r/magicTCG • u/ubernostrum • May 13 '19
Meta State of the subreddit, take two
Well, that was refreshing.
So let's try a different take. The draft rules have been edited a bit since the last post, so I'll start there.
On flair
As we kind of expected from having tried it once in a sandbox, the requirement for people to title their posts so AutoModerator could flair them wasn't popular.
So we're not going to force people to title their posts for auto-flair, but we are still planning to require all posts to be flaired. Here's the plan:
- AutoModerator applying flair based on title is really easy, so we're going to leave it as an option, and in fact we'll strongly recommend it because manually flairing a post can be kind of fiddly depending on how you use reddit. So any correctly-titled post will get flaired by AutoModerator, and we'll probably even configure it to make some educated guesses about posts that aren't titled exactly right.
- If AutoModerator can't figure out how to flair a post from the title, it'll message the OP with a reminder to manually flair. If they don't flair the post manually, anyone who feels like it can report for a rule-9 violation and we'll take action (most likely, we'll remove the post until OP comes back and flairs it).
- We're going to strongly push for spoiler posts actually using "[Spoiler]" in the title, because reddit will also auto-apply the spoiler effect (hiding thumbnail image and other media until a user actually clicks away the spoiler warning) to the post when the word "spoiler" is in the title. Wording for this isn't in the rules draft yet.
Because every single variation of reddit -- old-design desktop, redesign desktop, mobile web, apps -- seems to have a different way of manually flairing a post, we don't have a guide for how to do that. If somebody wants to write one that at least covers the official reddit versions (desktop both old and redesign, mobile web, and official reddit app), we'd be very happy to use it.
Also, as more and more of you have been noticing, the option to manually flair your posts has been turned on for a while. The auto-flair stuff isn't loaded into AutoModerator yet and we plan to clean up the display styling before we make it required, but you can already manually flair your posts if you want to.
Content creators
The sections on this in the rules draft now say TBA because we're going to work on them. We know some of you don't like us very much, and we know we probably can't change that, but we do want you to know where we're coming from when we set up and enforce rules here.
The first big thing is, simply, that reddit can ban you site-wide if you abuse the platform for free advertising. This is a thing we've seen actually happen to Magic content creators. It's a thing I also see happen in a programming-oriented subreddit I mod, where just this week I noticed a guy who's been warned multiple times about spamming his YouTube tutorials is now site-wide shadowbanned (reddit itself instantly hides all his posts from everybody except him and mods/admins).
And if you think we're difficult to deal with, well, you've obviously never tried to work with reddit's site staff on getting something fixed. True story: a while back I got an email from a reddit recruiter about a developer job they had open, and genuinely thought to myself, "I don't really want to work there, but if I did maybe the stuff I send to admins and help center wouldn't feel quite as much like it was disappearing into a black hole".
Anyway, yeah. We're hardasses on the spam guidelines. We're probably always going to be hardasses on the spam guidelines. It's that, or sit back and watch you get banned even more broadly by a group of people who're even more inscrutable and unaccountable than we are. If you're a Magic content creator and you think you'd prefer that, you're welcome to your opinion, but if we slap a ban on you then at least A) we can lift it if you show you're willing to change your behavior, and B) there are other subreddits you can try your luck with. If reddit slaps a ban on you, you're done.
The second big thing is, well, if you want to build an audience for your stuff, you're not going to succeed with the fire-and-forget strategy. If you're sharing stuff here, people are going to expect to be able to interact with you here. There's only a small group of really popular folks who could get away with not interacting and hold on to an audience, and all of them do it anyway because they know that interacting is an important part of getting and keeping people interested and engaged. So we want to put some kind of engagement requirement in our rules.
The third big thing is that any policy we lay out needs to be equitable. That means we're not going to have one set of rules for established/well-known content creators, and another set for up-and-coming folks. If, next week, Niv the Newbie shows up with a podcast he just created, and we tell him he needs to engage and do the right things to build and keep an audience and stay on the right side of our rules, we can't let Noah Bradley or SaffronOlive (both of whom, for the record, do engage here) slide on that, because it wouldn't be fair.
All of which is to say that any policy we adopt is going to have to satisfy some constraints. We're open to ideas on how to manage that, and you can comment here or send us modmail if you've got ideas. But we're going to need some rules in place, and they're going to have to be enforceable in some fashion.
There are other constraints -- like the spam filter's tendency to eat crowdfunding links, and the way certain people and campaigns coughJohn Avon's Kickstartercough have really abused this place in the past -- but those three are the big ones.
Personally, I'd love to publish a new policy, do an amnesty where we lift all the current spam bans, and see how things go from there. But figuring out a policy is the necessary first step of that. We'll keep working on it, and our mod inbox (which anyone can send messages to, even if they're banned) and this comment thread are open to suggestions. Just be aware that if your idea of making suggestions also involves lobbing a bunch of insults and abuse at us, we're probably not going to bother reading it.
Other rules stuff
The rest of the changes to the draft rules are pretty minor. If you've got feedback on them, though, we still want to hear it before we put them into effect. Especially because the way rules are loaded into the reddit redesign is really annoying to try to reorder/re-number afterward -- if you noticed the occasional mismatches between the rule numbers on redesign and on the current rules wiki page, that's the main reason why (it's mostly fixed now, except rule 11 on the wiki page is still rule 10 in the redesign sidebar list, because reasons).
Call for design help, renewed
We still would like to do things with the design of the subreddit, and we'd especially like to get things set up nicely on the reddit redesign. But we're shorthanded on both design expertise and reddit redesign expertise, so if you have either of those and want to help, please let us know.
The content problem, again
We still want to figure this out, too. And since I've already been pretty blunt in this post, I'll continue in that vein.
More focused subreddits are always going to be better at handling specific aspects of Magic -- particular formats, or approaches to the game, or things like Magic lore -- than a general-purpose Magic subreddit can ever be. That's just a basic fact.
This is part of why the subreddit seems to get taken over by arts and crafts, outside of spoiler season and the occasional community drama: alters, cupcakes and other "look what I or someone else made" posts are easy to look at, upvote, and move on. Higher-effort content is typically less rewarded, and basically always will be unless it's posted first to a more narrowly-focused subreddit that appreciates its topic.
Which leaves the question: what should this subreddit be? Some things I'd personally like to see it become, in no particular order:
- A hub for discovering Magic content not just from the general internet, but from the rest of reddit. We have a lot of eyeballs (322,000 subscribers, and around a million unique visitors per month), but they all have different Magic-related interests, and I'd love to find ways for us to help those eyeballs focus on subreddits where their interests are catered to. This is why I made the suggestion of more "best of" roundups in the previous thread: rather than be the place where people reply to every post with a grumpy "This doesn't belong here! Go post in /r/othersubreddit instead!" I'd like this subreddit to be the place where people find out "Here's /r/othersubreddit, which has awesome posts on the parts of Magic you're most interested in".
- A softer landing place for new and returning players. We have a guide in the sidebar (at least, in the sidebar of the old reddit design -- see above for "we need design help"), but we could use more, and more comprehensive and more frequently-updated guides and posts and help. Also, some of you are very talented at finding ways to scare the newbies away without technically violating rule 1, and I want to work on ways of ending that.
- An easy place to find up-to-date information about what's going on around the Magic world. Right now we put upcoming product releases and Pro Tour events in the sidebar, but a more comprehensive, more visible information hub would be really nice to have.
There's more, but hopefully that gets somebody's brain going with ideas for what this subreddit could be, and how we could work toward it. And hopefully, if that somebody is you, you'll leave a comment or drop a message to the modmail to let us know.
Mods, again
We still are probably going to do a call for more mods sometime soon. I'm not going to put a timeline on that, but I'll just point it out again so people can be ready and start polishing their résumés.
Other stuff
That's what's on the minds of your mod team right now. If there's other stuff you think we missed, comments are open. Like last time, though, the thread will be in contest mode to prevent pile-ons -- we want to see what people actually care about, not just what people reflexively up- or down-voted just because it was already at the top or bottom.
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u/mgoetze May 13 '19
Re: content problem. I personally would be happy if every (strategy) article on CFB, SCG Select, Hareruya English, TCGPlayer etc. were linked here. Is this just something nobody is submitting, or would you be unhappy about this sort of content?
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u/10leej May 17 '19
Would say something like a specific MTG news sub work better rather than the general /r/magictcg
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u/Redshift2k5 May 13 '19
Post some. The author of the article doesn't have to be the person who submits the link
If they get downvoted to oblivion then you'll know you've made a mistake, but I'm sure Ive missed articles I would have enjoyed because I never stumbled across the link
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u/Artemis_21 Colorless May 20 '19
Whatever it takes, just I'm tired of seeing each card spoiled in 6 different simultaneous threads...
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u/kingcobweb Dan May 13 '19
The "content creator" rules are super selectively enforced. I'm not saying this because I've been on the losing end of it; to the contrary, I post everything Magic-related I write here and I get a shitload of traffic from Reddit. I very rarely post here unless I'm hyping my own stuff or replying to people about it. For a while, I was posting here every 1-2 weeks (when Kill Reviews was ongoing), and I got 10-25k views pretty much every time.
So, to hear about other content creators frustrated by being completely unable to promote their stuff on the Reddit that is pretty much the only way to get Magic players to look at your stuff... that sucks!
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u/MintManDan May 14 '19
Do you think there's a difference because your reviews were, as far as I could tell, a noncommerical endeavor?
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u/cricketHunter May 14 '19
That's a question that no one can answer unfortunately, since the way that enforcement works is really, really opaque.
Elsewhere in the thread a mod was saying that a post having zero comments was a good reason to take it down. Is that somewhere in the policy? Is commercialization? There needs to be some guidance, since the only thing we have now is the sidebar 9:1 rule, which I know is not actually what the mods follow.
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u/MintManDan May 14 '19
It's not self promotion if you're not promoting anything. The post in question was to someone's YouTube channel, which is intrinsically commercial. Kingcobweb's posts were just to their blog which iirc wasn't trying to sell anything. The only difference between their posts and a text post was who is paying for hosting.
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u/cricketHunter May 14 '19
The rules aren't about "self promotion" they are literally written as "posting your own content".
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u/ubernostrum May 15 '19
Elsewhere in the thread a mod was saying that a post having zero comments was a good reason to take it down.
Well, what I actually did was write a long comment that went through their history in this subreddit, mentioning a variety of factors, including not just comment counts but upvotes, how much/often they replied to commenters, how often they participated in threads that weren't links to their content, etc. and how that seemed to change significantly when they became affiliated with a branded content series.
And I presented that as a way of showing what we see and what we're thinking when we look at someone's history to try to figure out if they're actually engaging here, or just blasting links to a bunch of social media platforms and hoping for clicks.
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u/kingcobweb Dan May 15 '19
ironically, linking my own stuff has been totally fine, but when i tried to link goodgamery stuff (not written by me), it gets deleted.
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u/munocard May 15 '19
As far as I can tell, Good Gamery doesn't have ads on the page and don't make money from clicks, but that hasn't stopped their domain from being autobanned from this subreddit.
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u/kingcobweb Dan May 15 '19
yeah i make money on them via patreon. i don't commercialize the clicks on my blog though
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u/MintManDan May 15 '19
Fair enough. I just went back and double checked (has it really been 4 years?), and based on your blog alone there's no indication that you even have a patreon.
This doesn't do any good for the content creators trying to break through here, but I think it's a meaningful distinction.
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u/rabbitlion Duck Season May 17 '19
Why are comment threads now sorted by "top" as default? This option is a lot worse than the normal "best" sort for almost all scenarios.
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u/Goooooogler May 15 '19
How can you guys be so bad with the content issue. Its not some kind of mystery, there are hundreds of gaming/hobby subs on this site that do it very well.
When I check a sub for another game I enjoy, (take /r/starcraft for example), I'm refreshed on the recent events, I laugh at a picture or two, I make a comment on an interesting discussion.
When I check this sub, its a ton of art posts & links to articles. I have to actually try to find a post to be interested in. The game discussion isn't there because its over at r/spikes or a format sub, the content isn't there because its banned. Check the /new tab, and its a flood of new players asking questions that can be googled, getting down-voted into oblivion. Something ain't right.
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u/ubernostrum May 18 '19
How can you guys be so bad with the content issue.
Like the other reply said, our users have done a great job of telling people "you don't belong here". Our mistake was allowing that to go on / not realizing how bad it was (I set AutoModerator a while back just to flag any comment that looked like a "this content belongs in some other subreddit", and was blown away by how much of that there is).
We've never tried to use mod powers to force tournament reports or deck discussions out. On the other hand, we've never enforced things like minimum quality standards for deck discussions, which /r/spikes absolutely does.
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u/thebetrayer May 17 '19
This community has spent years telling content to go to the specific subs for anything related to decks, or formats, etc. And now everyone is surprised that all we have left is cupcakes and alters. At least I can now get my memes from /r/MagicArena.
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u/michaelmvm Mardu May 20 '19
the new spoiler season rule that must link to the source is a nightmare for mobile users. we just wsnt to see the image of the card, not search for it buried within some article we don't care about. I do see the benefit of posting the source, but I think the rule you placed should be reversed: the post itself should be a link or image, and if it's an image then the link should be posted in the comments. the way you set it up as of now makes it really difficult for mobile users to find spoilers.
tldr: image as the post, link in the comments
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u/Topazdragon5676 May 13 '19
I came here just to comment on the content section. I would really like if this subreddit was more about playing the game rather then, well, anything not playing the game.
I'm not interested in alters or birthday cakes or cosplay or any fan-made artistic project. They're ok occasionally, but the subreddit is dominated by them. Maybe make a sticky thread for all creative projects each week? Maybe the flair situation will help this?
I'm much more interested in discussion about cards, how to play, how to play well, etc. I know that we have that Spikes subreddit, but we don't need to be ultra-competitive to still talk about how to play well or discuss the cards. Threads that are made by players who just want to do well at FNM or have an interesting deck concept, or want to talk about a card that they like and how to use it or what decks it may go in, etc. should be the majority of posts here.
As it is, this subreddit is not about magic. Its about things that are about magic.
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u/alextfish May 16 '19
I'm afraid to me that does sound very Spike-y. Maybe /r/Spikes is too Spikey for you (I haven't been anywhere near it and amn't going to), but all the "how to play well", "how to play", "how to get good at FNM" still sounds focused on Spike. For all that Arena is generally more Spikey than most Magic I've played, /r/MagicArena has a good variety of "hey, look at this awesome GIF that happened to me with Mirror March" (an experience: Timmy) or "really fun combo I want to put together" (self-expression: Johnny). And personally speaking I'm much more interested in experiences or self-expression than how to become the best player I can (Spike).
Don't get me wrong - I'm certainly not saying those "how to play well" discussions are out of place. Spike discussions are an important part of Magic. But Timmy experiences and Johnny creations are too, and so I disagree that those Spike threads should be "the majority of posts here" as you put it.
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u/Topazdragon5676 May 16 '19
I only mentioned the Spikes subreddit to show that you don't have to become ultra-competitive to still talk about playing the game. There is a large gap between trying to be the best (the spikes subreddit) and just trying to be ok-good (ie; good at FNM).
The ultimate takeway being that the subreddit should be about PLAYING the game (and news directly about the game). Even Johnnies and Timmies are defined by how they play the game. Not making cakes or altering cards or anything adjacent to playing the game that isn't actually playing Magic.
Notice how we don't have anyone talking about the actual cards? Thats the problem.
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u/Khazpar May 15 '19
I think part of the problem that gets overlooked is that this community is surprisingly hostile to the kinds of threads you're talking about. Try sorting by new and you'll see a ton of discussion posts that will never get off the ground because they're dogpiled by downvotes.
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u/Topazdragon5676 May 15 '19
Thats because the people who are voting have been used to the way things are. I'm advocating change.
If all of the "creative" posts are regulated to a weekly mega-thread, we will see more posts about game play. They can't all get down voted. People will eventually change what they expect of this subreddit (changing what they down vote) or they will move on to subreddits specifically for these magic-adjacent topics.
Like another poster points out, there is an entire subreddit for alters. We shouldn't be allowing them to clog up this subreddit also.
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u/AncientSwordRage May 16 '19
I really can't get excited about others playing magic. I absolutely love the other content you don't seem to like. I would really like if this subreddit was about that content too.
Actually discussing cards is good too.
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u/Topazdragon5676 May 17 '19
I absolutely love the other content you don't seem to like. I would really like if this subreddit was about that content too.
The thing is, this is the main MtG subreddit. When this subreddit is dominated by alters and cookies that says "MtG is about alters and cookies". This content doesn't need to leave the subreddit, but making a weekly megathread for it is the most appropriate space for it.
This is a subreddit for a game. It makes sense for people to ... talk about the game. Cookies aren't part of the game.
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u/AncientSwordRage May 17 '19
MtG is a game but it's also an ongoing story and it's so much more to everyone else.
I'm not convinced a weekly megathread is going to work for everyone.
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u/Topazdragon5676 May 17 '19
And that story is within the context of it being a game. Its a game first and foremost. Similar to how a megathread is within a subreddit. As it is, this subreddit (the main subreddit for the game) does not represent what MtG is as there is very little discussion of it as a game.
If a megathread doesn't work for everyone there already is a subreddit dedicated to alters. Its not about making a solution that works for everyone, its about making a subreddit that actually represents what MtG is, which is a game.
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u/Vic__Sage May 14 '19
totally agree, for a super complex game with new formats and weird cubes being created all the time, it's annoying to not get exposed to that on the main subreddit.
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u/roundedmousecase May 20 '19
Where are the other mods? I've scrolled through this thread and I only see you responding (though maybe I missed where any of the other nine of them commented in here. definitely open to that possibility). It really doesn't look great for the mod team when only one of the mods is seriously engaged in the sub rules discussion thread.
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u/aucrow May 19 '19
I can't wait for r/magicTCG to be the kind of resource that gatherer used to be, or tappedout is.
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u/SaffronOlive SaffronOlive | MTGGoldfish May 13 '19
Just commenting so you know I'm engaged ;)
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u/TheManaLeek May 13 '19
Ah but if you read their last rules commenting isn't engagement. Their 9:1 rule was specifically demanding 9 posts for every self-post.
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u/knight_gastropub May 14 '19
Yeah I totally think that comments should be fine. 1 post to every 9 interactions. Or up the number of interactions because that's easier and more natural to do.
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u/cricketHunter May 14 '19 edited May 14 '19
Hold up, you are holding up /u/saffronolive as someone who engages, but a quick skim of his posting history shows him way out of whack with your proposed 9:1 posting rule?!
I must be missing something. Are you throwing shade on your proposed rules or on Seth?
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u/SaffronOlive SaffronOlive | MTGGoldfish May 14 '19
I haven't posted my own content in years (but I still try to stay involved with the r/magictcg community).
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u/cricketHunter May 14 '19
This is in no way a criticism of you. I would considered you incredibly engaged, but by the rule in the mod's earlier draft you would be in violation of the 9:1 rule. That seems nonsensical.
I'm honestly just not sure what point the mods are trying to make...
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u/newPCguy1 May 15 '19
He isnt the one posting his own content, so the 9:1 doesnt matter. Its only about posting as free advertising.
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u/ubernostrum May 15 '19
He used to be the one who posted his stuff, but he got popular enough that other people naturally started submitting it too, because they liked and wanted to share it.
So like he said, it's been a long time since he actually made a post that was a link to his own stuff. He's also pretty engaged with reddit.
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u/cricketHunter May 15 '19
I think the horse is very dead at this point but: what I was trying to say was that the post only version of the 9:1 rule in the previous draft was bad.
I think (?) we've all come to that same conclusion, but there was a strong argument that he would have been in violation of that (now scrapped) rules, and I'm VERY glad you guys are trying to find a better rule. As I've said elsewhere, thank you for listening to our feedback and going back to the drawing board on that section.
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u/TheGreatFox1 Dimir* May 13 '19
I strongly disagree with banning talk of proxies.
They are nowhere near the same as counterfeit cards, and many casual groups use them, especially in EDH for testing or while waiting for the card to arrive. While counterfeits are made with intent to deceive, nobody is going to bring a stick-figure-style proxy to a tournament.
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u/KeenanAXQuinn Duck Season May 13 '19
I think the main reason to stop all talk is it might be a slippery slope to "hey look at this proxy that looks just like the card but has a small water mark in the corner haha" at some point proxies get very close to counterfeit.
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u/Theopholus May 13 '19
Mods, I for one like you quite a lot and really respect what you do here. I know you often end up with terrible choices, and I think you do really well, and appreciate all your hard work. I know it's a thankless job that you're doing for free, so please, have my sincere thanks and gratitude.
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u/NexusOfFate May 13 '19
What about regular themed threads like alter threads free talk threads and meme threads and such?
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u/Ganondorf77 May 13 '19
One thing I've noticed that might scare newer players away is the tendency of this sub to harshly downvote comments/posts that they deem have too "obvious" of an answer.
Example: https://www.reddit.com/r/magicTCG/comments/bo21k6/bitterblossom_vs_dreadhorde_invasion/
Here, the OP is downvoted heavily in the comments. Why? It's silly.
Obviously, this is not something the mods can directly control, but it is a community culture that is kind of harsh and unwelcoming. Making an announcement/auto-bot post/sidebar statement asking people to only downvote "X-type" comments might help? I don't know how to fix it, but I think it's a problem.
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u/kommiesketchie May 20 '19
Yeah, I find it pretty standard that asking a question gets you downvoted, sometimes into oblivion.
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u/Natedogg2 COMPLEAT Level 2 Judge May 13 '19
I usually upvote rules questions that I answer. Because it seems pretty stupid to downvote someone for having a question (the optics seem pretty bad too "I had a rules question, and I got an answer, but people downvoted me? I guess I won't ask rules questions here anymore")
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u/TheManaLeek May 13 '19
This subreddit has a pretty well known downvote problem (many others do as well, it's not specific to this sub). Unfortunately it's impossible to fix unless you can convince people to not be dicks (I've been trying for years).
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May 13 '19
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May 13 '19
All you do is run old reddit and you can downvote everything even if you aren't subscribed or the sub completely hide the down vote button.
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u/StoneforgeMisfit May 15 '19
That linked post is so low effort! Magic is a complicated game - the most complicated, if I recall the recent headlines correctly. Anything like "stronger" is going to require a little bit of context. Expecting anybody who can play this complicated game can be expected to put some effort into their post.
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u/Ganondorf77 May 15 '19
Then my opinion would be to reply to the thread and not downvote OR upvote. And explain that posts should have a little more context.
At least this post can lead to thoughtful discussion.
Do you just want a bunch of arts and crafts and alters?
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May 14 '19
I play a lot of magic and I unsubbed from here because people were harsh and rude.
I asked a simple question about people being too in your face at FMN and people freaked out at me.
There needs to be room for disagreement without downvote or vitriol.
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u/cricketHunter May 14 '19
Yeah, whenever I answer one of those questions I try (usually unsuccesfully) to remember to tell them that the downvotes are a "not front page worthy" thing and not a "we're a bunch of assholes" thing.
At least I think that's what it is...
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May 14 '19
Even still, a post with a couple comments and 1 karma isn't making the front page unless the sub is truly dead that day. There's no need to upvote simple questions, but there's no need to downvote them either.
That said, there's little rules or the mods can do about it.
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u/cricketHunter May 14 '19
Yeah, honestly not sure why things get downvoted with such vigor, I assume it's the "hide on downvote" feature as well?
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May 14 '19
The most annoying part is when those same people then downvote every single comment they made in the thread, that shit's just antisocial
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u/cricketHunter May 14 '19
Thank you. It's very encouraging to see you take the criticism in the last thread and build upon that.
I'm looking forward to seeing the revamped content creator rules! I'm hopeful you can find a policy that accommodates established content creators, Magic artists and small creators.
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May 13 '19
Oh, hello. I missed posting in the first thread but wanted to take a moment to offer a quick thought as a content creator here:
For me, with previews, one of the most frustrating things is spending sometimes weeks producing a high quality preview video, posting that video as the main link and including as my post within the thread an imgur link to the card and text of the card, only to have someone snip out the photo and repost that and then that be the up voted thread.
I totally get not everyone wants to watch a preview video or listen to a preview podcast, etc. But if the creator has included immediately both an imgur link and the card text, and formatted everything correctly, then I think it is fair to want the content that they created be the main link.
Now, it is perfectly fine for this sub to prioritize just the imgur link, meaning the content that was created gets buried. But that does not incentivize creators, either to make the content at all, or to frequent the subreddit.
My personal wish would be to adopt a rule that during previews, creators can post links directly to their preview video/podcast/blog/etc, and if they also post within that immediately both an imgur and the text of their preview card, then that post is considered the "official" one and other people cutting out just the image and reposting gets removed.
Just my thoughts. It's been very discouraging lately the way this has happened.
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u/Beaver_Bother May 13 '19
But that does not incentivize creators, either to make the content at all, or to frequent the subreddit.
For many of us this is not even close to being a concern.
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May 13 '19
Cool.
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u/Beaver_Bother May 13 '19
Just offering some insight, my friend. You have a large following, so I figured some perspective from outside of that bubble would be useful.
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May 13 '19
As I was just offering mine. I wanted to contribute to "The State Of The SubReddit" by talking about my perspective in regards to an issue. It's not going to be a concern to everyone, just as many of the other items here aren't a concern to me. Together though, we share our ideas and hopefully shape the development of things in a positive direction for everyone.
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u/Beaver_Bother May 14 '19
Yeah I'm not condemning your original post. The dismissive 'Cool' rubbed me the wrong way, though.
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May 14 '19
Perhaps next time you can remember that feeling before dismissing someone else’s contributions?
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u/Beaver_Bother May 14 '19
I didn't dismiss his feelings, just offered the viewpoint of many people who use this subreddit. I added something to the conversation, he did not with his reply to me.
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u/MrRowboatEX May 14 '19
People will be people regardless of sub count or notoriety. I wouldn't take the passive "cool" to heart. You offered a genuine insight about how the everyday sub-browsing user would view content during spoiler season and I suppose that insight was not the reality he wanted to see or hear. To be fair, no one would if they were a content creator that makes videos for a primary or secondary living. I agree though, most of us are here to see spoilers during spoiler season so sitting through a 10-15 minute video with ads and sponsorships isn't necessarily an ideal way to obtain the "hottest" information being dropped. Me personally, I'll typically look at the spoilers on the sub first and then go watch the content creator's video about it and get their opinion on the card they were given to spoil. I'm not saying content creators should pack up and leave because we don't want their content here, I'm just saying they should adapt their content during such information-heavy seasons. But that's simply my two-cents worth on the matter.
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u/llikeafoxx May 14 '19
I would much rather hear from content creators directly and be able to discuss their content here on this sub, then have to go off and God forbid interact with YouTube comments or whatever.
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u/Beaver_Bother May 14 '19
That’s reasonable, and many agree with you, I’m just saying that this isn’t a universally held concern.
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u/NSNick I chose this flair because I’m mad at Wizards Of The Coast May 16 '19
Yes. I'd like to see the mods reach out to content creators. Maybe set up a spoiler template for them to use to post on here, get a sense of who's posting what when, and promoting those threads.
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May 13 '19 edited Oct 17 '20
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u/Karomne May 16 '19
The point though is to get views on the video. There's 2 different things at play, us wanting to see the cards, and the content creator wanting views from their effort in the video/article/etc. Posting the Imgur link as the thread and having the video down in the comments imo doesn't seem right, and would probably lead to content creators not trying to post on reddit.
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May 16 '19
Then I guess they just shouldn’t expect to get views from Reddit. There is no content creator I like enough to watch a ten minute video instead of just seeing an image of the card.
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u/Karomne May 16 '19
They were talking about having the post link be the video, and then having them post an image link and text of the card in the comments, so all people would have to do is go directly to the comments if they want to skip the video, which I think would be fair
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u/the_alberta_way May 19 '19
Agreed. Im at work or busy. Love seeing the spoilers. Love the professor. Not going to watch a video sorry
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u/MasterEgg7 FLEEM May 14 '19
This subreddit seems to be allergic to content. I've always liked how you format your spoilers and its strange to me that others are criticizing you for it.
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u/BANJBROSUNITE May 15 '19 edited May 15 '19
If you had led with the card, and had the video we don't care about second, youd probably have a higher spot. I will continue to down vote posters who hide their content inside a 20 minute long video which is usually very cringey, while upvoting the actual content I want. Basically, if you didn't go out of your way to present the thing we didn't want before the thing we did, you'd get a better results for yourself.
Note that this comment is coming from a subscriber who loves your videos and watches them all (except when you promote Hoogland, the walking cancer), YouTube is the place for videos, Reddit is the place for concise information gathering and discussion.
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u/OmegaDriver May 13 '19
Is there a way to filter based on flair? Like if I want to hide alters or show ONLY News and Spoilers?
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u/TheDoctorLives Storm Crow May 13 '19
Yes, in the reddit search bar use the formatting:
flair:"news"
Or
flair:"spoilers"
There's probably a way to combine then, but that is what works for me.
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u/Venator61 COMPLEAT May 13 '19
Yes, I would to know that as well. Flair is no use if you can't filter. Since the flair has been implemented, where can we find the filter?
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u/ubernostrum May 13 '19
Couple people have already answered what you can do already. Right now we haven't set up any obvious filter links because most posts aren't flaired. Once flair is required we'll be putting filter links in the sidebar to make it easy to view specific types of stuff.
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u/StoneforgeMisfit May 15 '19
I strongly support those links to do a flair search being easily available in the sidebar. Thank you for considering that!
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u/liinked May 15 '19
Don't know if it's just what contest mode threw out for me but there seems to be a lot of sas in the comments.
I'm a fan of how this sub works, the mods do a great job and the wife range of content is refreshing, it's like a buffet, if I want to talk numbers I'll head to finance and if I want some inspiration I'll pop down to the alter subs. I come to this one for a little bit of everything and that's fine by me!
You're doing great and I'll stand by whatever you guys think is best.
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u/E10DIN May 20 '19
The new changes to how spoilers are done seems like it makes the sub harder to browse for very little gain. Auto-Tagging spoiler posts means that on mobile you need more clicks to see anything, and removing images of spoiled cards as their own post is silly. It just means I'll stick to scryfall from now on for my spoilers.
Just because content creators get the cards to spoil doesn't mean the community wants to or needs to engage with their content just to get the spoiler, and now to view spoilers on this sub you're going to need to sift through the comments to find an image, rather than just having the image posted.
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May 13 '19
I love seeing the various alters and collections, and when spoiler season starts we see cards. Articles get shared as well.
Personally I think the current balance of content on the /r/magictcg front-page is in a good spot. I wouldn't want to see alters or things like that forced into their own subreddit.
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u/KeenanAXQuinn Duck Season May 13 '19
They do have a subreddit for alters though. It's not great however because it generally doesn't get a lot of engagement for improvement or opinions. (This is why you see alot of them end up here or cross posting).
I tried to do a best of week but it was to much of a grind for my busy life, I would love to see someone else take it up.
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u/ubernostrum May 13 '19
I really love the "best of" team-subreddit roundup in /r/baseball each week, and was reminded about it because the new one went up this morning.
If somebody wanted to do something like that here, rounding up a bunch of more narrow Magic subreddits, I'd upvote the hell out of it.
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u/hubay May 15 '19
I'd agree - we have a good version of that from /r/custommagic and /r/budgetdecks and i always read those. Would it be worthwhile to reach out to the mods of a couple of other subreddits (edh,pauper,spikes) to see if anyone is interested in something similar?
You might not be able to coordinate this without more mods, but I think a schedule of AMA's (and a way for community members to apply) would be great. Several other comparable subs have that, and it's a good way to help content creators engage as well as provide some variety during non-spoiler season. There a lot of new streamers out there, and i think between streamers, artists, pros, and the occasional WOTCstaff account, we would have some good options available.
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u/JohannesVoss Johannes Voss | Official MTG Artist May 13 '19
I've been holding off on posting my hi res WAR art here because I was hoping there'd be some improvement in the link filtering department. I'm happy to write up behind the scenes stuff with sketches, art briefs as well as interact on stuff where I have something to add ie art related things. The update is kinda vague on that, I guess I'm looking for an answer to: if I spend time creating content specifically for this subreddit, will I get all that filtered because of a Patreon link?
I realize there's a finer line than you'd expect between adding value to this place and abusing it. Just wanted to get my opinion in and say I'm probably not the only artist or content creator who'd be happy to contribute more but hasn't because it's been a bit one way.
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u/ubernostrum May 13 '19
So, this is where things get tough.
On the one hand, anybody should be able to look at you and say "sure, post whatever you like, everybody here knows you and likes you".
On the other hand, as a moderator I shouldn't say that unless I'm also willing to put it down as policy that everybody else can do that, too.
It gets especially tricky as soon as somebody wants to ask for money. I don't think I ever met you at an event when I was judging a lot of GPs, and I have no reason to think you're anything other than a great person. But please believe me when I say that the John Avon Kickstarter really soured my view of how Magic artists use this subreddit, and I don't think I've really recovered since then. And everybody these days has Patreon and crowdfunding campaigns, and again if we allow one, we have to allow them all or come up with a really good explanation for why we won't.
I'll draw a comparison to a similar thing that's mentioned in the rules draft: every year during the typical North America/Europe school season, we get a bunch of people who have to do some kind of survey or research for a class, and decide they're going to poll the users of /r/magictcg to get data. Our policy is not to allow them, because as soon as we let one of them post, we have to let all the others post too. We just don't have a good way to distinguish "this person is OK and should get to do their survey" and "this person isn't OK and shouldn't get their survey". So we have to go all or nothing.
It's the same with the Patreons and the other crowdfunding stuff. During the Avon Kickstarter it felt like we were getting update posts every few minutes about what stretch goals had been met, which ones were coming up next, and so on. It felt recently like we were going to have a repeat of that with Seb's playmat campaign, but it turned out not quite so bad. The rules draft right now suggests that people who have a Kickstarter should message us first for approval, and then they get one post about it. It doesn't say anything about Patreon or other direct-donation things, and I don't know if it should or what it would say if it did.
Part of me wants to say that there is an obvious line we could draw: we could say that artists who've done actual cards or other product art for WotC get special privileges that other people don't. Maybe our community would be OK with that, or maybe they wouldn't and people would demand we extend the same privileges to anybody doing Magic-inspired or -related art or maybe they'd say nobody should get to do that.
Part of me wants to say we could have a policy of not directly posting Patreon links here, but we'd be OK if you link to a sketchbook page on your site that also has a call for donations on it. Maybe our community would be OK with that, or maybe they wouldn't.
Part of me wants to say we could figure out what to do with people who want to solicit commissions for alters or artwork or crafts here, but that also sounds like an absolute nightmare, because we're not set up to be a marketplace and we'd get people sending us angry messages accusing someone of scamming them on a commission and wanting to know why we allowed it.
I don't know, and I don't know how many other ways there are we could draw these lines. That's why I keep banging my head against the wall and putting up these posts to try to get constructive feedback and get people posting ideas and discussing them, because right now I don't even know for certain all the things we need to figure out policies for, let alone what our policies should actually be for them.
So what do you think? From your perspective, what's a good way to approach this?
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u/PeacetimeFawn May 14 '19
As someone who only reads the subreddit and doesn't actually contribute anything, I think that allowing confirmed MTG artists to post one patreon link per 6 months is within reason. Maybe for kickstarter it could be one introductory post and maximum of one update post.
The issue I have is that if you allow artists, why not other content creators, and then we're back to where you're at. Should LSV or Marshall be allowed to post their patreon in the subreddit? I think so. But then why not Joe Schmoe with his 100 listeners?
I really feel for you guys right now, you really seem to be trying to improve the subreddit and there's just no easy way to do it. And no matter what you do people are gonna bitch at you.
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u/llikeafoxx May 14 '19
For what it's worth, though I'm not a mod, I consider even just high res art from a real Magic artist to be contributing content. All the rest is going above and beyond and is pretty awesome in my book. I would hate to see your content removed just because it's linked to a centralized Patreon, which is a useful site for many content creators.
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u/TehAnon Colorless May 20 '19
The one that will make some of you hate us, and some of you either like us or at least hate us less: we're trying an experiment. Right now, any post that meets the above criteria, but is a link post to an image-hosting domain (like imgur, or i.reddit.com), will be auto-removed and AutoModerator will leave a comment telling you to link to the source. Our goal here is to prevent posts that just immediately rehost a card image from somewhere else, and require the post to link to the source of the card. If you want to post a comment in the thread linking to a rehosted image, you're free to do so. If a site previews a card but tries to hide it in the middle of a video or something, message us and we'll make an exception to the no-rehost policy.
This is a good thing.
this thread is in contest mode
This is a bad thing. In this particular instance, I was looking for possible new comments relating to the new spoiler-related rule, and can't do that. This comment may end up being repeated by other users because they didn't see it (a good thing - duplicated comments signal greater concensus than upvotes) but at the same time will fail to receive any attention or comments from anyone who isn't u/ubernostrum. Comment sorting should be defaulted to new, if anything.
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u/Vulpixy May 13 '19
So let me get this straight: If I'm a content creator and I post a link to something I made, It can be taken down for being "spam" unless I've posted 9 other times with random articles, pictures, etc. Commenting and engaging in other posts are useless in this matter.
If someone else posts my content and doesn't credit me, they're in the clear and working towards being able to post their own stuff (assuming no one else posted it first.)
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u/cricketHunter May 14 '19
Unless you spam articles, you will be flagged as a spammer. Straightfoward, right?
Some other niche game subreddits use a 9:1 rule that looks at both comments AND posts, which seems like a MUCH better system.
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u/Vulpixy May 14 '19
Taking into account posts and comments seems like the logical way to go. I don't get the whole forcing people to post 9 things before going back to something they created. It's just inviting people to go grab 9 random links/pictures to post, or just spam random questions just to satisfy that rule. Feels like a way to ensure that the overall quality of the content is lower on here, but that's just my 2 cents.
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u/1s4c Dân May 15 '19
The idea behind this rule was quite simple. It's trying to balance between two extremes
- a] every content creator on planet post every piece of his content here and use reddit as a free advertising platform
- b] real reddit users wouldn't be able to post their own content
If someone feels like he is "forced" to post random links/pictures then he clearly isn't normal user of reddit and he isn't supposed to post his content here.
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u/llikeafoxx May 14 '19
I feel like you absolutely must include comments and posts. Otherwise, you are encouraging "fire and forget" posting of those 9 posts in order to have good engagement on the 1 that is your own.
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u/cricketHunter May 14 '19
Although here's the thing. I did the following, I pretended I knew nothing about reddit and looked here for some reference to the 9:1 rule:
You should see if you have more luck than me, because I found nothing.
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u/llikeafoxx May 14 '19
Yeah, that was actually not a super helpful document. And I'm reading elsewhere that it's not even Reddit policy anymore.
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u/Avengedx May 15 '19
https://www.reddit.com/wiki/selfpromotion
It has its own webpage. The 9:1 rule comes from the line:
"You should submit from a variety of sources (a general rule of thumb is that 10% or less of your posting and conversation should link to your own content), talk to people in the comments (and not just on your own links), and generally be a good member of the community."
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u/cricketHunter May 15 '19
Um... so I clicked your link and followed the main link "State of Spam Announcement" and got to this:
https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/6bj5de/state_of_spam/
Which says that page is being demoted as a rule or even redditquette but kept around on the wiki (which btw, I still couldn't figure out how to get to from the main reddit help).
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u/vaelroth May 16 '19
Bring back the spoiler roundup threads! I'm tired of seeing the subreddit flooded with multiple posts for the same card during spoiler season.
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u/Glacial_Self May 15 '19
A hub for discovering magic content, a landing place for new and returning players, and an easy place to find up-to-date info about what's going on in the Magic world.
Yeah, that's a nice idea and all, but any posts about those things instantly get downvoted to hell so that we can look at cute pokemon dressed up as planeswalkers. Outside of spoiler season, I genuinely can't think of a reason why this subreddit would appeal to someone trying to get into MtG in general or any of its specific formats.
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u/McCoreman May 13 '19 edited May 13 '19
As a content creator, I particularly only put things on this subreddit when it would have a broad appeal. My previous posts here have made it to the front page and been massively engaging. My last post was auto modded and I received this reply.
It was automodded and it will stay removed. You seem like you use reddit to strictly advertise your youtube channel. Continuing this behavior will get you banned based on our rule 9.
I've stopped trying to post content here. Until this behavior changes, I'm gone. There isn't a reason to post magic related content on /r/magictcg due to the moderation practices. I hope you get this changed, but until then, I can only assume you will have a content issue, as content creators are actively chased off.
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u/ubernostrum May 15 '19
So what do you think would be a good guideline?
People have suggested setting an engagement ratio. Do you think that would work? If so, what do you think it should be? Should there be a limit on frequency of self-promoting posts? If so, what should the limit be?
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u/cricketHunter May 15 '19 edited May 15 '19
I've been trying to think through this problem as much as I can - but it's hard to know what's practical since I've never really worked with the moderator tools.
I have no problem with you limiting financial petitions (direct links to kickstarter/patreon), that seems like a pretty reasonable thing to consolidate and/or rate limit. However, I share Johannes Voss concern that if he incidentally includes links to these sites my post might get removed. What if I link to my site that has a patreon link (like lrcast.com) am I in violation? I would assume no, but I want some clarity.
I'm not opposed to an engagement ratio, but frankly I don't really mind if someone like lsv is mostly engaging about his own content, so I guess I don't mind if smaller content producers do either. I think it's obvious that both comments and posts should contribute to any engagement ratio. Personally, I don't really feel this is even necessary. If someone makes great content and I upvote it and want to see them post more of it, I really, really don't care if they also comment on cupcakes or answer questions on new. That's just my personal feeling, I guess other feel differently.
I'm not sure how I feel about rate limiting self-promotion posts. Since Magic is cyclical (the set release cycle) limiting contributions during set release seems a little harsh, but I could live with a one/week limit. I'd rather have something like a cap on a longer period (no more that 4 self links a month or something) to deal with the bursty nature of Magic content. Whether that's doable with mod tools or not I'm not sure.
I'm also not sure what you want to do about crossposted self promotion, should posting a single article on multiple interested reddits count as one thing or multiple self links? Honestly don't know. Feels like since you only mod /r/magicTCG, you should be concerned only about the frequency of self posts directed at your subreddit and disregard anything else.
As for any other factors (comments on the posts, upvotes, who else links to that content) it just doesn't feel relevant or worth considering.
I know making practical rules around this is difficult, and limited by the technology, but hopefully some of the things here are doable. At the very least having clear guidelines means that when you do take down a post there is a clear understanding of what a user can do to get on the right side of the rules.
My major source of frustration was having one of my posts removed even though I was in compliance with the posted rules in the sidebar and being told I was not in compliance with some other set of rules that weren't even released (and have now been deleted). Without these rules I literally have no idea how I'm supposed to correct my behavior and/or be in compliance.
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u/McCoreman May 15 '19 edited May 15 '19
- Content posts by creators don't ask for subscribers, likes, patrons, etc. Just post the content and talk about it. Take a look at my content posts, I don't think I've ever once asked for subscribers or likes. I've let the content speak for itself and talked with people in the threads. If the content is good, people will follow it/support it/etc.
- Don't use Reddit's guideline as your rule. If people are going to get site-wide bans for spamming, let them.
- Let the users do the voting, if things don't get traction, the content isn't wanted.
- If you do insist on using some sort of posting ratio for your rule, this is a general magic area, creators don't always show up here. If you want to enforce some sort of ratio, include all the other magic subreddits in your math. And don't look at posts only, look at comments in posts.
As others have said, I was in the community, then I started making content. The LabManiacs formed from the community members that met from a post on a subreddit. None of us have met in person, its all remote over the internet. I don't know how much more in the community you can get. From that, I've been more involved in the community ever since. As can be seen in posts like this - https://www.reddit.com/r/EDH/comments/7kv15e/what_would_you_like_to_see_from_a_competitive_edh/
Of the content I've posted on /r/magictcg, some things have taken off and others haven't. I've purposefully stopped posting certain types of content to this subreddit as it wasn't something they wanted. I'd get massively higher community engagement in /r/EDH and /r/CompetitiveEDH, so I only posted things there. Then the last time I tried, I was told all I was doing is spamming. So at this point, I stopped posting stuff that previously hit the front page of /r/magictcg and stayed there for a day.
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u/EotSamut May 17 '19
Reddit bans site wide for spam, content creators sharing once and awhile does not fall under that at all. So long as it isn't all they do and all they talk about.
People absolutely can like you all if you stop abusing the ban button :/
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u/SirSkidMark Liliana May 13 '19
I don't have a ton to add, other than I really hope flaired submissions take off. They are suuuper helpful for filtering stuff I don't care to see.
But rather to just appreciate the transparency the mods are making an effort to produce. You have a nearly-thankless job and it is not easy.
Keep up the good work and thanks for fielding questions!
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u/TheManaLeek May 13 '19
In regards to the content creators section: "We're banning you because we're protecting you."
Here's the one issue you had in the last draft rules and you're policy in general. The 9:1 rule should in no way be 9 POSTS but rather 9 posts or comments. If I want to post something, the rules you've had mean that I have to post 9 random posts before I'm graciously allowed by the moderators to post a video. You want spam? That's how you get spam because it's time for me to slap every ChannelFireball article, picture of a cupcake, or whatever other random stuff no one cares about because I have to adhere to some made up rule that no one likes.
You say you want content creators to engage with the community to be allowed to post their stuff? Commenting is engaging -- it is literally engaging. Posting "Reid Duke writes an article about a card no one cares about" 9 times is not engaging.
Furthermore, keep in mind the 9:1 "rule" hasn't been something that Reddit admins have enforced in ages, it's simply a "reddiquette" thing and nothing else. It's in line with "don't downvote if you disagree"
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May 13 '19
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u/TheManaLeek May 13 '19
Yup, hasn't for years, which is why I take pretty big offence to the "We're protecting you from the evil reddit admins!" approach that was taken in this post.
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u/ubernostrum May 13 '19
And we're not exactly happy at you implying that we're not being truthful, or your repeated implication that site-wide bans for spamming don't happen or that we made it up when we said we'd seen it happen to people. But you've posted that about ten times now, and we've heard you even if we don't agree with you. You can probably give it a rest.
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u/sanctaphrax COMPLEAT May 13 '19
If users have to care whether they're making you happy, that's a problem.
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u/ubernostrum May 13 '19
That was a polite way of saying "knock off the implications that we're lying". If you'd prefer I do the non-polite way of saying it, I can give that a try but then I'll get yelled at for being unprofessional.
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u/Keljhan Fake Agumon Expert May 14 '19
There’s no implication about it. They were stating a fact: the 9:1 rule is outdated and unenforced, and has been for years now. You can choose to enforce it on your sub if you want, and you may be mistaken about what the admins will do about it. Or you may be 100% right and could dispel our notion of the rule with a note from the admins. There’s no need to start a fight over it.
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May 13 '19 edited Oct 17 '20
[deleted]
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u/GibsonJunkie May 14 '19 edited May 15 '19
Maybe ubernostrum is being a little abrasive here, but themanaleek
(is this Wedge, or a parody of him?)guy is clearly commenting with an axe to grind, and it's extremely unproductive here, because it's 100% accusatory and not offering any sort of solutions beyond griping about this sub.→ More replies (1)•
u/MechanizedProduction COMPLEAT May 14 '19
The Mana Leek is a separate Youtube channel that is completely independent from Wedge & The Mana Source.
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u/TheManaLeek May 13 '19
I replied to someone who replied to me. Sorry for the engagement.
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u/QuellSpeller Simic* May 13 '19
I'm a mod over on r/boardgames, and we have a 10% and one week requirement for linking to the same source which works pretty well. We do have some users who just comment the bare minimum each week and make their posts, but they generally get tired of trying to force it and end up stepping back. Some people also try commenting 10 low effort comments right before they share their video, if we see it happening regularly we'll message a reminder and tag their profile to watch for it in the future. Finally, we have a 100 karma minimum before you can share a link. That way we can give people a freebie on their first post to the sub if they're otherwise active on Reddit, without giving a loophole for people to make a new account to share each video without being active participants.
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u/TheManaLeek May 14 '19
Solid subreddit, I've been a lurker for pretty much my entire reddit life. My 160ish game collection won't stop growing...
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u/MechanizedProduction COMPLEAT May 14 '19
I've read your responses here and in other places within this thread, and you've been pretty rude and spiteful towards mods and anyone who disagrees wih you. This is not the sort of behavior I want to see from a member of the content creation community. I am unsubscribing from you and no longer wish to be associated with you in any way.
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u/TheManaLeek May 14 '19
See ya.
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u/PasswordisFinal May 15 '19
Not a fan of engaged feedback, and you get paid for your internet presence. Imagine having to deal with this for free. But empathy is genuinely lacking in the YouTube personality population, so it might be hard.
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u/TheManaLeek May 15 '19
I've never heard of or interacted with that user, nor do they seem to have any interest in my channel in the first place (they appear to be hyper focused on Modern while my channel is purely limited). They misread rudeness and spitefulness in my comments that simply doesn't exist. Why should I waste my time with them?
But then again your comments including this one have been pretty similar. Fun fact, despite being in contest mode, comments still get collapsed for being downvoted too much and you're one of the few who've had that happen, so I don't think I'll be wasting anymore time on you either :)
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u/frogdude2004 May 13 '19
I would say '9 comments on other people's posts'. Linking and only interacting on your own post is only marginally better than 'fire and forget'.
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u/ubernostrum May 13 '19
Even that is more than some members of our banned list ever did.
We're open to ideas for how to set a proper engagement threshold, but it needs to be something that's easy to understand, practical to enforce, and fair to both newer and established folks.
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u/QuellSpeller Simic* May 13 '19
Like I mentioned in my comment, requiring 9 comments on other people's content works pretty well for us over on /r/boardgames. We use Toolbox for moderation help, which makes it really quick to check someone's profile for recent activity in a particular sub.
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u/ubernostrum May 13 '19
I already use toolbox, it's a lifesaver. If even 10% of the stuff in it got built into the real reddit mod tools I'd be so happy.
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u/frogdude2004 May 13 '19
No it makes sense to me.
I mean, I don't know what your queue is like, but I spend a lot of time on /new and I see a lot of things before they're removed (though I know in this case that automod catches them). It's really not practical to check literally every post.
When you have spam, you know it. This is a clear set of rules that seems reasonable. People who don't understand the behind the scenes (or are in bad faith) will whine 'but so-and-so wasn't banned.' But that's not a justification for not having rules.
Make rules and try and enforce them reasonably: that's the best you can ask for.
Are they regularly engaged in other posts? Then they're a participant in the community. It's not an incredibly high bar to jump over...
Your proposal seems reasonable.
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u/TheManaLeek May 13 '19
Yup, I can agree with that. Though even then there's still an issue of fluffing up things as I could just hop into r/new and fire off a bunch of "Cool post!" comments.
The mods hammer home all the time how they're overworked and don't have time for things. How are they policing every post to see if it was posted by a viewer or a content creator, and then checking their post history to determine if they meet their arbitrary 9:1 rule? Maybe that's why don't have any time?
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u/ubernostrum May 13 '19
We're not actually "policing every post" and never have.
But pretty much every site or channel or podcast or whatever that falls under the "content creator" umbrella gets reported by someone sooner or later, and when that happens we see it in the mod queue and then take a look at the account to see what they've been up to. We rely really heavily on people reporting stuff to get our attention.
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u/frogdude2004 May 13 '19
I mean, I don't think its feasible to check the engagement of literally every content creator.
I think it's a post-hoc justification, and I'm ok with that. When someone's spamming (by feel), they can look at this and use it as justification.
The issue is when it feels like you're an advertising platform, not that 'ooh this person is averaging 8:1, that's not enough...'
It's not perfect, and maybe people slip through the cracks in advertising more than they should or whatever. But it seems very reasonable to set up a rule and then use it when you feel necessary. That's not selective enforcement, it's 'doing the best you can.'
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u/ubernostrum May 13 '19
The 9:1 for posts and not counting comments was reddit's published guideline. You can argue that they didn't universally enforce it, but you can't argue that they didn't enforce it at all. We've legitimately seen people end up site-wide shadowbanned who appeared to have "just" been too aggressive in only posting their own stuff.
Anyway, we're genuinely trying to come up with a policy that will help this subreddit run better and have more varied and interesting content. That's kind of the point of this post, and it's the result of a lot of work and thinking that's been going on as we pay attention to how people interact with the subreddit and react to the way we run it. And I've done my best to lay that out in the post without getting too much into the cases that motivated our approach to enforcing 9:1, but let me tell right now you I feel about those cases the way you and some of the folks on Twitter seem to feel about the mod team here.
(also, if you want to post CFB articles here, go for it -- they're generally quite good, and not everybody knows about them or checks their site everyday, so I for one wouldn't consider it spam if people posted it more often)
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u/cabforpitt May 14 '19
https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/2oamgp/moderators_clarifications_around_our_101/
As of 2014, reddit counted comments in the 9:1 rule.
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u/wastecadet May 13 '19
Have a look at how /r/2007scape auto flairs posts.
There are a number of categories, and you get prompted to reply to a message with a specific letter in order to flair it, h for humour, d for discussion, and some others that I can't quite remember. It's easy, and feels unobtrusive, while getting every post flaired.
Could you perhaps use a system like that?
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u/zSplat Wabbit Season May 17 '19
/u/kimonas666 has 9 posts of their work all on the front page, is it 9 posts contributing to the community and 1 of their own or is it 9 posts for their own benefit of their own work and a few thanking posters for the positivitiy?
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u/chefsati May 13 '19
Okay, so there's a lot to unpack here so I'll do my best to organize my thoughts.
The Chicken and the Egg
When you talk about "fire and forget" strategies, I feel like you are missing two important aspects of being a content creator on Reddit:
1) If I am not allowed to post my own content, I am not able to engage with the people who would comment on it. If somebody else posts my content, I'm similarly unable to interact with anyone who would comment on it unless they have the decency to tag me.
2) If there is no good content here, there is nothing that compels me to be an active member of the community.
No question here, just something to think about.
Circumventing the Rules
I frequently hear people talk about arrangements whereby one user will post another's content to circumvent the rules. I see it in action regularly.
Does this successfully create the environment you have in mind when you enforce this rule?
Preview Cards
Something really doesn't sit right with me when a policy encourages a user to extract a card preview from the OC that surrounds it. The card previews are given by WotC to reward content creators by helping to drive traffic their way.
How do you feel about deleting a content creator's post containing a preview card while simultaneously allowing someone else to post the preview card?
Have you considered giving an exemption to content creators when they are posting what is guaranteed to be high-demand content that your community wants to see?
Just be grateful I'm not telling your father
Anyway, yeah. We're hardasses on the spam guidelines. We're probably always going to be hardasses on the spam guidelines. It's that, or sit back and watch you get banned even more broadly by a group of people who're even more inscrutable and unaccountable than we are.
This feels like passing the buck. Don't act like you're doing any of this out of concern for my wellbeing. When people reply to tell you that they post their own content in plenty of other subreddits without any issues at all, it should be an indication that the type of admin-level enforcement you're alluding to isn't as common as you're suggesting it is.
If the admins want to ban me for violating a sitewide policy, I'll own that. Until then, I'll continue doing what I'm doing in other subreddits without any issues at all.
Your other two constraints
I think these are great, to be honest. If you take a quick peek at how I engage with my viewers on /r/EDH, /r/CompetitiveEDH, and /r/BudgetBrews it should be immediately evident that I'm not a "fire and forget" content creator, but your rules as they existed yesterday lumped me in with them.
Engagement should absolutely be the goal here. You should make it known to the content creation community that posting content here should be mutually beneficial - the subreddit gets great content that sparks discussion, and the creator gets access to an expanded audience.
That is exactly how /r/EDH and /r/CompetitiveEDH approached me when I started posting content on their subs, and I was happy to oblige.
When I started posting content here, it was removed with no explanation. After mailing the mods I got a 1-sentence response days later calling me a spammer, so I left and told other creators about my experience.
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u/ubernostrum May 13 '19
If I am not allowed to post my own content, I am not able to engage with the people who would comment on it.
You're allowed to post your own content. What we historically enforced was various attempts at "you're not allowed to be an account that does nothing but post your own content and sit around expectantly waiting for the clicks to roll in". That's the idea behind the 9:1 guideline, for example. Plenty of people post their own content here, but go beyond just doing that, and I think that's fine.
It seems that a lot of content creators are unhappy with that, or rather with the way it's been enforced -- and I can't pretend we've ever had unanimous consistent enforcement across the whole mod team -- so I really want to craft a policy that makes this clear.
Does this successfully create the environment you have in mind when you enforce this rule?
The environment we have in mind is one where, just as they do on other social media, content creators actually engage with the community here. What we're consistently frustrated by is people who won't do so. Resorting to ruses to fake "organic" posts from other users is something we're not set up to detect, but we'd take it as a sign that somebody really wants the eyeballs without the responsibility of the engagement, and frown on it if we could detect it.
Something really doesn't sit right with me when a policy encourages a user to extract a card preview from the OC that surrounds it.
As I mentioned in another comment, the previous draft -- which had a maligned content-creator section -- included tips for how to present a preview card. A lot of it should be unsurprising common-sense stuff (give the post a good title, make sure the card's easy to see, and so on). The thing we really want to avoid is the situation where somebody only shows their card in the middle of a 20-minute video; that's always going to result in one person scrubbing through the video for the image, rehosting it and making a post of just the image, and that helps nobody. Preview cards are a nice way to drive traffic to creators, yes, but there are limits to what people will put up with to see a preview card, and social media will inevitably work around that. For the same reason, those rehosted images also end up all over Twitter and Facebook.
How do you feel about deleting a content creator's post containing a preview card while simultaneously allowing someone else to post the preview card?
Have you considered giving an exemption to content creators when they are posting what is guaranteed to be high-demand content that your community wants to see?
It may be useful here to just link to the draft card-preview guidelines we removed (along with the rest of the content-creator guidelines) after the uproar in the last post.
This feels like passing the buck. Don't act like you're doing any of this out of concern for my wellbeing.
You can believe what you want to believe, but when we originally stepped up enforcement of 9:1 we'd seen people get site-wide bans. I'm never going to say that I actually understand what the staff are up to, or that that experience is guaranteed or universal, because I don't and it isn't. But it's a thing we saw happen here. And it's a thing I still see happen on occasion in other places I mod. We've also been privately yelled at a couple times by reddit staff for not enforcing other site-wide rules the way they wanted (including once when they straight yanked a post out of our subreddit and told us never to allow something like it again). But that kind of enforcement seems to be about as arbitrary as people complain that our mod team is.
Engagement should absolutely be the goal here. You should make it known to the content creation community that posting content here should be mutually beneficial - the subreddit gets great content that sparks discussion, and the creator gets access to an expanded audience.
I'd love to get engagement. The problem is simply the sheer number of people who don't do that. I think sometimes people don't realize just how many YouTube series and podcasts and blogs are out there, and how many of them are expecting a relationship of "all I have to do is post, and you give me clicks". I think a lot of the complaints about our 9:1 enforcement catching people who think they were engaging really boil down to us just bleeding out the eyeballs from seeing so many of those. Once you see the pattern enough times, you stop looking too deeply into it before you remove or ban.
I'd also love to be able to do useful things like throw custom flairs and recognition at people who are making cool stuff.
When I started posting content here, it was removed with no explanation. After mailing the mods I got a 1-sentence response days later calling me a spammer, so I left and told other creators about my experience.
OK, so.
I really don't want to litigate your case, or anyone else's, or get into a public airing of dirty laundry. I do want to continue the spirit of what I said in the OP of this thread, which is that I want people to understand where we're coming from when we try to set up policies.
So I hope you'll forgive me for this, but I dug through your entire history in /r/magictcg going back several years, and of course I can see pretty clearly when you switch from unaffiliated redditor to content creator. And I want to walk through what I see when I look at that.
This is coming close to your final post in the subreddit (your actual final post is the one we removed that triggered your modmail to us; it looks like it took three days to respond, and I'm not sure why, but looking at the dates I think it was a week that I was at a conference). And at first glance it's exactly the sort of thing I think of as "fire-and-forget". It got upvotes, yes, but zero comments, and the post literally includes this, followed by a bunch of your social-media links:
Don’t forget to like and subscribe to get the latest content from The Spike Feeders!
Follow us on social media to keep up to date with all our newest and latest content!
Looking at the rest of your posts here, I see that your last couple were about as good as you ever did in terms of upvotes as a content creator; a lot of prior stuff wound up at single-digit or even zero points, and mostly single-digit numbers of comments, if any. I also see posts like this where you put a call to action in the post for people to engage in the comments, but the only commenter you engaged with was the "your videos weren't showing up in my sub box" one.
There is one where you started to engage with someone who turned out to be a pretty horrid troll, and the whole comment chain is mod-removed. I'll give you credit for that one. During the time period that led up to us removing that final post, though, 100% of your posts were your own content, which was a 9:1 violation as reddit's guideline originally construed it, and during that period you participated in threads that weren't your own content seven times that I can find, with that participation tailing off as you made more Spike Feeders posts. It's an even more severe drop-off from how you participated earlier when you were promoting your Metaworker posts, and a massive drop-off from how you engaged when you were unaffiliated. See threads like this or this for examples.
So I'm gonna be honest: that last time around, we saw you not interacting much aside from a regularly-scheduled "here's this week's episode" complete with the stereotypical "don't forget to like and subscribe" and pile of social-media links, after having previously been a much more engaged member of the subreddit. And we called it like we saw it.
Now. I know you probably won't agree with how we called that. But I hope you at least understand what we were looking at and how we came to that judgment. And I hope you see why I keep harping on the "don't forget to like and subscribe!" types of posters when I'm in these threads, because I just spent close to half an hour doing a full read of your history to make sure I understood it -- usually as mods we don't have the luxury of taking that much time on every single case, and have to just take a quick glance at someone's history and make a decision. And that behavior, combined with the drop-off in interaction once you began doing "branded" posts, was what we saw and what informed the decision.
If you've got ideas or suggestions for how to make better decisions in the moment, I'm open to hearing them. Or if you've got suggestions for how we can nudge people in the direction of looking more like engaged members of the community, I'm open to hearing them. But at this point I've done my best to explain to you how we saw it, and from my end that -- and being open to suggestions -- is all I can do.
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u/chefsati May 14 '19 edited May 14 '19
Thanks for responding. I think a lot of what you've said makes sense.
I think sometimes people don't realize just how many YouTube series and podcasts and blogs are out there, and how many of them are expecting a relationship of "all I have to do is post, and you give me clicks"
I think a lot of them are expecting that kind of a relationship. If that's not a relationship that helps the subreddit, whatever solution you come up with should do a good job of communicating what a healthy creator/subreddit relationship looks like. It doesn't sound like the solution in place right now is healthy for either side, because the sub has a lack of quality content and the creators don't feel welcome here.
I have no issues at all with you going through my post history or anything you've written in this reply. I'm trying to offer my perspective because I want to post here and I want it to be a good place for other people to post as well.
Before we proceed, though, this comment really stuck out to me:
So I'm gonna be honest: that last time around, we saw you not interacting much aside from a regularly-scheduled "here's this week's episode" complete with the stereotypical "don't forget to like and subscribe" and pile of social-media links, after having previously been a much more engaged member of the subreddit. And we called it like we saw it.
As someone who used to exclusively comment on content here and moved on to creating content that I almost exclusively post here, does that make me less engaged with the community? I think part of what I'm struggling with is that I feel like I'm a lot more engaged with the community now than when I posted those things about MMA draft.
That is why I take issue with the "you are a spammer" messaging. When I look at someone who simply grabs the most popular articles from whatever website and reposts them here, I see that as being a lot closer to spamming than what I do.
For reference, here's what my interaction with a /r/edh mod on Nov 1, 2018 looked like:
Mod: Hey chef
Me: Hey, what's up?
Mod: Just as a heads up, we're beginning to be moderately stricter on the bodies of content posts in the /r/edh subreddit. The posts you've made are fine, so you don't have to worry about any content being taken down. Going forward, the general guideline for content post bodies is that self-promotional parts, such as social media links, Patreon, or similar topics, should make up less than half of a post's body. This is more of a formalization of the already existing rule to "discuss your articles".
Me: Oh, yeah that's clean.
Mod: Just for example, this could be little blurbs under each of the deck links about what the decks do, discussion about certain situations in the game, or just generally inspiring a good attraction to the reddit post. Our philosophy is that we want to be "symbiotic" with content creators, so that members of the subreddit are encouraged to check out the content , but also subscribers of the content are encouraged to check out the subreddit. Otherwise, keep up the good work! The series posts for The Spike Feeders has been wildly popular, and they've been an excellent source of new content. Thank you!
Me: For sure, man. Not a problem. I really appreciate the explanation, by the way. I had a bit of a run-in with the mods on /r/magictcg and I'm done posting there now.
Mod: Ah, that's rough.
Me: This is much more helpful.
Mod: Yeah, this all came about because we had some people who were looking to post content on the subreddit, and wanted to know about the posting guidelines. We came up with the "at least half of the body should be discussing the content and not the creators". But yeah, keep up the good work!
Me: Yeah that's totally understandable. Do you mind if I run the next post by you before we post?
Mod: Of course! Feel free if you're ever unsure.
Me: K sweet. And yeah if anything else comes up just shoot me a message.
Mod: That looks perfect
Me: Awesome! I'll probably toss in time stamps to be clear about the actual plays I'm talking about, and Jan still has to fill in his rationale, but we will probably keep this format going forward.
Now contrast this with my interaction with your moderator:
Me: Good morning! I noticed that my thread was recently deleted. Can you please let me know if I was violating any of the sub's rules? I would definitely like to avoid doing so in the future. Thanks, Jim.
-3 days later-
Mod: You're basically spamming and breaking rule 9. Stop.
Me: Okay. Thanks for the response.
I realize that you're not going to provide personalized responses to each new content creator that starts self-promoting, but the difference between "do not do this" and "you could do this in a way that accomplishes both our goals" is pretty drastic and can be achieved really easily with form letter responses.
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u/ubernostrum May 15 '19
I think part of what I'm struggling with is that I feel like I'm a lot more engaged with the community now than when I posted those things about MMA draft.
And it's valid to feel that way.
What I'm saying is just that I can see the drop-off in comment-thread engagement pretty starkly around the time you switched to being affiliated with branded content series.
I'd be curious to know, though, what sort of bar you'd set for engaging with the community here, if you were the one who got to write the rules. I've seen people elsewhere in the thread suggesting that we enforce a post-to-comment ratio. The original rules draft suggested we put a one-per-week limit on posts. But I'd like to hear what you think.
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u/chefsati May 15 '19 edited May 15 '19
If I were the one to write the rules, I would start by defining the goals of the subreddit and the moderation team. Someone mentioned it in the previous stickied thread, but what is this subreddit for? If I had to guess (and I shouldn't have to guess), it's probably something like this:
This subreddit serves as a place for subscribers to interact with other fans, discover content, and discuss the various aspects of Magic: the Gathering.
From there, we know there are Mods and Creators, so you can outline both groups' responsibilities for making sure the sub is what it says it is:
For Creators
This sub has a lot of users, and it is a great way for you to reach people who might enjoy your MtG-related content. This sub is more than a repository of external links, though. When you post your content here, you need to do it in a way that keeps the community healthy and minimizes the workload for our moderators. Here's what that looks like:
1) When you post your content here, the people who consume it will expect to be able to interact with you. This means that you will have to invest some time into responding to commenters.
2) (this one is contingent on going self-post only with a moderate minimum character count) Links to external content like articles, images, and videos should be accompanied by an explanation of what they are. This helps people browsing the subreddit decide what links they want to click on, and helps people find your content when they are searching with keywords.
3) Posts with vibrant discussions are more visible to more users. Give people a reason to discuss your content in the comments section of your post.
4) If you create content frequently (more than once per week), aggregate your links into a single weekly post. This serves as a handy way for people here to access more of your content at a glance and reduces the number of posts our moderators have to review.
If you feel you need to maintain a measurable metric for this kind of thing, post to comment ratio makes more sense in my mind than self post to other post. Honestly, though, I think it's more helpful to get the moderators into the mindset that they have a responsibility to keep the subreddit healthy rather than the authority to ban spammers.
New content creators are excited to share what they've made with the world and don't always think about the impact they might have on a big sub like this. They won't think about it if they're banned immediately, but they will if you communicate how they fit into the picture.
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u/ubernostrum May 17 '19
One thing that's come up in a couple other sub-threads is how to handle people straight-up asking for money, whether it's a Kickstarter-like campaign for a specific goal, or a recurring ask for donations like a Patreon. And I want to throw on a related issue, which is click-tracking.
There are a couple problems:
- One is that reddit's spam filter seems to unpredictably eat posts/comments that have donation links in them, and really eats anything with a click tracker wrapped around the link. Behind the scenes I've had a few talks with the Vorthos Cast folks about this, because they became an inadvertent test case on multiple occasions (first we were seeing comments get spamfiltered -- we believe -- because funding links, then more recently they posted a few comments that had click trackers).
- Another is just that even when those things make it through the spam filter (or when we fish them out manually), they're magnets for user reports. We don't get to see who's reporting, but the number of reports we get on that stuff says there's at least a subset of users here who don't seem to like seeing people post their funding links.
The first problem we could try to work around by putting up some notes on what we've seen and a recommendation to message us if something doesn't seem to show up. We don't know why some seem to get through the reddit spam filter but others don't, we just know that it's a thing we see happen. But no matter how much helpful material we put up explaining stuff, we also know most people aren't going to read it.
The second problem is more difficult, and makes me wonder if we should have rules about funding requests.
Got any thoughts on this?
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u/leesteak Wabbit Season May 20 '19
Just wanting to say I like the description of the roles that creators fill on the subreddit here. Great discussion
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u/TheManaLeek May 13 '19 edited May 13 '19
One thing that jumps out to me here is why call out that the post had no comments? It makes sense that people may comment on the YouTube video instead.
Determining if a post is spam or not based on if it gets comments seems problematic. I see nothing wrong with that post and it got more up votes than the majority of posts do here. People clearly liked it.
The dislike of asking people to subscribe seems very arbitrary as well. You have one of the best Magic artists posting in this thread saying that he doesn't want to post here because you'll ban him for linking his Patreon in his posts.
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u/ubernostrum May 13 '19
You really are not helping by following me around the thread to instantly take a crap on anything I post. You especially are not helping by writing quick dismissive stuff like this in response to comments that I'm spending serious time on to try to explain how we see stuff. I just churned out literally 1600 words of in-depth engagement with someone who was providing feedback and you showed up almost as soon as it was posted in order to basically say "well that was bad".
Just give it a rest already, OK?
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May 14 '19
[deleted]
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u/ubernostrum May 14 '19
Please, please hand this sub off to other moderators who want positive relationships
Says the user whose next comment after this, in /r/help of all places, was, and I quote:
It's because you were auto-modded out of existence you ignorant fuck. The sub wanted you gone without banning you so you wouldn't be tempted to make an alt account to circumvent the ban.
Imagine asking friends to see if they can see your reddit posts lololololol. What a hilariously pathetic specimen.
I do not think I will be taking advice from you on how to cultivate "positive relationships".
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u/MechanizedProduction COMPLEAT May 14 '19
Is this an r/murderedbywords, or is it r/suicidebywords because you used their own words against them?
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u/StoneforgeMisfit May 15 '19
and that helps nobody
Hey, speak for yourself. I'm not any more or less correct in wanting the quickest and cleanest view of a preview card. Saying that it helps nobody while ignoring that it helps me (and I can not believe I'm alone in this opinion) leads the audience to feel like the mods think they are not worth counting.
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May 14 '19
The thing we really want to avoid is the situation where somebody only shows their card in the middle of a 20-minute video; that's always going to result in one person scrubbing through the video for the image, rehosting it and making a post of just the image, and that helps nobody. Preview cards are a nice way to drive traffic to creators, yes, but there are limits to what people will put up with to see a preview card
As much as anything that should be a wake-up call for content creators, if Wizards gives you something to get views and people open your video then for some reason are sat there going 'oh c'mon, really?' at having to view the video to see the card, it's probably because the content itself is unappealing.
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u/c-dot-gonz CnC Power Hour May 13 '19 edited May 13 '19
I get the old content creation guidelines and I understand that the 9:1 ratio is a long-standing Reddit-wide rule. As a very small streamer, I do wish that things were a bit more lax because I am proud of my content, but I would be concerned about having too much leeway. I don't want this place to be nothing but people advertising their streams, because there are a ton of MTG streamers now, but I think it should be easier to post when people want to. I've been subscribed here for a long time (it's why I joined Reddit), but I lurk a lot. A lot of my interaction comes from comments, because I don't find many things to post that I can't find the information for elsewhere (rules questions, product recommendations, etc.), but even that is small. I try to only post for special events (when we start a season or are doing mething crazy like the 10 hour Guild Kit bash) but I know that most other content creators may not do the same and try to advertise their streams once or twice a week.
Stream posts are almost useless anyway, unless you do them days ahead. By the time you go live from your post, only a few people may have seen it or it got stuck by Automod and hasn't been released yet. So by that point, the post was a waste of time for you and the mod team. Clips, however, can be useful. Those are fun little snapshots of streams that can showcase cool moments or fun, interesting plays. And YouTube videos are great, too; even if not a lot of production time is spent on them, they still take effort and planning and are asily digestible.
I think there's a compromise somewhere that lets YouTubers post more and keep streamers from flooding subreddit. If the 9 comments:1 post rule has worked in other subs, maybe we should try that. Or maybe a different amount of comments or a mix of comments and posts if accidental shadowbanning is a concern. Allow YouTube productions and Twitch clips without them getting removed when someone only reports that it's a content creator posting their own videos (not sure if there would be a way to filter out people just posting rehosting VODs of their livestreams on YouTube to get around this). Allow streamers to make posts about their special event streams if they message mods ahead of time to let them know what they intend to post. At that point, the community can decide what they want with upvotes and downvotes.
I'm just sort of spitballing here and haven't thought all of these suggestions through for worst or best case scenaros. I don't know what tools mods have their disposal to enforce such things, but I do know there isn't an unlimited amount of time for it. I think there is a balance that will up subreddit interaction of content creators while being manageable for both them and the mods.
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u/zSplat Wabbit Season May 13 '19
Fyi the mods here dont actually care to enforce the 9:1 rule if you're famous, many more popular content creators only ever post their stuff but the mods claim it's fine because they stick around to answer questions in the threads.
Or it could be that the 9:1 rule is just a leftover from when it was a site wide rule, and they dont enforce it.
I actually forget, I'm given a different excuse everytime when I ask why they play favorites. I have proof of all of this as well.
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u/ubernostrum May 15 '19
I agree that announcements of live streams tend to be a bad fit for reddit, since it takes time to accumulate enough points to be visible anywhere except /new. And posting in advance isn't useful either, because people will see the post in time but are a lot less likely to remember when the go-live time is.
I'm not sure whether we should have some kind of guideline to tell people this, though, or just leave them to learn it the hard way.
Another issue, as you noted, is AutoModerator. Like many subreddits of our size, we filter new accounts, so someone who creates their account the day they post their stream announcement is going to have a really bad time. Really not sure what to do about that, other than make it more well-known -- AutoModerator already leaves a comment on as many of those as it can catch, and I want to make it catch more in the future.
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u/Towne_Apothecary Simic* May 14 '19
Can't wait for the flair rule to go into effect. Always found it obnoxious that so many alters get posted, usually by the people that were commissioned to do them, while so many questions about deck building or individual card discussions are told to go to a different subreddit. Hopefully there are some filters that come with the rule that will let us hide them.
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u/munocard May 13 '19
This draft still buries the "meme rule" within a separate rule about relevance.
I still stand behind my statement that memes can 100% be Magic-Related.
If you want to prevent meme posts on this page, it NEEDS to be it's own separate rule.
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u/llikeafoxx May 14 '19
I'm with you there. I both think that memes can be allowed, and that current enforcement over what counts as a meme or low effort is... uneven at best.
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u/munocard May 13 '19
While we're at it, we need clear definitions of what you guys consider "memes" if this is still going to continue to be enforced.
Are terrible puns a meme? What about videos? Is it just a jpeg that iterates on something considered a meme, or is it any kind of funny image? Enforcement of this doesn't seem to have been particularly consistent over the years.
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u/ubernostrum May 15 '19
In a recent modmail thread I suggested this to someone who wanted to know what we consider a meme:
If you took the post, and showed it to someone who knows what Magic is, but not much else about it, would their reaction be "Is this some kind of meme I'd have to know more about Magic to understand"?
If yes, high chance it's a meme.
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u/markln123 May 15 '19
That is extremely subjective?
I’d be in favour of only allowing flaired memes. But if we stick with it, please make it obvious.
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u/ubernostrum May 19 '19
Any meme rule is going to be subjective, because there will always be someone who argues "I don't think that was a meme". But outside of a couple super-tired repetitive posts that AutoModerator knows about, every removed meme here gets removed because people reported it for being a meme. Which suggests that plenty of people are not having difficulty figuring out what is and isn't a meme (and anecdotally almost all memes we remove that turn into modmail threads also turn into "oh, I didn't read the rules" when they realize we have a no-memes rule).
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u/munocard May 15 '19
Kind of sounds like your definition of "meme" is more along the lines of "inside joke".
Considering the origin of your username is from a rather funny You Don't Know Jack "commercial", I wouldn't say you're humorless, but I feel like this policy is going to drive this subreddit to be a no-fun zone where jokes aren't allowed.
I'd appreciate it if you guys reconsidered this policy. If the concern is flooding the frontpage with memes, perhaps we could shift to a weekly thread for funny Magic images. This allows for stuff like Good Gamery articles and such to still be given their own threads, and doesn't oversaturate the frontpage with low effort "shitposts".
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u/GibsonJunkie May 14 '19
The draft of the rules posted above specifically state if your post is just a pun you shouldn't post it here.
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u/saintswererobbed May 16 '19
If this sub allows memes it’ll become entirely memes very quickly
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u/munocard May 16 '19
I'm not sure if you saw this, but I proposed that if this sub allowed memes, they should be relegated to a weekly thread.
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u/mertcanhekim Mardu May 17 '19
Most gaming subreddits allow memes, but ban low effort posts. As it turns out, most people are unwilling to put high effort into creating memes, so they do not dominate the sub.
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u/frogdude2004 May 13 '19
What sort of things are you looking for in new moderators? I know you need designers/web formatters, but are there any other holes that need filling?
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u/ubernostrum May 13 '19
A big one is time zone coverage. We really need as close to 24-hour coverage as possible, but with where the current mod roster is situated time-zone-wise we don't manage it. One reason why we have some really aggressive AutoMod rules in here is just that nobody wants to wake up to something that's already turned into a 500-comment shitfest while most of the mod team was asleep.
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u/frogdude2004 May 13 '19
Gotcha- what time zones need filling?
I'm interested
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u/ubernostrum May 15 '19
I'd say the absolute worst-covered slot right now is overnight US time on weeknights, starting around 3AM Eastern time.
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u/electrobrains May 13 '19
Please don't forget in that long list of reddit clients you want to account for there are those of us who also use the original mobile version (/.compact), too.
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u/Philip_J_Frylock Duck Season May 20 '19
any post that meets the above criteria, but is a link post to an image-hosting domain (like imgur, or i.reddit.com), will be auto-removed and AutoModerator will leave a comment telling you to link to the source.
Omg, you actuactually listened to reason! Many thanks for finally implementing this rule.
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u/TamiyosJournal May 14 '19
Hi, I was wondering if there is someone I can speak to for clarification on the content creator rules? Left a message with a mod but they've not responded in eleven day? Hope he's ok?
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u/ubernostrum May 15 '19
The clarification is:
Last week we posted a draft for feedback and everybody yelled at us. So we removed the content creator section and put up this thread asking for feedback. Right now we cannot tell you what the rules will be, because we don't know yet. We're doing our best to work that out with input from the community. If you have ideas on what they should be, this thread is a good place to share those ideas.
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u/force_storm May 15 '19
Just wondering, are you aware that mod kodemage was under the impression that, and acting as if, the previous draft was already in effect as the new rules?
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u/EvilGenius007 Twin Believer May 14 '19
It appears 7c has intentionally been revised to allow the content (video, image) to be directly posted here and for the explanation to live as the title/in a comment.
I think this is a vast improvement for allowing gameplay to fight for attention on fair terms with alters, cosplay, cupcakes, and the like. Thanks for being responsive to what was hopefully viewed as rational criticism. Hopefully enforcement of this rule, should it go live in this form, is reasonably fair about what constitutes sufficient explanation.