https://www.reddit.com/r/beta/comments/lx3aw8/feedback_a_collection_of_concerns_about_the_new/
created by eriophora on 03/03/2021 at 20:18 UTC*
245 upvotes, 13 top-level comments (showing 13)
About an hour ago, the new "online presence indicator" you're all seeing was announced[1] over on r/changelog. I personally have a number of concerns with how this will impact moderator efficacy and community member safety. There were many other concerns raised by other users in the r/changelog thread.
1: https://www.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/lx08r2/announcing_online_presence_indicators/
How This Impacts Large-Scale User Harassment & Doxxing
At r/Fantasy, we have had community members targeted by large-scale harassment organizations. Having an indicator opens up victims of large-scale harassment to further abuse. Harassers will either a) be able to collect data on when a user is awake, asleep, home, or not home or b) see that someone is "hiding," which will fuel their ire when it is perceived as a response. Showing as "offline" instead of "hiding" could help alleviate this.
When this is combined with doxxing strategies, this actively puts community members' lives in danger. Community members whose addresses have been publicized will now either make public the outline of their daily schedule or will be seen as "hiding" - a status which states that the doxxing has been effective and should be escalated to get even deeper under their skin. This is a great comment explaining why this language is loaded and how it may be perceived by potential abusers[2]. If online status is retained, this is even more dangerous.
2: https://www.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/lx08r2/announcing_online_presence_indicators/gpkgo17/
As u/bardfinn put it[3]:
3: https://www.reddit.com/r/changelog/comments/lx08r2/announcing_online_presence_indicators/gpkf7yw/
Those of us who have been unlucky enough to have been doxxed, and for whom this manner of telemetry broadcast will alert the people who want to rape and murder us that we are home -- or out of the house -- or asleep -- how do we opt out of this manner of broadcast telemetry?
I could easily picture anti-LGBTQ+ organizations using this online indicator to target and harass individuals who divulge queer identity and are "online," as a another example.
Small Scale Harassment
On a smaller scale, slap-fights occur frequently on reddit. With an online indicator, this means that users would be encouraged to escalate more quickly in thread. Further, if someone fails to reply in thread, it encourages harassment via DM or Chat because, "Why aren't you replying when I see you are online?"
The "hiding" status exacerbates that issue. If someone who is a victim of small scale harassment changes status to hiding, that broadcasts to the harasser that they have gotten under their skin and should continue to escalate. "Invisible" wouldn't necessarily resolve the first half of this issue, mind, though it would help with this second piece.
We have often received and seen our users receive lackluster responses from reddit admin when smaller-scale harassment is reported. I do not wish to see this increase when the current amount is already not being adequately addressed.
Even on a smaller scale, I believe this would encourage faster, more vitriolic escalations in the slap-fights we already have to spend a great deal of time and energy moderating. Now, rather than having a chance to step away and use the rest of reddit, someone may continue commenting if they do not receive a response because they see that the person is online. This is not the type of increased engagement that is good for anyone. This may happen either in thread or encourage chats/DMs outside of it. We have frequently had lackluster responses from the admin to this type of smaller scale harassment, and I do not wish to see it increase.
Impacts on Existing Privacy and Security Concerns
Despite previous promises, we are still unable to see who follows us on reddit. I have multiple followers. I have no idea who they are. If they are bad faith actors, this will increase their toolkit should they choose to develop a harassment campaign against me.
Blocking is insufficient to resolve this, as we all know just how simple it is to create an account and evade a ban or a block. We know this because as moderators we have no tools to combat it, not even a simple method of seeing which accounts share an IP with previously banned accounts (even if the IP itself is not visible, which would be reasonable for privacy reasons).
These unknown followers may be collecting data in ways that are invisible to me.
Other Moderation Issues
As others have pointed out there, this makes "mods are asleep" quite literal. Given that most "mods are asleep" blitz attacks are from off-subreddit and use brigading strategies, I don't think that having mods be "hidden" would resolve this. This is especially dangerous when combined with doxxing and targeted harassment campaigns.
Additionally, this provides an avenue for banned users to try to identify which moderator banned them and begin a harassment campaign with that knowledge. A similar issue arises when a post or comment is anonymously removed.
It will also cause problems when a community member submits a modmail and see multiple moderators are online and becomes angry when they do not receive an immediate response. Similarly, it will encourage community members who report content that they believe is rule-breaking (but which may not be) to harass actives mods into an explanation as to why a comment wasn't removed.
Users who find old posts through search or Google may also be more likely to commend and engage with ancient posts if they see users in that old conversation are online. This is a problem because those posts are no longer being actively moderated since they're weeks old, allowing for harassment or rule-breaking to occur without moderator knowledge.
Finally, being seen as "online" frankly just encourages users to message online mods instead of correctly going through modmail. This is an additional burden when we have to redirect every time - a burden on both mods *and* well-meaning community members.
These issues will add additional stress, burden, and personal danger to an already thankless job.
How is this Different from Other Social Media Online Indicators?
On Facebook, only people you've added as friends see you online. On Twitter, there is no "currently online" visibility. Discord has different settings for being seen online, invisible, etc, and it's primarily people you share servers with who can see that. It's also a little different since it is geared towards live chatting and you have more control over who you interact with through servers, DM settings, etc - most of Discord is not public. The vast majority of reddit is public, as are your interactions on it.
Comment by suddenly_ponies at 03/03/2021 at 21:24 UTC
36 upvotes, 1 direct replies
A week ago I posted that we should have better tagging and organization of Saved links and people said that the developers cost money and they can't waste time on things like that. Apparently they were wasting your time on this instead
Comment by jc3833 at 03/03/2021 at 21:58 UTC
17 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Another risk is the idea of the trolls coming in and doing shit because "no mods online, therefore, no rules"
Comment by thequeensownfool at 03/03/2021 at 20:36 UTC
27 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Thank you for concisely putting together a post that outlines all my concerns, as well as some I hadn't thought of.
We already have issues of users dming individual mods when they should be using modmail, or sending multiple messages in quick succession and then getting irate when they do not receive an immediate response. Having an indicator when we are online will definitely open mods up to more harassment.
Having users conduct harassment through old threads is also a very big concerns. r/Fantasy is a book subreddit. We often show up in google searches when people are looking for a specific request. We are not actively moding those old threads and are likely to miss any harassment conducted there until it is triggered by automod filters or reported by the OP.
Our entire mod team already has chat turned off. We want users to go through the appropriate channels of messaging through modmail, rather than trying to start chat converstations, dming, or replying to comments from individual mods. We do not want users to be able to see that we're online and get angry that we're not immediately responding to them. If anything, this will lead to increased work as we will have to ban people for harassment, and raised stress and burnout among our team.
Comment by blue_wat at 03/03/2021 at 21:01 UTC
9 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Yeah I saw the indicator and immediately thought that I might stop using reddit with an account soon.
Comment by apocalypticheartpain at 03/03/2021 at 21:16 UTC
8 upvotes, 2 direct replies
Honest question coming from an end-user, is there any large-to-medium community that *doesn't* face personal harassment and attempts to doxx? Humanity is innately awful; even when a community is as issue-less as possible, there are people who'll be out there to destroy the lives of the people maintaining it because "cruelty is funny and caring is stupid."
One of the reasons I actively avoid this website is disdain for the userbase and size; its advantage is that I don't have to log in for specific, niche questions.
This new change is enough to push people like me away, and I feel like is reddit's active attempt to shit on it's (for-free!) moderation teams while encouraging bad behaviour amongst the worst of its users.
Comment by TSM- at 03/03/2021 at 20:44 UTC
8 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Perhaps it would be useful for subreddits to control whether online/offline indicators are shown on that subreddit. That way, certain subreddits where it might cause a problem can disable them, but others can have them enabled to increase user participation. Like I can see it being a positive thing in r/askreddit, but not the best thing on say r/unpopularopinion.
Comment by Toybasher at 03/03/2021 at 21:28 UTC
3 upvotes, 1 direct replies
It's funny because I use the old reddit layout and can't see the indicator. Not on the mouseover tooltip when I mouse over someones name, not on their profile, etc.
Literally the only appearance of it is at the top right next to my own username by the sign out button. Like no shit I'm online, I'm signed in on Reddit staring at a page.
Comment by themusicguy2000 at 04/03/2021 at 04:38 UTC
2 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Yeah generally when reddit updates something to add something I don't like, I think "wow, that kinda sucks", maybe upvote a post saying it sucks, and keep using reddit - on a platform notorious for hosting terrible people, an "online" indicator can be straight up dangerous and I might actually leave the site over it if it's not removed
Comment by [deleted] at 04/03/2021 at 12:13 UTC
2 upvotes, 0 direct replies
I don't really share the concern that a green dot will result in an increase of malicious behavior. If someone were to discover your profile and dox you, they would do so regardless of the fact you are online.
With that said, I would very much like to know who my followers are, many years ago I had a problem with an online stalker who used information from my social media accounts to cause issues in my personal life. I refuse to believe I've ever said anything worthwhile enough to have gained a loyal fan-base. So who are they? I would say most folks do not like the idea of anonymous people eyeballing them, when you are followed on other platforms (IG for example) you are free to block that person or at least see what they're about.
It's 2021 and this issue still hasn't been addressed even though it was said we would be able to see our followers in 2019.
Comment by NobleKale at 07/03/2021 at 10:35 UTC
2 upvotes, 1 direct replies
About an hour ago, the new "online presence indicator" you're all seeing was announced over on r/changelog.
Interestingly, that thread isn't showing up at r/changelog anymore - the link still works, but that thread isn't listed on the subreddit.
Comment by un_blob at 03/03/2021 at 22:27 UTC
3 upvotes, 1 direct replies
At first I was thinking "well this is fine just disable it and don't think about it meh..." now I am concerned that this will be a feature regardless of what is said here !
Well done job, concise and precise, but also frightening for sure...
Comment by mr78rpm at 04/03/2021 at 19:55 UTC
0 upvotes, 0 direct replies
I'm using the term "concerned" because we've been invited to raise any concerns we might have. So... I'm concerned that this post was written with the starting phrase "about an hour ago." Yes, I'm serious.
It's now been 23 hours since "an hour ago." The truth of that should point out that writing "about an hour ago" is misleading. IIRC, every post I've ever looked at on reddit has an indication of how old the post is, given by the "submitted" factoid just under the Post title.
So if it's important how old the post is, it's automatically given. if it doesn't matter, then writing it into the post itself can only mislead.
Perhaps such references to posts should be disallowed in some way to avoid actual or potential misinformation about when something happened.
Comment by xynix_ie at 03/03/2021 at 21:15 UTC
-5 upvotes, 2 direct replies
Agree to all. If this was forced, but I just clicked it off and now I don't show up as being online. How is this an issue?