First off, if you're here wondering where all the images are, or why your post has been removed, we are in a partial shutdown where image and video posts are removed, though keep in mind, text posts are still allowed. This will be taking place from now (December 16th 2022 at 4pm EST (GMT-5) to December 23rd 2022, 4pm EST (GMT-5). We want our voices to be heard, but we also understand that our subreddit is a safe space for conversation and help, and we don't want to take that away from you.

For the next week, image and video posts will be disabled in protest against Reddit’s inaction in the face of hate. Please keep in mind that this protest is the best tool we have available to get Reddit’s attention. While removing images and videos will inevitably remove a lot of content, it still allows our community to be active, but reducing the overall amount of activity will attract Reddit’s attention through its advertising. We do not mean this as a punishment towards the community, but we want Reddit to see these issues, and we want our users to understand what’s happening behind the scenes. Thank you for bearing with us during the next week, as we understand that it can be hard when it feels like you’re losing parts of your community, even if it’s for a short period of time.

We are also looking to get the word out about this as much as possible. If you’re a moderator from another community, or a concerned user, we would like to hear from you. Please send us a ModMail here letting us know that you’re interested in helping out and how you would like to do so.

This post will focus on how Reddit is failing our communities, not only by ignoring the moderators who are actively trying to protect users, but by ignoring our users, and causing otherwise unneeded pain and suffering to them. We want our users to be aware of what Reddit has been failing to do for years now, as their administration instead devotes resources to NFTs and other new features designed solely to appeal to advertisers. We also want our users to be aware of what they can do to help themselves, and help this community, as we continue to try and provide a positive space for the LGBTQ community to enjoy. Here are the points to follow:

1. Issues that we as moderators have with Reddit
2. Issues with AEO
3. Issues with moderation tools
4. Recommendations to our users
5. A message to Reddit
6. Thoughts on additional tools/systems

Issues that we as moderators have with Reddit

"Anti Evil" Operations

First and foremost we should discuss Reddit's Anti Evil Operations, also known as AEO. A number of seriously glaring issues with AEO have lingered for years. As moderators, preventing hate is the biggest job we have. AEO either doesn't share this priority, doesn’t understand the nature of hate on its platform, or doesn’t have enough personnel to respond appropriately. Whatever the reason, there is regularly a lack of action on obvious hate. While we can ask to have AEO inaction reexamined through messaging /r/ModSupport, the same hate ends up "slipping through the cracks" again.

Many of you have reported obvious hate speech just for a message to come back (eventually) that it did not violate Reddit’s content policy. Here are some examples from the last week that Reddit somehow "missed," despite them quite obviously breaking Reddit's Content Policy (TW: Hate and threats of violence):

• kys lmao abominations, the lot of you
• You go to hell for not having true faith in Jesus Christ that it nothing else
• fuck gay people
• Get god bitches
• I hate transgender "people"

These are just a few of the quotes that we happened to have on hand. They are so obvious that the regularity with which these come back “no violation found” makes us wonder if some AEO staff actually support these statements.

We need Reddit to hear us on these issues. We shouldn't need to bring these things up on a daily basis. There's no good reason that so much hate is missed by AEO, and there's no good reason that moderators have to expend so much time escalating these same reports to admins. Reddit should be holding to its own standards.

AEO Closing Reports

When AEO actions a user for violating the rules, they will close any remaining open reports submitted within a similar time frame, rather than taking each report separately. This has led to users posting similar hate in multiple places only having one instance of it removed. It may also lead to bad actors avoiding punishment for more severe violations when AEO takes action on lesser violations first. Not only does this mean more moderator work, but it also gives the appearance of Reddit’s stamp of approval on blatantly hateful comments.

If the moderators and the users are doing the work to get these reports in, we should be able to expect that these things are investigated. This neglect devalues the work we do and allows hate to fester, undermining safety for everyone on Reddit. This needs to be fixed.

Lack of Usable Tools

Moderator tools may be invisible to users in general, but they have a huge impact on our ability to keep communities running smoothly. The biggest tool available to us is called automoderator (or automod).

Automod

Automod is an invisible moderator on most subreddits that helps the subreddit maintain its standards. It can be used to filter posts before they appear based on pre-specified rules. However, even when it removes a comment, users often still get the comment sent to them in a notification. We have seen a number of users complain about seeing hate, going to see the comment on the subreddit, and it being gone before they could even do anything about it--that is often due to automod. This is an excellent tool, but you should never have to see those comments in the first place.

We pride ourselves on being as safe a space as possible on this platform; however, we can't ever truly have that if our users are still seeing the hate that Reddit’s tools are supposed to prevent.

This is not the only Reddit tool that fails our communities. For instance, with the recent Reddit Recap, it seems as though LGBT communities were, at best, an afterthought given the number of diverse LGBT subreddits that did not appear on these recaps as shown here and here. These oversights shouldn’t be happening. Our communities should not be excluded from these types of things.

Recommendations for our Users

You may be wondering what you can do about this. While most of the work needs to be done on Reddit’s end, we do have the following recommendations.

Reporting

The first and most important thing we want to remind you of is reporting:

Please report any and all hateful content you see on the platform.

This is especially true for our subreddit, but please do so on other subreddits as well. If we are all reporting hateful content, Reddit cannot use the excuse that they did not know about it.

Remember that moderators cannot see who makes individual reports, so you will never be banned from a subreddit for reporting hate. If you report something for a sitewide violation (such as hate), you will usually (eventually) receive an automated response from the admins letting you know their decision about the content. If that message says that obviously hateful content did not violate their policies, we suggest you do the following:

1. Copy a link to the direct message you received from Reddit (not a link to the content that you reported).
2. Go to /r/ModSupport. (Yes, Mod Support will help you with these sorts of things even if you're not a moderator.)
3. Click on Message the Moderators, which should bring you to a message box that will let you direct message the Admins who work on this subreddit.
4. Give it a title with something akin to I reported hate, but no violation was found.
5. Paste the link to the message you received from Reddit as well as a short description for why you think it should have been actioned on. From there the Admins will re-review it manually, hopefully correcting their mistake(s).

This is an imperfect solution. It should not be so tedious to re-escalate these, but this is the best way to have incorrect decisions addressed. We want this platform to be better, and every little bit of help counts. Please do what you can, and keep in mind that we care. <3

You Can Turn Off Notifications

If you're one of those users who posts in our subreddit and then sees hate in their notifications even when Automod has already removed it, one way to protect yourself is to turn off notifications. Here are the steps on how to do so Keep in mind that these will remove all notifications, but if it's affecting you badly, this will help.

Turning Off Reddit Chat and DMs

A lot of you receive DMs and chat messages from trolls who see your trending posts on r/all. Unfortunately, moderators cannot stop this--banning them from our subreddit won't do anything, and we can't report them for you. While we do urge you to report them for hate or harassment, if you’d rather not receive those messages in the first place, please follow this Reddit Help Article on how to opt out of Chats. If you'd like to opt out of DMs as well, you can do so by following these steps:

1. Go to your settings.
   • If you're on Mobile, you should be able to see how to do so above, making sure to go to the Account Settings for u/your-username section and finding the section that says Blocking and Permissions
   • if you're on New Reddit or Old Reddit, use this link to go directly to the right page
2. From here you can toggle these settings on/off (if you're on mobile) or determine what level of privacy you'd prefer from chats/DMs (if you're on desktop).

Turning Off Online Status Indicator

Another issue we see is users who are harassed due to their online status. To turn that "feature" off you can do the following:

1. Click/Tap on your profile picture if you're on New Reddit or on Mobile.
   • On Old Reddit you should be able to scroll down to Privacy Options on your Preferences page.
2. Click/Tap on Online Status, and it will turn it off for you.
   • For those on Old Reddit, the option doesn't seem to exist, so try it on New Reddit or the official Mobile App.

To Reddit

The rest of this post is dedicated towards Reddit itself, so if you’re a regular user, thank you for reading this far, and feel free to skip this section. We want Reddit to see and understand the issues we have, as these are problems we have had for a long time, or are issues that really need to be addressed.

Issues and Potential Solutions For AEO

• Give better updates on our reports. We should hear back from AEO in days, not weeks or months. If something is holding the report up, let the user know.
• Stop suspending moderators for things like quoting a troll's comments in bans. The number of times we've had moderators temporarily banned due to AEO's incompetence is honestly disappointing and a detriment to the places we moderate.
• The process to suspend obvious trolls from your platform is too slow. How many times does a troll need to threaten to kill people before you permanently suspend them? We’ve also seen people only get a warning when they’ve sent sexualised comments to a minor - that should be an instant permanent suspension, and reported to authorities.
• Stop ignoring blatant report abuse. No, a post of a lesbian couple getting married is not “sexualisation of minors.” The person who reported it for that is quite obviously abusing the report button to waste our time as well as potentially harm users. Fix it.

• /u/Spez seems to think that AI tools are the future, touting an "80%" accuracy rate and the ability for users to be autobanned and ignored. There are large issues with this:

  • These kinds of AI tools may be great as supplements to human actions, but not as a replacement for them. They only work well when they are built properly and are maintained well, and Reddit has not proven to be reliable in this area. If Reddit cannot train their human staff to handle reports properly, how can we expect them to train automated models?
  • The tools currently in use for these types of things are known to have bias against minority groups, and we’ve already seen issues with AI-driven harassment filters, which appear more inaccurate than Spez’s 80%.
  • Sentiment analysis AI in general is not ready for a "set and forget" deployment. At present, this won't lighten our workload at all; it'll just waste AI processing power and time and lead to members of our community getting wrongly targeted by automated systems.

Additional Tools and Concerns

Some other useful tools and concerns that we think would not only help us, but would also help our users are:

• Give us a process to report entire subreddits. We need to be able to communicate with admins about why a subreddit is hateful and what to do. Otherwise, some of the larger hate subreddits that still exist will just keep attacking and brigading other subreddits.
• Protecting moderators and users from off-site hate. Our subreddit has been a target for raids from outside hate forums seeking to harm our users, dox our moderators, and disrupt the community. There are limits to what can be done about off-site actions, but talk to your moderators and reassure them about what you are doing.
• Work on the AI that you're actively using on our subreddits. The NSFW AI is useful, but doesn't tell us anything about why it’s tagged a post. Currently it seems to be tagging too much. If we can’t give meaningful feedback, how is it supposed to improve?
• Stop trying to win us over with PR events in lieu of actions.
  • Mod Summit has not actually done anything but sold us the product that already exists. Give us useful information from these events, insights into what you're working on--work with moderators directly during the event to hear our needs, and show us how you are using that input.
  • While we appreciate when Admins get involved, it is far too frequent that we hear “we’re working on it” with no evidence of progress. A lot of these issues have existed for years. We shouldn't need to bring up the same issues year after year. We need to see actionable change.
• Automod is incredibly difficult to work with for people who aren't at least somewhat familiar with coding. That’s less of an issue for our subreddit, as we have a number of people who are familiar with formatting code, but it's horrendous for smaller subreddits. This does not mean replacing it with something brand new--automod is far more powerful and customisable than many of the other tools Reddit provides, and we would not want to lose it--but we would love it if the automod editor came with code hints, or examples of common rules, or have some way for it to autofill syntax based on user input. Anything to make it more usable.
• We need better documentation for Automod. Right now the Automod documentation is out of date, and we've actually found (thanks to admin help) a number of helpful snippets that don't exist at all in the documentation. New moderators and subreddits are missing out on useful tools that can help them create a better community, and existing communities have to either work with the Admins to find things that are missing, guess and check to see what works, or be forced to work with an Automod that doesn’t meet their needs.

Thank You For Reading

For those of you that have read through this extensive post, thank you. We share these ideas and criticisms with the hope that in the future Reddit will continue to improve their system overall. We want Reddit to be a place where our communities are safe, and we hope this post will alert the admins to the ongoing failures to honor their commitments to safety.
We have worked directly with a number of Reddit admins over the years, and while those individuals have been a pleasure to collaborate with, it is clear that Reddit as an organization does not give them adequate support. Our frustration is primarily with the systems that have allowed our concerns to be recognized but not addressed. We will be happy to continue working with the admins on these issues to the best of our ability, but we will not be silent when platitudes are given as a substitute for action.

TLDR:

• Reddit has issues that need to be fixed:
  • AEO is a top concern.
  • Moderation tools are flawed.
  • Automod needs more attention.
• For our users, there are ways to get around some of these issues:
  • Report comments, posts, DMs, etc. that break Reddit’s Content Policy.
  • If reports come back negative, re-escalate them in a ModMail to ModSupport.
• To reduce the amount of hate you receive, you can:
  • Turn off Notifications.
  • Turn off DMs and Reddit Chat.
  • Turn off Online Status Indicator.