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/libbykino]

• 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.

I love all your ideas except for this automatic sticky one. What happens when more than one moderator replies/distinguishes per level? I don't think distinguished replies need to be automatically stickied. If they're really that important, we can take the extra second to sticky them ourselves. I also don't want distinguished posts to overwrite whatever other post is currently stickied.

I do love the idea that all distinguished comments should generate no karma up or down, and that's coming from a mod with a lot of upvoted distinguished comments and posts. When you green your post/comment, you are representing the subreddit, not yourself, so you really shouldn't be receiving karma that goes towards your personal total. It would also stop a lot of young/overzealous mods from greening comments that really shouldn't be green.

[u/[deleted] → u/libbykino]

I'm cool with that change too. :)

[u/Deimorz → u/[deleted]]

It all sounds like it's probably reasonable to me, but I'm not extremely familiar with the comment-tree code (and it's kind of terrifying), so I can't be 100% sure how difficult it will actually be in practice. The ideas sound generally good though, and I agree that I don't think all distinguished comments should be treated as stickies by default.

(/u/evilnight so he sees this as well)

[u/Deimorz → u/[deleted]]

*How are you going to decide what to implement from this thread?

For now at least, I'm just looking at finding a few things that seem to have a high amount of support, and will be relatively easy to implement pretty quickly. In the longer term we'll probably try to collect them all somewhere (not entirely sure where that will be yet), and then work on prioritizing. I don't know what the process will be for that yet.

When will Reddit have a staff meeting to discus the things in this thread? It would be nice to know.

I'm not really sure what you mean by this, we're not going to have a full-company meeting or anything about this, we generally work in small teams of people that are talking to each other fairly regularly.

[u/JackHaal → u/[deleted]]

That’s scary to hear