263
Weaponized reporting: what we’re seeing and what we’re doing(self.ModSupport)
Hey all,
We wanted to follow up on [last week’s post](https://www.reddit.com/r/ModSupport/comments/...
5 years, 11 months ago
—
6 years ago22 of 22
Tip Reveddit Real-Time can notify you when your content is removed.
your account history
Tip Check if your account has any removed comments.
view my removed comments you are viewing a single comment's thread.
view all comments
Understand that you say this, and I want to believe it, but the evidence you're showing me just isn't there. What you've told us about over the last several months are fixes to individual things. Not to process and pipeline. The bug with the reporter instead of the reportee being actioned is a perfect example here. That bug should have been caught well before production. That it reached production is a symptom of a deficiency in your peer review, automated testing, and QA testing steps.
I don't feel you have even acknowledged that you have a problem at the process and pipeline level. You seem to be focused entirely on the deliverable level. But if you do not fix a pipeline that is so broken that a critical, high user impact bug with the most basic function of a feature can reach production, that doesn't solve anything. Because you'll still be living in a world where a feature can massively cock up user experiences and nobody finds out about it until it becomes a huge issue every time you build something new, and in six months or a year we'll just have another string of mad threads here.
I understand that you need to say this, but I am not being this way for no reason. It would be a lot easier for me to be more constructive if my glasses weren't turned a shade of red by five and a half years of a nearly total lack of useful admin support in keeping garbage and spam out of my communities, two completely incorrect suspensions because of the numerous problems with what I commented on, and a suspension appeals experience that would have landed me without a job if I'd treated customers the same way. And what you're doing now, so far, looks just like what you have done before - say a lot of placating things, but affect no real or lasting change that makes everyone's lives better.
So, this crow I have here, I'm not going to not put it on a plate and see if you're willing to eat it.
This week a comod of mine got suspended - apparently instead of the troll he reported.
I have worked with this person for years. They do not use abusive language.
Notably, this suspension message came less than three minutes after another message telling me that a report I had made "had been investigated" and that "action had been taken under our content policy".
Please make sure they appeal and if that is denied, drop us a modmail here.
The modmail has been sent.
I would very much appreciate an explanation as to what happened, and what specific steps the admin team has taken to make sure it will not happen again.
The suspension has timed out after three days but my comod has not heard back yet on his appeal .
Update: After eight days, I finally revived a reply to my appeal. It read simply:
Again, there was zero explanation of what I allegedly did wrong in the first place.
Is this how reddit is supposed to be managed?
The original message you received should have told you why you were actioned, but if it didn't we'd love to know as that might be something that is broken. As I mentioned in my last comment, can you send us a modmail so we can look into it?
It didn't.
As I mentioned in my last comment, I did this three days ago.
Ah sorry, didn't see your other comment. Lots of comments on this thread.
I am virtually certain this is a case of mistaken suspension, my comod was suspended instead of the troll he reported.
In the six years I have been active on this site I have not once seen that user use abusive language - it would be wildly out of character for them to do so.
The problem here is manifold.
1) Users are suspended without being told why.
2) Appeals are handled long after the suspension timed out.
3) Appeals are as far as I can determine* denied automatically, without the reason for the suspension being looked into.
This is not just an issue affecting moderators. What is an average user going to do, who is not aware of reddit protocol and various avenues for adressing this issue with admins? This is in my opinion a serious issue, as it might very well cause decent users to leave the site completely.
*(I know I am speculating based on an incomplete dataset. But I have seen multiple users/ mods suspended apparently instead of the person they were reporting. With their appeals consistently denied.)
Addendum, 4) Trolls are very aware of weaponised reporting. Only this week I was told in mod mail by a user banned for anti-transgender bigotry that I better watch my step, as admins suspend moderators who use the term "TERF".
If I get suspended over the next couple of days it will be because I wrote, verbatim: "This is a TERF free zone." Not a slur, not directed at a user per se. However the atmosphere that has been created over the past couple of months now has me somewhat worried that I will be suspended over this, by tonedeaf anti-evil.
This is 100% what happened to me. Nobody from AEO in the course of their normal duties actually looked at my first suspension. It was not until one of the CMs from here acted internally that anybody looked at it, at which point I was informed it was stricken because it was too late to overturn it.
Despite this clear and incredible incompetence, I remain the only person I've seen to get chastised for my choice of words on describing it. /shrug?
stop trying to take everything out of public discussion. You guys just move stuff to DMs or modmail then stop responding there where there's less visibility into how bad your process is when you actually have someone refuting your generalities
I suspect you use modmail to communicate with your users and would be irritated if they wanted to discuss all issues via deeply-threaded comments. Resolving individual issues is best done via a ticket system so we can easily keep track of them.
I just looked at all messages I can find from you to the Community team in our queue and they all have replies. Please let me know if you have any that need a response, but we do reply to the messages here and you shouldn't be getting silence.
I typically use whatever they used to communicate with us. So if they send us a modmail message, I'll respond through modmail. If they bring up something in a public comment, I'll respond to that comment if I have a response.
and it's not my messages that I have issues with (although i am semi-bothered that the autosubscribing issue I identified almost a year ago hasn't been addressed despite me being told multiple times by admins in DMs that it had). But i read this sub regularly and there's a lot of stuff like this where the admin immediately tries to take the conversation into PMs, only replies with PR speak, then stops engaging once the person they're talking to pushes for real action instead of vague promises
It seems like you feel that there's some way to make immediate progress on structural issues. How do you recommend doing this?
[removed] content loading...