Comment by eriophora on 28/08/2020 at 20:25 UTC*

109 upvotes, 2 direct replies (showing 2)

View submission: Testing a new concept with select subreddit partners

A few issues we are seeing with this update, which we dearly hope individual subreddits will be able to opt out of even after it has been finalized:

• r/Fantasy does not allow memes on our subreddit. This includes responding in comments solely with a gif or reaction image. How are we to respond to our users who paid actual, real world money to use those on our subreddit... only for us to remove their comments, warn them, and potentially escalate to a ban if necessary? This reflects poorly on not only the moderation team, but on reddit as a whole.
• Having a list of power users (e.g., supporters) visible to all opens up many opportunities for abuse and harassment. Our subreddit has had major issues in the past with users being stalked and harassed - one particular campaign we worked closely with you to resolve.
• We have very strict rules on how community members may engage in self promotion and advertisement. Given that r/Fantasy is often used by authors to discuss and advertise their book, it becomes a "pay to win" influence on the subreddit. An author could, for example, create 30 accounts with variations on their name (e.g., u/eriophora, u/eriophora1, u/eriophora2) and use all of them to power up the subreddit and take over the list. This is deeply uncomfortable for multiple reasons, including the fact that creators whom have been revealed as abusers could buy a spot on this list without any of us having an ability to stop them. We are uncomfortable with the idea that we would be forced to feature known sexual harassers, or even just the idea that we would be forced to have a list of "patrons." This could also be used in an attempt to leverage special treatment from the moderation team. At a minimum, it's paying to advertise your name on that list... which we do not condone.
• Will banned users show up on this list? If so, it is likely that jilted users may create hurtful, racist, threatening, or otherwise harassing usernames and purchase a spot on the list. Given that moderators do not have IP-level banning tools at our disposal, in a worst case scenario this may result in a highly frustrating and distressing game of whackamole until admin are available to step in - and that's assuming that banning *does* remove them from the supporter list. We have seen coordinated harassment efforts in the past.
• This will make it much more difficult for new communities to compete with established ones. It's already a challenge to take on larger entrenched communities, and creating an additional barrier wherein you must get enough people to actively buy in with their actual money to unlock features is a large hurdle depending on the type of content the subreddit is meant to showcase. The potential long-term impact of this seems to be an overall reduction in diversity across reddit as a whole.
• These features largely favor communities that focus first on images, video, and other visual content. As a discussion based subreddit, this focus is somewhat concerning to us. Compared to reddit as a whole, our users will most likely be less interested in "powering up" our subreddit given the lack of utility. Will there be later features, roll outs, or other policies put into place in the future which will even more explicitly favor these "cash cow" subreddits over highly curated discussion-based subreddits such as r/Fantasy?

To be clear... please do not add us to the testing list. Frankly, these features are not helpful and the downsides listed above make us highly concerned for how this would impact our community. r/Fantasy is not interested in this new feature, and we do not see a benefit to our community either now or in the future. We understand that this feature is currently opt-in, but the future implications have us worried.

Replies

Comment by highlord_fox at 29/08/2020 at 05:05 UTC

29 upvotes, 0 direct replies

/r/sysadmin, as a text-only subreddit, would basically not need any of those features. We also have a fairly strict no-advertising/self-promotion policy, so basically being able to buy promotion space would be antithesis to our rules.

Comment by NineOutOfTenExperts at 29/08/2020 at 05:09 UTC

13 upvotes, 0 direct replies

Excellent points.