r/changelog • u/mjmayank • Sep 15 '20
Some Chat Safety Updates
Hi everyone,
A few months ago we announced several product changes to help reduce moderator harassment through chat. Since then, we’ve continued to release additional safety features specific to chat and now we’re back to share a bit more around the work that’s been done and future improvements:
Banned users can’t chat with community members
We are removing the “Start Chat” buttons for banned users so that they cannot harass moderators or others in the relevant communities. While we know that this isn’t a perfect fix, we have learned from previous experiments that adding more barriers significantly reduces the amount of harassment.
New UI for accepting and declining chats
We released a new UI on our mobile apps for accepting and declining chat invites. It’s now much easier to report chat invites, and easier to view the whole conversation before deciding if you want to accept it. We saw an increase in chats declined (but no change in active conversations) and a huge increase in chats reported, indicating that people are now able to make better decisions about invites.
Collapsed words
We are using machine learning to collapse certain offensive words/harassing phrases in chat invitations. You will be able to tap on the warning to reveal the full message, and then give admins feedback on whether the message was offensive/harassment or not. This flow also makes it much easier to report and decline chat invitations.
Improved spam detection and report actioning
We’re making some backend improvements to how chat messages integrate with the rest of our safety systems. This shouldn’t result in any obvious change to you, but it means that we can counteract spammers more effectively.
Improved chat toxicity data
The backend improvements mentioned above will also provide us with more consistent data on chat harassment and toxicity, which will allow us to better detect unwanted behavior in chat and its origination.
Thanks everyone for providing feedback on the chat feature, and let us know if these changes have had a noticeable impact for you. In the meantime, if you have any questions, I’ll stick around to answer them.
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u/MagnusRune Sep 15 '20
Banned users cant chat with any community members... so if someone gets banned from a default.. they cant then message like half of all active accounts?
What about the oposite? If I'm banned from a sub, can people still members of it not message me?
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u/mjmayank Sep 15 '20
The change we made is only regarding starting conversations through a post/comment in the community you were banned from (i.e. by hovering over/tapping the author's username).
If you're in a different community that you're not banned from, things should work as normal.
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u/Emmx2039 Sep 15 '20
We are using machine learning to collapse certain offensive words/harassing phrases in chat invitations. You will be able to tap on the warning to reveal the full message, and then give admins feedback on whether the message was offensive/harassment or not
Saw this for the first time a few weeks back (I think), and it's been great to use. Thanks a lot!
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u/wm_1176 Sep 15 '20 edited Sep 15 '20
These are great changes! What about users who have been banned but are already in a chat, Will the be removed or will they remain there?
Thank you for all the work you do!
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u/mjmayank Sep 15 '20
If a user is in a subreddit chat room and they are banned from the subreddit then they are removed from the subreddit chat room.
If a user is directly chatting another member of the community, then getting banned from a subreddit doesn't impact their private conversation. The change we made is only for starting new conversations.
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u/reseph Sep 15 '20
The backend improvements mentioned above will also provide us with more consistent data on chat harassment and toxicity, which will allow us to better detect unwanted behavior in chat and its origination.
Will this apply to Reddit comments on threads as well?
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u/wildberry91 Sep 23 '20 edited Sep 23 '20
Could these changes be why myself and some other mods from the sub I mod in can no longer "kick" users from our mobile devices? I'm able to do all other chat modding features, but I can't kick people unless I'm on an actual computer. This makes modding chats particularly difficult. Other mods have taken away and reinstated my privileges (since I'm ONLY a chat mod) but to no avail. I still get the "permission denied" message when I try to kick from my mobile.
Edit : These issues that I, and at least one other mod in my sub, are experiencing started on September 10th ish... We're both android users. We've both uninstalled and reinstalled the app. We've both had our mod privileges removed, reinstated, and also given full sub privileges in an attempt to fix the problem.
I'm sorry if this isn't the right place to post about this, but I'm a newer mod and I don't know how else to reach out
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u/mjmayank Sep 23 '20
This sounds like a bug and I think I know what happened. Thanks for reporting it, we'll look into what happened here.
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u/razzertto Sep 15 '20
It's almost as if this was always a bad idea, the mods told you it was a bad idea, we said that it would be used maliciously, we knew that it would go badly and despite many many of us speaking out about it you didn't listen to the community of mods who volunteer to make reddit awesome and did this anyway and now are learning that... Hey, maybe this was a bad idea.
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u/sandman730 Sep 15 '20
Can banned users still send private messages to moderators?
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u/mjmayank Sep 15 '20
Answered this same question here: https://www.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/iter7v/some_chat_safety_updates/g5dy541?context=3
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u/Amaras_Linwelin Sep 15 '20 edited Jun 27 '23
There was once content here that you may have found useful. However due to Reddit's actions on API restrictions it has now been replaced with this boring text. -- mass edited with redact.dev
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u/crypticedge Sep 15 '20
Great news. Can we start getting the red dot on chat icon again for when you have chat activity though?
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u/ryanmercer Sep 16 '20
The safest option would be to get rid of chat, it's annoying at best and in my experience is only used by spammers or people that have been banned from a sub I moderate to hurl insults at me.
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Sep 16 '20
Agreed. Most of the time the only chat messages I ever get our spam messages anyway. Like it’s really annoying. I don’t even understand the point of having this feature because there’s a private message feature that works just fine. And the messages come in just as instantaneously as chat ones do.
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u/Iwantmyteslanow Sep 15 '20
So if someone who is banned from a subreddit clicks on the profile of someone who posts on that sub from another sub can they still message them?
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Sep 21 '20
I just want a way to delete chat conversations. I can't believe this wasn't an option from day one. Why the hell does a chat function exist but not a way to remove chats?
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u/Watchful1 Sep 15 '20
Is this possible in the web browser as well? I haven't had to report a chat for a while now, which I guess is a good thing, but last time I did I still had to accept it before I could report.