Reddit faces content quality concerns after its Great Mod Purge

fne8w2ah@lemmy.world to Reddit@lemmy.world – 1559 points –
Reddit faces content quality concerns after its Great Mod Purge
arstechnica.com
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In response to concerns that the new r/homeautomation mod team could overlook posts with dangerous misinformation, the anonymous Redditor pointed me to the subreddit's sidebar, which has a disclaimer about the dangers of electricity. However, the disclaimer is only visible on old Reddit. The mod doesn't know why.

Oh Lord

Thank God I wasn't the only one who went WTF. That's like one of the simplest things I learned as a mod in my first 2 days. You gotta update the sidebar twice for both versions of it. It's been over a month since they probably took over and they still don't know this.

I love this article but it also makes me sad like with the old r/canning mods pointing out the unsafe material the new mods left up.

Sadly, even before the mod purge many subs couldn't get that right. I don't know how many discussions I had over the years about things that appeared in the sidebar, only to find the other person was looking at a completely different version of it. New.reddit.com was a problem from the start.

That's so true lol. Long story below but it deals with a fuck up some mods did with the old/new rules & automod.

I once had to deal with a major fuck up that the previous mods left me as they all fucked off to mod the next version of the console the subreddit was for. On the day they added me and two others, they practically said bye and good luck but didn't give us any control of the sub. They never touched the sub & the two other new mods quit or didn't touch the sub too. Was fun to be the sole mod with a subreddit of 5 million people for like 5 months....

The issue was that on the day before the old team fucked off, one of them changed the automod to automatically remove any post that dealt with support. It was set up that so the "support help" flair that any user could pick, would trigger the automod to remove it and then warn the user they would be banned if they didn't post it in the correct support thread.

Buuuuut the automod stated the rule wrong compared to the New Reddit version and mobile app people were flocking to modmail freaking out that they were about to be banned for trying to ask help to fix their console. AND it never stated what support thread or gave a link to it which made everyone ask on modmail for that too.

I had to deal with hundreds of modmails alone while learning how to code automod since the old mod refused to fix it even though I stated how people were freaking out. Thankfully I got help from somebody else that gave me tips on automod and how to correctly code it.

It turned out the automod was only stating the old.reddit rules and nobody had changed the new.reddit rules to match it. I used RIF to mod so I only saw the old sidebar lol.

I wanted to say all that because i realized that experience I had with basically being left to hang is how all these new mods probably have been for the last two months. All these features with no help or support from past mods would suck so much. I eventually snapped and called out all the old mods for how shitty they were for leaving one of the biggest subreddits on Reddit to a single person before leaving the team.

End of the long story lol. Sorry for making you read all that 😆 I just really hate how the new.reddit format can fuck up sooooo much shit.

No, I enjoyed reading all that. I was never a mod but was on reddit enough to pick up some things. Thank you for the window behind the scenes.

Function and design parity between versions? I don't even know what that means. Would that require teams to talk to each other? Because we nixed that to prevent unionization.

Would that require teams to talk to each other?

There probably isn't an old.reddit.com team in the first place, so no talking is needed.

To be fair, the amount of people automating their HVAC system with "a raspberry pi and a bit of python" in there with nobody batty an eye has been high long before the purge. Some people mess with everything they can without understanding any of what they're doing.

How can I use a sonoff to control my fireplace guys?

Remember the Kickstarter candle light which could be lit remotely but not put out remotely?

we talking about gas or electric? The Internet goes out and you suddenly can't turn off the gas...

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