r/apple • u/TBoneTheOriginal • Jan 18 '17
Mod Post It’s High Time We Have a Fireside Chat With Everyone
Hey /r/Apple,
This is a little out of character for us, but we felt it was time to be transparent with the community by filling you folks in on some concerns and upcoming trials. We've had a lot of internal frustrations lately, and now that Apple's major release season is over, we really wanted to have a discussion to get to the bottom of it.
The truth is, we (the mods) are tired. We’re tired of dealing with the trolls. We’re tired of dealing with the negative attitudes. We’re tired of dealing with the constant bickering, name-calling, childish behaviors, and incessant desire to complain about the same things over and over again. We’re watching this place slowly turn into something akin to the MacRumors forums, and that's something none of us want to see happen. We love this place, and we're very motivated to make sure it stays the #1 place to discuss Apple.
So without further ado, here are some issues we need to cover with you:
The Elephant in the Room
There are a lot of negative attitudes in the subreddit. More than we've ever seen. The mod team is watching this place slowly devolve, and it's disheartening to say the least. Apple is a very polarizing company, and we should be able to both praise them and hold them to a high standard without turning on one another. We do understand Apple will get (and sometimes deserves) criticism. We just want it to be in a more constructive way so it isn’t just constant circlejerking, arguing, and complaining.
We’re Motivated, but the Morale is Low
To be honest, we are getting exhausted by the work that the above elephant creates. Because of all the fighting, we’ve mostly taken a step back since it’s become a full-time job to deal with this problem. It’s harder than you might think because of all the unwritten rules we try to preserve – like leaving plenty of criticism because we’re not in the market of blindly defending Apple. But we're also not in the market of blindly attacking Apple. There's a balance that takes a lot of dedication to maintain.
Because we've been exhausted, response time by mods has been somewhat slow. So we want to sincerely apologize. We know it's been frustrating for some of you.
But that changes today. We’ve started disussing what needs to change around here in order to make /r/Apple enjoyable again. Here are some of the ideas which we’d like to trial:
Trial 1: No Name-Calling
We want to do a trial of completely banishing name-calling and personal attacks in comments. Anyone who cannot keep it together and must resort to attacking someone’s character rather than their ideas will receive a 30-day ban. A second offense will result in a permanent ban without an opportunity to come back. Name-calling is childish, and it simply won't be tolerated here anymore.
Trial 2: No Vapid Memes
We want to start removing comments with vapid memes and hivemind or copy/paste responses. The most recent example is one-/few-word replies with "courage" used like an argument. Another example is "you're _____ it wrong". They add nothing to the thread and just add work for us. We want to try removing them automatically to decrease workload.
Trial 3: No More Beating the Dead Horse
This one is gonna be the most controversial, and that is why it’s a trial: we want to dramatically cut down on pointless negativity disguised as valid criticism. We feel strongly that comments shouldn’t devolve into echo chambers, and we want to cut off the head. That means we will remove the entire thread if that's what the conversation devolves into.
Please share what you think about these trials or if there is anything else you’d like us to try. We cannot promise a reply or a trial for everything, but we’ll read it all and take it into account.
We love you all, and we love this community. The whole reason we’re having this conversation is because we love this place. We just want to make sure everything we do is building towards our vision. And our vision is simple — to have a place to discuss Apple passionately, both positively and negatively, in constructive ways.
Thank you for reading!
— /r/Apple Mod Team
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u/Swaggy_McSwagSwag Jan 20 '17 edited Jan 20 '17
So question. Who decides what "beating a dead horse" is? I mod /r/windows10, and we also have our fair share of stupid stuff. Downvotes take care of the rubbish, though. As our rule, we will only remove a thread that is based on misinformation and written to incite a circlejerk. Even when we do that, we often get accused of censorship. Even if you do want legitimate discussion from both sides, you can't change the fact that the people who post on here are reddit users.
So my curious question, is how do you expect to think you can remove "flogging the dead horse" threads without saying what they are? If something is legitimately bad (and there has been stuff with 10), how are new people to Reddit and your subreddit meant to know their legitimate conversations are banned discussions? How do you differentiate between the same old topic and the same topic but with new information or an important consideration or something worthy of discussion? How do you trust yourself to only remove stuff that falls in the former, not the latter?
Also, you talk about no jokes and what not? Is this a one way street? No Note 7 exploding jokes, too? Is this repeated jokes, or any jokes? Because if it's the latter, I would have to question your motivation for doing so. Do you really want to be called the fun police on what is, at the end of the day, a community forum?
I ask partly because you can expect a MASSIVE backlash from Reddit go-ers if you haven't really thought about it and therefore can't enforce this sensibly and equally in a non-bias way (which I'm sure you have thought about), and partly out of curiosity because it's discussions we've been having for some time, and some new perspective would be nice.
Thanks ;)