https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/gw5dj5/remember_the_human_an_update_on_our_commitments/
created by ggAlex on 03/06/2020 at 23:26 UTC*
0 upvotes, 132 top-level comments (showing 25)
Dear mods,
We are all feeling a lot this week. We are feeling alarm and hurt and concern and anger. We are also feeling that we are undergoing a reckoning with a longstanding legacy of racism and violence against the Black community in the USA, and that now is a moment for real and substantial change. We recognize that Reddit needs to be part of that change too. We see communities making statements about Reddit’s policies and leadership, pointing out the disparity between our recent blog post and the reality of what happens in your communities every day. The core of all of these statements is right: We have not done enough to address the issues you face in your communities. Rather than try to put forth quick and unsatisfying solutions in this post, we want to gain a deeper understanding of your frustration
We will listen and let that inform the actions we take to show you these are not empty words.
We hear your call to have frank and honest conversations about our policies, how they are enforced, how they are communicated, and how they evolve moving forward. We want to open this conversation and be transparent with you -- we agree that our policies must evolve and we think it will require a long and continued effort between both us as administrators, and you as moderators to make a change. To accomplish this, we want to take immediate steps to create a venue for this dialog by expanding a program that we call Community Councils.
Over the last 12 months we’ve started forming advisory councils[2] of moderators across different sets of communities. These councils meet with us quarterly to have candid conversations with our Community Managers, Product Leads, Engineers, Designers and other decision makers within the company. We have used these council meetings to communicate our product roadmap, to gather feedback from you all, and to hear about pain points from those of you in the trenches. These council meetings have improved the visibility of moderator issues internally within the company.
It has been in our plans to expand Community Councils by rotating more moderators through the councils and expanding the number of councils so that we can be inclusive of as many communities as possible. We have also been planning to bring policy development conversations to council meetings so that we can evolve our policies together with your help. It is clear to us now that we must accelerate these plans.
Here are some concrete steps we are taking immediately:
1. In the coming days, we will be reaching out to leaders within communities most impacted by recent events so we can create a space for their voices to be heard by leaders within our company. Our goal is to create a new Community Council focused on social justice issues and how they manifest on Reddit. We know that these leaders are going through a lot right now, and we respect that they may not be ready to talk yet. We are here when they are.
2. We will convene an All-Council meeting focused on policy development as soon as scheduling permits. We aim to have representatives from each of the existing community councils weigh in on how we can improve our policies. The meeting agenda and meeting minutes will all be made public so that everyone can review and provide feedback.
3. We will commit to regular updates sharing our work and progress in developing solutions to the issues you have raised around policy and enforcement.
4. We will continue improving and expanding the Community Council program out in the open, inclusive of your feedback and suggestions.
These steps are just a start and change will only happen if we listen and work with you over the long haul, especially those of you most affected by these systemic issues. Our track record is tarnished by failures to follow through so we understand if you are skeptical. We hope our commitments above to transparency hold us accountable and ensure you know the end result of these conversations is meaningful change.
We have more to share and the next update will be soon, coming directly from our CEO, Steve. While we may not have answers to all of the questions you have today, we will be reading every comment. In the thread below, we'd like to hear about the areas of our policy that are most important to you and where you need the most clarity. We won’t have answers now, but we will use these comments to inform our plans and the policy meeting mentioned above.
Please take care of yourselves, stay safe, and thank you.
AlexVP of Product, Design, and Community at Reddit
Comment by recalcitrantJester at 04/06/2020 at 02:34 UTC
278 upvotes, 4 direct replies
Here are some concrete steps we are taking immediately:
1. We're gonna talk, at some point in the future.
2. We're gonna talk, at some point in the future.
3. We're gonna talk, at some point in the future.
4. We're gonna make things better, in some vague way.
I don't think you know what "concrete steps" are. Everyone on reddit already knows how to talk, you are bringing 0 things to the table by telling us that you'll be telling us things. fucking **do** something.
Comment by [deleted] at 04/06/2020 at 03:00 UTC*
57 upvotes, 2 direct replies
It's become very difficult to believe, and support you guys, when all you say in every post is "We hear you, we will continue listening and take action", and proceed to sit around twiddling your thumbs(atleast that's what it looks like from the outside), until the next controversy erupts.
It gets difficult to support you guys when people get suspended for clearly being sarcastic or for friendly banter, because our sub got brigaded and the users mass-reported, but every single complain to you goes unheard, yet users who've posted comments calling for rape and "ironic killings" get a free pass to participate and spread their venom.
I sincerely hope that something changes this time, but judging from the past couple of years and the steps you've actually taken to combat the rise of hate speech on this platform, this post sound like nothing but empty platitudes.
Comment by [deleted] at 04/06/2020 at 01:11 UTC
345 upvotes, 13 direct replies
[deleted]
Comment by kenman at 04/06/2020 at 00:07 UTC
368 upvotes, 11 direct replies
What I don't get with all this navel-gazing is: why don't you just open your eyes?
The problems are right in front of you.
You act like reddit.com is firewalled and you can't access it. You act as if reddit.com is some abstract thing that you cannot experience for yourselves. You act as if you cannot view literally every piece of content on this site. You act as if you don't have terabytes of data, and brilliant engineers, to help you parse that data.
You're the VP of Product, Design, and Community at Reddit, whose entire job is to understand these things, and the best you can do is form councils, solicit input, and go behind the curtain to talk amongst yourselves only to emerge on the other side with *we've tried nothing and we're out of ideas....time to poll the audience*?
The most basic of examples:
https://www.reddit.com/r/ModSupport/comments/gve2id/can_the_admins_please_disable_certain_awards/
This problem was surfaced to you on day one. There have been countless reports made to you, both in public and in private. It's probably the most clear-cut example problem that exists, with the most clear-cut fix: **remove the potentially-offensive rewards!**
These awards aren't content. They aren't a part of the "core experience" that is *reddit*. They don't even have a history on the site (such as the *gold* and *silver* awards). They're just flair, plain and simple.
And yet, admins often pop into these posts, give the lamest of platitudes -- with plenty of r/ThisIsntWhoWeAre vibes -- and then disappear. It's not rocket science! You don't need to form a congressional subcommittee to see that a) it's a problem, b) it can be easily fixed.
And yet, you refuse. It's like you're paid by the number of times you can dodge the problem, while getting bonus pay for every misdirection comment you can provide the userbase about things "getting better".
Why? WHY? Why not just do something about it?
Just take a look around. There's a plethora of subs that capture the toxicity on reddit (which is a telling sign in itself), with mods from all walks chiming in with their experiences. And yet, you act like that's off-limits, because evidentiary procedure wasn't followed or something.
Reddit leadership is weak, ineffective, and must go.
u/spez, time to hang it up.
Comment by SarahAGilbert at 04/06/2020 at 01:23 UTC*
269 upvotes, 9 direct replies
Hi /u/ggAlex and /u/spez (if you tune in). Or more aptly, perhaps I should address this to your PR team. They’ve done a lovely job with this message.
I won’t introduce myself since my username is my real name, but to save you a Google, I’m a postdoc at the University of Maryland and I research online communities. In fact, I wrote my PhD dissertation on r/AskHistorians[1] and more recently published a paper[2] on what I learned about moderating the community. After that paper was accepted for publication, I asked the team if I could mod and they let me. So I’m a relatively new mod and while I've been a reddit user since 2012, I've only been modding for about 5-6 months. It’s funny thinking about that paper now. Re-reading it is like looking through a glass, darkly. While the paper focuses on a single thread, now I see removed comments all the time. You can see them too, but do you look? Check out our most recent posts. I’ll link them for you: look at the removed comments of the post written about this history of policing[3]. We locked our protest post[4], but look at the reports. Look at them on both posts. Then, check out the modmails we’ve been getting. Sure, we’ve gotten our fair share of positive responses, but many are abusive and they’re abusive because we took a stand against anti-black racism and protested the role this site plays in cultivating and spreading anti-black racism.
1: https://open.library.ubc.ca/cIRcle/collections/ubctheses/24/items/1.0372890
2: https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3392822
I understand that this is a complicated issue. I understand that freedom of speech on the internet looked a lot different and a lot more shiny in 2005 than it does in 2020. But as I wrote in my paper, and as the AskHistorians team notes in this recent article from Newsweek[5], issues around racism on the site are deeply embedded in reddit’s norms. Committees are a start, but are useless unless change is reflected in the site’s rules. Anti-racist rules must also be explicitly stated, sanctions enforced, racist subreddits should be banned[6] and infractions should be communicated with users[7].
5: https://www.newsweek.com/reddit-subs-go-private-silent-protest-hate-speech-1508508
6: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3134666
7: https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/3359252
Finally, remember that the bulk of moderation on reddit is conducted by volunteer moderators and it is essential to consult with them before rolling out features that impact them[8] and to listen to them when they tell you that features like awards and reports are used to abuse them. While volunteer mods may be something of a thorn in your side, making alternate moderation paradigms like the commercial and algorithmic content moderation used by Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, etc. more appealing, remember that it’s these mods, by establishing their own sub-specific rules and norms, that make reddit unique–they are why Reddit can be a source of information, support, and inspiration. Failing to support moderators means that you’re failing to support your users. We are your best tool in the fight against racism. If you really want to do something about it on your site, you will support the mods who are on the ground fighting it.
Comment by [deleted] at 04/06/2020 at 00:07 UTC
63 upvotes, 3 direct replies
[deleted]
Comment by deleigh at 04/06/2020 at 19:57 UTC*
763 upvotes, 33 direct replies
Edit: Thank you to everyone who reached out, whether in agreement or disagreement. I've read all of them so far. There are too many replies to respond to, but I did want to address one point. In order to not take up more space than I already have, I've made a post on my own subreddit that you can read if you're interested.
To those of you who are messaging ggAlex on other threads demanding they answer questions on this thread: stop. They have a life outside of their employment with reddit and that needs to be respected. Let them enjoy reddit as a regular user and, if they see fit, they will respond on their own time. Stop harassing them. This is exactly the kind of behavior I don't want to see continue.
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Original post follows: _____
Alex,
I'm not a moderator, but I've been an active reddit user for about ten years now. I first discovered this site when I was a senior in high school who loved to peruse Slashdot and Digg while on my breaks. If you had told me back then that, ten years from now, reddit's admins still couldn't figure out how to handle racism and harassment on their site, I'd believe you. I'd believe you instantly. Do you know why? Because the problem isn't with the technology, it's with the people running it.
Look at the language that you yourself use. "Your communities." This is *your* web site, Alex. *Your* community. *Your* responsibility. Reddit employees do not even see themselves as stakeholders in their own site. That has to stop. From the accountants to the CEO himself, you have to be involved beyond tech support and blog posts.
You aren't playing Civilization. This isn't a video game you can divest yourself from and watch from above like some inattentive, omnipotent observer. Reddit started out as a bicycle with training wheels. You could afford to be a little hands-off and let your child explore relatively risk free. Today, you're piloting a Boeing 767. You can't just put it on autopilot and take a snooze and see where you end up. You're too influential to have that luxury anymore, I'm afraid.
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This site is being ran by people who have no clue, none, about how to interact with people, only with technology. How many reddit employees have a degree in a soft science or humanities field? You, and many people in your shoes, repeat *ad nauseam* the platitude of "remember the human," but the ones who need to hear it the loudest are the ones stuck in their hamster ball tech bubble at reddit HQ.
To remember implies that something has been forgotten. You haven't forgotten the human, you've never acknowledged the human to begin with. Start with that. Sit down and listen to the black voices, the female voices, the Latino voices, the Asian voices, the LGBTQ voices, the Bhuddist voices, and the Muslim voices in San Francisco and listen and take notes and then make some changes to your company's internal philosophy. The policy will follow. When the root is what's poisoned, spraying the branches isn't going to stop the fruit from being poisoned, too.
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It starts with bossman Steve. In his BLM blog post, he linked to a subreddit that reddit employees have no involvement in and linked a comment a regular user made and passed it off as what redditors can do to get involved. How lazy and insulting. Is that what the CEO of a major tech site thinks qualifies as acknowledging black lives? Mark Zuckerberg could at least scrounge through his pocket change to commit 10 million dollars to racial justice causes, but the best reddit can do is two links and an icon? I'm speechless. Might as well put the snoo in blackface and have it say a quote from a minstrel show while you're at it.
People are being radicalized on your site. Ideological violence—murder—is committed by people who were heavily involved in hate communities on reddit that are still not banned as of today. All you jellyfish can muster up is some finger wagging and a yellow triangle to let them know that they've been so naughty that they get an ad-free experience and the inability to give reddit money through awards. Here I am wishing every subreddit could be so privileged.
It's a slap in the face to everyone who has been telling you to do something about hate speech for years. It's gaslighting, plain and simple. There's a reason you won't find that blog post on /r/blog: it's insincere drivel and each and every one of you know you'd be called out for pretending to care about black lives.
I'm sure when spez makes his grand entrance in a few days we won't see any address of what spez himself has done to enable white supremacy and bigotry on reddit. We'll be lucky to get a halfhearted apology and maybe some vague call to action that relies on moderators doing *more work* just to get ignored like they always have.
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What you've written could honestly have been written in 2015 and it would have been just as true then as it is now. How many more years have to pass, how many more times do you have to post this message before actual change happens?
You aren't the first person to promise change. Nor the second, nor the third, nor the tenth, even. Moderators have been demanding change ever since I first joined reddit. Those complaints are greeted with self-aggrandizing, ethical grandstanding about free speech and valuable discussion which are all just a euphemism for telling moderators they're on their own. By the way, though, we'll happily take the millions of dollars "your communities" raise through awards and pat ourselves on the back for doing such a good job.
I sincerely hope tech companies become legally liable for not doing anything to stop this. It's gone on long enough.
Comment by [deleted] at 03/06/2020 at 23:37 UTC
140 upvotes, 3 direct replies
[deleted]
Comment by metastasis_d at 04/06/2020 at 01:24 UTC
22 upvotes, 2 direct replies
If you take action on modmail reports tell us what thing we reported that you're taking action on. Even if it's to do nothing.
"We have taken action" when we send dozens of reports is useless at best and spam at worst.
Comment by Watchful1 at 03/06/2020 at 23:54 UTC
89 upvotes, 2 direct replies
the disparity between our recent blog post and the reality of what happens in your communities every day
I think the issue everyone is complaining about is not what happens in their communities, but the other communities on reddit that promote these ideas. All of the statements by the subs that are blacking out have some variation of calling reddit out for offering a platform for users that promote racism. They are calling on you to deplatform these users across all of reddit, not to help them police their own communities.
I agree that more communication is a step in the right direction, but unless reddit is willing to make sweeping subreddit bans I think your post is kind of missing the point everyone is trying to make.
Comment by mfukar at 04/06/2020 at 09:07 UTC*
16 upvotes, 2 direct replies
/u/ggAlex , let me preface two questions with the observation that the administration clearly has no working concept of what civil discourse should look like here, and why racism is not a discussion point, but something that has no place in a modern society. The statement here is extremely vague, a generic apology, and "more of the same". So I for one would like a discussion based more on reality:
1. what concrete actions have been taken by Reddit or the administrators, which were the output of existing "council" meetings?
2. Does the administration understand that the position
the best defense against racism...instead of trying to control what people can and cannot say through rules, is to repudiate these views in a free conversation
is infeasible in small communities, given that:
1. People can be anti-racist without being wholly free of racism. This means it is hard for someone with an anti-racist stance to have, at a given point in time, a complete and bullet-proof understanding of racism as a phenomenon in all aspects of society (even the ones directly relevant to the reddit communities they moderate or subscribe to) so that they can repudiate racist statements and misrepresentations of scientific fact in a conversation
2. Communities on reddit cannot rely on experts (on the subject of racism) to be available at any time, to repudiate arbitrary hate speech
3.
4. Perhaps more ~importantly~ topically [wrong choice of word], communities do not want to discuss racism. Communities want to discuss the topic the community cares about, in an environment that is free of racism, hate speech, and pseudoscience.
and if it does, what open points do you expect upcoming community councils to address, which cannot be addressed by the administration itself?
In short, do you have an actual plan, and is it rooted at the fact that our society is incompatible with racial prejudice?
Comment by CorvusCalvaria at 03/06/2020 at 23:40 UTC*
67 upvotes, 2 direct replies
truck rustic degree lunchroom silky resolute workable subsequent reach test
Comment by [deleted] at 04/06/2020 at 01:26 UTC
38 upvotes, 2 direct replies
Allow blocking reporters just like you're working on a feature to allow blocking of people giving awards. Both are anonymous, but being able to block award givers proves you can enable blocking of people using anonymous features. So roll it out to reports, please.
Comment by RainbowQuartzFusion at 04/06/2020 at 00:11 UTC
37 upvotes, 3 direct replies
Why wasn’t the message put out by Spez posted here on Reddit like most admin message posts are? By not posting it here, it looks like you guys are trying to avoid a call out by the users.
Just do the right thing and ban hate speech.
Comment by syphlect at 04/06/2020 at 16:12 UTC
13 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Bull. Shit. As usual.
11h in and not one single admin answer (that I saw, maybe it's buried in the lower comments).
Comment by Hergrim at 03/06/2020 at 23:44 UTC
61 upvotes, 4 direct replies
Why does it take a public shaming of Reddit's toleration of racism, misogyny, etc for you to actually do something about it? Why won't you act when it first becomes a problem?
Comment by whyhellomichael at 04/06/2020 at 00:12 UTC*
28 upvotes, 1 direct replies
What about in 2018 when /u/spez said that racism was permitted on the site as people have different beliefs?
https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2018/apr/12/racism-slurs-reddit-post-ceo-steve-huffman
Comment by SweetMissMG at 03/06/2020 at 23:49 UTC
32 upvotes, 2 direct replies
Mods need better help with banning members that have had multiple alts banned within the subreddit. We have provided significant evidence of this with little help. These members are the same ones sending hate Modmail and can only assume are using the edit report feature to insult and threaten mods anonymously.
Comment by thecravenone at 04/06/2020 at 00:11 UTC
19 upvotes, 0 direct replies
the disparity between our recent blog post and the reality of what happens in your communities every day
So why is the blog post still up but the mea culpa is in a tiny section of the website that only a fraction of a fraction of users even know about?
Comment by [deleted] at 04/06/2020 at 00:32 UTC*
37 upvotes, 1 direct replies
[deleted]
Comment by CedarWolf at 04/06/2020 at 00:57 UTC*
44 upvotes, 3 direct replies
I'm just sick and tired of hearing all this 'we hear you, we're going to help you, we're going to do something, we're going to clean up the site,' and nothing really gets done. It's all piecemeal. A little action is taken here and there, or a sub gets quarantined, but it's just moving the sludge around.
You can't just drape a sheet over a problem and pretend it's suddenly not there anymore. When you Quarantine a sub, that's all you're doing. You just cover up the problem, but it's still there, like roaches breeding under wrapping paper.
This is the first I've heard about these councils. Do they have the power to actually *do* anything? Are you actually going to listen to them? Do you actually listen to us? Are you going to back up *any* of these fine words with some *action?*
We need effective modtools for a site this big. Why not hire the /r/Toolbox people already? We need a way to standardize the way our subs are viewed, so when we post the rules and subreddit guidelines, we know *all* of our users will be able to see them. We need better support for moderators on mobile. We *don't* need more chat spaces or more private messaging options or more direct chat or more inboxes. We don't need flashy new user profiles that look nice, but are harder to check for removed comments or offensive material. We don't need new awards, and we sure as Hell don't need more last-minute announcements about new 'features' that make the site harder to moderate and blow up in your dang faces three days after they're launched, same as *anyone* with *any* experience on this site could have told you in advance if you had just bothered to *tell* us about it to begin with. We have thousands of mods with decades of intimate experience with this site. *We're a resource. Use it!* Stop springing stuff on us at the last minute.
Stop adding new broken crap to the site and fix what's already here.
Enough is enough.
Step up, take a fucking stand, and declare loudly and proudly, that *we will no longer put up with this shit*, and then back it up with some fucking action. Have some goddamn morals and do what you know to be right. Stand for something, stand for a better future, and we will back you all the way.
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Hey, /u/redtaboo. I don't know if you'll see this, as I'm a couple of days late on this post. I have a sad bit of reddit's history that I'd like to share with you.
Go ahead and add my name to the letter.
As you may know, a young trans girl named Leelah Alcorn took her own life back in December of 2014. She made national news. What you may not know is that she was a redditor, and active on our boards.
Within days of her passing, a 15 year old kid in Kansas made an account and a subreddit, whose sole purpose was to find and harass trans folks. They were trying to 'push' people to 'the day of the rope' and they encouraged our readers to commit suicide. They were at this from January all the way to August of 2015, and their harassment was constant.
Every day, our communities were under siege.
If you go back through the AutoModerator filters of subs like /r/asktransgender and /r/MtF, you'll find a *ton* of slurs we had to add to our filters, just to try and stem the tide. We banned hundreds of invading accounts, and they just kept right on coming. They doxxed our mods, slandering us and targeting us, putting our jobs and our lives in danger.
And when they couldn't get through our mods and filters, they started finding suicidal and depressed users, and they started harassing them directly, stalking their targets across subreddits, taking their pictures and modifying them, attacking people directly with hateful PMs, and always, *always* encouraging our readers to kill themselves.
They thought it was funny. It was *vile*.
We went to the admins for help. We sent dozens of reports, we messaged y'all directly on Slack. The admins shut down their subs, but they just kept making new ones. /r/transfaggots, /r/trans_fags, /r/transfags, etc. Getting the admins to take action took months, and as soon as their subs got shut down, they'd have another one, up and ready to go, that same day.
Finally, the admins banned /r/transfags, during the /r/coontown and /r/fatpeoplehate sweep. They had two other subs, something like /r/trannyshoah or /r/tranny_shoah, ready to go, because they knew their sub would get shut down again and they already had spares, just waiting to be launched. This time, however, as soon as they moved to the new ones, the admins shut those down, too, and booted those responsible off the site.
*That* put an end to it. *Finally*. After months of abuse, the admins had finally taken decisive and effective action.
But we lost people. We had a significant spike in suicidal posts that year, and we lost a few good people during that time period. Most close to my heart would be /u/Lumberchick, one of our mods, who took herself away near the end of June, 2015. She was a huge advocate for trans folks in the military, and she passed away before the Obama administration announced that they would be allowing transgender service members to serve openly in the Armed Forces. I will always regret that she wasn't alive to be there for that.
She wasn't the only one we lost.
So I have to ask myself, for all the things reddit stands for, for all the times we've raised money for charity, like relief for Haiti or Puerto Rico, or when we raised money for that orphanage in Kenya and we helped fix that guy's face after he was attacked by a machete...
If reddit can be such a force for good in this world, why do our readers have to die before the admins will take action and help clean up our site? We're all working to help make these healthy, safe, helpful, and welcoming communities, so why does the site's paid staff allow communities that exist solely to hurt others? It's like welcoming cancer to infect and poison the rest of the site. *Why?*
Why continue to allow these cesspits to sit and fester, breeding more hatred, encouraging group polarization and bigoted extremism? Why does reddit, as a platform, put up with this sort of behavior? It does no good for the site, it does no good for the people they target, and it does no good for the people doing the attacking. So why give them a platform? Why allow this sort of thing to propagate? ***WHY?***
Comment by [deleted] at 04/06/2020 at 00:39 UTC
18 upvotes, 0 direct replies
We have not done enough to address the issues you face in your communities. Rather than try to put forth quick and unsatisfying solutions in this post, we want to gain a deeper understanding of your frustration
Put your money where your mouth is. Remove the Yikes award from the site.
Comment by Qurtys_Lyn at 04/06/2020 at 00:45 UTC
18 upvotes, 3 direct replies
We will convene an All-Council meeting focused on policy development as soon as scheduling permits.
Ah yes, racism is a problem that can be solved with a meeting.
Comment by eviscerations at 04/06/2020 at 00:48 UTC
17 upvotes, 0 direct replies
yall are fucking pathetic. get the hate subreddits fucking gone and do it a fucking week ago you piece of shit.
Comment by wickedplayer494 at 04/06/2020 at 02:53 UTC
6 upvotes, 2 direct replies
I think that quarantines are simply a way to chicken out on banning a subreddit without actually following through on it. The announced intent of that feature was to promote reform in subreddits that are frequently walking very close to or right on the line of the sitewide rules. To date however, as far as I'm aware, no subreddit that has been quarantined has ever emerged out of it. The real intent seems to be to simply suffocate it *reallllly* slowly and continue to throw barriers in their way, some of which are arbitrarily devised with little to no advance notice to "the rest of us", until it becomes too impractical to continue.
The site would be a lot better off if you put your figurative money where your mouth is, just like 2015 and earlier: either a subreddit is in compliance, or it should be banned. If a subreddit straddles the line, do what the sitewide rules have always said as far as potential punishments: warn them nicely, if they don't take action or simply spit in your faces, warn them again a little less nicely. If after that they still don't get their act together, it's a lot less painful to just take the subreddit to the back of the shed and put it out of its misery.