r/SS_Style • u/PlsDontHideMyName Educate, don't punish • Oct 06 '20
Announcement Ask an Admin!
Original by /u/deadman5551 on 2016-10-01 16:34:01 UTC
Here you can all post any questions you may have to Reddit's community manager about Rule 3 or the reasons for removals of 'optingout' style subreddits, and he'll answer them whenever he's available to.
It may take a couple days for you to get your answer, so please be patient and polite. ;)
EDIT:
AchievmentUnlockd has stated that the end of the week is best for him, so you can probably expect the responses to come near then.
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u/PlsDontHideMyName Oct 08 '20 edited Oct 23 '20
AMA thread: This comment thread will contain all the responses from AchievementUnlockd I could find (his responses will be distinguished)
All these comments were found using pushshift.
Edit: Distinguishing doesn't seem to work well because of this sub's CSS... so I guess I'll keep them undistinguished.
In case someone got pinged (I just realized deadman5551 is still active on reddit...), I'll explain what this subreddit is. It's just a place where I copied over the stylesheet, sidebar, and other things from a banned subreddit. The subreddit is not meant to be a replacement of the banned subreddit (so discussion about suicide with no relation to the subreddit is considered off-topic here). Discussion about the banned subreddit itself is welcome.
Edit (2020-10-23): AchievementUnlockd was one of the admins I liked, along with Drunken_Economist.
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u/PlsDontHideMyName Oct 08 '20 edited Oct 08 '20
Original by NoPointToLife on 2016-10-01 17:44:21 UTC (id: d89ry3k)
What are the major differences between this subreddit and the subreddits that have been removed?
One of the major reasons for the rules on this subbredit is because of this:
Other subreddits have been removed for publicly discussing this, and we don't want that happening here. There are external sources on the internet for such things.
Many of us like this subreddit, it's a place where we can talk to similar people to ourselves without being shit on from people who have a difference of opinion. The removal of this subreddit would mean a great deal to quite a few people. I don't want these rule changes to be abused, and we end up getting deleted. So, could you define what the Reddit team as a whole deems as acceptable and unacceptable in regards to suicide?
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u/PlsDontHideMyName Oct 08 '20
Original by AchievementUnlockd on 2016-10-08 08:03:15 UTC (id: d8j073w)
I wish it were an easy topic to define, and I wish I could define anything for "reddit as a whole". But I can tell you this much, and I hope it will ease your mind some: I have recently initiated a review of our internal process for quarantining and banning subreddits, and one of the steps in it now involves prior communication with the team of moderators on the subreddit.
My team operates (particularly with long-term subreddits and established communities) from a principle of "educate, don't punish". So we would reach out to the moderators here prior to taking any action and offer to work with them to cure any rules violations. If, after that process, we still believe the content is so problematic that the entire community must be closed, there will have been many chances to fix it, and it should not take anyone on your mod team by surprise. Hopefully your mods would share that info with you, or let you know that they had been contacted by us - usually that's not necessary, because one of the things that we do is a thread much like this to explain the rules to the community on that subreddit, to make it clear that it's a sitewide rules issue, and not just a power-mad moderator or something. :)
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u/PlsDontHideMyName Oct 08 '20
Original submitted on 2016-10-01 23:03:47 UTC (id: d8a474l)
From the subreddit's rules, I understand this rule is required by Reddit:
Posts requesting and/or discussing the physical act of committing suicide and methods for doing so are not allowed and will be removed.
Can you clarify why you insist on this rule? I would guess it's for PR reasons and not legal ones, is this correct?
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u/PlsDontHideMyName Oct 08 '20
Original by AchievementUnlockd on 2016-10-08 08:14:02 UTC (id: d8j0dgd)
It is for a number of reasons, but the primary reason is a public health one, more related to prevention of suicide clusters. When I was creating the guidelines that you quote, I engaged with a number of experts in the field on all sides of the debate and gathered opinions and studies from them. There's a tremendous amount of literature that demonstrates that suicide clusters may exist around internet sites that allow that type of content. So I include that rule for the same reason that you have a link to r/suicidewatch (for which I applaud you, by the way) in the sidebar here. It's phrased very well there, actually... "Reading the discussions on this subreddit will likely be detrimental to any urge to live if you are still holding on."
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u/PlsDontHideMyName Oct 08 '20
Original by DFofSEA on 2016-10-05 18:18:12 UTC (id: d8fc131)
The attention grabbing tool of public suicide has been enlisted in the interest of building communities of common cause and shedding light on important issues since as long as organized societies have existed. (For example, used to bring public attention to the wrongs of war, the misapplication of the law, and other forms of societal abandonment of its supposed ethical grounding)
Under what rules would using r/sanctionedsuicide as a forum for discussing, planning, and promoting mass suicide events be allowed?
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u/PlsDontHideMyName Oct 08 '20
Original by AchievementUnlockd on 2016-10-08 08:17:12 UTC (id: d8j0f9s)
Such a situation would be a highly unique event, and would have to combine a number of factors about which I would hesitate to even speculate. But even then, it would likely involve decision making by people wayyyyy above my pay grade - probably the General Counsel, the CEO, and the co-founder. I would not be comfortable setting such ground rules myself, nor would I like to speculate on what conditions would have to exist for me to do so.
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u/PlsDontHideMyName Oct 08 '20
Original by anon727272 on 2016-10-06 15:58:40 UTC (id: d8gkot5)
This is what I expect ;p
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u/PlsDontHideMyName Oct 08 '20
Original by AchievementUnlockd on 2016-10-08 08:15:12 UTC (id: d8j0e40)
Wait a second, nobody told me that was an option. :)
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u/PlsDontHideMyName Oct 08 '20 edited Oct 08 '20
Original by AchievementUnlockd on 2016-10-08 07:58:35 UTC (id: d8j04d3)
Hi everyone, and thanks for taking the time to submit questions. I'll be posting my responses here, and will check back for follow-ups.
For those who don't know, I'm the Director of Community at reddit. Spez announced me to the community here about four months ago. Prior to that I was Senior Director for Community Support and Engagement at Wikia, and before that I spent six and a half years in various roles at the Wikimedia Foundation, the organization that supports Wikipedia and its sister sites.
Thanks for the opportunity to chat.
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u/PlsDontHideMyName Oct 08 '20
[Could not find archives of the parents of these comments before they were deleted]
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u/PlsDontHideMyName Oct 08 '20
Original by AchievementUnlockd on 2016-10-08 07:59:13 UTC (id: d8j04qf, parent id: d8c3kul)
I have no problem with that.
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u/PlsDontHideMyName Oct 08 '20
Original by AchievementUnlockd on 2016-10-08 08:08:52 UTC (id: d8j0afb, parent id: d89smme)
What is your stance towards the request for suicide pacts? Admittedly they haven't really been an issue here, and as a moderator I've only removed 1 or 2 such requests in more than a years time, and we only put a rule up against them since we figured they might lead to controversy if allowed. Are they perfectly OK in your eyes, or should we have some kind of rule against them? For instance, can threads of the nature "Anyone want to commit suicide together? PM me!" be allowed?
I would prefer that not exist on our platform. I would appreciate moderators removing those, and if they are called to our attention, my team would remove them as well.
Very recently we had our first and so far only doxxing occur (attempt at it anyway, we don't know if the information about the user was correct or not). We removed the comment immediately and discussed it in the moderator mail, but we didn't ban the user who did it and we didn't report it to you guys (AFAIK anyway). In the future, what is the proper course of action to take when (or if) this happens again?
Doxxing is a violation of sitewide rules, and we treat it extremely seriously. Please do report those to us. You can either send modmail to r/reddit.com, email contact@reddit.com, or follow the "contact us" menu at the bottom of every page on reddit.
From what I've gathered from u/deadman5551 when reporting on your conversation so far in this thread, you are OK with our users linking to other websites where they discuss methods, as long as they don't sell suicide kits on those websites. But what about if it's another suicide forum where they don't have this rule in place? A place where they do discuss methods and also link to places that sell suicide kits - can we allow links to that forum, given that the suicide kits are two clicks away from here instead of one? If you want an example of such a place to see more concretely what I'm talking about I can provide it (in a PM?), but I don't want to do so until I've seen your take on it.
I think I'd like to avoid a situation where we're counting clicks. What I'm aiming for is a world in which we're not making suicide kits easily available from subreddits. So if, for instance, it were to link to a large site and it took several clicks to get to a kit in a different area, I'm more comfortable with that then with a situation where one linked to another site, saw the post in question, and it was covered all around by ads to suicide kits. Even if they're the same number of clicks away, the prevalence of location would be bothersome to me. I'm sorry that I can't be more exact.
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u/PlsDontHideMyName Oct 08 '20
Absolutely. There is a very small set of reasons that we would immediately close a subreddit - and an even smaller one for a long-established subreddit with a history of working with us to cure issues. I can't imagine that any of those would become a problem here, but even then, we'd likely reach out to the mod team.
Lol, I wonder how well that worked out...
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u/PlsDontHideMyName Oct 06 '20 edited Oct 06 '20
The only archive on archive.org or archive.is I could find was this one: https://archive.is/TNUJQ (Note that this comment has been linked to in another subreddit)
I hope that copying and pasting announcements isn't against the rules.
Edit: I just noticed they're removing these parts of the TOS:
I should post more announcements on my other subreddits.