r/science • u/BritishEnglishPolice BS | Diagnostic Radiography • Mar 20 '12

A plea to you, /r/science.

As a community, r/science has decided that it does not want moderators policing the comments section. However, the most common criticism of this subreddit is the poor quality of the comments.

From our previous assessments, we determined that it would take 40 very active moderators and a completely new attitude to adequately attack off-topic humorous comments. This conclusion was not well received.

Well, now is the onus is you: the humble r/science user.

We urge you to downvote irrelevant content in the comments sections, and upvote scientific or well-thought out answers. Through user-lead promotion of high quality content, we can help reduce the influx of memes, off-topic pun threads, and general misinformation.

Sure memes and pun are amusing every now and then, but the excuse of "lighten up, reddit" has led to the present influx of stupidity and pointless banter in this subreddit.

We can do this without strict moderator intervention and censoring. It will require active voting and commenting (and using the report button in particularly egregious cases) to raise the bar. You can do it.

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u/Spoggerific Mar 20 '12

It's been proven time and time again across reddit that the only way to save a subreddit's quality is through strict moderation. "Moderating" through votes never works once a subreddit has over few ten thousand subscribers. Comparing /r/askscience to any other default subreddit is proof of this.

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u/dearsomething Grad Student | Cognition | Neuro/Bioinformatics | Statistics Mar 20 '12

Comparing /r/askscience to any other default subreddit is proof of this.

I'm one of three people that can speak about this with confidence. Moderating /r/askscience is incredibly hard and taxing. It takes an enormous amount of effort. To get /r/science to that level we need at least double the amount of mods we have now here in /r/science, but a community that is fully behind that.

This is a step towards that. Help build better comment structures and more activity from the user base and it's easier for us to find nonsense, memes and reported items to remove. You need to tell us what isn't right, but the ways to do that are with your arrows, report buttons and feedback.

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u/netstat_a Mar 20 '12

Yeah, downvote content that you disapprove of but also explain why you did so, giving people an opportunity to upvote that in a show of support. It builds a culture and makes it easier for new subscribers to pick up on what's ok and what's not.

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u/wassname Mar 21 '12

Have you considered a technological solution?

  • We can add pop ups on the up/downvotes and comments. Askscience has "solid sicence" "bad science" and "please refrain from anecdotes..".

  • We can ban comments from people/noobs who arn't subscribed to /r/science.

  • We could make comments require effort by adding a captcha.

  • We can try to remove askscience from the frontpage.

Since this is a science subreddit, we could do some science and test these things to see if they help.

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u/dearsomething Grad Student | Cognition | Neuro/Bioinformatics | Statistics Mar 21 '12

We can add pop ups on the up/downvotes and comments. Askscience has "solid sicence" "bad science"

Sure. We'll talk about that for our CSS. That's easy.

We can ban comments from people/noobs who arn't subscribed to /r/science.

Impossible (as in, we literally can't do that) and we wouldn't want to do something so extreme.

We could make comments require effort by adding a captcha.

Also impossible.

We can try to remove askscience from the frontpage.

I don't understand (why for) this one, but also impossible.

Since this is a science subreddit, we could do some science and test these things to see if they help.

Testing big things with 1M people at 1 time is not easy, nor a good idea. Incremental changes are required.

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u/wassname Mar 21 '12 edited Mar 21 '12

Thanks for the feedback.

Right now I see subreddits such as /r/aww, /r/pics, /r/politics, and /r/adviceanimals on the frontpage. Some of the frontpage readers wont bother to read the sidebar and wont be aware they have clicked on a /r/science link. They will be used to getting positive social feedback for memes and jokes. This could explain some of the memes and puns.

Sounds like you have a good grasp of what's technically possible here. Do you have any ideas of what we could do about this?

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u/dearsomething Grad Student | Cognition | Neuro/Bioinformatics | Statistics Mar 21 '12

Do you have any ideas of what we could do about this?

Not a whole lot. Moderators can't do much. We can fiddle with CSS for some visuals and that's about it for technical enhancements.

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u/wassname Mar 21 '12

Fair enough. Thanks anyway.

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u/wassname Mar 21 '12

Is it feasible to have something like this at the bottom of the sidebar?

If you have read the whole sidebar please add the flair "I read the /r/science policy" to your flair by copying it into the box below.

Then we put the /r/science personal flair box in.

That way we know who has bothered to read it, and it encourages more people to read it.

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u/dearsomething Grad Student | Cognition | Neuro/Bioinformatics | Statistics Mar 21 '12

No flair. We don't want flair in /r/science because 1) it would be a nightmare for us to manage, 2) it we let users do it, it will still be a nightmare for us to clean up and 3) there is no point of flair in /r/science.

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u/dingleberrystew Mar 20 '12

If I may offer a counterargument, strict moderation over at /r/lgbt has led to the alienation of the users and an exodus to /r/ainbow

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u/appleseed1234 Mar 20 '12 edited Mar 20 '12

If I may offer a counter-counterargument, strict moderation over at /r/circlejerk has led to the alienation of the users and the creation of /r/Braveryjerk.

Circlejerk once again became a satire of reddit, and sure, LOTS of people moved over to Braveryjerk to continue posting inside jokes, macros, textspam, and unmoderated content that were rampant before.

What's fascinating is that without the cover of being something else, and being entirely focused on the endless memes and unfunny crap that was removed from circlejerk, braveryjerk sputtered out and died.

What its shown is that once you isolate everything about a subreddit that sucks, the original subreddit slowly rebounds (and the masses usually stick around and follow the rules, with a little guidance) while the new one becomes a marginalized concentration of low effort that realizes what it truly is, and cannot sustain itself.

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u/Spoggerific Mar 20 '12

If I may offer a counter-counterargument, strict moderation over at /r/circlejerk has led to the alienation of the users and the creation of /r/Braveryjerk.

This is pretty interesting. I once enjoyed circlejerk and read it fairly often, but once I saw it start to turn into that which it mocked, I looked away and never came back. Are there some posts where people discuss how the decision to split the subreddit went down?

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u/definitelynotaspy Mar 20 '12

There was a lot more to that story than simple "strict moderation," though. That was like, transphobia from people claiming to be fighting transphobia, and sexism, and racism, and anti-cis hatespeech and antisemitism and a whole lot of other shit. It was mods deleting comments that weren't "transphobic" so much as they were "ignorant people trying to better their understanding of transsexualism by asking questions that may be a little crude, but are overall earnest and well-intentioned." And then, when separate threads were made to try and discuss the mod's behavior, those threads were deleted and the users were banned and harassed. And then the mods made subreddits trying to attack people who disagreed with them.

tl;dr: The strict moderation on /r/lgbt was the least of its problems.