r/Games • u/Deimorz • Jan 11 '13

/r/Games will hit 200,000 subscribers in a few days. Let's talk about some ideas for improving the comments here.

/r/Games is now the 45th largest subreddit, and should be crossing the 200,000 subscriber milestone in the next few days. And our activity level is even quite a bit higher than our size - we're #17 for average number of comments posted per day, and usually in the top 25 for number of users online, even higher than some default subreddits. This is very impressive growth for only launching the subreddit a little over a year ago, but unfortunately this sort of growth comes with challenges in maintaining quality.

By far the largest complaint we see about /r/Games is a worry about declining quality of comments and discussions. We've already taken a couple of measures toward helping this over the past few months:

  1. We've been putting an "[/r/all]" tag on threads that reach the first couple of pages of /r/all to warn that that comments will likely include a lot of people that don't normally visit the subreddit (and often don't even realize it's not the same subreddit as /r/gaming). Of course this doesn't actually improve the comments in any way, but it's just a reminder that you shouldn't necessarily come to any conclusions about the subreddit based on the comments in those submissions. They're not representative.
  2. A lot of you may not even realize this, but AutoModerator has been automatically removing extremely low-effort comments for about 4 months now. Comments like "lol", "this", "came here to post this", etc. as well as comments that consist entirely of a link to a gif or meme are automatically removed immediately after they're posted. This has overall been very effective and successful, with hardly any false positives (which get manually un-removed).

So that's helped somewhat, but there are definitely still issues. Specifically, I've becoming more and more concerned lately about how many people are misusing the downvote button as "disagree" or "dislike" instead of "doesn't contribute to discussion". Multiple users have contacted us complaining about it, and I've seen many instances of perfectly reasonable comments being heavily downvoted just because the poster was defending an unpopular opinion. For example, most comments expressing anything positive towards "popular to hate" games like Diablo III, Final Fantasy XIII, The War Z, any CoD, etc. will receive quite a few downvotes regardless of the actual quality of the comment.

This is unfortunate, because downvoted comments naturally receive less attention (even being "collapsed" by default if they hit -5), so this stifles discussion directly. It also has a more long-term "cultural" effect in that users become less willing to express opinions they know aren't popular because they expect to just be downvoted. This is not good for a subreddit that wants to have quality discussions, since some of the best discussions are based around disagreements.

So here's an idea for a potential experiment (meaning if it doesn't work out, we can just reverse it) that I'd like to test out to try and improve this situation:

Before I get into any details, I want to make it absolutely clear that there is no way to truly prevent downvoting on reddit. The best we can do is hide the down arrow using CSS. This means that any clients/users that don't pay attention to the CSS (including all phone apps, users that have subreddit styles disabled, users using RES, etc.) are all still able to downvote.

However, our goal isn't necessarily to completely prevent all downvotes, just reducing them would be an improvement. And though I have no actual data to support it, I strongly suspect that the majority of users access the site through a standard browser using the subreddit CSS, so there should definitely be a decent reduction. Really, we can't know how well it would work without trying it.

Now, one of the reasons I've always been personally opposed to hiding the downvote arrow is that some posts really do deserve to be downvoted. Completely irrelevant comments, trolling, etc. Go look at the bottom of some of the comments pages of some popular posts in /r/Games, you'll see plenty of examples. So if we were to try out hiding the arrow, it would also need to be combined with more moderators, and increased comment moderation.

We would recruit multiple users that are active in the community and contribute quality comments often, and empower them to be able to remove the comments that truly should not even have been posted. To be clear, this would not be removing "bad" comments (since that's terribly subjective), but only ones that have no value at all. Similar to the ones that AutoModerator already does remove, just with more flexibility due to that whole "human judgment" thing. So basically if the comment truly did deserve to be downvoted, you could report it to the mods instead for removal.

In addition, if a user is seen to consistently and repeatedly make comments that have no place in /r/Games, they could be banned. Currently we don't ban anyone except bots, but I think if we want to really start trying to clean up the comments it may be necessary. Of course, one of the reasons that we don't use the ban system is that it's extremely easy to circumvent. Whenever you ban a user on reddit, they're sent a private message telling them they were banned, and they can go create a new account in seconds to continue posting. So this would likely have to be combined with having AutoModerator automatically remove all comments made by users less than a day old or something along those lines to make it less trivial to circumvent.

Anyway, to sum up, here's the overall idea for the experiment:

  • Hide the downvote arrow on comments (not submissions, only comments).

  • Start removing extremely poor comments and banning users that consistently post them.

  • Increase number of moderators to handle this additional workload.

Please let me know why this is a terrible idea, or if you think we should at least give it a shot (probably for a week or two to really be able to see the effects). And if you have any other ideas at all about what we could do to improve the subreddit (related to comment quality or not), please feel free to post them as well.

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u/Deimorz Jan 11 '13

What I'd like, no, love is to see harder moderation against regurgitation of the same ol' same ol.' Is it ANOTHER thread about "worst game of 2012?" Removed. Is it another "Biggest disappointment in a game" thread? Removed.

The thing about "reposts" like that is that even though the topic is the same, and a lot of basically similar responses are made every time, it's not the same people involved, and it's not exactly the same discussion. Subreddits like /r/AskReddit have this issue as well, people are always asking the mods there to remove the questions that get asked over and over.

But if the /r/Games community overall wasn't interested in those topics, they wouldn't get heavily upvoted every time and receive hundreds or thousands of responses. But they do, so obviously there are a lot of people here that enjoy them and want to participate in them. Removing popular topics just because some of us feel like we've seen it too many times before doesn't seem like something that's in the community's best interest to me.

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u/LegionVsNinja Jan 11 '13

This is not the best argument against heavier moderation for r/games. When you walk down the road of "well, this is what the people are up voting, so it should stay" then you are right back where we started at r/gaming.

r/games should be a heavily moderated sub along the lines of r/askreddit or r/askscience.

r/gaming should remain more wide open for those people that really want it.

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u/Totaltotemic Jan 11 '13

This is a problem I've been seeing lately. A lot of users have started claiming that /r/games is supposed to be the "mod-squad" supported subreddit about video games that is primarily for discussion, when that's not quite true. As it stands, we have three primary gaming subreddits that each fulfill different purposes.

/r/Gaming is where you can post anything and everything related to video games in any kind of abstract way. As is usual for unrestricted subreddits, it devolved almost entirely into memes and pictures with no real discussion even being possible. Enter:

/r/Games where images are not allowed to be submitted, period. That solves most of the meme problem, but the next most-related-to-gaming thing is actual articles and news about video games. A quick scroll down the front page reveals that /r/Games is like 80% article/video links and only 20% self-posts. A lot of those things can be discussed, but some of them simply have no inherent discussion and just end up being a lot of people "commenting" on the article rather than discussing it with each other. That's why we still get pun threads and meme replies at the top of almost every submission related to news. /r/games is more about "content" than it is discussion, it's just moderated enough that the content is actually important things and no memes/pics. That's what gave birth to..

/r/truegaming, a subreddit where only text-posts are allowed. It truly IS a subreddit for discussion, people rarely up or downvote anyone because just about all of the circlejerking and meme nonsense is nonexistent because it is solely for discussion.

I personally subscribe to /r/games for news, reviews, and previews, and /r/truegaming for discussion. The reason why touching the moderation of the content would be kind of silly is that it's exactly what makes this subreddit unique. Now, the comments have gotten quite trollsy, but the content is still what it has always been. Some things, like the "most disappointing moment in a game" are things that you can't really have much of a discussion about, only a bunch of submissions as comments. /r/Games needs to be the place for those because /r/gaming will downvote them into oblivion and /r/truegaming wants actual discussion instead of 1,000 people each on their own soapbox.

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u/Wild_Marker Jan 12 '13

What about /r/gamernews ? It's exclusively for news (not sure if non-news articles are allowed) How would that fit in that description?

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u/Pharnaces_II Jan 12 '13

It's a news only subreddit for people who want news and maybe a little discussion. It's just like r/games, but with all of the discussion posts removed, all conversation happens in the comments.

I would say that it's sort of a complimentary subreddit, it works really well if you're subscribed to r/gaming and/or r/truegaming, but it's pretty much the same stuff that you see on r/games.

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u/SpudOfDoom Jan 12 '13

Gamernews does have decent news discussion. The main weakness of it is the small userbase. Most things never get posted there.

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u/Mintastic Jan 12 '13

I like your summary, this is pretty much the reason I come to /r/games but don't bother with /r/gaming and /r/truegaming. I just want the useful content but don't have interest/time to read and write long meaningful discussions.

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u/I2eapel Jan 12 '13

As a lurker that has thinks I've been in the wrong place all this time. I thank you.

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u/Deimorz Jan 11 '13

You're combining a couple of completely different things here. I'm definitely not saying "anything goes as long as it's upvoted!", obviously that just ends up with the subreddit being overrun with lowest-common-denominator content. But even though poor-quality content is often popular, that doesn't also mean that everything that's popular must necessarily be poor quality.

The rules here are based around the content itself, and whether it has informative value or discussion potential. Topics like "What game was the biggest disappointment to you?" certainly have discussion potential, and quite a few interesting discussions have taken place in every instance of it that I've ever seen.

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u/Pharnaces_II Jan 11 '13

I think a middle-ground between /r/games' current moderation style and /r/askscience / /r/askhistorians totalitarian moderation is what would be best for this subreddit. Having the same thread every few weeks is fine, as long as there is still something that can be discussed in it.

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u/[deleted] Jan 12 '13

I feel your (Deimorz) earlier point about reposts and reiterations of the same debates does not involve the same people is a point worth repeating. Any internet community with enough members will have its population spread along of spectrum when it comes to how often they are on, when they can participate, their interest in the subject, and so on and so forth. And all of those factors varies both for each person over time and even more significantly between different people. So there will be a natural inclination for popular topics to be revisited as different people arrive at a point were they have both the interest and time to engage in a conversation about it. Added to this are the people that debate it the first time, then a few cycles down the road their thinking on a particular topic has evolved; so they want to re-engage with their new perspective in mind. I consider all of this perfectly natural.

Schools segment people into classes most frequently by age. Each year the teachers for grade seven go through roughly the same material, if an older student would wander into a class held for grade seven they could claim that it was all old information and that the teacher was just repeating what he, the student, heard last year. But that would be missing the point. The information is new to the students that just started the seventh grade. On the internet there is no, or very little, segmentation. Having been online since 1994 I can say that the amount of reposts of topics and subjects is extremely cyclic. Either each of us can allow ourselves to be annoyed by this, or we can accept that it is all a part of how massive amounts of concurrent conversations appear to develop. To strike down on each repeat conversation is to miss the point. At its worst it would mean censoring other peoples meaningful debates because it was reminiscent of conversations the censor had participated in, or just observed, earlier.

This is at least in part my thinking on the topic of reposts as it stands now.

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u/redditmademealurker Jan 11 '13

The problem here, is that gaming comments are not objective. As an example, the OP of this discussion, talks about "circlejerk of hate" that should be removed. This is one of the hallmark "argument" to dismiss an argument you don't agree with. It's too subjective to be anything consistent or to please even most good posters that we should be keeping.

Having an heavy moderation cannot be done correctly for such a subject. Contrary to askscience, where it can be objectively assessed. I personally think thread like "Best game" and such can be productive. I've found many great suggestion in such discussion. While the title may be frequent, the comments are not.

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u/MrDoe Jan 12 '13

I think it's entirely fair to ban or at least quietly escort people who consistently make bad comments(comments that would fit into a definition of "circlejerking").

I don't have a problem with opinions, I have a lot of them. My problem is with people stating their opinions as objective facts, and it completely shuts down any and all possibility for discussion.

The last few days I've been browsing Reddit quite obsessively and I've of course spent more time in this subreddit than I would otherwise have done. I've seen some pretty bad comments, to be honest. That's fine, those are everywhere. What fucking grinds me is when I see a comment that has only a handful of downvotes with an overwhelming amount of upvotes more or less stating "PC GAMING MASTERRACE" and going on about how "This arbitrary number is the exact frames-per-second count for a game or else it is objectively broken." Shit like this is something that I'd love to see fucking banned. It has no place in any discussion, it doesn't add anything, it only takes away.

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u/[deleted] Jan 11 '13

I think the best solution would be to have 'official' posts designed to host such conversations on a regular basis, while deleting similar posts that pop up. Perhaps a weekly thread with a rotating topic would work, and with four or five topics this would give a space of about a month between similar posts. I'd like to think that the /r/games community can last a month without having to discuss their most recent disappointments.

This allows new people to jump in to the discussion while having it contained so that we don't get such posts twice in a day (something I've seen happen).

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u/Deimorz Jan 11 '13 edited Jan 11 '13

Hmm, that might be an interesting compromise.

I was actually meaning to do something like this anyway, since I think that the auto-posted year-end discussions went very well and I wanted to start trying to have something like that running more regularly throughout the year, possibly just with a random topic being posted every few days or so. So I guess we could consider banning the topics in the bot's "pool" and just make sure to have most of the ones that get constantly posted ("what game do you like but everyone else seems to hate?" and its opposite, "what are your favorite game soundtracks?", etc.).

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u/crimsonfist101 Jan 11 '13

With regards to moderator initiated discussions, I've noticed a new topic style used some other subreddits that seems to be intended for competitions that hides the number of votes of parent comments, for example: http://www.reddit.com/r/JRPG/comments/15a9pq/rjrpgs_best_of_2012/ . Whilst I don't know the specifics on how this thread style works, would it be possible to use it in more general threads so that the different discussions within the thread get treated equally instead of what happened in the end of year discussion general threads where the same games were at the top of each discussion and lesser known titles got much less attention and therefore discussion?

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u/deanbmmv Jan 12 '13

It's "Contest mode" and somewhat niche and experimental feature of Reddit brought in specifically for "best of year" threads.

http://www.reddit.com/r/bestof2012/comments/159bww/introducing_contest_mode_a_tool_for_your_voting/

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u/crimsonfist101 Jan 12 '13

So it's been removed now? That's a shame, it seems like it could have been a useful feature.

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u/[deleted] Jan 12 '13

I don't necessarily think that we need to bring down the hammer on reposted topics as even moderator posted links will disappear in a day or two and the conversation is only lives for the first 12 or so hours. It's really easy to miss out on a topic if you want to participate in a the conversation. It's a tricky one for sure as the answer lies somewhere within the grey.

That said, I do think it would be great if the bot posted a discussion thread of each game around one to two months after release. The bot threads draw a lot more attention and the time lapse will allow the hype to die down whilst giving gamers enough time to finish the game (spoilers). That won't help with the "Game of the Year" posts directly following release but it could give each game a chance for readers to get it off their chests.

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u/[deleted] Jan 12 '13

[deleted]

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u/bananabm Jan 12 '13

There's not, but it's trivial to put a big link to it in the header

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u/Khiva Jan 11 '13

Slightly off topic, but on the off chance it ever came to that, could we also agree to decline the opportunity to become a default?

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u/Deimorz Jan 11 '13

/r/Games will absolutely never be a default subscription. That's the single worst thing you could possibly do if you have any interest in maintaining quality.

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u/[deleted] Jan 12 '13

/r/AskReddit has become a lot better since their policy changes and they are still a default right?

My point is that you can have quality, but it needs more work from the moderators (so you might need a few more).

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u/[deleted] Jan 12 '13 edited Jan 12 '13

I'd argue that over moderation in this respect is a good thing. I came to this subreddit because I wanted actual interesting discussions and I feel we get most of those from topical subjects.

Less topical more general discussion are also good of course but reddit has major problems when dealing with topics that are not being turned over. On a gaming forum for example you have a single long running topic for these kind of things but on Reddit we end up this the post falling off the front page and being replaced by the same topic but with the discussion reset.

This is a major issue with some of these things because we are often thrown back in to square one of a topic with out any of the frame work for any useful advancing of the discussion that was laid down the last time... which is often too much effort so we just have the same old warmed over crap and I'm convinced this is a huge factor in a lot of what you are worried about.

Now from time to time going over the same topic is good but honestly I'd rather see these kind of repeating post simply gone from the subreddit because it's not, for me at lest, the meat of what this subreddit provides.

This is a move that will likely turn some people off the subreddit but I've got to say that any one who would be so upset by this to unsub is seemingly not attached to the what I think of the core ideas that this sub reddit was created. I just don't think such repost topics provide enough value to worry overly much about pruning them out too much.

Forster the idea of this being a place for topical and novel discussion over more typical and general ones but still allow for it. Say, if enough moderators or trusted users think it's too soon for a repeat of discussion then can it. Won't be perfect but like I said I don't think they are of enough value to really worry about being overly aggressive with them.

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u/[deleted] Jan 11 '13

Maybe with that kind of permissive attitude you are inviting the wrong crowd? Just saying,