8 upvotes, 5 direct replies (showing 5)
View submission: An update to Mod Push Notifications
That sounds intense, I'd be interested in hearing more about your workflow and needs.
Comment by dequeued at 18/05/2021 at 19:46 UTC*
49 upvotes, 3 direct replies
Moderating from mobile is a pretty hopeless affair for large subreddits. Yes, there are some moderators that do it, but it's pretty uncommon.
I don't think app improvements are likely to change that much. To moderate effectively, you need a larger screen, multiple tabs, ability to easily copy text back and forth (using archive.is, writing warnings, using Pushshift, search engines, etc.), use Toolbox mod macros and other Toolbox features, and many more things that are difficult on mobile. (Edit: I actually do most of my moderating on a laptop without an external monitor, but if I need to do anything on my phone, it is just super painful and slow, and it's more about the form factor, mobile UX, the limitations of not having a keyboard, etc. than the app.)
The majority of moderators, especially on larger subreddits, use old.reddit.com because it's faster, more comments/submissions fit on a single screen, you can customize what moderators see with stylesheets (and Toolbox works better as well), and it's unfortunate that it's so neglected nowadays.
Comment by Bardfinn at 18/05/2021 at 23:50 UTC
9 upvotes, 1 direct replies
When moderating some subreddits that are regularly brigaded / harassed by other communities, it is often necessary to have open these URLS (to proactively moderate):
https://reddit.com/r/subreddit/new
https://reddit.com/r/subreddit/comments
https://reddit.com/r/subreddit/about/spam[1] (for removed items)
1: https://reddit.com/r/subreddit/about/spam
https://reddit.com/r/subreddit/about/modqueue
as well as modmail.
In the app, on iOS, I have to go three menus deep to find my modqueue; Finding it is not intuitive - it's under the "search / browse" dock launch icon (second from left), then under "Mod" in that screen's menus, ***then*** clicking the Mod shield hidden away in the upper right, ***then*** clicking "Mod Queue". Which ... is the only selection in that menu.
(this seems like an anti-pattern, by the way: People moderating communities should have a dock launch icon to moderation tools -- hiding mod tools from people is failure by design).
That gives me the /overall/ modqueue, which shows me items and shows me that they're reported or removed with tiny status flags on the right - but I have to click those icons to get any associated report / removal reason text; There's 0 indication from that queue which communities the modqueued comments are in (important as different communities have different rules), and of course there's no "batch processing" features -- selecting items and then running a single command on all of them (spam them, approve them, remove them) which can be necessary when a brigade decides that everything needs to be falsely reported - or when someone goes wild with spamming links to their discord server.
(Getting the mod queue for an individual community involves going into the "Search" Dock Launch icon, going to the "Moderating section", picking the community, going to "Mod Tools" for that community, and *finding "Mod queue"* in the menus. Mod Queue for a subreddit should be its own button on the top level of the subreddit, if someone is a mod of that subreddit)
I haven't gone into testing whether the app supports "removal reasons" and/or automated feedback to users about why their posts / comments are removed, as it's my general impression that:
A: New Reddit has next-to-no support for providing feedback to users about why their items were removed, and apparently that extends into the app (I might be wrong about this, though)
B: there's still four different browser extensions I use regularly to identify user accounts that ***we*** know chronically and repeatedly harass other users and violate Sitewide Rules and subreddit rules -- accounts which Reddit doesn't suspend, and whose subreddits Reddit doesn't take action against except *sometimes* shuttering the subreddit (but not kicking off the harassers / bigots) or, occasionally, in the past, quarantining the subreddit.
New Reddit's moderating experience, and the app's moderating experience, works great if someone has a small community that, for example, discusses fig trees, and occasionally gets some bored teenagers trolling it.
New Reddit's moderating experience is entirely unsuited to dealing with what happens when someone asserts, for example, that bigotry and misogyny and white supremacy are bad, or that the American Republican party is corrupt and viciously anti-Democratic, or that there is state-sponsored oppression of the culture and genetic freedom / reproductive freedom / ethnic freedom of the Uighyur by the Government of China.
Or, as it were, moderating any medium to large subreddit where the people with vested interest in putting harmful propaganda before a large audience, believe that they should be allowed to steer the discussion towards their pet propaganda topic. Or multi-track drift it towards their pet propaganda topic. Or hijack the topic and crash it into the side of a mountain named "Dead Cat Peak", as it were.
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All of that said - if PNs are "teleporting" people into the modqueues where they're needed, that makes navigating the "mod tools" etc menus less of a concern.
Comment by the_pwd_is_murder at 19/05/2021 at 13:38 UTC
4 upvotes, 0 direct replies
You know in the old days a gentleman would at least take a lady to dinner before asking to see her workflow.
But seriously...
I am on the mod teams of 3 subs that I would call "active." I can rapidly elevate into access on one more active sub within the same family of communities in a pinch because we're connected via Discord and because I've got a bot in there.
For every queue I am actively working I have open:
Usually at least once a day I need to access something in the config as well, be it automoderator, rules, wiki, sidebar, flair, or collections.
So if I'm actually working all 3 at once that's a minimum of 15 Reddit tabs.
I do not use r/mod. There's no easy way for me to tell which sub i'm working in the combined r/mod list without custom CSS to tint the names of the subreddits, which is a right PITA to maintain, especially since I already have a bunch of snippets to increase the font to ludicrously large size.
In addition I will often have open:
If I'm also working on the bots I will also have that account open in another browser profile.
I get either a browser notification on the queue (which has been a thing for quite a while now) or an alert from our Discord bot which tells us when it's been too long since any mod actions were noticed, or my desktop RSS reader updates with new posts.
First I check modlog to make sure nobody else has been active in the past few minutes. Then every unapproved post gets flair checked, approved or removed with a removal reason. Every report gets actioned. Every modmail gets answered, and finally every comment gets screened. Any major trends I notice or problems that could affect the meta get reported back to the team in Discord.
For comments I usually check in the Discord to see what the last comment was that anyone screened since there's no way for us to mark them otherwise. We usually mention the time of our most recent comment patrol when we leave active duty for the day.
Repeat every 15-30 minutes for as long as I can stand it, usually anywhere from 4-12 hours.
Once a week we do the community newsletter, which is partially automated but takes a lot of massaging to go from notes to something that's nice to read. Once a month (usually) I do the transparency report[1] which tallies up all of our moderator actions from the previous month. This is also mostly done through human supervised automation.
1: https://www.reddit.com/r/hermitcraft/wiki/subreddithistory/20212tps
I actually have a playlist of 5 unlisted videos on Youtube that I made to train the most recent batch of new moderators that came into our team. It's a little dated but if you actually want to see the workflow in action I will happily share the link with you directly. I would post it here but it has some confidential stuff in it.
Comment by sunzusunzusunzusunzu at 18/05/2021 at 21:44 UTC
2 upvotes, 0 direct replies
That's pretty standard for most subs if you want to do it quickly.
Comment by iVarun at 19/05/2021 at 14:32 UTC
2 upvotes, 0 direct replies
Toolbox mod macros
The other reply mentioned this in reply to you, surely you must be aware of this tool and if so how in the world does the product planning team and/or reddit devs think to themselves, Yes, Macros is something we have seen and it is NOT something we need to implement anytime soon or ever, either natively on Desktop or worse yet not even on the Mobile app for Mods use.
In what logical world is that prudent product management?
The fact that Admins had to resort to that *Adopt a Admin* policy demonstrates how detached/out-of-touch Admins have become from modteam work. They quite literally have no clue what Modteams do and how and what they need.
Mods made Reddit what it is, NOT Admins or its devs, it grew despite the latter not because of them.
Even the community comes later. Mods and mod work should be plastered front and center in Everything Reddit employees/devs do behind the scenes if it wants to ensure whatever the heck it wants to do, be it growth, commercialization or some other pretentious BS. Stop trying to run a 300 Million user mega-platform, let subs de-fragment to much higher degree and provide them with Admin class toolkits to be used on their own subs only.
Reform the Moderator system. This not longer 2011. And yes Speed matters, planing something and implementing it 2 years down the line doesn't work anymore. Like that recent example of Know-Your-Followers feature delay of 24+ months from initial announcement. Incompetence of the highest order. But useless avatars on a platform which thrives on comments, expedited product development timeline. Ridiculous resource management, both capital and talent.
And where are the per-post traffic metrics? about/traffic page is amateurish still. How can mods grow, adapt to what is happening on their community if they don't even have every little detail that they should be having.