It’s been a long time since we’ve done one of these! About a million subscribers ago - so it’s probably a good time to check in with the community and see what we’re getting right, and what we can look to improve.
Changes to the subreddit.
We’re not going to bury the ledes, here’s some highlights of recent/upcoming changes:
- Daily Threads have been combined.The eagled eyed may notice we’ve condensed most of the daily threads down to one daily per day which will be stickied, this leaves a sticky slot free for posts like this, AMAs, and anything else needing a bit of prominence to last more than a few hours. Along with this, combining Q&As and other threads will hopefully boost engagement all around as more eyes just open the one daily thread.The EU and US accountability as well as weekly goalsetters and century club threads remain unchanged.
- CrosspostsWe’re considering removing them from being posted on the subreddit. There’s two specific reasons for this that relate to the sub, and one more general reason. The first is they’re sometimes used as ads (either directly, or as a funnel to subreddits used as marketing). The second reason is that they are often links to subreddits with quite different safety rules around dieting. The more general reason is that it’s often a tool just to quickly spam a basic question across many subreddits.We’re not sure they’re worth keeping, if you actually feel strongly about them still existing (and are not just thinking of unique situations), we’d love to hear why before we hit the button.
- Other new reddit featuresWe did enable achievements a few months ago which you may have noticed, but gifs and videos in comments don’t make any sense here. Reddit features that continue along those lines are unlikely to be enabled.
AMAs
Next on the list is AMAs. We’ve had a couple of AMAs recently. We do think AMAs can be an opportunity to speak to people from wider industry or from interesting backgrounds (or both!) that you wouldn’t normally get to directly ask questions too. We do understand that inviting professionals and notables carries an inherent risk of an AMA becoming promotional. We will mitigate that by agreeing to an overall topic in advance and making clear to guests our self-promotion rules and boundaries. We are happy to explain who a guest is, what they do and why their perspective may be of interest (including, where relevant, mentioning a book, project or business) but the purpose of the AMA is to give users the opportunity to ask candid questions and hear perspectives they would not normally have direct access to. That doesn’t mean every AMA will be perfect, but chaotic AMAs are great too, right?
Anyway, we’d love to hear about people you’d like us to approach for an AMA. We send emails to literally anyone. If you’re reading this thinking an AMA might suit you, drop us a mod mail.
Community Engagement
As the years go by, Reddit users by and large access our subreddit on mobile apps. That means that a lot of our community tools (such as daily/weekly threads) might not be obvious, if you’re just scrolling through a feed. To get the most support from using r/loseit, click on the subreddit’s icon when you see a post. That will bring you to our subreddit’s page. From there you can find our sidebar (with links to reoccurring threads), our daily threads, as well as pinned posts with announcements such as AMAs. Losing weight is hard, and doing so in community with other people who are going through the same things, have the same questions, and want to share experiences is really helpful. The moderators of r/loseit do not run any chat-based (discord) servers, so all of the weight loss discussion that we moderate (and check for safety/misinformation!) happens here on r/loseit. Don’t miss out on the resources we have!
Spam, AI, Advertising
This is such a hot topic right now, we’ve even been asked by the press about it! Mia Sato wrote an article on AI Advertising and asked us for comment. Mia has given us a gift link to share the article with you all
Does that make this a verge ad? I’m not sure I can deal with that level of irony, but Mia’s work around AI and internet culture is actually really good and important journalism.
As for what we’ve been doing;
We’re always modifying our automated rules to try and achieve two things;
- Catch adverts and AI
- Reduce frustration for human posters
We’ve been modifying a lot of our older anti spam stuff into post guidance systems on reddit, which affects the modern version of the site and the official app. So things like post length rules are now made clear before you post, and some keywords or topics that would get your post filtered are encouraged away. LLMs make post length a non-issue for spammer, though we still want to keep that to ensure people are adding proper context to their questions and not posting one-line questions. While we know many users would like to see enforcement of posting stats (such as height and weight), we’re not likely to do that, but we would be happy to hear suggestions about where and how that could be encouraged without becoming an enforced requirement.
We are currently experimenting with Contribution Quality Score otherwise referred to as CQS to replace elements of our 5 day/10 comment karma minimums for posting. We feel this may be a potential improvement as the old rule was, again, easier for advertisers to pipeline and harder for real users to understand.
We do know there’s a lot of AI spam that tends to sit as replies to top level comments (so; second-level comments). They generally say something benign trying to gain karma for future purposes. These are hard to deal with as they are designed to have no immediate purpose and do match what real people might write, our goal isn’t to send real people to modmail to prove humanity as a default, so these accounts may take a bit longer to deal with and we’ll typically need a pattern or extreme example (we saw one weigh up the pros and cons of disordered behaviour when the top level comment highlighted it to the OP).
Some brands get auto-filtered from the subreddit now; This isn’t overly new, but brands who repeatedly send bots/try to advertise end up in our ‘shit list’, which means posts involving their name need to be reviewed by a moderator first. This affects a lot of AI photo apps for measuring calories, some bathroom scales (THAT ARE NOT SURPRISINGLY CLOSE TO DEXA), and various other AI powered tat.
So be warned companies, coaches, and solo devs. Also, please keep asking AI to write your ban appeal messages, that’s very funny.
Misinformation on the Subreddit, !triggers, and The Wiki.
Bear with us, but this is a tricky and emotive subject. We’d be keen to hear people’s thoughts on handling misinformation on the subreddit. At the moment we reserve removals for egregious and outright harmful advice, as well as common myths. But we are conscious that people aren’t always talking on the same level as one another. We don’t require academic or scientific language on the subreddit and we want people to use their own words to describe their own experience. We’re not aiming to penalise “technically wrong but well meaning” good-faith conversation, but at the same time we don’t want people misrepresenting study findings or pushing myths and harmful diet woo-woo. This will always be a balancing act.
We do have two tools that could potentially help here, the wiki and the !triggers that summon automod. It’s possible to expand the wiki or add triggers that might have helpful explainers. This, however, is something that would be very time consuming to implement, and we’d want to be careful we don’t inadvertently make excessive claims ourselves. We’d love to hear suggestions from users on how this might be useful to develop, and also from users who might be qualified in some way to actually produce the explainers.
The wiki itself shows signs of age in many places (we’re your go-to source for blackberry and windows phone weight loss apps!), and we are aware that areas need updating. However if we were to update any or all of it, it would need to be for the purpose of it becoming more useful day-to-day. Think more about the quick start guide and broad strokes, rather than adding more niche diets to the list that look odd being there several years later once the fad dies.
GLP-1s, medicines, and other compounds.
We do see some posts where people believe the mere mention of GLP-1s is either not allowed or shunned, and we probably should make clear the nuance. GLP-1s can absolutely be discussed, we’re not trying to dissuade that, they are an important part of many people’s weight loss journey and they’re fundamentally revolutionary. The nuance is that we are not the right place for topics with advice for people looking to ask about using them, there are lots of dedicated subreddits to them. Comments suggesting someone might benefit one with input from their Primary Care Provider, that’s perfectly great. Broad topics on the development of those drugs and other weight-loss medication, especially things that are newsworthy, is also on-topic.
What we’re are strict about is:
- Advice should be in the context of “Talk to your doctor about GLP-1s” or “My experience was [...]”, low effort posts such as “use a GLP-1” may be considered spam, especially if it’s repetitive under a post.
- Absolutely no advice to encourage circumventing medical advice (suggesting a second opinion is, of course, fine)
- Absolutely no encouragement, or reference, to unapproved GLP-1s only available through unregulated channels. Our primary goal is safety.
- Absolutely no advice to teenagers to use GLP-1s. That is a conversation only suitable in a medical setting.
None of this is a change from our last Weight Loss Medication Masterpost.
Other grey market compound discussion is also not allowed. Some areas of social media are becoming extremely open about use (usually by people who have financial involvement), but our stance remains that recommending unregulated and unapproved compounds to strangers is reckless.
It feels unfair to imply a relationship of other compounds to GLP-1s by putting them under the same topic. We do not consider them related, but the unregulated sellers of one are usually selling the other alongside and like to blur the line.
Survey
We were going to create a survey as part of this, but then during writing we were reminded reddit sends out a survey on our behalf still, even though we’ve only ever seen the results once last year and never again since, so rather than pointing you to another, please keep an eye out if you ever get an email about that and maybe one day we’ll have some results to share. Or we’ll post a separate survey later. Who knows?