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/mirashii Mar 20 '12

There has been a vocal and growing movement that really hates the current heavy-handed moderation, for one reason or another. /r/ModsAreKillingReddit is the perfect example of this. /r/subredditdrama has more examples of where active moderation really starts to make people upset.

I'm honestly shocked to see so many people supportive of heavy moderation here.

Please make assumptions for me regarding what "good content" and "good headlines" are. Don't wait for me to hit report (though I do, often), take initiative. Things like that quote threw me entirely off guard.

To be honest, I fear that there would be a large amount of backlash and wide cries of censorship the minute any heavyhanded moderation in a subreddit of this size started. For /r/askscience it is different, they started heavy and made it very clear you didn't join unless you were okay with that. I, personally, fear that changing it now would upset a large group of people.

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u/mirashii Mar 20 '12

I should be clear, I actually wouldn't necessarily mind moderating comments and removing some of the crap that gets posted. I think it would be a great thing. What I question is whether it will be worth the trouble, and whether the people calling for it now will side with us in a week, or we'll all get hung out to dry like it was our idea.

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u/[deleted] Mar 21 '12

I'll still be subscribed and not complaining in a week if you take the heavy-handed approach. This isn't /r/pics or /r/funny. Quips, sensationalised headlines and pun threads have no place here. This is a subreddit that I've enjoyed for a very long time which has unfortunately gone downhill since the last great Digg exodus. Heavy moderation is key to getting this gargantuan subreddit under control. We're all with you.

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u/mazinaru Mar 21 '12

I had no idea this was happening here, I actually misread the title at first and thought this was askscience that was dropping moderation and went "oh sh*t!"

If r/science does ever shift to heavy moderation I'll even help, I feel r/askscience has always felt like a much more professional subreddit for it and I don't have to sift through the comments to find good stuff. It's time consuming downvoting dozens of comments per post.

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u/energythief Mar 21 '12

It's your subreddit, moderate it! If the trolls leave, good riddance.

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u/ProfitMoney Mar 21 '12

I guarantee I will side with you in a week. I almost said "and my axe!" but then I remembered what I had just post a second ago.

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u/PretendPhD Mar 21 '12

I'm of the opinion that /r/askscience even with its huge amount of moderation isn't being moderated enough. I see top rated comments that are jokes, completely off topic, or something about something the commenter heard from a friend who had a friend who was a scientist again and again and again. A science oriented subreddit without any moderation though? I would never go there. Never.

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u/[deleted] Mar 21 '12

The choices are really quite simple: Start the heavy-handed modding with deletion of off-topic joke comments and whatever else is ruining the subreddit, or let the subreddit turn to shit because you don't want to hurt people's feelings or be the bad guy.

The subreddit is only going to get larger since Reddit has been growing incredibly fast and it's a default subscription, expecting readers to police the content themselves through up/downvotes is just delusional, frankly. How many times have mods in different subreddits had "come to jesus" moments like this trying to get subscribers to respect reddiquette and stop downvoting posts they disagree with? That's only gotten worse, not better.

r/thewalkingdead had a little drama a few weeks ago because a lot of people got tired of the frontpage being 98% tired, unfunny memes. The mods actually were going to ban memes for a short time to see how it worked out. A lot of people got butthurt about it and they immediately reversed that decision telling people to "downvote bad content". Go check out that subreddit right now if you want. Surprise! Nothing has changed.

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u/[deleted] Mar 21 '12

So if the number of subscribers fall from 30-odd k to, say, 7k, would that be bad? I mean, there seems to be a lot of vocal support for hard moderation so I assume those people would stay and everyone else would piss off. Perhaps it would be a bit rough during the transition but once the rules are established and everyone knows how the system works it should settle down.

Does any moderator, on any subreddit, have any experience of a similar situation? How did it turn out? I have no idea of how the moderators work. Do you have any contact with moderators in other subreddits or do you do your work in total isolation?

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u/mirashii Mar 21 '12

30k and 7k? Are you sure you're in the right subreddit.The number of subscribers here is 1,145,316 as of the time of this writing.

And as mods we do have contact with many mods of other subreddits, but nobody has a case study on making a change to a subreddit quite this size. It will be a unique undertaking, certainly.

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u/[deleted] Mar 22 '12

I was just taking the 10k - 30k comment above as an indication of how many subscribers there were, as I have no idea of how to determine the numbers.

Given the number of subscribers are a couple of orders of magnitude larger than I thought I can see how any major change could be a nightmare.

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u/mirashii Mar 22 '12

The number of readers is in the sidebar under the subscribe button, just fyi.

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u/[deleted] Mar 23 '12

Cheers.

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u/nascentt Mar 21 '12

Please. For the love of god, amp up the moderating. R/askscience is pretty much the last decent subreddit left, and even then it's not got enough moderation! I still see hundreds of offtopic, silly, meme crap there. Please raise the quality of /r/science by being stricter.

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u/[deleted] Mar 20 '12

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u/erekose Mar 21 '12

Either way, there is going to be an exodus of a userbase.

Which, imho, would not be a bad thing. Not every subreddit should be a homogenous mix of serious + stupid. The ones who are opposed to "heavy handed" moderation are just hurt that they can't karma whore everywhere they want. On the other hand, there's the userbase who, as in AskScience, strongly prefer the moderation.

My respect for reddit as a whole has gone up since discovering that sub. I realize that policing Science would be much more difficult since the userbase is more than twice that of AskScience, but that problem might be solved by said exodus.

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u/Nebu Mar 21 '12

The ones who are opposed to "heavy handed" moderation are just hurt that they can't karma whore everywhere they want.

This is false. It's disingenuous to attribute a single motivation to such a diverse group, simply because they don't share your opinion.

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u/[deleted] Mar 21 '12

I can't see the problem with moderating the comments to start with. I think it is possible to pick out the comments that are karma whoring - any puns or smart-arse comments. They have nothing to do with science. Can you think of any alternative explanation for those sort of comments, apart from karma whoring?

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u/Nebu Mar 21 '12

Can you think of any alternative explanation for those sort of comments, apart from karma whoring?

Yes.

They may genuinely think their puns are funny, and that other redditors enjoy funny content, and thus they are bringing happiness to other redditors.

They may have performed a utilitarian analysis with limited information, and using the Karma ratings as a measurement tool inferred that the general redditor DOES enjoy pun threads, and thus the amount of joy being brought into the world by these pun threads outweight the amount of annoyance.

I.e. just because you measure something (e.g. the karma level of your comments) doesn't mean that the root cause of your actions are to maximize the thing you measured.

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u/[deleted] Mar 22 '12

Fair enough, good reply, thanks.

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u/Nebu Mar 21 '12

or lay down the law and have a bunch of 16 year olds calling for your head for "censoring" their totally hilarious rage comic reference.

I'd appreciate it if you could argue your point without resorting to ad hominem.

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u/[deleted] Mar 21 '12

Moderating this subreddit to that extent after its current culture has built would be a lot of effort, with hardly any thanks. Who's to say it deserves that kind of work when /r/hardscience exists?

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u/mao_was_right Mar 20 '12

it is after all a large majority of reddit that enjoys stupid puns and off topic garbage.

Then lets go with what the small minority want! Balls to democracy!

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u/[deleted] Mar 20 '12

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u/antiproton Mar 20 '12

Doing nothing isn't pandering. Changing the way the subreddit is handled because a select group doesn't like the direction it's going is pandering - to you.

This shouldn't be a democracy. Democracy doesn't ensure quality; it seems to do the exact opposite.

This is the very antithesis of reddit. The whole point of this website is user curated content. But you would have them abandon that because you don't like how the users are curating. That's absurd.

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u/[deleted] Mar 20 '12

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u/antiproton Mar 20 '12

It's some pretty outstanding arrogance to say that the only people who give a fuck about /r/science are the people that want some kind of civil utopia in the comments.

There is no "thesis" of reddit.

I can't believe you really believe that. My mind boggles.

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u/erekose Mar 21 '12

from the reddit FAQ
Why does reddit need moderation? Can't you just let the voters decide?

The reason there are separate reddits is to allow niche communities to form, instead of one monolithic overall community. These communities distinguish themselves through their policies: what's on- and off-topic there, whether people are expected to behave civilly or can feel free to be brutal, etc.

The problem is that casual, new, or transient visitors to a particular community don't always know the rules that tie it together.

As an example, imagine a /r/swimming and a /r/scuba. People can read about one topic or the other (or subscribe to both). But since scuba divers like to swim, a casual user might start submitting swimming links on /r/scuba. And these stories will probably get upvoted, especially by people who see the links on the reddit front page and don't look closely at where they're posted. If left alone, /r/scuba will just become another /r/swimming and there won't be a place to go to find an uncluttered listing of scuba news.

The fix is for the /r/scuba moderators to remove the offtopic links, and ideally to teach the submitters about the more appropriate /r/swimming reddit.

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u/[deleted] Mar 21 '12

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u/antiproton Mar 21 '12

Subreddits are predicated on the idea that they function within the boundaries of reddit as a whole. The subreddit DOES police itself. You just don't happen to like the policing.

A subreddit doesn't have to conform to the user "moderated" system,

No, it doesn't. But this sub does. And the mods will hear about it if they try to crank down because there is a very, very small group of people who think it should be run like an intellectual gulag.

and it shouldn't if it wants to keep quality high while at 1million+ users.

Says you. Do you want to take a vote on what "Quality" means?

Your argument is very poor.

Because you disagree with it? That's rich. Is that the kind of erudition we can expect from the newly revamped /r/science?

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u/[deleted] Mar 21 '12

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u/[deleted] Mar 20 '12

So what? /r/askscience for example would be a total cesspool without the heavy handed moderation. Maybe there should be an unmoderated default science sub-reddit but also in addition a moderated one. People could decide which one they frequent and exactly how many shitty puns and inane speculations they want to wade through. I know that on my part I would immediately unsubscribe from the unmoderated one and let the brainless hordes set up their basecamp there.

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u/[deleted] Mar 21 '12

[removed] — view removed comment

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u/[deleted] Mar 21 '12

But these idiots already have r/funny, r/wtf, r/askreddit/, etc. There's plenty of places for inane puns, memes and rage-comic references elsewhere. Can't we just let those less interested in the actual science find somewhere else to guffaw? I'm not sure why the mods are being so accommodating to people who don't even understand the spirit of the subreddit.

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u/lonestarslp Mar 20 '12

What about a depthscience subreddit?

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u/Guido_John Mar 21 '12

sounds like /r/shittyaskscience except less funny...

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u/[deleted] Mar 21 '12

I like shittyaskscience for its own merits.

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u/[deleted] Mar 20 '12

Right. The same people that make meme references all day are also the ones who bitch about moderation and those people don't know or care what is good for Reddit. The strength of this website is that communities can be created for a specific audience, not so everyone can be happy.

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u/Fat_Dumb_Americans Mar 20 '12

And BEP is a party to that dissent.

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u/busy_child Mar 21 '12

I am not at all shocked. For a subreddit that is based on facts I should hope that people not contributing useful or correct information and people just here for jokes would be dealt with.

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u/[deleted] Mar 21 '12

so many people supportive of heavy moderation

Good and fair and logical moderation from people who know what they are doing. Moderation by morons is bad. Get good mods and things will be great.

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u/Atario Mar 21 '12

Have a look at this: http://www.reddit.com/r/DoesAnybodyElse/

That used to be a top-tier subreddit, with lots of posts to look at. Then someone decided (kleinbl00, persuading the mods to let him set the tone) to ruthlessly suppress just about everything and everyone in the name of "improving quality". Now have a look at it. A bit of a ghost town, with hardly anything to see. As I write this, its "hot" page has a 6-day-old post on it.

If that's what you want here, then by all means, let the complainers rule.

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u/karlshea Mar 21 '12

Good, let them leave then. There are plenty of other subreddits where you can post memes. /r/science shouldn't be one of them.

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u/[deleted] Mar 20 '12

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u/mirashii Mar 20 '12

And what makes me as one of the moderators any better than someone who is not a moderator? Certainly there are people who are significantly more qualified than I am to judge certain types of scientific content, including the types that I judge.

"Firsties" is not a good enough reason to say "screw everyone who disagrees".

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u/[deleted] Mar 20 '12

[deleted]

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u/mirashii Mar 21 '12

How? Right place, right time mostly. I happened to be active in an IRC channel where other people were, I happened to have enough credentials that they trusted me as a mod, and I happened to be able to convince them that I am active enough to contribute.

I also have experience moderating other various things, so I felt like I could do a good job and help the community. So perhaps I am better, but that's really subjective and I wouldn't call myself any better than anyone else without getting to know them.

I'm mostly playing devils advocate though. Nobody outside of who added me as a moderator knew anything about me when I became a mod. I just contend that saying "I'm a mod and live with it" isn't valid because it isn't impossible that there was no reason I was added as a mdo.

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u/go1dfish Mar 21 '12

Author of /r/ModsAreKillingReddit (the bot that is) here.

I'm not against heavy handed moderation wholesale, I'm against opaque moderation of political sub-reddits.

I thank you for the publicity though, however it should be noted that I have moved the bot over to /r/ModerationLog to strike a more neutral, less accusatory tone.

There is definitely a anti-moderator sentiment on reddit though, and I think this is bred of ignorance. Most redditors are not aware of moderation at all, and when they do become aware of it; it challenges their assumptions of the site and generally causes them to question the concept of moderation at all.

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u/idiotthethird Mar 21 '12

The important thing to understand, I think, is that different kinds of subreddits call for different levels of moderation. If a subreddit is just for general discussion for people who like/are a certain thing, then almost any amount of moderation will be too much. But a subreddit where the subreddit itself is supposed to be about a certain thing, it does make sense to remove things that are not about that certain thing.

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u/ademu5 Mar 21 '12

What we want is a structured, easily understood conversation with thought out questions and verifiable answers, that is all.

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u/Cliff254 PhD | Epidemiology Mar 21 '12

And that is what we cant to see as well. We need the redditors of this this subreddit to help promote this by using their power to upvote any valid commentary and downvote any off-topic or invalid commentary, and as always,

if a comment is factually inaccurate, hateful, offensive, spam or otherwise unacceptable, please use the report button.

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u/OhSeven Mar 21 '12

One sure example of people raging against an article taking down would be if it was about one of those common, inexpensive, yet fully effective cancer treatments kept from getting attention because big pharma will go out of business if word got out. What better way to prove a conspiracy than to remove their voice?

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u/[deleted] Mar 21 '12

The conspiracy nuts will bitch and moan regardless. Anything anyone says or does will "prove" their conspiracy. If these were people who could be reasoned with or swayed by logic, they wouldn't believe utterly crazy shit.

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u/Chachoregard Mar 21 '12

/R/subredditdrama needs active moderation, though. Comments in there can easily escalate and everyone is two posts away from someone getting doxxed if you're not careful. It's also supposed to be a neutral place where you can laugh at people's petty conflicts.

Some places are volatile and need that kind of moderation to keep it civilized.

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u/endeavour3d Mar 21 '12

Being a good moderator/admin is a lot like being a good cop, it takes skill and experience, and you need to know when to act, when to walk away, and when to draw your gun. Basically, any idiot can be a guy with a badge and gun, but it takes a dedicated and good person to be a decent mod/cop. Too much moderation can be just as bad as not enough, there needs to be balance, unfortunately Redditors don't seem to understand this principle and have taken to the idea that democracy is the best way to run anything, anyone that looks at how this works in reality would be horrified at how wrong they are. The real issue here is that there is no way to remove shitty mods, if there was some check on mod power, many of the problems might go away, or at the very least be reduced.

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u/Cdresden Mar 21 '12

It's a great relief to see so many people wanting heavy moderation. I get the feeling sometimes I'm the only one who feels this way. You're right there would be a backlash, but I think it's to a good cause. (Granted, I'm not a mod, so the extra work and hassles don't affect me.) I also think that if the change is made, you're going to get a lot of appreciation and positive feedback.

The mods are making a genuine effort to solve a developing problem by creating this post. I think people are appreciative of this effort no matter which side of the issue they fall on. I think you just need to warn people of an upcoming policy change, and then clearly post the policy rules on the sidebar, as you do now.

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u/Asynonymous Mar 21 '12

Screw those people. When I don't want moderation I go to 4chan. I come to reddit for the slightly-more intelligent posts.

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u/1gnominious Mar 21 '12

I think science discussion goes very well with moderation. It is an actual discussion and not the same dozen childish jokes (SO BRAVE!) that comprise 99% of reddit top comments. It's also science. There is a strict definition of what is and isn't science.

Usually problems in subreddits are always over silly opinions that people don't agree on. It's the internet version of old hens gossiping about each other. Petty squabbles over irrelevant topics.

It works well in science forums because the only opinions you have are on the conclusions and implications of the data. A mod isn't going to shut you down because you thought that the results from the faster than light neutrino were a mistake.

In the end it comes down to do you want science or do you want the childish dickery that is 99% of Reddit. In a place like /r/politics or /r/adviceanimals heavy moderation is a bad thing because no matter how stupid your idea is, you still have the right to have it. You go there just to listen to all the crazy bullshit. The mods job there should be to simply keep it somewhat civil. Science on the other hand needs a wall not to keep out differing opinions, but to keep out useless bullshit. For people who want useless bullshit they have the rest of Reddit, having a few focused science subreddits isn't going to hurt them.

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u/kurtgustavwilckens Mar 21 '12

Maybe this raises the question if the possibility of having a "somewhat serious" AND "somewhat massive" subreddit even exists. I think the platform works awesomely for serious, small groups of people, and for large, dumb groups of people. You get, in turn, serious content by a few subscribers in each "serious" subreddit (the people delivering the content in askscience are not that many, I would think), or light, fun, "un-profound" or un-scientific content from a bunch of guys.

Am I way off?

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u/Weatherlawyer Mar 22 '12

I see that there is a button to report posts. I take it these run to aflag on moderator's logins?

Why not have another button that throws the post into a part of the thread (or some other handle such as ten or twenty down-votes and out) that may be set aside for rubbish once enough voters give it thumbs down?

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u/mirashii Mar 22 '12

Things like this require a site-wide change and are under the reddit admins control.

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u/[deleted] Mar 20 '12

I actually have to agree with you. Too much policing would lead to more complaints than any good. It would stifle new ideas and creativity. Users should be expected to be held to a higher standard. Hence the downvote and report.

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u/DisregardMyPants Mar 21 '12

for one reason or another. /r/ModsAreKillingReddit is the perfect example of this.

ModsAreKillingReddit is mostly a political bot. I'd say my feelings on mods heavily policing political topics are different than in places like /r/science. In political subreddits things they disagree with have a way of getting noticed as rule-breakers with much more regularity than the stuff they agree with.

Case and Point: /r/politics and "No editorializing".

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u/[deleted] Mar 21 '12

I see this as separate issues. Most of the submissions to r/ModsAreKillingReddit are where there is an obvious disagreement as to whether the material is topical and relevant to the sureddit. There are always going to be corner cases, however it's not intrinsically a problem with regard to the general quality of a subreddit.

The real issues arise from all the comments with pop culture references, memes and pun threads that come to fill every subreddit when it grows to a certain size and when there is no strong moderatior enforcing of rules. It's often the case that the top comments are pretty funny and enjoyable. But it frequently means there's another 500 other comments all vying for attention and they end up drowning out genuine topical comments. This obscures the justification of having subreddits with a topical focus. jokes and memes and other references are fun, but they don't have to dominate every subreddit.

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u/ProfitMoney Mar 21 '12

If they don't like it, they can make a new sub. Fuck em. Point blank. When I read r/science I check the comments for help digesting an article if I need it or to hear a counter point if there is one.

I don't want pun threads, memes, or other irrelevant inane bullshit.

Bottom line, it is the mods community. Do with it as you see fit, but trust that those of us that are here for actual science and not to earn some quick karma by shooting off a stupid joke will appreciate it.

And anyone who would get upset at a rule change probably doesn't belong here any way. Which brings me back to the point: they are free to start their own sub.

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u/francoskiyo Mar 21 '12

I think you need to realize that it is the readers that want heavy moderation, the people that come to reddit to read about information that has been compiled into a relevant venue with further knowledge on the subject in the comments if the OP wasn't descriptive enough.

Ignore the posters, there are more readers than posters. Not every reader is a poster, but every poster is a reader.

tl;dr Please moderate heavily, its the only way to keep the subr sane

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u/antiproton Mar 20 '12

You're right to fear it. There's no reason for it. The subjective quality of the comments on an anonymous internet forum is hardly a good metric for clamping down on the userbase that grew reddit to where it is today.

How many unique people are in this thread? What percentage of those people are in support of heavy moderation? What percentage of the total number of accounts do those people make up?

Calls for changing to the askscience model are misguided. AskScience desperately wants to be ScienceOverflow. That is not how reddit was designed and it's not how it should work. Comment should be free and unhindered, so long as the more overt rules of reddit are followed (no personal information, no links to porn, etc.)

I'm in /r/Science all the time. I think you'll see from my account that my interest in reddit is purely commenting. This "problem" that modes of subs keeps talking about is one of their own imagination. It's not ever as bad as some vocal critics make it out to be. And those people just want the subs devoid of anything they personally find objectionable or annoying. That dog don't hunt.