About an hour ago, the new "online presence indicator" you're all seeing was announced over on r/changelog. I personally have a number of concerns with how this will impact moderator efficacy and community member safety. There were many other concerns raised by other users in the r/changelog thread.

I have collected my concerns and the concerns others have shared here, and I encourage you to post your own feedback as well if there is anything I missed.

How This Impacts Large-Scale User Harassment & Doxxing

At r/Fantasy, we have had community members targeted by large-scale harassment organizations. Having an indicator opens up victims of large-scale harassment to further abuse. Harassers will either a) be able to collect data on when a user is awake, asleep, home, or not home or b) see that someone is "hiding," which will fuel their ire when it is perceived as a response. Showing as "offline" instead of "hiding" could help alleviate this.

When this is combined with doxxing strategies, this actively puts community members' lives in danger. Community members whose addresses have been publicized will now either make public the outline of their daily schedule or will be seen as "hiding" - a status which states that the doxxing has been effective and should be escalated to get even deeper under their skin. This is a great comment explaining why this language is loaded and how it may be perceived by potential abusers. If online status is retained, this is even more dangerous.

As u/bardfinn put it:

Those of us who have been unlucky enough to have been doxxed, and for whom this manner of telemetry broadcast will alert the people who want to rape and murder us that we are home -- or out of the house -- or asleep -- how do we opt out of this manner of broadcast telemetry?

I could easily picture anti-LGBTQ organizations using this online indicator to target and harass individuals who divulge queer identity and are "online," as a another example.

Small Scale Harassment

On a smaller scale, slap-fights occur frequently on reddit. With an online indicator, this means that users would be encouraged to escalate more quickly in thread. Further, if someone fails to reply in thread, it encourages harassment via DM or Chat because, "Why aren't you replying when I see you are online?"

The "hiding" status exacerbates that issue. If someone who is a victim of small scale harassment changes status to hiding, that broadcasts to the harasser that they have gotten under their skin and should continue to escalate. "Invisible" wouldn't necessarily resolve the first half of this issue, mind, though it would help with this second piece.

We have often received and seen our users receive lackluster responses from reddit admin when smaller-scale harassment is reported. I do not wish to see this increase when the current amount is already not being adequately addressed.

Even on a smaller scale, I believe this would encourage faster, more vitriolic escalations in the slap-fights we already have to spend a great deal of time and energy moderating. Now, rather than having a chance to step away and use the rest of reddit, someone may continue commenting if they do not receive a response because they see that the person is online. This is not the type of increased engagement that is good for anyone. This may happen either in thread or encourage chats/DMs outside of it. We have frequently had lackluster responses from the admin to this type of smaller scale harassment, and I do not wish to see it increase.

Impacts on Existing Privacy and Security Concerns

Despite previous promises, we are still unable to see who follows us on reddit. I have multiple followers. I have no idea who they are. If they are bad faith actors, this will increase their toolkit should they choose to develop a harassment campaign against me.

Blocking is insufficient to resolve this, as we all know just how simple it is to create an account and evade a ban or a block. We know this because as moderators we have no tools to combat it, not even a simple method of seeing which accounts share an IP with previously banned accounts (even if the IP itself is not visible, which would be reasonable for privacy reasons).

These unknown followers may be collecting data in ways that are invisible to me.

Other Moderation Issues

As others have pointed out there, this makes "mods are asleep" quite literal. Given that most "mods are asleep" blitz attacks are from off-subreddit and use brigading strategies, I don't think that having mods be "hidden" would resolve this. This is especially dangerous when combined with doxxing and targeted harassment campaigns.

Additionally, this provides an avenue for banned users to try to identify which moderator banned them and begin a harassment campaign with that knowledge. A similar issue arises when a post or comment is anonymously removed.

It will also cause problems when a community member submits a modmail and see multiple moderators are online and becomes angry when they do not receive an immediate response. Similarly, it will encourage community members who report content that they believe is rule-breaking (but which may not be) to harass actives mods into an explanation as to why a comment wasn't removed.

Users who find old posts through search or Google may also be more likely to commend and engage with ancient posts if they see users in that old conversation are online. This is a problem because those posts are no longer being actively moderated since they're weeks old, allowing for harassment or rule-breaking to occur without moderator knowledge.

Finally, being seen as "online" frankly just encourages users to message online mods instead of correctly going through modmail. This is an additional burden when we have to redirect every time - a burden on both mods and well-meaning community members.

These issues will add additional stress, burden, and personal danger to an already thankless job.

How is this Different from Other Social Media Online Indicators?

On Facebook, only people you've added as friends see you online. On Twitter, there is no "currently online" visibility. Discord has different settings for being seen online, invisible, etc, and it's primarily people you share servers with who can see that. It's also a little different since it is geared towards live chatting and you have more control over who you interact with through servers, DM settings, etc - most of Discord is not public. The vast majority of reddit is public, as are your interactions on it.

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