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I'm sure everyone here has at least heard of the cringe subreddits: /r/cringe and /r/cringepics. But I'll give a little backstory anyways for those of you who've never really been there. When /u/drumcowski founded /r/cringe (technically, the sub already existed but it was inactive), he wanted the subreddit to have a community that empathized with people in embarrassing situations. The community grew really quickly as it filled a very popular niche that was waiting to be filled. Over time, image posts began filling the subreddit due to the nature of reddit's voting algorithm (as I'm sure regulars in this sub are quite familiar with), so he made the controversial decision to ban image posts from /r/cringe and created /r/cringepics. I was added as a mod a few weeks after to help deal with the growing community (I was one of the few who agreed with the decision, was active, and generally shared the same philosophy for the sub as the rest of the mod team at the time). I don't remember when exactly the shift happened, but eventually the cringe subreddits started becoming really mean-spirited. There was a period of time where we were getting several highly upvoted meta threads by regulars telling people to knock it off and stop bullying people. It was clear that there was a growing rift in the community, with the original regulars upset at the mean-spirited nature of the sub and the new users who basically think bullying is a necessary thing to shame people for "being weird." Eventually, the bullying crowd seemed to win out, and these meta posts started coming in far less often. We were noticing that the general perception of the two subs started to change as well - people were frequently disgusted by the behavior exhibited in the cringe subs. The cringe subs used to top people's lists of "worst subs" in those weekly /r/askreddit threads, for instance. I would say this was true for most of 2013 and about half of 2014. The cringe subs basically became non-stop mockery of bronies, furries, neckbeards, kids being edgy/weird, etc. The very idea of "cringe" (an entirely subjective term) was, in our eyes, becoming corrupted. Rather than empathizing with someone in an awkward or embarrassing situation, the term was being used to mock people acting like "degenerates" (in the 'chan use of the term). You would often see someone say something stupid on a default sub, and another person would reply "/r/cringe" as if it was supposed to be relevant content. Initial Mod Response How did the mods feel about this? We hated it. A lot of us looked down on the bullies and tended to pull pranks on them to try and make them GTFO. We would keep adding more and more mods to help moderate comment sections to remove the worst of the worst, but not a lot of people would volunteer due to how unpopular it was and how easy it was to get burned out. We did find a few people who thought they could help change the sub, but after a while it was all the same: we all just stopped caring because we didn't feel like there was anything that could be done. We kept adding more and more rules to continuously target more and more extreme cases. Eg. "no 4 panels", "no facebook memes", "no music videos" hoping that this would help cut down on the negativity. It helped, a little, but the sub was still a huge embarrassment. The top mods would rather focus on the quickly growing /r/showerthoughts and forget that the cringe subs ever existed. We even tried to rationalize it by saying things like "if we killed the sub, it would just come back far larger and far nastier due to the backlash, and if those subs had mods who condoned that behavior it could get seriously bad." Basically, the cringe subs had unintentionally become "containment" subs. Containment subs are total bullshit though - they just don't work. People were so outraged by the things being posted, even though we required all personally identifiable information to be scrubbed, that large groups of people would still somehow find the source and tell them off. Imagine the worst of /r/fatpeoplehate before FPH rose to prominence. I thought about quitting a few times, it just didn't seem worth staying as a mod of a sub that was acting so vile. I would get a lot of (deserved) enraged comments on other subs about the state of the cringe subs even on unrelated posts. I guess the reason I stayed on for so long is that I was friends with the top mods on the sub, and none of us ever really gave up on the sub considering we were adding a new rule like every month (hoping that things would get better). It got to the point where we had like 18 rules listed in the sidebar! Examining the Problem Most of us were busy with school and other obligations to really devote any time to figuring out how to fix this mess. But I decided one day in the summer of 2014 to just sit down and think hard about what to do with the sub. My view of the main problem was this: fighting against the userbase to stamp out bullying was a waste of time. The problem was the userbase itself. We would wait for a person to make a really offensive comment before taking action, but another would quickly take their place. Over and over and over again, it was like playing whack a mole with bullies. And there was no end in sight - the sub was still growing extremely quickly (for a time, /r/cringepics was in the top 20 fastest growing subs, beating out several defaults). My solution: in order to change the culture of the sub, you have to take away what attracts them there in the first place. Nothing else will work. In the case of the cringe subs, we figured out the most common link between all of the posts we thought were bad - they almost always involved something being done by a single person. No social situation or interaction, just one person "being weird." Oftentimes the person "being weird" is even enjoying themselves. So our solution was simple: mandate that every single post had to directly involve at least 2 people in some kind of interaction. This would instantly kill off most of the content that was popular at the time, and undoubtedly cause a poo poo-storm of controversy. Other subs currently face similar situations. /r/subredditdrama attempted to stop their sub from becoming /r/circlebroke-lite by having mods call out bad comments. It failed. /r/tumblrinaction is trying to make their sub less serious by moderating comments and submissions from people who take things too seriously. It will fail. You have to completely neuter the content that brings them in.* It seems simple, of course, but how you do it is extremely important. See, in all three of our cases (SRD, TiA, and the cringe subs), the mod team has a different vision for what the sub should be like but in all three cases, nothing is done for such a long time mostly because of the fear of a backlash. How do you deal with the backlash? We especially feared the backlash from our subscribers as it could quickly turn into a reddit-wide shitstorm that would have spawned an alternative sub even worse than what we were currently in control of. So I came up with a way to prevent any shitstorm from occurring. How We Did It First step, as I mentioned above, is to clearly define a rule that would exclude the kind of content that attracts most of the problem users. Yes, it may seem arbitrary (and it probably is) and will likely be subjective, but if your mod team has a vision of what you want to see out of the sub then it should be possible to come up with something. Next, you need to set this rule as a new internal guideline to enforce, do not make the rule official and do not reference this new guideline when removing threads. Yes, I am basically saying you need to be less transparent here and that you need to basically use some more vague justification for removing threads. In our case, we simply removed most of those posts for being "not cringe-worthy" (something we had been doing for a long time previously, to be fair). What you're doing here is creating a front page of your sub that you think your sub should look like in the future. Go full Nazi, even if it means your sub will be almost barren. When we did this, we used to have 30+ posts in a single day. Afterwards, we would only leave up like 2-3 posts a day. The idea behind curating the front page of your sub this way is to train any new subscribers to associate the content you want to see with your subreddit, and to make any of the problem users who miss that sort of content to eventually unsubscribe and move on. You should do this for at least a month (which is what we did). After your transition period is over, then you'll want to announce the new rule. We took this as an opportunity to consolidate our rules from 18 down to 6-7. When we did it, our mod post was downvoted, but we didn't have any significant backlash. All we got were a few modmails about us "killing the sub", but most of the comments on the mod post were like "this sub has been poo poo recently so I guess I'll unsubscribe anyways." In addition, you should give your users an alternative in the form of a multi-reddit. I made a public multi-reddit full of subs with the kind of content that we were removing so people wouldn't focus on a particular alternative. And that's basically it. Just continue enforcing your new rules, add new mods who like the changes, and keep going. Eventually a different set of users start to populate the subreddit, and the old users will move on to their own sub. But because you avoided a huge public backlash, that sub never gained much visibility. How effective were we? Take a look at /r/cringeanarchy. Then compare that to /r/cringe and /r/cringepics today. The top posts should show a really stark difference. The hate messages have largely stopped, and we even get supportive messages now thanking us for cleaning up the sub. I've seen an uptick of viewpoints that are a lot less judgmental about people's hobbies and appearance, and I've seen a lot more progressive views as well. We're considered one of the subs "taken over by SRS" now (despite the fact that the top mods here have been the same for years) so make of that what you will. Downsides Of course there are some downsides. Looking at the current situation of the cringe subs, I can list a few: Because there was never any huge drama from the rule changes, most of the people who left the sub in distaste, or hate the sub due to its bad reputation don't know that things have changed. Even worse, they'll continue believing the sub is the same as it has always been, and continue spreading that idea when the sub comes up. Over time, though, this should slow down as people catch on. I've seen a lot of people bring up the sub's name and mention how they've changed for the better. Even though you've changed things, you can't control how people essentially advertise your sub. Today, I still see people mention "/r/cringe" whenever someone does something dumb as if it's supposed to belong on the sub. The sub's competitor will grow, and there's nothing you can do about it. /r/cringeanarchy is vile and its mods are supportive of it (check out their sidebar). They aren't anywhere near as large as the original cringe subs, though. And there's a very real chance, given what happened to /r/fatpeoplehate, they might be banned if they continue the way they are. Your growth will suffer. Looking at the traffic stats for the cringe subs, it's easy to tell that there was a dip in traffic after we implemented the rules. Your monthly uniques and subscriber growth rate will slow down, but will eventually pick back up. Today, the cringe subs are still able to get multiple posts to /r/all, and have grown significantly in terms of the number of subscribers. Sure we're not as big as we could be, but it's a worthwhile tradeoff. The problem doesn't entirely go away. Bullying people is still an issue, but it's not a different beast. We get comments disparaging people's behavior that sometimes go too far - eg. calling people autistic virgin losers and making fun of forever-alone neckbeards. With some Automod and active mods, though, the problem is much easier to control.
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Nov 5, 2015 22:57
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 10:01 |
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gently caress the ROW posted:what yankees actuall believe while crowding the minorities into jobless ghettos I mean, minorities aside, we can still agree that fat hee-hawing white Southerners should all have been murdered. Maybe by their former slaves, maybe by anyone with ears.
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Nov 6, 2015 06:46
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