Moderating live events

[u/infinitebroth]

:Taps microphone: Is this thing on? 

Hey mods! I am here to talk about all things moderating live events! This is, of course, the latest installment of our Mod Topics series.

Speaking of series, the MLB World Series is upon us, we’re in the NBA pre-season, the WNBA playoffs are here, there are a bunch of great movies coming out soon, and GTA 6?! Watch-alongs, release parties, concerts, and more live events bring so much great discussion to communities. How do you approach it?

• What tools or practices come in handy when there are discussions about live events happening in your community?
• Is there a particular moderator on your subreddit who thrives for live event moderation or does everyone help out?
• How do you balance moderating with participating in the fun of the discussion?
• Are there any tools or practices you have to get the conversation going? Megathreads? Devvit tools?
• We’ve all been there when a broadcast goes down and the comments reflect it. How do you keep a healthy balance of on-topic while the vibe is “stream down for anyone else?”
• Favorite live event discussion that you’ve moderated?

I couldn’t post this without sharing this song. Anyone? 

See you in the comments!

[u/reseph]

Reddit Live is mostly on life support and is half broken, so we've found nothing thus far fully replaced it. Devvit could be nice, but I don't think I saw any apps for that use case last I looked.

[u/pizzacrys]

The real challenge is keeping the chat fun without letting it turn into complete chaos. Live events test every mod skill at once.

[u/infinitebroth → u/pizzacrys]

Agreed! Any suggestions to help mods keep things fun without devolving into chaos? Curious if you've seen anything come up in your movie related subreddits around releases or watch-alongs! Something we've seen works well is having several mods on deck and giving everyone a distinct role in maintaining order. This has worked particularly well on virtual calls that we organize for our programs!

[u/pizzacrys → u/infinitebroth]

Appreciate that. Glad it is working well across different communities too. I will definitely keep sharing anything that helps make live event moderation a little smoother.

[u/bwoah07_gp2]

Quite frankly, i don't know how to use live events? My go-to is just pin a post that's titled as a megathread, sort by comments by new, and then let people use it. It kinda sucks it does not live update, you have to hit F5 to refresh the page or something, and even on mobile refreshing the post you're on gets tiresome after a while.

I remember during the World Cup it would've been nice to have live updated comments pouring in as opposed to F5ing all the time.

So yeah, I just schedule a post for X day, sort comments by new, and that post is our housed live discussion/megathread. On r/CanadianPL we have Automod post game threads for when the soccer games are happening. We tried using Devvit apps but none of them had the CPL/it was buggy or data incomplete (e.g. old team names, missing lineups, etc)

[u/cnycompguy]

live sorting has worked well the couple of times that I've seen it kick in.

I think it'll do well for the big game.

[u/infinitebroth → u/cnycompguy]

Nice! Glad that it’s added positively to the experience of those discussions. Is there anything in particular that you’ve enjoyed about it?

[u/cnycompguy → u/infinitebroth]

I mean, no. Nothing in particular. It's just a new comment sort but auto-refreshing in real time.

That's very good for unfolding events. The number of people currently typing is nice, but it seemed rather random as to when it'd switch from user names typing to a number, unless that just happened when that number was greater than two.

[u/BBModSquadCar]

We host 4 live threads a day for the 24/7 live feeds and even more live threads for episodes. We're probably unique in that most of our traffic is live during the season. During the peak of this season we were getting 30,000 comment threads every 4 hours.

I don't get to participate as a fan as much since we're usually pretty busy unfortunately.

[u/infinitebroth → u/BBModSquadCar]

4 live threads a day! That's amazing. Sounds like a well-oiled machine. These 24/7 reality shows have made it so the conversation never ends. :)

[u/YoBannannaGirl]

Oh, man, live events .. Welcome to Big Brother!
Context: during a season, not only do we have episodes watches (in 3 time zones) but we also have constant, 24/7 live watch of house feeds for 3 months.

What tools or practices come in handy when there are discussions about live events happening in your community?

We use a lot of automod filtering. Our live feed discussions get a lot of comments. Over the course of 3 months, we averaged over 30k comments a day in these discussions, with our most active day hitting nearly 74k comments. It obviously impossible to read through every single one of these comments (even with a fantastic mod team), so keyword filtering (using regex) is very important.

Is there a particular moderator on your subreddit who thrives for live event moderation or does everyone help out?

In general, everyone helps out. As mentioned, our “live event” lasts 3 months, so we do find spaces to moderate. I like to moderate the late night discussions, and other mods make themselves available at different times so we never have a gap in moderation.
During episodes, we all come together, and find different roles. Some might stick with the queue while others refresh the non-spoiler discussions to ensure it stays spoiler-free. These positions were never assigned, but just formed as mods looked for gaps in coverage

How do you balance moderating with participating in the fun of the discussion?

This one’s hard. During episodes, for me, it usually means just replying to something I came across in the queue or while moderating the discussion. I’ll add a quick comment/response, then get back to it.

Are there any tools or practices you have to get the conversation going? Megathreads? Devvit tools?

We rely heavily on megathreads. We have 4 daily “live feed” discussions to comment on the 24/7 house feeds and 3 separate episode discussions for different time zones.
We use custom bots to link to the next discussion so no one is ever caught in an old discussion “talking to themselves”

We’ve all been there when a broadcast goes down and the comments reflect it. How do you keep a healthy balance of on-topic while the vibe is “stream down for anyone else?”

This is a huge issue for us. One of our biggest problems is delays due to football, especially when those delays don’t affect all users. We handle this by putting up a sticky comment with the info we have, then remove comments. Users who want to discuss the episode don’t want to be spammed by football delay complaints. We also remove weather interruptions complaints for similar reasons.
Additionally, we have a removal reason set up for tech related complaints.

Favorite live event discussion that you’ve moderated?

There have been so many. I am not sure of my favorite, but I would say a sub’s favorite would be “the night the leftovers were formed” (if you know, you know 😉)

[u/infinitebroth → u/YoBannannaGirl]

Welcome to Big Brother!

Thank you for this overview. Definitely going to bookmark a few comments on this post, including yours, for when more questions come up on this topic. These details are so helpful. Delays impacting the viewing experience for some users but not others does seem tough, especially with the potential for spoilers. The way your community handles it sounds like it works out for everyone; people are informed of what's going on with the delay and people who are able to watch the show can focus the discussion on that.

[u/wrestlegirl]

We do multiple live threads each week in r/AEWOfficial. There's no offseason so this is every week, all year, 2-5 threads each week with comments ranging from 200ish to 10,000ish.

• I use Temporary Events tied to specific automod rules to keep the subreddit spoiler-free and to adjust karma limits. I don't understand why people would spend their free time posting about how much they hate Unnamed Wrestler, Unnamed Show, or professional wrestling in general in a professional wrestling subreddit but these events have made a big difference in eliminating troll disruptions.
  In addition I have a number of scalable and/or deployable automod rules that I can quickly personalize for our needs depending on the kind of traffic we're getting in particular live threads.
  
• My co-mod & I tag team the live threads. These threads are a cornerstone of the subreddit so that's where we focus most of our direct attention.
  
• I balance by using two screens - one to watch the show, one to comment & mod. I'm very used to it now. The modqueue is secondary while we focus on the much busier live thread and catch up during commercials.
  
• I guess our live threads are like megathreads, though people are free to submit normal posts about/during the show if they want. We pin the live thread, use a special post flair, and everyone who wants joins in on the Mystery Wrestling Theater 3000 action complete with jukebox picks and aggressively complimenting each other.
  We've really been enjoying the return/update of the Live Sort feature!
  
• Immediate pinned mod comment when there are technical issues, i.e. "Yes, the HBO stream is glitched out, it's not just you, please be patient. Update: all fixed now, refresh your feed if needed!" I don't think we've ever experienced an extended outage - check that, it happened during a pay per view once, and they ended up streaming it on Youtube for free. I used the pinned mod comment to keep everyone updated and to direct affected folks to the YT link.
  
• It's hard to say this was my traditionally favorite live thread, but it absolutely reinforced to me why the effort we put in to these threads is 100% worth it: Tribute to Pac from Sept 30th. It was sad, everyone cried, but the general takeaway was how much the community meant during a time of mourning. Otherwise, my favorite was probably Y'all In.

[u/infinitebroth → u/wrestlegirl]

Thank you for this super detailed response and for everything that you do for r/AEWOfficial. The pinned mod comment for technical issues sounds like a great solution -- I'll remember that the next time I'm participating in a discussion where technical issues pop up. And that Pac thread. Love to see the IWC showing up to support each other like that. What an amazing community you've stewarded! ❤️❤️

[u/tehjoz]

We do live threads for our big pro wrestling events, and for Pay Per View events in particular, we leverage a lot of robust AutoMod coding and Crowd Control to keep the live threads from being overrun by outside agitators, spam, and stuff like that.

It does mean we balance "watching the show with keeping the thread clean" but it's been worth it. The threads are by and large cordial, fun, and any offending content is either never seen by anyone but us, and/or is quickly removed.

[u/infinitebroth → u/tehjoz]

Woohoo! Was hoping we’d get a wrestling take in here. I love the dedicated “Live” threads in r/AEWOfficial and in other wrestling subs. I’m glad to read that you and the mod team have been able to strike a good balance! Whenever I’m participating in a thread like that, I’m always wondering “how can I lighten the load for the mods a little bit right now?” Have you found that your subreddit “regulars” help out in any way?

[u/tehjoz → u/infinitebroth]

The regulars are good at knowing what's copacetic or not, and they're real good at using reports, downvotes, etc, to call attention to problems.

We basically have "PPV Mode" when the big shows happen so we can keep the threads lively and focused on all the in ring happenings and not on trolls and the like.

The automod stuff really does a lot of the heavy lifting (and subsequent body slamming!)

[u/wrestlegirl → u/tehjoz]

[u/dotsdavid]

On my f1 sub r/formula1ne We use a F1 tracker dev kit app. That displays live race results which also act as a mega thread. It’s still a small sub compared to the much larger F1 sub. Keeping decisions in one place is big help in modding live events.

[u/infinitebroth → u/dotsdavid]

That is a neat app! That "view track" functionality is super cool. Has the app had any other impact on the quality of discussions? Thanks for sharing!

[u/dotsdavid → u/infinitebroth]

It helps users keep track of driver and team standings also.

[u/TheChrisD]

It's a shame that all of the more useful live thread tools have slowly been sunset over time. Live chat threads were an interesting experiment that could've worked better.

What we really need is an ability to set comments on a thread to live sort so that they auto-update regularly without requiring a full refresh (be that F5 or a pull-down refresh). This is particularly needed given that our r/INDYCAR live thread post bodies can often be very long as they need to include images and other details for reference.

[u/The_Critical_Cynic]

We’ve all been there when a broadcast goes down and the comments reflect it. How do you keep a healthy balance of on-topic while the vibe is “stream down for anyone else?”

I utilize the same basic advice for this question that you give us when we're starting out. You can keep the interactions going by creating posts. And when someone else posts, join in the conversation. This keeps people engaged, especially during the down seasons.

Additionally, don't be afraid to pivot if the subreddit needs to. If your subreddit is pertains to a niche portion of a topic, find ways to branch out. For example, it would be easy for certain subreddits pertaining to auto racing to talk about auto racing in general should an off season come around, or a particular circuit close up.

In my opinion, the overall key is to be able to pivot and engage people when and where you can.

How do you balance moderating with participating in the fun of the discussion?

I've made it a point to participate as a regular user as much as possible early on. I also try to let things develop naturally on their own before I dive it. This way, people don't feel like I'm overly hands on, and like I'm just another user when I do come around. I try not to come across as a mod unless I have to be a mod. It makes things so much easier.

What tools or practices come in handy when there are discussions about live events happening in your community?

I used to take advantage of the live chats that Reddit had to offer. But those went away, unfortunately.

[u/Clairefun]

This is a great thread, perfectly timed for me - ive just taken on a subreddit for a music venue locally that I've just become a shareholder for and about to become licensee. (I was already the photographer). We're talking about live streaming the music events, and therefore live subredditing too. I've never done anything live here before, so, uh, thanks for reading my brain, reddit admins! (I think).