https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/mlgsw5/safety_updates_on_preventing_harassment_and_more/
created by enthusiastic-potato on 06/04/2021 at 17:21 UTC
441 upvotes, 65 top-level comments (showing 25)
Hey hey mods,
Over the past couple of months, the Safety Product team has been sharing updates on safety related improvements and product features that we’ve completed -- including Crowd Control[1] and PM restrictions[2] (in case you missed them!) Today, we have some new updates that we’d like to share around those projects, as well as some information on a new pilot feature that we’ll soon be exploring.
1: https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/lw9m6q/crowd_control_and_other_safety_updates/
2: https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/l4vkc1/addressing_mod_harassment_concerns/
Since we announced rolling out Crowd Control to GA about a month ago, you may be wondering- *“Hey why hasn't my sub gotten Crowd Control?”* We have been taking a slow and steady approach to our rollout rate to make sure the implementation goes smoothly and that we can quickly address any bugs that may pop up. We are currently rolled out to 75% of subreddits and our goal is to reach 100% in the next few weeks. For any mods who have recently tried Crowd Control for the first time, we’d love to hear any feedback you may have!
We’re also excited to share that we recently updated our safety-related Reddit Help Center articles and all of them can be found here[3]!
3: https://www.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/categories/360003247491-Rules-Reporting
In a previous safety-related post[4], we talked about how we planned to expand our PM harassment reduction measure to Chat. We’re moving into the next phase where the feature is now live for 50% of eligible mods, and we expect it to be 100% in the next few weeks. The work involved to get here included introducing restrictions that made it harder for trolls to use throwaway accounts to contact mods, and also measuring the restriction effectiveness to make sure they were working properly. The chat restrictions include requiring a verified email from a trusted domain[5] amongst some other considerations for new accounts.
4: https://www.reddit.com/r/modnews/comments/l4vkc1/addressing_mod_harassment_concerns/
We are really excited to share that next week, you might find yourself as part of a pilot for a new feature that we’re starting to explore. We call it “Snoozyports,” as the feature gives you the ability to “snooze” custom reports on old.reddit or on new.reddit. Once you “snooze” a custom report, you have effectively turned off all reporting for that user in that specific subreddit for seven days. This feature will still keep all reports anonymous.
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https://i.redd.it/tg7zmaxs5lr61.gif
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https://i.redd.it/nn64dzbu5lr61.gif
In considering all the features referenced in this post, we wanted to give a big, HUGE thank you to our mods that participate in our Mod Council. They continue to help us help mods by sharing their perspectives, concerns, and ideas. We appreciate the dialogue they offer and that they make time for us.
Looking forward, we will be doing quite a bit of planning as we address some bigger ticket issues. Our first priority is expanding and planning improvements to our blocking feature. This is going to take some time as it's a biiiiiiig project and we know there is a lot of work to do here. We will also be focused on building out some more privacy features, improving the new inline reporting flow and making it more accessible, and (as mentioned above) planning for the report abuse revamp.
Last but not least, while the experiments to block abusive messages in private messages and chats were successful, they did not address modmail, which is a place that mods experience a lot of harassment. We are beginning to work on a new “spam” tab in modmail where highly suspect messages will be moved. This approach ensures that no messages are lost forever while still eliminating the in-your-face nature of a harassing message in the primary inbox. We are in the early phases of development so please share your feedback or the edge cases that we should keep in mind.
That’s all for now folks! We will be hanging out for a few hours to address any questions or concerns.
Comment by NoyzMaker at 06/04/2021 at 17:36 UTC
118 upvotes, 2 direct replies
Hol' up.
our Mod Council.
What is this? Who is on it or how do we volunteer to potentially participate?
Comment by InitiatePenguin at 06/04/2021 at 18:18 UTC
39 upvotes, 2 direct replies
What happens when a snoozed user files another report? Does it go into limbo?
I experience users who report comments and then come into ModMail about it. ModMail won't be able to indicate that reports from that user are snoozed because it anonymous.
Then I look like an idiot when I tell the user that I don't see any reports, and down the rabbit hole we go with accusations of lying or saying the site is broken.
Comment by trai_dep at 06/04/2021 at 21:51 UTC*
33 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Related to preventing Mod harassment…
There have been multiple reports to Admin using the proper reporting tools by many Mods on a variety of Subreddits (some very large ones) concerning a large-scale series of attacks by a bot net spamming our Subs with Monero/XMR crypto-currency comments. Literally every new post was hit by these bots.
We've obviously done the prudent thing and trained our automod to find & remove the posts. We've manually, (laboriously) banned each bot as it appears. We've reported to Admin, pleading with them to use the Anti-Evil team's more advanced, IP-level blocking routines and other techniques. The limitations of ~~this~~ our Mod-level approach are already being used to evade automatic pruning of these spam deluge.
The response from Admin has, so far, been…Crickets.
There was even a post on r/Modsupport that provided, in great detail, results of investigations one of the affected Mods did, listing the dozens of Subs targeted, and the scores of bot accounts used to attack us. Link is here[1]. The post was removed by the ModSupport Mods (rule #2).
1: https://old.reddit.com/r/ModSupport/comments/mjy2ah/the_xmr_crypto_spam_attack_is_at_4_weeks_424/
Thanks!
Comment by [deleted] at 06/04/2021 at 17:34 UTC*
60 upvotes, 2 direct replies
[deleted]
Comment by Halaku at 06/04/2021 at 18:22 UTC
17 upvotes, 0 direct replies
We call it “Snoozyports,”
I now want this as an Snoo avatar feature. Maybe black with sleeping Snoo heads going *Zzzzz*.
And call them Snoozyshorts.
Comment by [deleted] at 06/04/2021 at 17:27 UTC
45 upvotes, 1 direct replies
I look forward to the snooze reports! This is great! Can we still track who snoozed reports and is it logged? What permission is it tied to, if any?
Comment by riiga at 06/04/2021 at 17:56 UTC
31 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Thank you for including old reddit!
Comment by Pruvided at 06/04/2021 at 18:03 UTC
12 upvotes, 2 direct replies
For the Snoozyports, do users see that they cant use custom reports, or is it just a one-sided mute?
Comment by Merari01 at 06/04/2021 at 19:19 UTC
8 upvotes, 0 direct replies
I am very happy with the snoozyports feature :D
Comment by MajorParadox at 06/04/2021 at 17:57 UTC
16 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Cool! I agree with the other commenters that it should be there for non-custom reports too. It's probably much more likely to get spammed with false reports of the default kinds because the report dialog makes it harder to pick go pick the specific sub reasons / custom.
What happens if multiple users make the same custom report? Will the snooze button mute both of them?
Oh also, will snoozing one automatically remove the rest from the queue (assuming no new, non-snoozed reports are there)?
Comment by michaelmacmanus at 06/04/2021 at 20:39 UTC
15 upvotes, 2 direct replies
Mod over at r/minneapolis. We're running daily discussion threads for the Chauvin trial and naturally are getting bombarded by trolls (4chan links to us daily.) We've decided to employ the Crowd Control feature and the user feedback has been positive (what little we've had) so that's nice.
The efficacy of this feature would be about 100 fold if instead of collapsing comments from outside actors it simply filtered them like automod so they had to be manually approved. We've already set our automod up for various thresholds such as karma and account age. Since reddit clearly has this functionality is it possible in the future we could employ it? Sure would make our lives a lot easier.
Another final note: I've seen several instances of users being labelled as "crowd controlled" that are in fact long time members of our community. The false positives make the feature a bit counter-intuitive to boot.
Comment by Texan_Eagle at 06/04/2021 at 17:23 UTC
14 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Awesome
Comment by TheNewPoetLawyerette at 06/04/2021 at 19:09 UTC
8 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Veeeeerrrrrrrry excited for snoozyports. The custom reports seem like a good starting point for testing how often this snooze feature gets abused and I'm especially glad to have an option to leave custom reports on in a sub while still getting consequences for users who abuse the feature -- the stuff people say in custom reports can be absolutely hilarious and the best part of modding, and it's sad to lose that due to the bad actions of a handful of people who want to harass mods.
I'm also very much looking forward to seeing the feature expanded to other report reasons; I'm tired of posts featuring men in makeup, trans women, and nonbinary people getting reported as "spam," "threatening or harassing," or "involuntary pornography involving minors" every time one of these posts hits the front page. We get it, y'all don't like seeing queer content. :/
I also see how this mute feature can potentially get abused -- i.e. hate subs muting reports from users who report hate speech to admins and hampering the efforts of users reporting content policy violations in good faith. Perhaps an important thing to work into this feature would be a way to report use of the snoozyreport feature in bad faith, as a way to bring admin attention to mod teams that are not operating according to the content policy? Of course those reports will be abused too but hopefully without consequence for mods who are acting in good faith.
Also fingers crossed /r/rupaulsdragrace gets to adopt an admin soon! Sounds like the next round will be taking place when we predict All Stars season 6 will be airing so it's sure to give an admin a great picture of the *drama* of modding our sub during our most active periods of the year!
Comment by t0asti at 06/04/2021 at 17:34 UTC
20 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Does this work for custom reports only (free text reports, like in the examples), or will this work for the standard report options as well, eg "This is Spam" and any subreddit defined report options?
I'm asking because sometimes (thankfully rarely) we get someone mass reporting a lot of posts with the same report reason.
Overall liking this feature a lot.
Comment by Blissful_Altruism at 06/04/2021 at 17:50 UTC
9 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Would you ever consider expanding that to non-customs? The grand majority of report spamming we’ve had on r/Warframe has been non-custom.
Comment by Xenc at 07/04/2021 at 13:31 UTC
5 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Will there be any internal flagging of a user who is snoozed from multiple subreddits or the same subreddit in succession?
Comment by [deleted] at 09/04/2021 at 02:22 UTC
6 upvotes, 0 direct replies
PM harassment reduction measure
Is that, like, mostly for harassment of mods? Because there's an *enormous* PM harrassment problem on Reddit when it comes to the ladies that post in NSFW subreddits. Some of them like the attention, others not, some of the guys sending these PMs aren't so bad, others are extremely bad.
the ability to “snooze” custom reports
Are we saying that custom reports are the only frivolous reports out there? If we're going to do more to combat frivolous reports using report reasons that are clearly not relevant in the slightest, how about a button on *all* the reports that moderators can press to flag the user that made it (anonymously, of course), and if a user gets enough flags, somebody on the admin team takes a closer look at their report behavior.
Comment by MyUserName-exe at 06/04/2021 at 18:43 UTC
4 upvotes, 0 direct replies
great job
Comment by Ivashkin at 06/04/2021 at 20:35 UTC
4 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Genuinely good features here. thank you.
Comment by TRUELIKEtheRIVER at 06/04/2021 at 22:04 UTC
3 upvotes, 0 direct replies
/u/enthusiastic-potato is it going to ever be a thing to have an option for crowd controled comments to be unhidden on client side by default? it's really annoying to be reading a thread and the randomest damn comments get CC'd, and I just want to opt out of it entirely
Comment by Sun_Beams at 07/04/2021 at 08:34 UTC
4 upvotes, 1 direct replies
Can we get snoozing for all report options? We had a wave of report abuse in r/food from users using the reddit violence report.
I've also used the report form for report button abuse a lot lately and the admin response time and quality of responses are really poor. A shed load of 3 month old posts mass reported by some disgruntled account took way too many reports and way too long for the admins to action.
Comment by AONomad at 07/04/2021 at 08:54 UTC
4 upvotes, 0 direct replies
big /u/enthusiastic-potato fan :)
Comment by [deleted] at 21/04/2021 at 23:34 UTC
3 upvotes, 0 direct replies
I like the custom reports. Let me snooze the reddit reports. Spam and misinformation are the most abused reports I get. "This is misinformation" is the new "I disagree with this" super downvote.
Comment by helpwithdeaththreats at 06/04/2021 at 20:40 UTC
6 upvotes, 1 direct replies
This is great for preventing harassment, but it falls short when harassment gets through, and users or mods get threats of death, violence, or doxxing. At that point, the tools to report are like shouting at a brick wall. It took reddit MONTHS to respond to the FBI after a death threat.
Comment by ani625 at 06/04/2021 at 17:39 UTC
9 upvotes, 0 direct replies
We call it “Snoozyports,” as the feature gives you the ability to “snooze” custom reports on old.reddit or on new.reddit. Once you “snooze” a custom report, you have effectively turned off all reporting for that user in that specific subreddit for seven days. This feature will still keep all reports anonymous.
Love this.
