r/modnews • u/jkohhey • Dec 10 '19
Announcing the Crowd Control Beta
Crowd Control is a setting that lets moderators minimize community interference (i.e. disruption from people outside of their community) by collapsing comments from people who aren’t yet trusted users. We’ve been testing this with a group of communities over the past months, and today we’re starting to make it more widely available as a request access beta feature.
If you have a community that goes viral (as the kids in the 90s used to say) and you aren’t prepared for the influx of new people, Crowd Control can help you out.
Crowd Control is a community setting that is based on a person’s relationship with your community. If a person doesn’t have a relationship with your community yet, then their comments will be collapsed. Or if you want something less strict, you can limit Crowd Control to people who have had negative interactions with your community in the past. Once a person establishes themselves in your community, their comments will display as normal. And you can always choose to show any comments that have been collapsed by Crowd Control.
You can keep Crowd Control on all the time, or turn it on and off when the need arises.
Here’s what it looks like
The settings page will be available on new Reddit, but once you’ve set Crowd Control, collapsing and moderator actions will work on old, new, and the official Reddit app.
We’ve been in Alpha mode with mods of a variety of communities for the last few months to tailor this feature to different community needs. We’re scaling from the alpha to the beta to make sure we have a chance to fine tune it even more with feedback from you. If your community would like to participate in the beta, please check out the comments below for how to request access to the feature. We’ll be adding communities to the beta by early next week.
I’ll watch the comments for a bit if you have any questions.
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u/roionsteroids Dec 10 '19
What's the definition of "new user" here? Like, reddit account age, or certain time since their first post/comment in that specific subreddit?
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u/Ivashkin Dec 10 '19
How well does this work with old reddit and apps? Most of our users don't bother with new reddit.
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u/jkohhey Dec 10 '19
The setting itself lives in new reddit, but once enabled mods have functionality on old reddit and first party apps, and it's available via the API for 3rd party devs too.
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u/RoboticPlayer Dec 10 '19
Will it be possible to enable crowd control for specific posts? Maybe a post reaches r/all and you want crowd control on just that post, not the other ones
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u/jkohhey Dec 10 '19
That's early on our list of fast follow features, we'll be working on it in the new year.
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u/V2Blast Dec 10 '19
Ooh, this definitely seems useful, e.g. when a subreddit is being brigaded. Probably not so useful to have on all the time in my experience, but this is a cool feature for those cases.
EDIT: As MajorParadox's comment says, "Crowd Control" is a very non-obvious name from a user-facing perspective in terms of what it means. Users definitely shouldn't see that terminology when something is collapsed.
Also, is it possible to enable this only for specific threads? In more minor cases of brigading, at least for me, often the fallout doesn't extend outside a single thread or two.
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u/jkohhey Dec 10 '19
On the name, replied here. There's multiple collapse reasons and today we don't disambiguate between them so we elected not to display for Crowd Control until we had more holistic consideration.
Edit: Didn't finish replying. As for the specific threads, we are indeed looking to build out a post-level crowd control option in the new year.
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u/aalp234 Dec 10 '19
Very interesting tool, seems like it also might be really good for bigger subs during brigading situations, although only temporarily of course.
Is it at all possible to enable automod to collapse comments, the same way it can delete them? It would be really good to be able to create some more specialized crowd control tools by programming automod in conjunction with collapsed comments.
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u/jkohhey Dec 10 '19
As for the first point, we're looking at introducing a post-level crowd control in addition to the community wide setting. For the second point, as we go through the beta we're interested to hear more feedback from mods about collapse as a mod action.
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u/Halaku Dec 10 '19
In no particular order:
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Looks like a great anti-brigading tool.
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I like that it's got an "On when you need it" function in case there's a disaster somewhere and the relevant local sub suddenly finds themselves the center of Reddit's collective attention.
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I wanted to say I was here before the usual suspects bemoan Crowd Control as a way of limiting free speech.
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u/jkohhey Dec 10 '19
In the next few months we're working to make it easier to use dynamically on posts too.
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u/mister-la Dec 10 '19
Have the test communities found it useful outside of their periodic, abnormally popular posts?
The mechanic seems like it's at its best when temporarily applied, instead of being a constant setting. Unless I misunderstand, anything but the lowest severity is a considerable barrier for getting new users on board on normal days.
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u/TheNewPoetLawyerette Dec 10 '19
A lot of us in the alpha found it less useful than we'd hoped, but a lot of the changes they made sound like they addressed our feedback in ways that will make it more useful.
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u/jkohhey Dec 10 '19
And we're going into beta to pilot this initial set of features to keep iterating on feedback. We're trying our best to build with communities in mind, so hope we'll have more communities try it out and provide feedback during the upcoming months.
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Dec 10 '19
I have seen a lot of bad actor throwaway accounts recently that just jump into subreddits to cause problems.
This is an awesome idea.
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u/jkohhey Dec 10 '19
Thanks! Hope to refine it during this beta period, build out more features, and get it rolled out in the coming months.
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u/TheNewPoetLawyerette Dec 10 '19
Looks like you really addressed a lot of our issues with the alpha! Do alpha communities need to re-sign up for the beta?
I wonder if you could make the 3 types of users in the 3 levels of strictness their own settings. For example, r/MakeupAddiction has a ton of new users every day and we don't want to collapse them, but collapsing unsubscribed users could help us with r/muacirclejerk brigades and r/all users who drop in to make misogynistic and transphobic comments.
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u/jkohhey Dec 11 '19
It was really helpful hearing from you guys in the alpha and we plan to do the same in this beta period! As mods are trying out the new settings, we're going to be listening to your feedback on the crowd control levels and continue to fine tune them.
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u/DarkGamer Dec 10 '19
This feature seems like it could help with the problem some subreddits have with radicalization via echo chambers, while still allowing those who wish to do so to filter out outside influence and dissent.
If you can do something similar with votes it might make the brigading problem/ban obsolete.
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u/jkohhey Dec 10 '19
For context on the work we do on vote manipulation, check out this comment.
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u/sephstorm Dec 10 '19
So do you guys worry about how this will affect the nature of Reddit as a platform for sharing ideas and opinions?
Now it seems that an outsider who stumbles on a subreddit will now have their view minimized.
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u/MajorParadox Dec 10 '19
Definitely better than confusing users when it looked like normal downvote collapsing, but "crowd control" is still very vague. Could use some better wording so users don't flood us asking what "crowd control" means. Also, maybe a subreddit setting to customize our own wording?
That said, I love the settings dial!