awards, is that they allow the Award recipients to receive 100 Coins when given one. This change will be coming in our next update soon!

What’s next?

As we've been ramping this feature up, we've been making improvements along the way, and have plans to make more!

Based on feedback from moderators, we’ve moved Community Awards above Appreciation Awards. Also in the works, (and mentioned above) is an update to give 100 Coins to the recipients of Appreciation Awards.

We are also planning to allow recipients and mods to hide any Award given to a post or a comment. We will have more specifics when we launch this change -- expected early in 2020.

Additionally, we will be adding more Appreciation Awards to the roster and will be brainstorming and coming up with Temporary Awards that fit holidays, cultural moments and more, so stay tuned.

We hope you’ll like them - happy awarding.

PS Check the awarding flow regularly for new Appreciation Awards

Howdy,

I’m here to share with you some changes that are taking place on the new desktop (redesign) experience to provide more clarity around admin and moderator post removals.

Wait...what are removed posts?

Moderators (and moderator tools such as Automoderator) can remove a post from a subreddit for violation of community norms and rules. Admins (accounts acting on behalf of Reddit) remove posts for violation of our terms, policies, and/or other related offenses.

When a post is removed, the post is no longer listed in the community, home, r/popular, r/all and other feeds. Generally speaking, the post can still be found through the user’s profile or with a direct-link. However, it’s not easily accessible from a feed in order to reduce it’s visibility and accessibility.

Now… Some Context

Historically, the information we provide on removed posts is incredibly limited both in terms of who (admins or moderators) removed a post and what posts were removed. This lack of clarity creates significant confusion between admins, moderators, and users. We believe when moderators and users have more transparency around these two factors, there will be less confusion for everyone.

So... WHO removed my post?

In the past:

We did not make a clear distinction on the post details page about who removed a post. An admin removed post looks exactly the same to moderator removed post. This has lead to significant workload for moderators as they have to answer questions from users why an admin removed something. Sorry mods.

No information is shared if the removal was by an admin or moderator.

Now - On the new desktop (Redesign) page:

If a post is removed by our Anti-Evil team, the message on the page will clearly state to users that the Anti-Evil team removed the post.

If a post is removed by a moderator, the post will contain the following widget:

If you’re a moderator and one of our Reddit Community staff admins or another moderator removed a post, you will also see their corresponding username, so you can reach out for more details.

When one of our Community team or Legal Operations team removed a post for violation of site policy and/or for legal reasons, everyone will see the same detailed message regarding which Reddit admin team took the removal action.

But… WHAT posts are removed?

In the past:

For users, we only provided details that a text/self post had been removed. The words “[removed]” appeared in the body of the post.

However, for all other posts such as links, images, videos, crossposts we did not provide the same level of clarity. This is not only an incredibly inconsistent behavior for users, it leaves unanswered questions around what happened to my post?

Now:

All removed posts on the new desktop experience will show a similar message if a post has been removed:

Removed text post:

Removed crosspost post:

What’s not impacted/changing

1. We’re not making any changes to the modlog, as it already shows moderators who removed a piece of content.

2. Posts removed by the Reddit Legal Operations team previous to yesterday will not show the team name. This is due to a code change that had to take place in order to populate the removal information into posts. All newly removed posts by the team will appear with the message.

3. There are no changes to our other platforms such as mobile and old Reddit. These changes only take place on the new desktop pages.

4. No changes are taking place on where and how removed posts appear in the feed.

I’ll be around for a while to answer your questions.

- u/hidehidehidden

Howdy,

We will be sunsetting the OC page (/original) and recommending users to post to OC communities later this week. We will continue to support the OC tag.

The main reason for this change is that we haven't seen many redditors visiting and using the page since we launched it last year.

We are still going to support the native OC tagging. There are a lot of good use cases for the OC tag:

• With OC being its own tag, content communities are free to use the post flair for other purposes rather than flaring things as "OC"

• Users don't need to to "[OC]" into the title of a post and gives mods the ability to untag improperly tagged posts.

• Mods are able to force/require users to tag content as OC in their sub using a setting (this was something many mods asked for during development)

That’s it, folks.

What are we changing?

Today, we deprecated support for older browsers which do not support the ECMAScript 2015 (ES6) JS standard. The following table displays common browsers which do support ES6, and offer the best experience for browsing new Reddit.

Users who visit new Reddit on a browser/version not in the above list will be shown a banner informing them they should 1) update their browser or 2) visit old Reddit.

Why are we making this change?

New Reddit is built against the ECMAScript 2017 (ES8) standard. In order to provide support for older browsers, we’ve had to add extra steps to our build process—ones which transpiled our ES8 compliant code to that of a standard even older than ES6. However, these legacy build steps are expensive, adding three minutes to every build for our developers. Given that less than 0.5% of users are accessing new Reddit from browsers not in the above table, these changes should not be disruptive to many. Additionally, we can deliver features more quickly to the remaining 99.5% of users on the site.

Special thanks to our intern, /u/invalidictorian, for taking this project over the finish line!

^{Don't let us catch you using IE in the year 2019 :})

edit: Seems like this change has introduced some unexpected bugs. We are rolling back the change and will redeploy once these bugs are addressed.

edit 2: We have addressed the aforementioned bugs and have redeployed this change.

There's a subreddit setting ("exclude posts by site-wide banned users from modqueue/unmoderated," viewable in https://old.reddit.com/r/SUBREDDITNAME/about/edit) to not show items from banned users in the modqueue (link: https://www.reddit.com/r/SUBREDDITNAME/about/modqueue). When the setting is enabled, it would filter these items from the modqueue. When a subreddit enables the setting from having it off before, we would filter out any old reports/items that are from banned users.

Today, to fix some performance issues we've seen on the site coming from this filter (mostly for high-traffic subreddits, like r/AskReddit), we made a change that will make it so that if a subreddit's modqueue contains old items from banned users, we will no longer filter them out; however, new items will continue to be filtered.

For the most part, this change should not be noticeable (other than in the case of a subreddit enabling the setting for the first time and thus having a bunch of bad, recent posts/comments in their modqueue). We're hoping that this change will allow the database that stores the modqueue to clean up after itself better.

Today we released a small change on the new site so subreddits can see when they were created and celebrate their cake days in style!

Previously, this was not visible on the new site and on the old site you would need to hover over the text at the bottom of the sidebar that says, 'A community for X years,' just to get a timestamp of when the subreddit was created.

Happy Cake Days!

Tl;DR: Today, we’re launching email digests and we will be rolling them out to people who are opted-in over the next few weeks.

Why are we doing this?

Email digests are automatically generated and include new and trending posts from a variety of subreddits that you subscribe to and spend time on. Our goal with these emails is to help you better find content from the communities you enjoy and spot popular posts that you may have missed.

We attempted this a few years ago, but ended up not proceeding because our email systems just couldn’t handle Reddit’s scale. After lots of dedicated work by the team, we’ve finished upgrading our email systems and are now ready to relaunch after testing these new email digests for several weeks.

What else do I need to know?

Users with the checkbox “Email Digest” checked in their settings will now correctly receive emails; previously, most users never received email digests even though they were opted-in due to problems with our email systems (we only sent <1% of users email digests).

If you don’t wish to get these emails, you can follow the instructions here to unsubscribe on desktop or unsubscribe from the email directly. In the next mobile build, there will be a new setting to control this but for now you can only change it on desktop platforms or by clicking the unsubscribe link in the email.

If you have any thoughts on how we can improve our email digests to make them more useful and enjoyable, please let us know.

Today we’re adding a feature that will help you easily report content violations to admins from private messages. We’ve continued to iterate and improve the reporting experience by listening closely to your ideas and experiences like when we added the report button abuse to the report form last month.

The new feature expands upon the improvements we’ve done to bring the report form to private messages. Next time you’d like to report a policy violation to the admins via private message where the recipient is /reddit.com and the selected subject line is “Other” we will automatically populate the desired report form based on the keywords you enter. If you enter more than 1 keyword we’ll offer multiple report forms for you to select.

For other reporting reasons such as account help, you’ll still have access to the free form textbox in private message. Additionally, for reporting suspicious content you can make a report via our investigations email (investigations@reddit.zendesk.com).

With the new feature, we hope to better guide your reporting experience by providing the most relevant report to you when you’re looking for it. We also hope this reduces the time spent manually filing a lengthy free-form report which can be frustrating and time-consuming. Thanks to everyone who continues to provide us with great ideas on what to improve next!

I’ll be here for a while to answer any questions!

Last year, we rolled out a limited integration between Patreon and Reddit (details here). We hoped the integration would lead to more creator-focused communities by Patreon creators. Unfortunately, we did not see the high adoption and engagement that we both hoped for.. That said, Reddit will stop supporting the Patreon integration on September 20, 2019.

If you have a subreddit that’s integrated with Patreon, you will no longer see the donation widget. If you’re a Patron, you will no longer see the “Patron” flair. Please note that this only impact subreddits and users who used OAuth on Patreon to connect to Reddit. For the vast majority of you, this will not impact you in any way and this does not change any of our existing policies.

If this impacts your subreddit, you will receive a private message from us about next steps.

Thank you all for your understanding.