Comment by deathbyproxy on 27/06/2021 at 07:36 UTC*

1 upvotes, 0 direct replies (showing 0)

View submission: An update to Mod Push Notifications

r/nosleep Moderator here.

I, for one, love the idea of the mod notifications, and the idea of improvements designed to make the moderation experience on mobile more intuitive to encourage mobile moderators to perform more diverse moderation actions.

But there might be a better argument for an official app designed specifically for moderators. One that is made to provide mods the most broadly effective mobile moderating experience, one that streamlines all moderation duties because it's designed not for the general user experience, but for the moderator experience and needs. Because at the moment, you're trying to wedge moderation tools into an app that wasn't designed to facilitate them. Instead, an app designed from the ground up with moderation purposes at its core would probably do more for the mobile moderation experience than additional improvements to a framework that wasn't designed for moderators in the first place.

I mod on New Reddit with the mod toolbox when on desktop, and have also moderated heavily on mobile.

However, I'm an outlier on our sub.

As a brief run down of what we do:

All posts on r/nosleep are manually reviewed unless they break a rule our automod can easily catch.
While all posts are visible upon submission, we have to manually review and approve all rule abiding posts to indicate to each other that it has been seen and is rule abiding.
All rule breaking posts are either manually removed by a mod, or automatically removed by automod.
All removals include a message to the user detailing the removal reason.

While we do have mods that are actively modding on mobile, the majority of their actions are approvals because the removal process is too cumbersome on mobile. Because we include a removal reason for every single removal. It's not a matter of just removing the post. We have to send an official modmail message to the user informing them of the removal and the reason for removal so they have an opportunity to fix the post. Toolbox (as previously mentioned, a third party tool) lets us do this at the moment of removal--automatically send a DM with the removal reason, and automatically archive the message (new feature) to prevent modmail from being backed up with unarchived removals.

Mobile requires several additional steps most mods don't want to go through.

I wrote a full guide to make mobile modding easier, but the gist of it is:

Copy the link to the rule breaking post from the app.
Open a browser window set to modmail instead of the in-app modmail in case you need to remember the username's spelling and punctuation when manually entering it into the user name box.
Have previously set up text replacement with all current removal reasons so you only have to type a keyword into the message box to populate the entire removal reason dialogue.
Paste the story link at the end of the message so future mods can easily access the story if the user responds with updates or requests for more information.

Because of this we have a disproportionate amount of mod activity weighted in favor of approvals while mod queue gets backed up with unreviewed and rule breaking stories a smaller percentage of desktop-based mods are left to deal with.

For us, a more ideal moderation experience on mobile would look like this:

On removing a post from mobile, the option to automatically open a modmail message with the user's name pre-populated is provided.*
Access to a dropdown list of removal reasons pre-generated by the mods to insert the full text of said removal reasons.
The ability include a link to the original post within the message (like a radio button option).
Auto-archive the mail upon sending.

Alternatively, (and more streamlined, simple, intuitive, and encouraging) the removal action itself includes access to all mod-supplied removal reasons and an option to send as a comment, DM, or modmail without having to go through the modmail system directly. Plus, still, auto-archiving the message to keep modmail clean.

This could be an option moderators could opt into/toggle on in their mod tools interface, so any subs that wouldn't benefit from a removal system like this would not have to deal with it as clutter. But would be of massive assistance to, I think, many subs including our own.

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