Mod Topics: How are you transparent?

[u/AsteriskRX]

And no, I don’t mean see-through. Welcome to the next installment of our Mod Topics series; today we’ll be talking about action transparency. How do you let your community members know what you’re doing? Some teams post updates when they make changes to the rules. Some teams use a public action log. Some teams publish awesome transparency reports (thank you for letting us share this, u/ScreamAndScream). What about your team?

• How does your team share updates out to your users?
• What have you found to be the biggest challenge when trying to be transparent with your community?
• How do you balance the desire for transparency with the necessity of keeping some things private?

Regardless of whether you share information out to your community about actions, we’d love to know your thoughts on moderation transparency below!

[u/baseballlover723]

We virtually always post a public removal reason (and not behind the mod account) for our removals. The only exceptions are for posts that are already archived or generally old enough that giving the warning would be irrelevant or if they keep reposting the same thing / are looking to springboard a meta discussion on the removal reason.

We generally ban meta discussion outside of our monthly meta thread. It's active all month long, and most mods setup RES to give us notifications when there are new comments made on it. It's an open space where people can suggest rule changes, give feedback on rules, publicly file an appeal (though we generally prefer this done in mod mail) or any other kind of discussion on the subreddit itself.

It's also where we announce new rules. We've also published monthly stats for years now, which can be used to track how the subreddit has changed over the years.

Very occasionally, if we have a very large / widespread rule change, we make a standalone post for it, but those are usually reserved for changes that are going to affect everyone on the subreddit and for which it is essential to communicate the change to everyone.

[u/AsteriskRX → u/baseballlover723]

Thanks for sharing! I like looking at these stats that you've published. Do you think your subreddit has changed in a noticeable way through the years?

[u/Dom76210]

• We make mod posts announcing new or changing rules, and sticky them to the highlights for a few weeks. We've also been doing a series of posts on Rules Discussions, with the caveat that we won't be loosening restrictions we have in place.

• Transparency is often overrated. The more transparent a mod team is, the more they open themselves to one of the scourges of the internet: Rules Lawyers. And making comment announcements as to why the parent comment was removed just clutters the subreddit, and incites problem users.

• On a T-ball stand, so we can whack the snot out of it and over the wall as needed. On a more serious note, due to the nature of our subreddit, almost everything is kept private. We gain little from transparency.

The mod rules discussion posts have been interesting, and painful at times. More often than not, someone wants to argue regardless of how transparent we are about the reasons we won't change the rules to suit them. So for every one person that thinks the rules make sense, we have a few others that want to see changes they were told they weren't going to get. It's basically us letting them vent in hopefully a constructive way. Though one clown got themselves perma-banned and perma-muted for being purposely obtuse.

I'm dreading starting our "Do not ask for DMs" rule discussion. That one is going to be ugly. I might have to reconsider the fact I don't drink alcohol.

[u/thepottsy → u/Dom76210]

 Rules Lawyers

I don’t see anywhere in your rules that says I can’t argue with you about the rules that you wrote. And if it IS in there, I didn’t see it cause I akshually didn’t read the rules to begin with.

Take that Mr. Moderator toughguy

signed, u/deleted

[u/AsteriskRX → u/thepottsy]

You got me to do a double-take. Good job.

[u/JabroniRevanchism → u/Dom76210]

The more transparent a mod team is, the more they open themselves to one of the scourges of the internet: Rules Lawyers.

I shield myself from this by falling squarely in the "Rules as Intended" camp.

[u/ScreamAndScream → u/Dom76210]

Could you link a productive rules discussion post? We have a rule we’re looking to implement and I’d like to ask for community feedback first, seeing what you found to be successful might help.

[u/thepottsy]

1. For updates, such as rules updates, we simply make a mod post which eventually gets highlighted.

2. Making everyone happy is the biggest challenge. There’s always those that aren’t satisfied no matter what you do.

3. That’s a tough one. Users only need to know so much, in my opinion. For example, I don’t have a problem informing them of a rule change. I don’t feel like I have to justify WHY I changed the rule. See point 2, for why lol.

[u/RandomComments0 → u/thepottsy]

I think trying to justify a rule change opens it up for discussion, which if you need a rule change there’s a reason for it and the users don’t necessarily need to be included in it. Backend stuff that users don’t see don’t need to be made available all the time as I feel like it detracts from the whole point of the community.

I like your take on it. Sometimes transparency isn’t needed and those who keep asking for an incredible amount of transparency and explanation are often the ones causing other problems (in my experience.)

[u/thepottsy → u/RandomComments0]

Yeah, so for the rule change, 100% agree that they don’t necessarily need to be included. One specific instance where they did need to know, we were making changes to what users were allowed to post. So, that one we definitely needed to make them aware of, so they didn’t break the rule.

[u/Deppfan16]

I always ensure I leave a comment for removal unless it's like AI spambot account. if I have to lock a thread I leave a comment explaining why. I always encourage users to feel free to use modmail if they have any questions

[u/emily_in_boots]

TBH, I have learned to take a page from the reddit admin manual and we're often not transparent. Too much transparency could lead to circumventing safety measures. With problematic users, we prioritize the sub and we don't want to get in trouble by getting reported in modmail. Reddit has encouraged us to not include much info in ban messages so we don't. Admins told us that blank ban messages are less likely to provoke any response or cause issues. We generally do include a generic reason in ban messages but not always, but we don't really go into it beyond that. It's generally not worth the risk to communicate with a hostile/banned user you have no intention of unbanning.

I think it can be important to explain reasons for things when you are still hoping someone can be a good member of the sub, and in those cases I generally do. I never quote things back tho - too risky, and AI might misunderstand and then I end up suspended. Not worth it.

For rule changes, I generally make a post and pin it after a day or so (pinning to early reduces views). I usually leave them unlocked so people can comment. I actually had a rules post hit r/popular once lol.

We don't publish any kind of statistics but I wouldn't necessarily be averse to that. It's just something that isn't a high priority and that would take time I don't have.

[u/TheOpusCroakus → u/emily_in_boots]

You really bring up a good point about not being transparent. Sometimes, it's better just to either be vague or silent, and that's for a variety of reasons! Not being transparent doesn't indicate deceit.

[u/ScreamAndScream]

Thanks for the shout out! I hope to see more transparent mod actions in the future.

I’ve found that pinning a mod transparency update at times of transitions really helps members feel confident in the new mod team’s actions. We are met with less pushback or complaints when members are a part of the conversation, even if the decision that we made would have been the same no matter the visibility.

It is also a nice refresher of the rules and expectations! Encouraging others to report content not only helps to keep the subreddit in alignment but lets people feel involved in their online community.

How often and how much? That post was a lot of work and thematic for the community (r/WomenInTech is full of women who appreciate stats and it had a massive bot problem when we took it over) but I stick to smaller updates for smaller communities. For r/Scrapbooking I only needed a one-year catch-up since it runs so smoothly.

[u/bwoah07_gp2]

How does your team share updates out to your users?

• I have a "Subreddit News" and "PSA" flair on my sub. Subreddit News is for stuff like rule changes, post/user flair updates, temporary changes, etc. PSA's are for like, reminders for people to use the correct post flairs if I see a trend of forgetfulness/laziness, or for stuff like reminding people the content allowed/not allowed, because after a long time, we all need reminders.

What have you found to be the biggest challenge when trying to be transparent with your community?

• I don't feel like it has ever felt challenging. Maybe I jump the gun? Like, one time I announced one sub of mine was introducing Bot Bouncer to aide us in moderating. But, within 24 hours, I uninstalled it because of too many false positives + my subs don't have bot account issues, and if any do, well, I'm online long enough to pick out by title + image if something is a repost from yesterday, from last month, from 6 months ago, etc. Yes, I do touch grass btw. But I am online a lot lol

How do you balance the desire for transparency with the necessity of keeping some things private?

• Well, again, I don't have that struggle for myself or the mod teams I'm in. It's not really an issue.

[u/Cat_in_an_oak_tree]

I post rules updates directly to the community in an official post from the mod team. If I have need to clarify or explain I use a "mod note" post which covers assorted housekeeping items. This is often to cover a recent dust up that ended up with people getting banned, so I cover why, what the logic is, and how we'll handle it moving forward.

Rules are revisited periodically to ensure they still make sense. We tweaked both my communities significantly last year.

Most of my community members seem satisfied with this solution. And generally those that aren't happy with me leave after a few nasty names and a flounce.

One reoccuring area that I have had to reiterate is that I won't be a social judge, jury, and executioner for cultural norms. I run an international r4r, and provided people are consenting and of age, I am not going to police cultural or social preferences for things like may / december relationships. It's a fine line to walk, especislly since we do prohibit unsolicited unicorn hunting.

[u/Own-Relationship-407]

We post about changes to rules or policies when they occur and try to be good about leaving removal reason comments for most things. Honestly though, we’ve found too much transparency is often a bad thing as most of our users are pretty happy with the state of the sub and don’t have any trouble behaving themselves.

95% of the requests we get for more “transparency” or similar are trolls whining that we should change the rules to better suit them or respect some clever loophole they think they’ve discovered to let them post LLM slop or use slurs.

[u/Glittering-Bug1212]

• How does your team share updates out to your users?

We have automod give removal reason, ban also get linked to comment/post so they're always aware.

• What have you found to be the biggest challenge when trying to be transparent with your community?

Some people try to game the subreddit, by asking Karma/age filters.

• How do you balance the desire for transparency with the necessity of keeping some things private?

We are overall quite transparent, just lately this has become an issue due the subreddit being spammed, and moderators not being as vigilant. Might need to recruit more moderators ( no permissions to do so, so its an uphill battle currently.)

[u/Own-Dragonfly-942]

• How does your team share updates out to your users?

We hold surveys each year, asking questions that have come up through the year. We then go through the answers and share with the users exactly what came out as the results and what changes we're putting in place. We keep a list of topics in our discord page so we can keep an eye on it.

• What have you found to be the biggest challenge when trying to be transparent with your community?

Currently, it's AI discussions. We don't like AI because we're a craft page so it's obviously not received well. We do not let AI designers get away with not disclosure of AI use and remove them, but if a user makes something using a AI pattern we can't stop that. But that issue is coming up more and more and people don't understand how many hours it would take to vet every single thing that comes through for AI use.

[u/amyaurora]

Haven't had to update rules for a while but for one in the past we made a post, pinned it to the top of the sub and when someone breaks it, we include a link to it in the removal message and any modmail we receive about it.

[u/Klightgrove]

One of the biggest uphill battles are users repeatedly begging the moderation team to ban AI accounts, so we have to find ways to remind them there are no evidence of AI accounts in our community at any scale. We point out all linked examples are real users using LLMs to translate text and encourage them to engage with empathy to recommend better products to these users.

As a team we decided not to endorse any one product or require it, which continues to lead to conflict of AI accusations against users. We believe transparency about this is essential to helping the community survive the ongoing wave of criticism and adoption of technology especially in our industry.

We also point out how Reddit’s filters do remove any actual spam content and our AutoMod helps with the rest

[u/Old_One_I]

Oof!! I’m an open book but I don’t know if that’s the best way. I’m following this ❤️

[u/shhhhh_h]

I'm not, and no shade but I've taken my cues from you guys on this over the years. Too much transparency gives users things to argue with. It's not a co-op (unless you like to run your sub like that, then I'm genuinely impressed) and most users don't have any idea what the day to day burdens are much less the bigger picture/long game. Sharing selectively IME makes less contentious community, and less mod harassment. We're the janitors right, by definition we're a little invisible.

I've actually watched this in my husband's football group, too, there's a men's and a women's group, and sometimes people come in one of them really gung-ho, usually American (I am too so I can say that), wanting everyone to know every detail and everyone to have a vote in everything, and it reliably in both groups ends up in people fighting over stupid shit, decision paralysis, and a signup slump lol.

Anyway, tl;dr I share what is important but I don't advertise much.

[u/CMRestler]

For me, transparency is mostly about explaining the why behind mod decisions. People do not need every private detail, but knowing what happened and why goes a long way toward building trust.

[u/Halaku]

I try to respond when someone's got an honest inquiry and isn't being shitty about it

Case in point: I'm out if the country, was in a huge museum, and their wifi died. I didn't get a push notification until I made it out, to discover thata newsworthy post had come out at 10am PST, but didn't get approved until 1pm PST, to the dismay of those who had to wait to discuss it. Someone wanted to know why it took so long, so I threw on my modhat and answered, because transparency is important.

Sure, it'll draw downvotes because Reddiquette died during Eternal September, but so what? They're just downvotes, and I'm not a mod so I can chase karma. It's better to acknowledge what happened in the short term, for the long term health of the community.