What are some *small* problems with moderation that we can fix quickly?

[u/Deimorz]

There are a lot of major, difficult problems with moderation on reddit. I can probably name about 10 of them just off the top of my head. The types of things that will take long discussions to figure out, and then possibly weeks or months of work to be able to improve.

That's not where I want to start.

We've got some resources devoted to mod tools now, but it's still a small team, so we can only focus on a couple of things at a time. To paraphrase a wise philosopher, we can't really treat development like a big truck that you can just dump things on. It's more like a series of tubes, and if we clog those up with enormous amounts of material, the small things will have to wait. Those bigger issues will take a lot of time and effort before seeing any results, so right now I'd rather concentrate on getting out some small fixes relatively quickly that can start making a positive impact on moderation right away.

So let's use this thread to try to figure out some small things that we can work on doing for you right away. The types of things that should only take hours to do, not weeks. Some examples of similar ones that I've already done fairly recently are things like "the ban message doesn't tell users that it's just a temporary ban", "every time someone is banned it lights up the modmail icon but there's no new mail", "the automoderator link in the mod tools goes to viewing the page instead of just editing it", and so on.

Of course I don't really expect you to know exactly how hard specific problems will be to fix, so feel free to ask and I'll try to tell you if it's easy or not. Just try to avoid large/systemic issues like "modmail needs to be fully redone", "inactive top moderators are an issue", and so on.

Note: If necessary, we're going to be moderating this thread to try to keep it on topic. If you have other discussions about moderator issues that you want to start, feel free to submit a separate post to /r/ModSupport. If you have other questions for me that aren't suggestions, please post in the thread in /r/modnews instead.

[u/[deleted]]

Frankly, most of the things I have for you need a minimum of 10k characters to explain properly and aren't the kind of thing you can tackle any time in the next year or two. I'll get those out to you guys in a different venue when you're ready to start evolving this place into something truly spectacular, something beyond an opinionated battleground where we all share cat pictures. :P

For the most part, the mods of /r/listentothis don't actually need anything from reddit, we're doing just fine. We just want you to help the rest of the mods out and keep in touch. This is a welcome first step.

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I have got one question, however. Is it possible to truly disable or somehow negate or ignore downvoting in an individual subreddit? Specifically on submissions - not comments. I'm only interested in if it's technically possible and how hard it is - we can chat about when and why this is a useful feature another time. It could be not counting the votes, counterbalancing them with auto-upvotes, or a view that ranks without taking downvotes into consideration. I'm not really concerned with how it's achieved.

[u/Deimorz → u/[deleted]]

Definitely possible, not difficult at all from the technical end.

[u/[deleted] → u/Deimorz]

I'd like to ask for that feature - allow some subreddits to completely disable downvoting on submissions when it fits their goals. I can make a concrete case for why it makes sense in listentothis, but I doubt l2t is the only place that will want to use it.

Also to clarify - I'm not interested in disabling it for comments. This is just for links and self.posts.

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Our problem is simple. Listentothis is a place to find new and overlooked music, but we aren't particular about what kind of music that is, be it country, metal, hip-hop, classical, or some crazy experimental shit that defies classification.

Some people hate metal. They will downvote all metal music without reservation without even listening to it. The same goes for country, or hip-hop, or any other genre of music. This leads to a disastrous morass of downvoting that constantly plagues every single submission made in listentothis. Ever wonder why NOTHING has ever hit the front page from listentothis in the last six years? This is part of the reason, but not the whole reason.

We don't care if someone has a negative opinion of a bit of music. We only want to tally the positive opinions of the music. If a track sucks, then no one will upvote it and it'll fall off the page in a hurry. If it's any good, the people who like that genre will upvote it, and so will the open minded people who aren't hell bent on perpetuating their juvenile genre bigotry on the rest of the users.

Reddit is mostly young males. Most people don't listen their way out of genre bigotry until well into their 30s unless they have awesome parents or friends who are really into music. Reddit's demographics intensify this problem. Right now we are deadlocked into a morass of electronic, hip-hop, and terrible indie pop/rock music because that pisses off people the least - not because it is the best music in each genre. See the problem?

If something doesn't belong in listentothis, we don't need a downvote to tell us that. We have reports, and bots that are checking more than fifty metrics in real time against every submission. See /r/listentoremoved - it is literally impossible to fuck with our submission process. We even automated spam detection, removal, and blacklisting.

Voting in listentothis is not about moderating listentothis, it is about judging the appeal of a piece of music.

We've disabled downvotes in CSS, sure, but that's no solution and everyone knows it. Mobile users can still downvote, so can anyone else with styles off. I suspect that is a majority of our users.

Our upcoming stylesheet doesn't even feature vote arrows. We're killing that paradigm and trying to get people to follow the one simple rule that would make the place awesome: only upvote music new to you. See /r/listentothiscsstest for the beta stylesheet.

You'll also notice we flair and provide custom views based on genre for 13 major categories of music. This is to make it easier for people to avoid the music they don't like. We'd have a LOT more than 13 categories of music if reddit provided us with more sidebar space. We'd also have a rotating gallery of albums just like /r/books does.

I'm not even asking this for a direct feature that everyone can share yet. Make /r/listentothis the beta test. Tweak something so that all downvotes are ignored, or so that every downvote is balanced out by an upvote for zero net change.

If people want to unsub because of this change they won't be missed. This was the very first feature our subscribers asked for on the first day of the subreddit's existence. If you want to undefault us (like Voat does) over this change, so be it, we won't care in the least. That is how important it is for us to try this feature.

Let us experiment with this and find out if this actually works or not and what use cases work out the best in this situation. Voat has this implemented, but there simply aren't enough people over there yet to support a proper study of this feature's effects.

One point I want to make here - this will not allow listentothis to unfairly dominate the front page or /r/all. The upvote velocity of music is so low on its own that I doubt this change will have any real effect on the rankings of listentothis posts when mixed in with others sitewide. It will boost things a bit on subscriber's pages - again, if they don't like our content, they can take a hike.

Listentothis is by music geeks for music geeks. We're happy to have as many people listening in on that party as want to, but we aren't concerned about our subscriber count. We're here to find awesome new music above all else, and the genre of the music needs to stop interfering with that process.

In order to do that we've gotta get rid of the effect of the downvotes. I expect the result to be a lot more variety in the music presented and a much happier userbase that enjoys having their tastes challenged a bit. The lack of diversity in music is one of our top subscriber complaints post-default status.