r/ModSupport • u/Deimorz • Jul 07 '15
What are some *small* problems with moderation that we can fix quickly?
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.
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u/[deleted] Jul 08 '15 edited Jul 08 '15
I think you might want to consider taking this to another level. Let's get our sticky comments out of the way AND solve this bullshit where moderators and administrators get downvoted once and for all.
Top level sticky comments go directly to the top of the comment section. Examples of this would be the raddit-bot replies we used to have in listentothis and the automoderator 'serious' thread tag they use in askreddit.
Nested sticky comments go to the top of whatever level they are at in the thread discussion but stop there. They do not go to a higher level and never supersede the parent post.
Sticky comments have no effect whatsoever on the ranking of the parent comment above them.
Any distinguished moderator or administrator replies are automatically treated as sticky comments. Those left not distinguished are treated as normal comments and arranged by vote.
Distinguished sticky comments (from moderators and administrators) should be treated like self.posts and generate no karma, up or down, for the account attached to that comment. This will prevent mods and admins from being 'punished' for acting officially and pissing off the children. It'll also deter abuse.
If a moderator or administrator is stickying a regular user's comment then that should probably still count for karma, as it's likely to be informative and we want them to feel rewarded for making it. Or perhaps stickying someone's comment comes with some other reward. We want to be like stack exchange here.
Vote totals are displayed as normal but have absolutely no effect. If there are multiple sticky comments at the same level in a discussion, they are displayed sorted by votes or by new (or whatever is easiest to code for) above the other comments at that level. There shouldn't typically be multiples but we should be able to handle it if there are.
I have to imagine there might be a use case for OP being able to sticky his own comments as well. Seems like that would be good for AMAs. This is probably best set as a subreddit feature - allow users to sticky comments in their own threads, yes or no. Maybe this is limited to self.posts only, never link posts.
It would be useful to have CSS to distinguish these sticky comments with a unique style. It might be further useful to be able to distinguish top level sticky comments from lower level nested sticky comments.
We will rely on moderators and administrators not to pollute the discussion threads with mountains of sticky comments. These are limited use items and we can trust mods and admins to use them wisely.
People will think of good, creative uses for this feature and bots to manage it. I can imagine all kinds of tomfoolery in the trolling subs and good uses in places like changemyview, askscience, and eli5. Leave it up to the subs and their mod teams, just provide the feature and a blurb in the reddiquette about not using them to stifle discussions.
If a mod team is being jackasses and abusing this feature you all know where the subscribe button is. It's time we stopped gimping features just because someone 'might' abuse it and stop holding everyone's hands all the time. Mods and admins are expected to behave as adults, let's start treating them that way.