TL;DR Subreddit returns to previous posting and commenting rules.

Hi :)

Our poll regarding next steps for /trance concluded. Considering those results and all comments received here and on Discord, the posting restrictions have been lifted.

Results

The results of the poll:

A few notes from poll:

• 45.1% voted for some of opening vs. 35.4% which voted for some sort of closure.
• 40.5% voted for some sort of restriction vs. 40.1% voted for no restrictions.
• Margin of Error at 95% Confidence is estimated between 5.1% and 6.1%. See bottom of post for the math.*
• 49.8% originally voted that we close for two days in support. Understandably a portion of those people would have voted to open post-June 14th.

Moving Forward

Clearly there is still difference in thought amongst users of the subreddit -- the winning vote is only a majority-minority after all. There are also other issues that are ongoing (some which are highlighted in the prior poll thread) and additional actions by Reddit over the past few days regarding the roles of moderators at Reddit.

As full disclosure, moderators of r/trance did not receive any sort of modmail message from Reddit. Most likely due to our relatively small size compared to other subreddits. I'd like to think, as well, because our subreddit had been re-opened under restricted mode and every decision that we've made as moderators has been as a direct result of feedback and polling data from the users.

All that said, our normal rules still apply moving forward. That includes being respectful and kind to one another, even if their opinions are different from your own.

We also ask for your patience, especially starting around July 1st. Some moderators on our team primarily use mobile devices, and some moderator actions on the official Reddit app are not yet available.That said, we also have moderators (including myself) that do a bulk majority of our moderating via desktop, which is not impacted. Finally, any of our third-party tools for moderation are, as far as I'm aware, exempt from Reddit's new API charges, so there should not be disruption on that front.

Wrapping Up

Just welcome back, happy posting, and enjoy the music :)

• soccernamlak and the moderators of r/trance

*Margin of Error

Statistics allows us to calculate a margin of error of a sample compared to the full population to understand the range and confidence that our listed sample values matches the "true" value if we could somehow ask everyone their thoughts. This is how poll surveys IRL are conducted.

Over the three days the polls were open, we had 932, 929, and 846 unique visitors to the subreddit, which has a subscriber count of 84,543 people.

Using the entire subscriber count as our population size, we can say that we are 95% certain that the "true results" for each % listed above is within /- 6.1% of those values from the poll. For example, if we could ask every single subscriber their thoughts, we are 95% sure that the % of people who would want open without restrictions is between 34% and 46.2%.

Clearly, not every subscriber is active here; these numbers count inactive accounts that have been that way for years.

If we look at traffic to the subreddit based on unique visitors over past three days, we get a range of 846 - 932 people, which equates to 1707. One consideration is that a person visiting the site once each day would count separately per date. Further, one person accessing the subreddit from home and from work would count as two unique visitors.

That said, the beauty of stats means our margin of error doesn't shift as much. Using either 846 or 932 as our "population size", or even a 10% reduction of such to account for same user across multiple devices, only reduces our margin of error around 1%, or /- 5.1%

Caveats:

• Some people who want to remain closed may not have voted as they continue their personal dis-use of reddit. This is suggested by unique traffic being around 15-20% less these past few days compared to before June 12th.
• Margin of error calculations assume some level of bias has been minimized in the original poll. While that was attempted, there are still sources of biases in this poll. See below.

Biases:

• Poll was was sticky comment. Some users, especially those using the Reddit App, may have missed the post due to UI design choices that are out of our control.
• Some people that are currently not using Reddit in support of the protest would not have seen or voted on the poll.
• The poll requires a Reddit account to vote; not all viewers of the subreddit might have had an account or logged in within the polling window.
• The polling window may have been too short at 3 days to fully capture the range of thoughts; that said, percentage differences were relatively consistent throughout polling.
• Polling options were not randomized per user; placement bias (restricted options before open options) may have played a role.
• There is no way to restrict polling to "active r/trance user" or subscriber of r/trance -- anyone with a Reddit account could vote. That said, as a smaller music subreddit, the odds of others skewing the poll results is slim.
• Other biases not listed here.