225 upvotes, 27 direct replies (showing 25)
View submission: Announcing Online Presence Indicators
I have a question:
Those of us who are chronically harassed and stalked -- how do we opt out of this manner of broadcasting telemetry altogether?
Those of us who moderate communities where literal hundreds and thousands of accounts join and wait for "the mods are asleep" to attempt to deluge the community with shock porn, hateful image macros, rape threats, death threats, ASCII image art depicting pornography and scatological acts -- How do we opt out of this manner of broadcasting telemetry altogether?
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?
What will this broadcast telemetry do to make Reddit safer to use for women and gender / sexual minorities?
Will this be turned on by default for everyone? Will it be turned off by default for everyone?
Can the "Hiding" status indicator label be changed to something that doesn't convey an active intent and agency?
I ***do not want*** this feature on my account. I don't want "Online", I don't want "Not Online". I don't want "Available" or "Not Available". I don't want "Away" or "AFK" or anything like that.
I want -- when people retrieve the .JSON that describes my account's metadata, for this field to not be filled by `NULL` as a value, but to be *entirely absent from the dictionary*.
Comment by cyanocittaetprocyon at 03/03/2021 at 22:35 UTC
30 upvotes, 4 direct replies
Admin /u/lift_ticket83:
Questions? I’m sure you’ve got them! Our team will be hanging out in the comments to answer them and can address any additional feedback or suggestions that you might have.
Just kidding. They really have no intention of answering questions.
Comment by [deleted] at 03/03/2021 at 22:11 UTC
9 upvotes, 1 direct replies
[removed]
Comment by Kimarnic at 03/03/2021 at 22:27 UTC
9 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Those of us who moderate communities where literal hundreds and thousands of accounts join and wait for "the mods are asleep" to attempt to deluge the community with shock porn, hateful image macros, rape threats, death threats, ASCII image art depicting pornography and scatological acts
Holy shit
Comment by [deleted] at 03/03/2021 at 20:11 UTC
31 upvotes, 1 direct replies
They aren’t gonna respond to this, they’re busy doing fuck all.
Comment by [deleted] at 03/03/2021 at 19:27 UTC
66 upvotes, 0 direct replies
The admins are out of touch with Reddit
Comment by PrincessOfZephyr at 03/03/2021 at 21:21 UTC
10 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Reddit admins throwing their mod teams under the bus to push features nobody asked for seems to be their default mode of operation.
Comment by LeagueOfBlasians at 03/03/2021 at 21:51 UTC
10 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Welcome to social media and big tech.
Where these people arrogantly think they know you better than you do and act in your “best interest”.
Comment by [deleted] at 03/03/2021 at 20:34 UTC
18 upvotes, 0 direct replies
For real...some of us are harassed on the regular.
Comment by Sonderfall-78 at 03/03/2021 at 21:58 UTC
18 upvotes, 4 direct replies
Log out. Never log in again.
Comment by usernameaa2 at 04/03/2021 at 00:06 UTC
8 upvotes, 1 direct replies
u/lift_ticket83, why are you and the admin team *hiding* from this reply?
Comment by [deleted] at 04/03/2021 at 13:08 UTC
4 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Signal boost. Deleting my account because of these reasons.
I genuinely cannot see the purpose of this function, if it is not for making these bad behaviours easier. So... reddit is not only ignoring these problems, but actively catering to them.
I wish I could say I was surprised.
Comment by CL-Young at 04/03/2021 at 00:27 UTC
9 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Admin u/lift_ticket83 , are you going to address this?
Comment by [deleted] at 03/03/2021 at 19:39 UTC
21 upvotes, 0 direct replies
[removed]
Comment by SulkyJoe at 03/03/2021 at 22:56 UTC
6 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Give this one a response, this is a big issue being created here
Comment by Tetizeraz at 04/03/2021 at 00:26 UTC
3 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Great comment. You summarize all the reasons this feature is a bad feature for Reddit.
Comment by TRxz-FariZKiller at 03/03/2021 at 22:56 UTC
9 upvotes, 0 direct replies
u/lift_ticket83
Comment by [deleted] at 04/03/2021 at 15:32 UTC*
1 upvotes, 1 direct replies
[deleted]
Comment by lift_ticket83 at 04/03/2021 at 00:50 UTC
-13 upvotes, 22 direct replies
Thanks for sharing your understandable concerns. I’m happy to share more about how we’re approaching many of the things you’ve raised.
“Those of us who are chronically harassed and stalked -- how do we opt out of this manner of broadcasting telemetry altogether?”
You can disable this feature entirely by toggling your presence indicator to “Hidden.” You can do this on both old and new Reddit, and it will not change regardless of what device you use to browse Reddit. When your indicator is toggled to “Hiding” no other user can see your online status.
“Those of us who moderate communities where literal hundreds and thousands of accounts join and wait for "the mods are asleep" to attempt to deluge the community with shock porn, hateful image macros, rape threats, death threats, ASCII image art depicting pornography and scatological acts -- How do we opt out of this manner of broadcasting telemetry altogether?”
This is an important call-out and is something that we’ve thought about and discussed further during broader discussions with moderators. These indicators are currently not planned to show within the mod list, so users will not be able to see at a glance if all mods are online.
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?
What will this broadcast telemetry do to make Reddit safer to use for women and gender / sexual minorities?
We’re building out several safety features that we’re aiming to have ready for the general audience launch that we hope will address several of the things you called out. One of these features is making it so that users who are banned from a subreddit will not be able to see the online status of users within that specific subreddit.
Will this be turned on by default for everyone? Will it be turned off by default for everyone?
Yes - this will be turned on by default and that’s a large part of the reason why we’re announcing this in advance and why we made the opt-out process so easy. We want to give everyone the chance to opt-out of this feature before we make the presence indicator public-facing.
Can the "Hiding" status indicator label be changed to something that doesn't convey an active intent and agency?
This is something we went back and forth on, and we should have been more clear about our reasoning in the post. We chose the word "Hiding" because if a user has switched the toggle to disable this feature they're still technically online even though it would not be viewable to anyone else. We didn't want there to be any confusion in the broader sense of the term.
We will have a Help Center article explaining all of this before we go live with our general audience launch.
Comment by [deleted] at 04/03/2021 at 15:52 UTC
0 upvotes, 1 direct replies
[deleted]
Comment by [deleted] at 03/03/2021 at 22:07 UTC
-10 upvotes, 1 direct replies
[deleted]
Comment by gobbleself at 04/03/2021 at 01:19 UTC
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
And, how is it determined? Will third party apps be forced to provide information to Reddit?
Comment by Zatoro25 at 04/03/2021 at 10:38 UTC
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
I got to believe the investors have been trying for this feature as long as reddit has been in their portfolios. "Online" has to be the first monetizable bit of info, so it makes me wonder if this 'compromise' is the end of reddit for me. I doubt it, but some day I might look back and wonder why was it I stopped using that one website every day, oh right the avalanche started when the snowball that was online status was dropped
Thank you for your post putting my thoughts to words, specifically your intensity and tone. Otherwise I might have missed the significance
ps I hope I'm not coming off as sarcastic, it's early and I'm stoned and my thanks are sincere
Comment by dimensionalsquirrel at 04/03/2021 at 14:19 UTC
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Use apollo
Comment by reddit_oar at 04/03/2021 at 16:27 UTC
1 upvotes, 0 direct replies
seconded
Comment by [deleted] at 04/03/2021 at 18:29 UTC
1 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Those of us who moderate communities where literal hundreds and thousands of accounts join and wait for "the mods are asleep" . . . .
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?
You overstate your case. Already, one can look at a user's recent posts and comments, note the timestamps of each, and figure out when he is usually active. There are tools that automate this and make a convenient heatmap-style plot.
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In college, I spent far too much time on Reddit. (I deleted that account.) Accordingly, a plot of my comments over time would have shown any interested person:
1. When I slept.
2. When I worked (gaps for the commute; low activity throughout the workday; high activity during lunch).
3. When I was in class (by complete silence at the same time every week).
4. When my semester started and ended; when final exams took place; when my school had breaks and vacation days.
Back then, a Reddit profile only showed the last 1000 comments. But it would not have taken much effort for someone with rudimentary programming skills to write code that periodically scraped my profile, saved my comments and posts in a database, and generated a long-term plot. (I had enemies, so I would not be surprised if someone had done just that.)
Knowing this, I acted as though anyone on Reddit knew what school I attended and what my major was, and I made sure that my other disclosures (interests, personal characteristics disclosed, writing style) added up could not give me away.