48 upvotes, 3 direct replies (showing 3)
View submission: Announcing Online Presence Indicators
1: https://www.reddit.com/r/beta/comments/lx3aw8/feedback_a_collection_of_concerns_about_the_new/
Hi there! I am one of the mods over at r/Fantasy. In the past, we have had users who have been victims of large-scale harassment campaigns. I am worried how a feature like this could be abused by groups to target our community members.
I don't think that showing as "hiding" is a good alternative. It would be much better for this to work like all other online indicators, where "invisible" shows as offline. Being set to "hiding" would just offer one more avenue of harassment and would likely escalate issues when targets are perceived as responding to the harassment by changing their online status.
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.
Can you address these concerns?
Comment by [deleted] at 03/03/2021 at 21:28 UTC
14 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Can you address these concerns?
Narrator: They did not.
Comment by [deleted] at 05/03/2021 at 04:00 UTC
2 upvotes, 0 direct replies
As another Mod, I have programmed AutoMod to automatically comment on every post in my subreddit, notifying users of this new feature, its potential for abuse, and how to disable it. Since your users in particular have experienced horrific harassment, I think they would REALLY appreciate being informed this way.
I think it's pretty clear that the admins don't want users to know about this, because if they did they would have posted in r/Announcements rather than r/ChangeLog. Therefore, I believe it's up to us mods to get the word out and protect the members of our communities.
I really hope you will consider doing this! My sub is pretty small and my reach really limited, so I am hopeful of getting mods of larger subreddits on board.
Comment by ryanmercer at 08/03/2021 at 11:21 UTC
1 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Happy cake-day!