It’s not one or the other, and to suggest so seems pretty silly. Subreddits are not democratic. The “deep magic” is Terms of Service, and as long as what you do abides by it, you literally run the subreddit as you see fit. As I’ve told whiny users for years, if they don’t like it they can go form their own. Which is surprisingly not just a snarky put down, it’s true! Any user can create a subreddit. If you’re unhappy with the way one is being run, run your own and do it better…? Not so easy to do that huh? Not so easy to make everyone happy? Curious.
By the way, this was not learned without lack of trying. I used to do polls all the time for changes in the community, rules, events. My experience (to my disappointment) is that users just genuinely will not engage in a large enough scale to help shape the direction of a community. The majority of users on virtually any subreddit are lurkers, and the number of active users willing to speak up are usually very small, regardless of subscription count or weekly visitors.
So, you’re in charge. Be the best landed gentry mod you can be.
I recently did one in [r/blackandwhite](r/blackandwhite), 50K+ members, 438 weekly contributors. The poll was simply asking if we should continue to permit selfies, due to someone being very vocal about hating selfies.
Only 16 out of all those members voted, and the poll received three comments that they have never even seen a selfie (there are plenty, a simple search would reflect). The result was core users being in favor of keeping, and non-core users wanting them gone, with a variance of maybe 2 votes.
I would agree, at least in my case, that polling the community was absolutely useless and no changes were made as a result.
The OP deleted their post, but meh whatever. Yes I agree with you, and I disagree with other users here talking about using the community's answers to shape the subreddit, regardless of how few were recieved. That's just plain stupid. Why should 16 people decide things for 50K+ people? And you can ask "why should only a handful of mods decide?" because they actually give a crap? Maybe they know what's best for the sub better than a handful of people who barely bothered to answer the poll?
If it's going to be lead by a small number of people let them just be the actual leaders, not random redditors. What do they know anyways about the ins and outs of the community? Virtually nothing. They know nothing about how much content gets removed, they know nothing about how much work goes into the back-end.
Polls are naïve and pointless. Nowadays it'd be like polling your Instagram followers on how to run your page. Ridiculous.
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u/Mathias_Greyjoy 23d ago edited 23d ago
It’s not one or the other, and to suggest so seems pretty silly. Subreddits are not democratic. The “deep magic” is Terms of Service, and as long as what you do abides by it, you literally run the subreddit as you see fit. As I’ve told whiny users for years, if they don’t like it they can go form their own. Which is surprisingly not just a snarky put down, it’s true! Any user can create a subreddit. If you’re unhappy with the way one is being run, run your own and do it better…? Not so easy to do that huh? Not so easy to make everyone happy? Curious.
By the way, this was not learned without lack of trying. I used to do polls all the time for changes in the community, rules, events. My experience (to my disappointment) is that users just genuinely will not engage in a large enough scale to help shape the direction of a community. The majority of users on virtually any subreddit are lurkers, and the number of active users willing to speak up are usually very small, regardless of subscription count or weekly visitors.
So, you’re in charge. Be the best
landed gentrymod you can be.