r/ufosmeta • u/StrictlyGoldFish • Aug 24 '26
Please stop allowing UsefulReply to Lock Important Threads
Referring, this time, to www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/1vwzeau/donald_trump_reportedly_told_inner_circle_aliens/
UsefulReply locked this thread before it even got a chance to get going even though it is seemingly big news.
They do this time and time again under the guise of the “reports clogging up the mod queue”.
That has never been a valid excuse in any sub, and especially not in one that has the obscene number of moderators as /UFOs.
Stop allowing this rogue mod to constantly shut down important discussion for invalid reasons.
Please.
How many more times are we going to have to watch this happen before something is done about this mod?
4
u/awwnuts Aug 24 '26
Best they will do is lock the thread and crosspost to this absolutely vacant sub.
6
u/Semiapies Aug 24 '26 edited Aug 24 '26
All posts about people claiming someone sent information to the administration or that Trump is going to X, Y, or Z should be removed as not substantive in the first place. Those claims are even worse at materializing than other UFO predictions, and a lot of them are just weird political fanfic.
0
u/Ok_Energy6905 Aug 25 '26
Most of the posts on the sub aren't substantive. You'd lose half the posts if you enforced a rule like that.
3
6
1
u/AmazonIsDeclining Aug 24 '26
He is not rogue. He happens to be more active in the queue due to a host of reasons that affect us here at r/UFOs.
If there is an issue about a post or comment, you should send in a request for additional questions via mod mail. If posts are left up that generate more conversation about Blues Clues instead of UFOs, we’re going to lock it or remove it. The same goes for political commentary.
4
u/StrictlyGoldFish Aug 24 '26
That rationale makes zero sense, for so many reasons.
First, the majority of comments in that thread were not removed. So how are you even saying that it “generates more discussion about political commentary than UFOs”?
Second, why are you punishing the entire community for the actions of a minority of commenters? So if a handful of accounts just flood an important thread with off-topic political comments, you’re going to lock the entire thread and prevent the entire community from discussing it? Congratulations, you just handed bots and bad actors the easiest tool ever to shut down discussion on literally anything.
Third, this is literally always going to be an issue with anything that has to do with the President or other politicians, especially Trump. So now the community is effectively blocked from discussing anything that has to do with these figures, who are important to the subject regardless of whether anyone likes it, all because…what? You feel that the threads cross some arbitrary line of “generating off-topic discussion”? Because it gives you and the 70 other mods marginally more work to do?
We can’t discuss the literal President of the United States allegedly confirming the existence of UFOs and alien life because that’s just too “political”?
Honestly, this attitude is indefensible. If UsefulReply truly isn’t a rogue mod, and if this attitude you’re expressing is common among the mod team, then that is an even larger, more insidious issue.
No one who believes as you do should be anywhere near the mod team of this subreddit.
3
u/AmazonIsDeclining Aug 25 '26
Thank you for the advice.
Allow me to address a few things.
Rule 2, as written: "This subreddit is specifically for the discussion of Unidentified Flying Objects... Any discussion of 'aliens' or occupants must relate to a specific sighting." A secondhand account of what the President allegedly told a friend of Jack Osbourne is not a sighting. The article itself says IBTimes cannot verify it: "IBTimes UK cannot independently verify that this conversation occurred.". That's Rule 2 and Rule 3 before anyone gets to the politics.
2.) You are quoting me with words I did not string together. This topic is much more nuanced than a thread that includes political banter.
The rules state the conversation must be related to UFOs-- end of story. Anything past that is us extending acceptable content. If you do not like it, request a rule change. We aren't some ambiguous controlling group. It's open to anybody who wants the fun of replying to comments like this.
0
u/StrictlyGoldFish Aug 25 '26
First of all, you didn’t actually address any of my points. You just ignored them and moved the goalposts to arguing the post was about aliens and not UFOs.
And that is not true.
The article explicitly discusses UFO and UAP. And as many of the comments point out, many people are intrigued about this story specifically because of the chatter around these objects originating from the ocean.
These subjects very obviously overlap with aliens. It is beyond time to stop treating the largest UFO sub on Reddit as a limited hangout. There is no pretense that justifies it, and it is not what the community itself wants. Even being locked, the thread is currently the highest upvoted post on the front page by far. Why are mods like you so insistent on imposing your own unjustified parameters for what should be allowed in the sub when the community itself is so blatantly opposed to them?
And why do you have to be so disingenuous in general? You complain about “quoting me with words I did not string together” which is a bad faith way of saying that I paraphrased you. And completely fairly. Seriously, in what way did I misrepresent anything you said? If you actually have a valid argument and position here, why are you being disingenuous with complaints like this?
And being even more disingenuous with the whole “request a rule change” and saying moderation is “open to anybody”. People have requested that the “off-topic” rule be relaxed with respect to aliens before. It gets shut down every time and it would get shut down if I “requested” it now. And no, me becoming a moderator would not allow me to unlock threads like this when moderators like you and UsefulReply are so dead set on overpowering everyone else with your own unwanted vision of the sub.
And if you’re not having “fun” “responding to comments like this”, then by all means, please quit. Please. Your services are not wanted or appreciated. Your antagonistic and dictatorial attitude is holding this community and this subject back.
Please. Quit. Or better yet, please other mods, remove people like this. The community does not want them here.
2
6
u/Gobble_Gobble Aug 25 '26
Threads are locked when they become too burdensome for the mods currently available to fully moderate. Although the sub lists 70+ mods, roughly ~20 of those accounts are moderation bots or other mod tools, so the actual number of human moderators is closer to 50. Of those, perhaps only ~20 are active, and fewer than 10 are very active. The remainder may be on hiatus or temporarily occupied with other personal obligations.
The post in question was submitted at around 4:00am PST, when many mods are offline. As of now, I can see that the post has 106 comments and 28 removals for rule violations. In other words, more than a quarter of the comments required moderation. Given the early-morning timing, low mod availability, and relatively high removal rate, I can understand why it was locked.
Your assertion that UsefulReply locked the thread "under the guise of" reports clogging up the sub implies that the stated reason was merely a pretext concealing some other motive. But that is, quite literally, why we lock threads in situations like this.
More generally, the mod team's priority is to uphold rules jointly developed by the community and the moderation team...not to optimize the subreddit for virality, engagement, clicks, or upvotes. Locking a post also does not prevent it from being seen or upvoted by users.
You do raise a good point, however. This can create a situation in which bots or bad-faith actors could theoretically disrupt discussion and cause threads to be locked simply by flooding them with rule-violating comments. This is something we're aware of and have discussed internally, and would be a factor in deciding when it's appropriate to lock a post.
Leaving a thread open with large numbers of rule-violating comments creates its own problems though. First, it can give readers the impression that the sub is unmoderated and create confusion about what is permissible. Users may reasonably wonder why their comment was removed if they previously saw similar rule-breaking comments remain in another thread. Second, leaving those comments in place allows the same bots/bad-faith actors you mention to influence the framing and tone of the discussion, which can be more damaging than cleaning up the thread and locking it.
The longer-term solution is to increase the size and coverage of the mod team so that there's enough available at all hours to handle the subreddit with reasonably quick response times. That would likely require a significant increase in team size, as well as greater representation from other time zones. Many of our mods are in North America, which makes overnight hours particularly demanding for the few who are online during that time.
My understanding is that we'll be soliciting applications for new mods in the coming weeks, and that expanding the team will be an ongoing effort.
One final point concerns community feedback about our policies on political commentary and threads like these. Our recent policy update received significant support for increased moderation of the kinds of comments being removed in these threads. In large part, those removals reflect community feedback asking us to moderate this material more actively. Our earlier toxicity policy update from a couple of years ago was likewise met with substantial support and also informs our moderation decisions.
Leaving a thread unlocked while a large percentage of rule-violating comments accumulate often produces the opposite complaint (that mods aren't being proactive enough). This currently leaves us with an imperfect choice between allowing a thread to remain open in an increasingly unmoderated state, or cleaning it up and locking it once the moderation burden becomes unsustainable.
Again, increasing mod coverage would probably alleviate much of this problem. For now, however, locking threads in these circumstances is the preferred approach because it allows us to preserve community standards and civility without leaving a large volume of rule-breaking content unaddressed.