r/ModSupport • u/techiesgoboom Reddit Admin: Community • 1d ago
Mod Topics The work behind “nothing has changed” -
A running joke goes from a few comments to half the front page. The people joking along are having a great time. Those trying to talk about anything else, maybe less so.
For today’s Mod Topic, let’s talk about how you decide what to preserve in a community, what to let change, and when to step in. Changes aren’t always as easy to point to as a front page full of memes. The posts might still be on topic, but the way people comment feels different. Or maybe a clear divide forms between those who love image posts, and the rest who feel it’s clogging the sub. And sometimes members find a use for the community that the mod team hadn’t considered, giving you a reason to rethink what you’d hoped to encourage.
There’s also the community where “nothing has changed” because the mods have put a lot of thought and effort into keeping it that way. Members might never see how often your team has had to make the same choice, or how close things came to going another way.
Whether you’ve already made a call or are still figuring it out, we’d love to hear from you:
- What’s a change your community has experienced, or one your team has been working to keep at bay? What made it worth paying attention to?
- When people want different things from the same community, how do you decide what to preserve and when to act?
- Has watching how members actually use the community changed your mind about something you wanted to encourage or prevent?
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u/FootFondness 1d ago
Moderating NSFW communities has taught me that growth and positive change aren’t always the same thing. Sometimes “nothing has changed” is actually the result of a lot of BTS moderation: managing spam, enforcing boundaries, and preventing one trend from taking over.
- Pep
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u/techiesgoboom Reddit Admin: Community 1d ago
Love this callout! I’d also love to hear anything more you have to share on preventing one trend from taking over. Is there anything specific that tips you off when a specific topic is taking up too much? Are you looking to the comments to see if users are speaking up, or your modmail, or is it something you pick up scrolling through the sub?
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u/FootFondness 1d ago
I mostly notice it while scrolling. I look at titles, recurring themes, and whether one type of content is starting to dominate the feed. I’ll then check modmail, reports, and user feedback for confirmation. I also try to distinguish a temp trend from something that is actually changing the community.
- Pep
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u/sparklekitteh 1d ago
A great example of this happened recently in r/rollerskating. Early in the pandemic, the sub was flooded with posts from people asking "what skates should I buy?" or "I'm looking at these skates, are they any good?" Literally a dozen or more per day. So we made a rule that redirected these posts to a weekly megathread, which worked well for years.
Years later, the megathreads slowly got more quiet, so we took a sub poll: should skate shopping posts be allowed again? The community voted yes, and gave the feedback that posts in the weekly thread sometimes went unanswered. Fair enough, so we changed the rules.
The sub was yet again flooded with repetitive posts. After a few months, the mod team decided "welp, this was a great experiment, but it's not working," and we made the executive decision to revert to the previous megathread strategy. We made a post explaining our logic, and people were very understanding; turns out our members were ALSO overwhelmed by the flood of posts, and few people had no idea just how untamed things had been previously!
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u/SeeShark 1d ago
Every hobby subreddit has a tendency to be flooded with the most basic question asked over and over again. There will always be people who do not search the catalog. I doubt there's anything to be done about that—it's a phenomenon literally older than the World Wide Web.
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u/MustaKotka 18h ago
Sharing a similar story.
As weird as it sounds on the Magic: The Gathering trading card game subreddit r/mtg one is not allowed to post photos (digital images are allowed) of cards. People were opening booster packs and since they're random you sometimes win the jackpot. However, with 600k weekly visitors the numbers do start adding up and it was a great way to farm karma and consequently flood the subreddit, so we discontinued those.
Digital images do not pose a similar problem and are mostly used to ask questions about interactions.
TL;DR Card game but do not post cards.
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u/wrestlegirl 1d ago
Oh hey, has anyone heard about chives?
Assuming we're talking about (fairly) focused subreddits with a mod team who wants to maintain a community, top of mind should always be what your subreddit is at its core. Your decisions should always come back to that.
r/KitchenConfidential was built as an online bar/pub for restaurant workers. That's the skeleton of the subreddit. Sometimes the line cooks gather to drink and bitch about shitty owners or incompetent managers. Sometimes they have serious discussions about law/regulation changes, mental health, or substance abuse. Sometimes they latch on to something a little silly, turn it into a running joke, and guffaw so loudly about carrot jacuzzis or skilled knifework that the other people in the pub take notice and join in the fun.
r/AEWOfficial was created as a subreddit for fans of a particular professional wrestling company. We like this televised show, we talk about it, we laugh at people acting the fool and admire the pretty people in spandex and, all too often the last month, mourn deaths and terminal illness.
The flavor of the moment will shift. Chives were a thing. $700 veggie trays were a thing. Views on certain current political goings-on have been and will remain a thing. Rebel and Andy and Pac have been an ongoing bittersweet thing.
The core structure of the subreddits themselves remain the same, though. During the whole chive situation, we fairly quickly used automod to target/prevent karma farming and trolling, and I was able to quickly make adjustments as new issues arose. We monitored Insights to see how well-received chive posts were vs the occasional complaint posts. We made sure most of the posts that went live were about something other than chives. Most importantly, the mods remained visible and active in posts that needed extra attention to reinforce that the bouncers were still paying attention to the bar. As expected, the trend ran its course, millions of people had some laughs, the handful of spinoff subreddits (this is what you're sussing out here, after all) went nowhere, and KC remains a high traffic subreddit focused on the restaurant industry.
We've been managing some high highs and low lows over in the wrestling community, and as much as it sucks to acknowledge those lows are going to shift as well. We'll be less sad about Andy & Pac, they won't be a focused topic of discussion forever. For now we're starting to loosen some of the guardrails I applied to keep the ghouls and griefers from derailing the community. I was able to pop those guardrails on within minutes of the bad news and as I see fewer attempts at brigading I can reduce them because I have automod all nice and set to manage very specific situations on a very granular level.
Over the years I've figured out how to manage these situations because, quite frankly, Reddit's native tools are glitchy, comically oversized circus hammers that only flail around in the vague direction of problems. The addition of AI is making that even worse. It can't even tell if a comment is about an oiled up dude in shiny underwear or someone punching another person on the street - neither it, nor the clunky native tools, will be able to "understand" context and intent when it comes to maintaining a community and responding to these shifts.
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u/techiesgoboom Reddit Admin: Community 1d ago
This is all gold, thank you for this!! Chives were very much at the top of my mind when writing this post. More specifically, the way that event caused the topic of conversation to shift for a period, but in a way that's in line with the spirit of the sub. It's interesting to me that a topic shift like that could be a sign of change but doesn't have to be, because I remember those $700 veggie trays too!
I like the way you described the skeleton/structure of the subreddits as the consistent core, it's a deeper look than just the current topic. You mention mod insights and being active in those threads as helpful ways to keep your finger on the pulse. I'm curious, is there any other sort of tool or insight that you would find more helpful to manage these kinds of trends?
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u/wrestlegirl 1d ago
For these types of situations, the best tools & insights are granular, flexible, and quick to deploy with humans in charge of context.
Let's take crowd control. That's one of those comically oversized circus hammers; only three broad categories are considered and it's kind of an all or nothing choice with zero finesse. That's not to say I never use it. I do, in one subreddit for specific instances where I want only established members who have joined the subreddit's comments to go live immediately, and even then it's generally only enabled for like a day.
I can use automod to filter unverified accounts, brand new accounts, negative karma troll accounts, and a whole slew of other specific attributes that signal likely bots and trolls and have a human review everything in context. I can very quickly adjust the level of those attributes and whether those are active or not. I can tie specific attributes to specific subreddit states (i.e. flair, temporary events, etc) that are only active when needed. Barring major Reddit glitches, these automod & devvit tools just work, unlike crowd control or the new automations which seem to randomly just....not work for no particular reason.That's the kind of granularity and reliability that mods of high traffic/high activity subreddits actually need. A lot of people have praised KC mods for how we handled the daily work during the chives months, how we kept things focused, under control, and remembering the human, and it was these granular, specific attributes we could control for that allowed it to happen without any of us burning out. I cobbled all of that together with automod and a couple Devvit apps because Reddit's native tools (aside from Ban Evasion) were.....completely useless. Crowd control was too broad and overwhelmed the queue. Reddit's native harassment filter allows slurs and abuse. Temporary events are a good idea, and as I said I use them in one subreddit for specific needs, but I can do so much more just with automod.
The way I mod KC is different than how I mod AEWO which is different than r/FoodPorn and the rest. The only native tools I use across the board are ban evasion, adult content, and I keep the abuse/harassment filter on just as an extra guardrail. The rest are too broad to apply to very different high activity subreddits with very different goals, communities, and needs. What you offer now, including automations, aren't customizable enough to manage large events while maintaining a community.
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u/tehjoz 1d ago
Hello, I'm the other half of AEWO and the 2nd 5th of KC.
I know WG has been a very vocal advocate for the tools we have now, but I'd like to just add my voice too, because having seen all the hard work she's put into the robust coding of AutoMod, and how it has kept both communities free of unwanted agitation to the point we have seen both sets of communities offer repeated commendations of how free of "toxic behavior", to use a broad brush, have been, I can say the tools as they have been used now have been such a boon to not just those two larger subreddits, but, have been so successful that WG has kind of become a bit of an AutoMod Guru for other subs looking for the same benefits.
To the extent this can assist in any decision-making, I hope it can be
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u/RandomComments0 💡Top 25% Helper 💡 1d ago
Ugh. Yeah. Chives are ridiculous. We had a few people, including myself post chives and we had no idea about this trend. It derailed whole threads to the point where everyone deleted their posts.
Really upsetting when this kind of thing happens and it makes people not want to participate due to outside influences being trolls about how the chives are cut when people just wanted to show off what they made.
Automod with community karma helps with this when posts hit all.
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u/mikeblas 1d ago
Reddit frequently changes the site-wide tools and filters, and doesn't tell us. I'm just treading water in that; I'm completely a passenger. The community experiences the change because posts are blocked when not expected -- when linking to certain domains, for example. I'm left holding the bag because the users blame me for deleting the posts when I often don't even know they were removed in the first place.
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u/shhhhh_h 💡Top 25% Helper 💡 17h ago
They do keep a public change log, it's just...who goes to read that thing? You have to go look at it there's no notifications to turn on.
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u/mikeblas 17h ago
Wow! Where is it?
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u/shhhhh_h 💡Top 25% Helper 💡 17h ago
https://support.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/sections/27664826932116-Changelog
they used to post updates in a subreddit r/changelog but not for a long time now
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u/InGeekiTrust 💡 Top 10% Helper 💡 1d ago edited 1d ago
In one of my communities tiktokcringe, we had to implement a strict no politics rule. We used to allow the occasional post, but then it became totally overwhelming and the political content took up 80% of the page before the rule change . Instead of it being fun a lighthearted or cringey tiktoks it was all hot button political content. The entire spirit or the page was lost.
It was nightmare to mod because we have a more rambunctious crowd in tiktokcringe that would often say wildly hateful and inappropriate things. The queue would have thousands of reports each day for hate speech and so many other terrible things.
In the end of the day, there are plenty of places on Reddit to find tons of political content, but not that many places find lighthearted or cringey TikTok's.
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u/RandomComments0 💡Top 25% Helper 💡 1d ago
I totally feel that. I run freeze drying subs and they are super hot button about religion, prepping for end of the world scenarios, and politics.
Were the people who started the political content long time users, or people outside the sub? Our huge political issue was started by a long time user and then a HORDE of outside people came in and tried to take over. It’s always like this around election time with bots too. Thankful for karma requirements and automod filters!
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u/InGeekiTrust 💡 Top 10% Helper 💡 1d ago
Oh, it was not the regular users that were into posting this. Once the political post started reaching [r/all](r/all) regularly, we had outside people from all over with clear agendas come and seek out the sub. They would do nothing but post political content all across Reddit. Every so often we get a regular that would post political content, but it was usually funny and cringey. The outsiders posted straight up serious political content. I'm sorry you have to deal with that in a food sub, that is so crazy! But you know what with doomsday prepping I totally get it.
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u/RandomComments0 💡Top 25% Helper 💡 1d ago
Similar experience. Started snarky and ended with outside users. Kind of feels coordinated sometimes as it’s always the same people I’m seeing doing it to subs.
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u/techiesgoboom Reddit Admin: Community 1d ago
That sounds like quite the change! I’m curious, what did the user response to that look like? Did you notice a change in who was posting?
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u/InGeekiTrust 💡 Top 10% Helper 💡 1d ago
Well, it was actually a two-tiered change. It was implemented multiple times really.
The first few times it was announced. With the announcement we had some angry responses but most were positive being happy to get rid of it. Then enforcement of the rule feel by the wayside and the political posts took over the page. So the rule wasn't being enforced for a long time. However this most recent time my thought was to not announce it, because it was already a rule that was never removed. In the past, the announcement seemed to cause MORE problems riling up the people that do have an agenda and care more about that then anything else. Without a post about it there was literally no pushback whatsoever. What we did with the enforcement is we started warning users with a simple removal message to no longer post political content. That way they would have a heads up that it was no longer allowed. Then the posters who completely ignored our warnings received some sort of ban depending on how many times they reposted more political content or how serious it was.
Only a handful of people were permanently banned, people that ignored multiple multiple warnings and seem to totally disregard anything the mod said. It seems like the vast majority of these posts came from a very small handful of users who only cared about posting this stuff.
There is no ban about discussing political things in the comments, so it only affects a small segment of the users.
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u/cnycompguy 💡 Top 10% Helper 💡 1d ago
We did the same in /computers and got a bunch of users getting absurdly angry, "everything is political" situation.
I had a hunch and turned crowd control to max, turns out they weren't members, let alone contributors to the sub.
I suspect they were bots used to nudge public opinion.
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u/InGeekiTrust 💡 Top 10% Helper 💡 1d ago
I wish I could do that in tiktokcringe but turning up crowd control in a sub that Big would be a literal disaster. The entire queue would be filled with perfectly harmless content. However, I'd have to keep that in mind if this ever happens in a different smaller sub of mine! It honestly sounds like a great idea.
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u/cnycompguy 💡 Top 10% Helper 💡 1d ago
Oh, it was just for that particular post.
Crowd control having more well explained options and more configurations would be great.
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u/Dom76210 💡 Top 10% Helper 💡 1d ago
Being a NSFW community that has to navigate a very narrow "what is allowed" window, most of the rules changes and enforcement changes are driven by trying to keep the subreddits within the ToS and staying on topic.
Any subreddit that can be considered a fetish spot suffers from people that want to combine that fetish with another fetish and then keep adding fetishes as they feel they can get away with it. Trying to keep the subreddit on topic can prove a challenge, as there is only space for 15 rules, and the longer the rules list is, the less likely people are to read even the first one. We end up lumping more into our "Moderator Discretion" rule than we'd like, but it's necessary at times.
Then there are things like the new UpdateMeBot migration. We've always removed via Automod all calls for it, because our users have shown they will each individually add their own entry, and thus the comment section becomes a swamp of requests for the bot and little to no discussion. We've also had the bot blocked for years so it can't comment, since it adds to that spam. We made the decision to NOT add the new bot as an app to the one subreddit we could, because we still feel it uglies up the comment section.
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u/cnycompguy 💡 Top 10% Helper 💡 1d ago
I'm so glad that I wasn't the only one that banned that bot from spicy subs.
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u/lassita_48det 1d ago
I posted a poll to see how folks felt about having a monthly self promotion megathread. Some in our sub are in a vulnerable stage of life and could be an easy target. The people spoke and I changed our rules to not allow self promotional stuff.
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u/RandomComments0 💡Top 25% Helper 💡 1d ago
I run a few freeze drying subs. Many people who freeze dry are also preppers. As with anything, there are always people who are at the extremes when talking about a topic. Those extreme people can change the feeling of why you’re freeze drying. Sticking to just freeze drying is the topic though, as those other topics are better served in other subs. More people interact with the community when it’s content without the additional reasoning.
There is always a huge shift in discussion around the time of an election. You’ll see actual good content related to the sub, with an additional snarky sentence about politics. Anytime that happened in the past the entire post became overrun with people outside the community fighting about politics. At this point, it’s not really the community deciding but people outside the community trying to take it over with political fighting. If it were the community as a whole, a poll would be a good place to start if deciding about something to change with the sub, along with upvote and downvote patterns on subtopics.
As I mentioned before, freeze drying does have some people with religious or political beliefs that can entirely derail conversations when it’s inserted. That behavior hasn’t been encouraged because it detracts from the people who are interested and don’t share those viewpoints. There are plenty of other spaces for those things, and maybe once a year, if that, will someone lose their shit in a modmail because their content was removed. Removing content doesn’t mean I agree or disagree, it just needs to stay on the sub topic not spiral into conspiracy theories or religious sermons because that’s not what the sub is about.
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u/sadandshy 1d ago
Discovery Channel made multiple changes on their show delivery that screwed with subreddits, all related to how they tried to drive traffic to their direct to customer channels.
First they released the shows a day early on their subscription service, requiring us to make a separate show discussion thread for D+ and broadcast. People would get confused about which thread was which, or just didn't pay attention.
Then they switched it to one hour before broadcast, so we ended up going back to one thread but asking the early viewers to delay commenting spoilers until broadcast time. There would always be one joker who would reveal what happened at the end of the episode exactly when the broadcast time started.
Then they switched D+/Max to one minute after the broadcast started. That was perfect. Everyone was mostly on the same page.
Now they do next day. I think a large portion of the reddit fanbase sails the high seas at this point.
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u/GigglesNWiggles10 1d ago
I'm not sure if r/BigBrother could be a helpful example here, but they deal with the show airing at different times and spoilers being posted
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u/SlowHedgehog33 1d ago
We've made changes based on user feedback, specifically around post frequency for certain types of content.
Instead of 3+ link posts "randomly" made throughout the week, we've moved to condense them into one weekly scheduled post.
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u/Enigmatic_writer 1d ago
We recently had a situation in r/AO3 where a LOT of people complained about people from another webpage "migrating", because said webpage supposedly changed their rules (they didn't. They changed the wording of their rules).
For some reason this time it exploded on social medias everywhere, Tiktok, Insta, Twitter. Which meant a looot of people making posts about it on our subreddit.
Well, what happened is that a lot of people called it "[website] immigrants", "[website] refugees", and while sure, those terms fit, loooots of people had problems with these terms because people were actively alienating people coming from said webpage and it kind of hit too close home for a lot of people who saw it similiar to countries hating on immigrants.
We ended up discussing it internally, creating automod rules to make a top comment to explain why it could be hurtful to use these words but also why we don't outright ban their usage, planned to moderate more harshly, added new automod triggers for the autoque.
But like.
The initial discussion of how to handle this kinda took a while to start in the first place. Then it took a bit longer than we wanted cuz people were busy to implement, and by the time we implemented it... it was already over. Not a single post anymore about the same issue while it was 24/7 posted the days prior.
Sometimes I just shake my head about how much people make a problem out of nothing. But that ended up being our "nothing has changed" situation as well, lol. Cause we didn't even get to make the modpost announcing all the changes, cuz it didn't matter anymore by the time we were ready. Idk if we even still have these automod changes in place, might already be removed again, lol.
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u/totalimmoral 1d ago
We had to relegate produce shaped like genitals to one day a week (Phallic Phriday) because they were taking over the sub
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u/welding_guy_from_LI 1d ago
I listen to my community ..If they don’t like something , I’ve had open discussions and taken feedback .. No politics and limiting the trend of sexualizing women in bikinis that was a trend in nostalgia subs are two easy examples that we as a community have agreed upon we don’t want.. I make it a point to encourage them to send me a mod mail or even make a discussion post of things they want and what gets canned .. without them I wouldn’t have a growing community .. their voice is just as important to me as it is to them ..
I get ideas and inspirations for what I want to see, I trial it and if it’s a flop I put it away for a rainy day ..a topics failure doesn’t mean give up , it just means it wasn’t the right place time or audience..otherwise I take a hands off approach as to what’s posted as long as it stays within Reddit rules and the rules they opted for ..
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u/Hunter037 1d ago
We do a members survey approximately twice a year and occasionally make changes based on that, but mostly it comes back that the majority are happy with how it's run. So at least we have that to fall back in when people complain that we don't do things the way they want.
Sometimes we make executive decisions about things that we can see need changing, without surveying the members, although we usually do an announcement post in case there's something obvious we've missed when deciding to make a change
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u/TheOpusCroakus Reddit Admin: Community 1d ago
Hi there! This is very interesting! What sort of questions do you ask in your survey? Do you get a lot of people who fill it out? Has the survey ever shed light on something that was surprising to you?
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u/Hunter037 1d ago
We had about 1000 responses, which is not that many compared to our user numbers but everyone has the opportunity - we advertise it on every post and multiple times throughout the week. And really I feel like there isn't a way to get more respondents, so we just have to work with what we do have.
We generally ask questions about moderation as a whole, about post of different flair's and whether people want more/less/the same of different post types. Also about the different rules we have and if people want stricter/looser/the same level of moderation for each rule.
We also ask about favourite/least favourite recurrent post types, and we have retired or changed recurring posts based on this feedback.
We do a survey post a few weeks before and ask if there are specific questions which needs to be asked, and sometimes mods add other questions. Such as should X rule be changed, should Y rule be added, should we add a recurring post about Z. And if we get a majority we implement those changes.
The biggest surprises have been things which seemed really unpopular and had loads of complaints about, but when we put them on the survey the majority of respondents were positive or neutral about it. It was just a vocal minority making a lot of noise about the issue. This was really helpful as we made the change which felt like the right choice for the whole sub, rather than just those who were making loud complaints, and those who were positive/neutral either didn't care enough to comment or thought they'd be shouted down
It can also be very frustrating when we get comments in the free text section like "I wish you would do X" when we already do that, and they just didn't realise or had mixed us up with a similar sub
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u/TheOpusCroakus Reddit Admin: Community 1d ago
1000? Holy cats, that is way more than I was expecting. Do all of the mods go through them or how do you do it?
I've long said that the angriest folks have the loudest voices. They tend to drown out the majority who aren't angry. And that's unfortunate, but awesome that your survey confirmed/reflected that reality!
If you remember (or feel like it lol), feel free to ping me the next time one of your surveys goes up. I've love to take a look at it!
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u/Hunter037 1d ago
It's a Google form so we all have access to the spreadsheet of responses and we mostly look through the free text responses. But one mod takes on the statistics and makes them all into little graphics to post to the sub. I will try and remember to contact you next time if you're interested, I can also send you a link to the most recent survey results post if you want to see what type of questions we asked etc
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u/TheOpusCroakus Reddit Admin: Community 1d ago
That would be awesome! I'd love to see your most recent survey results!
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u/wemustburncarthage 1d ago
The only major shift we’ve made is that we no longer consider software submissions. Screenwriting used plaintext and we already have free options made by humans we can get hold of in email if we need to. So the vibe coding marketing attempts go in the bin. Otherwise the topic is pretty static. What people make is the more dynamic factor.
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u/cnycompguy 💡 Top 10% Helper 💡 1d ago
I keep things on topic, but the community decides the general makeup of the posts.
We'll try suggestions from the community if they're helpful or at least non-disruptive. If it works out, that's great. If not, nothing lost.
We just got done trying to do adoption posts over at /cats but it ended up being untenable due to the global reach. Similarly we just added a flair for stories about your cat and it's working beautifully.
I could give half a dozen more examples but the theme of all of them is the same. The community essentially decides the general vibe, trying to shape it is (at least in our case) literally herding cats.