'k, guys. I wanna try a little behavior modification here, so I'd appreciate y'all cooperating.

There's 20,000 eyes on this subreddit, presuming our demographic is not predominantly pirates or friends-of-Leela.¹ Of those 20,000-odd eyes, six of them belong to the moderators. Which means things like our little "I can't manage my books, buy me a pizza because I've got a $70k a year job but apparently no credit card" dude get through sometimes. I asked for sentiment on it, sentiment was overwhelmingly for "ban it, ban it now" so that's what I did. That's what I'll continue to do.

Know what I didn't see, though?

A single report.

Not a one. Not a single report. I think this is because there's a misunderstanding about what the "report" button does. So lemme explain:

The Report Button does not ban things. It adds things to our "reported links" section as moderators, and it adds them, be they posts or comments, to our Mod Queue. This magical place fills up with everything that has either been trapped in the spam filter (for better or worse - for /r/realestate it's usually for the better, for /r/foodforthought it's usually for the worse) or reported by concerned citizens like yourself.

Humans evaluate your reports. Nothing happens to a "reported link" or "reported comment" until I, ytknows or Anomander click remove link.

Clicking the "Report" button is the equivalent of drawing the ref's attention to a foul play. The ref may not give you your foul, but he's more likely to give you one if he sees it than if he doesn't.

It would honestly be a big, big favor to us, as moderators, if you clicked that button more often. If you wanted to go the extra mile, you could even message the moderators - we aren't omniscient, we aren't omnipresent and this is a community-run community, even if only three of us wear striped shirts.

Do me a favor. Click "report" on this submission. Do it now.² I'll tell you to stop at some point, but I want you to see that people keep commenting and stuff regardless of the fact that a submission has been "reported."

The system does work and we'd love your help in keeping it going. Thanks for everything,

• your friendly neighborhood moderator

1) by the way, ever searched Google Images for "Leela" with safesearch off? Fuckin-Rule-34-Inna-HAUS!

2) Okay, you can stop. This post has now been reported over 60 times and people are still commenting. Note that if you report it, it'll go away for you. That's the magic at work.