https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/e8vl4d/announcing_the_crowd_control_beta/
created by jkohhey on 10/12/2019 at 19:45 UTC
353 upvotes, 121 top-level comments (showing 25)
Crowd Control is a setting that lets moderators minimize community interference (i.e. disruption from people outside of their community) by collapsing comments from people who aren’t yet trusted users. We’ve been testing this with a group of communities over the past months, and today we’re starting to make it more widely available as a request access beta feature.
If you have a community that *goes viral (*as the kids in the 90s used to say[1]*)* and you aren’t prepared for the influx of new people, Crowd Control can help you out.
1: https://i.redd.it/xw21qwlcfcy31.gif
Crowd Control is a community setting that is based on a person’s relationship with your community. If a person doesn’t have a relationship with your community yet, then their comments will be collapsed. Or if you want something less strict, you can limit Crowd Control to people who have had negative interactions with your community in the past. Once a person establishes themselves in your community, their comments will display as normal. And you can always choose to show any comments that have been collapsed by Crowd Control.
You can keep Crowd Control on all the time, or turn it on and off when the need arises.
​
Crowd Control callout and option to show collapsed comments
The settings page will be available on new Reddit, but once you’ve set Crowd Control, collapsing and moderator actions will work on old, new, and the official Reddit app.
We’ve been in Alpha mode with mods of a variety of communities for the last few months to tailor this feature to different community needs. We’re scaling from the alpha to the beta to make sure we have a chance to fine tune it even more with feedback from you. If your community would like to participate in the beta, please check out the comments below for how to request access to the feature. We’ll be adding communities to the beta by early next week.
I’ll watch the comments for a bit if you have any questions.
Comment by MajorParadox at 10/12/2019 at 19:51 UTC
105 upvotes, 3 direct replies
Definitely better than confusing users when it looked like normal downvote collapsing, but "crowd control" is still very vague. Could use some better wording so users don't flood us asking what "crowd control" means. Also, maybe a subreddit setting to customize our own wording?
That said, I love the settings dial!
Comment by fdagpigj at 10/12/2019 at 23:27 UTC
18 upvotes, 1 direct replies
I have to say, based on my intuition since I don't have hard data to go on, that this sounds very ineffective against the purpose it's designed for while threatening healthy reddit usage.
First of all, I think it should by default be thread-specific. It should probably also not be something mods might be encouraged to keep on all the time, but rather should be able to turn on automatically (the sensitivity being set by mods) if you detect brigade-like behaviour (lots of users who don't frequent a subreddit suddenly finding a specific thread).
I also think making it so if a user has negative karma in a subreddit their comments are always hidden is a very bad idea, as this will further help form circlejerks and echo chambers, those are already a problem on reddit. Moderators can already ban users they deem unwanted, putting in a feature to automatically impune their comments seems extremely overkill. At that point if you have one bad comment chain in a community you might as well make a new account.
Comment by sephstorm at 10/12/2019 at 20:54 UTC
42 upvotes, 5 direct replies
So do you guys worry about how this will affect the nature of Reddit as a platform for sharing ideas and opinions?
Now it seems that an outsider who stumbles on a subreddit will now have their view minimized.
Comment by ladfrombrad at 10/12/2019 at 19:52 UTC
12 upvotes, 2 direct replies
Will those comments that are collapsed be available to discern through the API and let third party apps show that?
Comment by shabutaru118 at 11/12/2019 at 02:48 UTC
12 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Is there a way for users to regain control and have nothing collapsed for their own view?
Comment by AssuredlyAThrowAway at 11/12/2019 at 10:00 UTC
11 upvotes, 1 direct replies
I'm really confused by this; how are users supposed to develop a reputation in a community if their comments are hidden from most users simply because they lack history in a given subreddit?
Isn't this pretty blatantly hostile to people who are new to reddit in a way that cannot possibly be balanced out by the benefits it might bring to established communities?
I realize this is just a beta, but it seems antithetical to the very nature of reddit to allow moderators to use such a feature as userbases on this platform are per se transient.
This kind of feature runs the risk of turning communities into echo chambers that accord with their moderators ideological viewpoints, and I urge extreme caution before implementing it site wide.
Comment by roionsteroids at 10/12/2019 at 19:57 UTC
17 upvotes, 2 direct replies
What's the definition of "new user" here? Like, reddit account age, or certain time since their first post/comment in that specific subreddit?
Comment by Ivashkin at 10/12/2019 at 20:37 UTC
23 upvotes, 1 direct replies
How well does this work with old reddit and apps? Most of our users don't bother with new reddit.
Comment by RoboticPlayer at 10/12/2019 at 20:38 UTC
17 upvotes, 2 direct replies
Will it be possible to enable crowd control for specific posts? Maybe a post reaches r/all and you want crowd control on just that post, not the other ones
Comment by mister-la at 10/12/2019 at 20:35 UTC
10 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Have the test communities found it useful outside of their periodic, abnormally popular posts?
The mechanic seems like it's at its best when temporarily applied, instead of being a constant setting. Unless I misunderstand, anything but the lowest severity is a considerable barrier for getting new users on board on normal days.
Comment by GetOffMyLawn_ at 10/12/2019 at 22:52 UTC
8 upvotes, 3 direct replies
I don't understand how collapsing comments helps with anything.
Comment by trytoholdon at 11/12/2019 at 07:16 UTC
7 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Seems like there are lots of euphemisms in this post. By “negative interactions”, you mean downvotes, right?
Do you think it fosters a healthy community to essentially create echo chambers by design?
Comment by Watchful1 at 10/12/2019 at 20:32 UTC
8 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Is the state of the comment decided at the time of submission or at the time of displaying it? So if a user is new to a community and posts a comment that is collapsed, but the comment is highly relevant and gets upvoted to the top of the thread despite being collapsed, will it remain collapsed (by default) forever? Even if the user comments heavily in the thread and meets whatever the threshold is for being established.
Comment by V2Blast at 10/12/2019 at 19:53 UTC
29 upvotes, 2 direct replies
Ooh, this definitely seems useful, e.g. when a subreddit is being brigaded. Probably not so useful to have on all the time in my experience, but this is a cool feature for those cases.
EDIT: As MajorParadox's comment says, "Crowd Control" is a very non-obvious name from a user-facing perspective in terms of what it means. Users definitely shouldn't see that terminology when something is collapsed.
Also, is it possible to enable this only for specific threads? In more minor cases of brigading, at least for me, often the fallout doesn't extend outside a single thread or two.
Comment by pinkiedash417 at 10/12/2019 at 21:23 UTC
15 upvotes, 3 direct replies
Will users (not mods) be able to override this in their viewing experience without resorting to third-party applications?
Comment by aalp234 at 10/12/2019 at 19:51 UTC
23 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Very interesting tool, seems like it also might be really good for bigger subs during brigading situations, although only temporarily of course.
Is it at all possible to enable automod to collapse comments, the same way it can delete them? It would be really good to be able to create some more specialized crowd control tools by programming automod in conjunction with collapsed comments.
Comment by Phaethonas at 11/12/2019 at 07:04 UTC
5 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Who thought that this was a good idea? What distinguished Reddit from other social media, despite any other shortcomings Reddit had, was that Reddit was designed in such way that it did not allow echo-chambers. Now, with that feature, you are creating echo-chambers and brigading. That's a shame.
Comment by GambitsEnd at 10/12/2019 at 21:05 UTC
5 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Seems like this could be interesting, depending how the final implementation works out.
Reading comments it seems a big concern is communicating to users what this feature is in a way that makes sense. While "Crowd Control" is definitely an accurate description for what the feature is trying to do, it has negative connotations and I guarantee you any user that sees "Crowd Control" next to their comment will be displeased while will lead to poor behavior.
A potential solution is a feature I've been wanting for a while that would work in conjunction with this one. A couple of subreddit settings that when turned on will display a small "badge" or icon next to the user's name in posts. Similar to a flair or the cake day icon. One setting will display an icon for users new to Reddit (a new user icon, essentially) and a different setting when turned on will display an icon for users new to the community.
The two settings just mentioned above can then interact with the "Crowd Control" feature, allowing moderators to see which kind of users have their posts automatically collapsed (and an icon that says "Auto Collapsed" can display to denote exactly what it did rather than a somewhat ambiguous "Crowd Control").
Comment by [deleted] at 10/12/2019 at 22:19 UTC
5 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Hopefully this can help when AskReddit does their "What small subreddit deserves more attention?" and small high quality subs get sudden influxes of low effort meme posting.
Comment by jondeerryder at 11/12/2019 at 08:12 UTC
7 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Creating even more of a echo chamber while censoring other people's speech, bring back free speech. Bring back the Reddit we used to love.
Now we just search for alternatives to Reddit while regretting the efforts we did to make this site popular.
Comment by [deleted] at 11/12/2019 at 10:54 UTC
7 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Yes I have a question, actually:
Are we currently at war with Eurasia or Eastasia?
Comment by Halaku at 10/12/2019 at 19:56 UTC
27 upvotes, 1 direct replies
In no particular order:
Comment by Ouroboron at 11/12/2019 at 05:08 UTC
10 upvotes, 1 direct replies
This is a terrible idea that will absolutely be used to reinforce groupthink and echo chambers. Stop enabling this nonsense and open back up to what Reddit used to be.
Comment by redtaboo at 10/12/2019 at 19:46 UTC*
1 upvotes, 194 direct replies
Please reply to me here with your subreddit name if you would like to test this in your community. We’ll start adding communities by early next week!
We'll update here again if we decide to stop accepting requests.
Comment by [deleted] at 10/12/2019 at 19:52 UTC
14 upvotes, 1 direct replies
I have seen a lot of bad actor throwaway accounts recently that just jump into subreddits to cause problems.
This is an awesome idea.
