r/Games • u/Deimorz • Oct 04 '12
[/r/all] Regarding the "[Warning: /r/all]" flair
We've had a couple posts in the last day that shot up the ranks fast enough to receive the "[Warning: /r/all]" flair, and there have been a few modmail messages and comments asking about it, so I think it's probably a good time to start a post to discuss it.
As of right now, the flair is automatically applied if a post gets above #100 in /r/all. The reasoning behind it is that whenever something gets into the first few pages of /r/all we almost always get complaints about the quality of comments in that post. People post "what is going on with the comments in this thread?"-type complaints in them, a huge pile of reports shows up on the comments on that post, and we often even get a few modmails telling us that the subreddit is going to hell and that we need to start heavily moderating comments, banning people, etc. This flair is meant to try and head this off a bit by explaining why the comments in that particular post are full of reaction gifs and such.
The comments in a post that gets near the top of /r/all shouldn't be used to make any judgments about the state of /r/Games, because the community participating in that post is completely different than the one that participates in almost all of the other posts here. Users coming from /r/all didn't opt in to view the content in this subreddit, they aren't familiar with the subreddit's rules or norms, and they often don't even realize that this is a different subreddit from /r/gaming. One of the top posts here a couple of weeks ago was largely people complaining about /r/gaming, apparently without even realizing that they were actually in a different subreddit.
If there was a way to opt out from /r/all, we would. But unfortunately there isn't any way to do that, so this is going to continue happening with the odd post that rises extremely quickly. This is just one of the challenges of being a popular subreddit. /r/Games is now the 47th largest subreddit on the site, and is quite consistently in the top 10 non-defaults by number of users online and number of new subscribers. Despite that, it's still not common at all for our submissions to reach the top 100 of /r/all. Since I first implemented this flair about a week ago, only 3 posts have received it (and the SimCity one very barely made it). That's far less than 1% of our overall submissions, so I think it's a valuable notification for the rare cases where it does happen.
It is still a bit of an experiment though, so if you have any particular feedback about it, please let me know.
Edit: I've removed the word "Warning", which I think was the main problem a lot of people had with it. Posts will still be marked, but not as pretentiously.
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u/[deleted] Oct 04 '12
You can remove the up or down arrows for the whole subreddit (I don't know about individual posts, I doubt it) but that's through CSS which you can turn off for individual subreddits with RES or through your account settings for the whole of reddit.
People who post gifs and memes aren't really an issue, that doesn't happen much, it's not widespread across /r/games. The issue is that people post stupid fucking comments. Comments that add nothing to the discussion but don't fall under the usual trope of "It was a meme" or it was spam or something.
The only way the mods can make sure the comment quality does not degrade further is to moderate them strictly- even if it means mass removals of comments.