Updates

The updates list has grown pretty long, so now it's a stickied comment.

This also isn't the megathread, this is just an announcement post.

Announcement

This change has been a long time coming. A year ago, we created some recurring megathreads as a place to contain the most frequently-recurring topics (you can find reddit searches for them in this sticky post at the top of the sub.) Among these is a megathread for posts that are primarily venting or ranting.

Starting today, we will be requiring all ranting/venting/complaining/etc. posts to instead be submitted as replies to the Rant/Vent Megathread.

This does not include all posts seeking help, only the ones primarily focused on ranting or venting or getting out negative emotions.

I also want to emphasize that this is not a punishment. Having a post removed for this reason will not lead to any kind of warning or ban. We're just doing for rant/vent posts what we already do for posts about being newly diagnosed or just starting meds.

To get straight to the point, we're doing this because we want to keep this community healthy, to make sure it's oriented toward sharing helpful tips and tools, disseminating evidence-based information, and supporting one another.

Regardless of how the sub actually functions, it can often come across as an overwhelmingly negative space, and it's true that sometimes these sorts of ranting posts can push down more neutral or positive posts where people are seeking help or offering advice or tips. This leads people to believe that we remove all positive posts and that we only want this community to be a pit of despair. Nothing could be farther from the truth. We want /r/adhd to be a place where people come to help each other and know that they're not alone in their struggles, that there are people who understand the things they're going through. We're hoping that this change will support that goal.

This is not a decision we've come to lightly. The mods have discussed this internally among ourselves and with mods from other communities for more than a year. We understand that this may not be a popular change. We're anticipating that many people will feel upset and potentially alienated when we have to remove their posts and redirect them to the megathread, and we hate that we have to do this. This is not something we want to do, but right now we have no other means of adjusting /r/adhd's presentation.

We have asked the admins for a proper user-accessible feed filtering system several times now, and the only response we've gotten was from a reddit employee who reached out to us on an entirely unrelated topic, who thought it was a great idea but had authority or ability to act on our request. Basically, our pleas for help have been completely ignored. This is really the only workable solution we have right now, shitty as it is.

Things will be messy for a bit while we tweak and figure things out, so we apologize in advance. We've kept putting this off as we had ideas for how to approach it, but perfection is the enemy of good enough. We're just gonna have to bang out some minimal AutoModerator rules and iterate on it over time. In the meantime, we'll be relying on everyone to report posts that our filters miss (both for this, and for any other rule violations).

Thanks for reading and for being such a great community.