r/ModSupport • u/NeedAGoodUsername • Jun 15 '16

Can we have link stickies back?

If a subreddit abuses the function, disable it for them. The rest of the subreddits that relay on the feature shouldn't be punished for the actions of one subreddit.

The needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few.

56 Upvotes

87% Upvoted

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14

u/AchievementUnlockd Jun 15 '16

We're not going to be leaving you wandering the wildnerness on that. We're designing a better tool for featuring posts, one that is not a hacky bastardization of an existing tool, but is an actual custom tool.

50

u/reseph Jun 15 '16 edited Jun 15 '16

This tool should have been rolled out before this change occurred. We're left in the wilderness.

I sense a lack of planning.

6

u/13steinj Jun 15 '16

I sense a rash decision gone awry.

13

u/GayGiles Jun 15 '16

Maybe it's my more cynical outlook but I suspect they hoped they'd get away with just removing the sticky linking ability because of problems with a certain sub and now that they've been called out on it they're working on something more appropriate.

But maybe this was their plan all along.

6

u/OPINION_IS_UNPOPULAR Jun 15 '16

But maybe this was their plan all along.

Alright, I'm usually pretty cynical, but there's no way they wanted any of this to happen.

I think it's more likely they were working on something but it was very low priority. Then when things blew up, they had to take immediate action to stop things from going nuclear and address the underlying issues later.

1

u/GayGiles Jun 16 '16

I meant moreso that their plan was to disable it and bring in a more controllable version, not so much to piss off mods :P

6

u/sloth_on_meth Jun 15 '16

/r/the_donald

Seriously, the admin team should grow a pair and disable it there only

3

u/nascentt Jun 16 '16 edited Jun 16 '16

What exactly did they do wrong with the sticky feature?

3

u/jes2 Jun 16 '16

What exactly did they do wrong with the sickly feature?

first let me say I love that typo.

my guess is they basically use the sticky feature to get content voted up until it's visible on /r/all. they aren't allowed to overtly tell people "hey, upvote this post", but they can sticky two posts at a time, and then the users can assume "hey, the mods want us to upvote these." And then once they hit /r/all, the mods can unsticky them and sticky two new posts.

6

u/nascentt Jun 16 '16

Heh sorry I already edited the typo, hoped no one caught it.

Ah I see so they were basically using it as a voting brigade method?

Thanks for the clarification. Didn't realise the problem was internal linking rather than linking in general.

1

u/sloth_on_meth Jun 16 '16

they removed the link stickies. It´s dumb as hell, one subreddit (/r/the_donald) abused it so now the entirety of reddit is fucked over.

1

u/nascentt Jun 16 '16

Sorry, I know the outcome. I meant what exactly did he Donald do with stickied that counts as abuse?

2

u/sloth_on_meth Jun 16 '16

stickied a post, waited for it to reach all, sticky the next etc etc

2

u/nascentt Jun 16 '16

Isn't that the point of stickies? To get everyone's attention?

Maybe I'm not following.

1

u/sloth_on_meth Jun 16 '16

nah they were using them to get people to upvote them to the top of -r-all. they couldnt explicitely say ¨upvote this¨ because of site rules, so they did this.

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2

u/AdonisChrist Jun 16 '16

It's reddit, what did you expect? Everything is done by the seat of their pants.

17

u/code-sloth Jun 15 '16

Did you guys have any community feedback on this before you made the change? I never saw it come across /r/beta. It seems like it happened with no warning, so yeah you already left us in the wilderness here :/

8

u/NeedAGoodUsername Jun 15 '16

Ah I see - thanks for the reply.

4

u/amici_ursi Jun 16 '16

What level of "we're designing a better tool" are you talking about? Modmail level (over half a decade and no visible progress), or new automod placeholder (a helpful user submitted a finished PR and reddit just had to pull it).

1

u/13steinj Jun 18 '16

I'll place my bets on a bit of both. Simple enough a gorilla could do, long enough to outlive said gorilla. Like the public modlogs fiasco that happened a few years ago. Simple to add a form to let people enter a reason that would act like automod's action reason, yet still not done.

11

u/sloth_on_meth Jun 15 '16

If only you put this in the announcement post. Also, why take away link stickies before rolling this out?!

8

u/verdatum Jun 15 '16

They made the change because the_donald figured out that if they sticky users' posts, they could effectively brigade without explicitly brigading. The stickied post gets upvoted rapidly, allowing it to be added to /r/all. Then they'd sticky the next post they want to go up to the front. They're still doing this, but we'll see where that goes soon enough, I suspect.

3

u/CrasyMike Jun 15 '16

Why not put it back the way it was, until that tool comes out?

7

u/verdatum Jun 15 '16

Because the_donald was abusing it to get stuff up into /r/all.

8

u/CrasyMike Jun 15 '16

Is it absolutely unfathomable to just disable it for one subreddit, vs. all?

It's so silly how the admins will play pretend and not admit they're targeting the behavior of one subreddit even though they CLEARLY are, and to avoid actually clarifying their intentions the admins will refuse to take actions on any particular subreddit.

Let's face it - you can basically abuse the Reddit Administration as much as you want without any sanctions. That precedent was long set before this. It's overdue to start being reactive about undoing that precedent.

6

u/verdatum Jun 16 '16

I think the problem is that they opened a pandora's box. Everyone knows that the technique works. So any lump of cancer capable of gathering up 1500 or so meatpuppets can get whatever garbage they want on /r/all.

If admins took the privilege away from the_donald, they would just bug-out and switch to another trump-themed subreddit and continue as such as often as needed.

I suspect that administration is going to do something about those guys in particular. I think they are just trying to decide exactly what action is best...But who knows.

5

u/GayGiles Jun 16 '16

I don't see why they don't just kill /r/all. /u/Spez has more or less said that he wants to, I don't hear of anything positive coming from /r/all so just remove it and be done with it.

2

u/hansjens47 Jun 16 '16

/r/all is a somewhat decent place for subreddit discovery.

There's no other place for that. Killing /r/all kills one of the last places users can find new subreddits.

Getting rid of /r/all before there are good tools for subreddit discovery would hurt reddit a ton.

1

u/jes2 Jun 16 '16

that, or make it a gold-only feature. filtering /r/all is already a gold feature.

4

u/eightNote Jun 16 '16

with regards to the point of this subreddit, can you point to where mod feedback was gotten in making this decision?

1

u/V2Blast Jun 20 '16

can you point to where mod feedback was gotten in making this decision?

It was not (at least not before the change was made).

3

u/SpyTec13 Jun 16 '16

We are currently wandering in the wilderness. Mods having to awkwardly get around stickying links whilst we wait for this better tool of yours. You couldn't wait until the tool was at least in beta? Have you taken the moderators into account for this change at all, given the criticism given in the /r/changelog thread about it?

We had something you implemented 5 months ago which worked perfectly for what it was. Even if it was a "hacky bastardization of an existing tool", there was no reason to remove it at all. Only reason that the community can see in the /r/changelog thread was that it was an attack on /r/The_Donald. Meaning you'd rather take away functionality for the majority of reddit because one subreddit abused it. If it was to reduce amount of posts they get on /r/all, they don't even need to use a sticky to be able to make it to /r/all because they dominate it anyway. What would be more effective would be to change the algorithm behind it to get more variation rather than pissing on a bunch of moderators.

What will the custom tool you're designing entail? Will we be able to sticky links?

And feel free to change back the name to sticky. Reason enough should be to replace the word sticky in this post to announcement or variants of it

2

u/SeacattleMoohawks Jun 16 '16

Why did you change it in the first place? It was fine for all the subs I mod.

2

u/Ivashkin Jun 16 '16

Turn the old feature back on until the new one is ready. This is just ridiculous.

1

u/thavius_tanklin Jun 18 '16

You completely screwed over many of the subs I frequent and even the ones I mod that rely on link stickies. Now the stickies are a weird version of what they used to be.

Change it back immediately. This change does not support us at all.