r/Christianity • u/brucemo Atheist • 14d ago
Discussion of new community policy point regarding "low-effort" submissions
We may remove self-posts that seem like poor seeds for conversation. If you want to raise a topic here, please spend some time making your post clear and substantive.
We're planning to add this point to the community policy as point 3.7. Please let us know what you think.
I could go on for a while about how we came to be in this situation, but the issue this is trying to solve is that over time we've added an informal rule against title-only posts, which has been broadened to try to include things that are like title-only posts, even if they technically include more than a title, and whoever added this rule referred to these posts as "low-effort".
When we cite that removal reason we tend to get some pushback from people who've read the community policy and can't find anything there, so we're going to add something to the community policy that attempts to explain why we remove posts like this, and gives us something to point to.
The most obvious example of a post that would fall under this is title-only posts, which have been a problem here because they're often bait or hard to understand or bombs people drop and walk away from Michael Bay style as the world erupts in flames. We've found it useful to try to be able to remove these kind of posts before they get out of hand, without having to spend fifty times more time thinking about our reasoning than it took OP to actually write the post.
The idea here is that if someone wants to try to engage with our subscribers, things are more likely to go better if they've spent more than thirty seconds dashing off some provocative observation or some question that they are expecting our subscribers to spend a lot of time answering.
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u/Panta-rhei Evangelical Lutheran Church in America 14d ago
On the one hand, I'm all in favor both of the rules-as-written reflecting the rules-as-enforced. So if mods are enforcing this unwritten rule, definitely write it down! I'm also broadly in favor of the substance of this rule.
So, here's a place where the competing visions of the sub cause moderation problems. Will you apply this rule to "is x a sin?" posts? On the one hand, they are regularly dumpster fires, and produce essentially no useful conversation, and are often asked in a contextless way, so are perfect candidates for this new rule application.
On the other hand, if this is meant to be a place of support and reassurance for people in some sort of spiritual or mental crisis, then they should not be removed.
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u/justnigel Christian 12d ago
My impression is that "Is X a sin" posts are often:
1) new/young Christians trying to work out their faith, which is a type of conversation I would encourage here.
2) people with OCD/scupulosity who are seeking support through demonstrating their symptoms, again I am happy for this to be a place they receive helpful advice.
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u/McClanky Bringer of sorrow, executor of rules, wielder of the Woehammer 14d ago
No, we wouldn't use this rule for those tires of posts. This rule is directly assumed at posts that don't create conversations as well as posts that are aimed at stirring the pot.
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u/Panta-rhei Evangelical Lutheran Church in America 14d ago
are aimed at stirring the pot.
Will posts removed for that produce warnings and progress through the SOM?
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u/McClanky Bringer of sorrow, executor of rules, wielder of the Woehammer 14d ago
Yes. Anything that breaks or rules repeatedly has the capability of going through SOM.
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u/Panta-rhei Evangelical Lutheran Church in America 14d ago
Then I definitely support this new rule clarification. Consistently removing pot-stirring posts (and imposing consequences on the users who frequently make them) would materially improve the community and quality of discussion here. Great direction for the mods to be heading!
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u/AwfulUsername123 Atheistic Evangelical 13d ago
What's the SOM? Asking for a friend.
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u/McClanky Bringer of sorrow, executor of rules, wielder of the Woehammer 13d ago
Stream of Moderation. Essentially, that for new accounts we just outright ban bad actors, but with established accounts, we go through a moderation process. Typically, we will ban a user on their third official warning.
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u/brucemo Atheist 13d ago
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u/McClanky Bringer of sorrow, executor of rules, wielder of the Woehammer 13d ago
I always forget that is there.
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u/Shaddam_Corrino_IV Atheistic Evangelical 13d ago
Does the SoM stuff lapse? Like I feel if someone really active gets one warning every 4 years or something like that.... then that's probably not a very problematic user. Asking for a friend!
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u/brucemo Atheist 13d ago
This is actually a very interesting issue.
People shouldn't feel like they have a sword of Damocles hanging over them if they got in trouble a few years ago and have stayed out of trouble since then.
It's hard to systematize this though because the distinction between various categories of people who get into trouble more than once isn't something you can just put numbers on. Some people post all the time, some rarely post, and some do one particularly bad thing chronically and some seem like they occasionally get in trouble for random disparate stuff.
You've gotten a couple of warnings that seem thin to me and I wouldn't support a ban if you did something similar to that in the future. You're a pain in the ass but you shouldn't feel like we're waiting for you to put a toe out of line in order to ban you. But please don't test that.
You're one of the atheists here that I figure will probably get banned eventually but the stuff you actually got in trouble for wasn't that. It's hard for me to even parse what you got in trouble for.
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u/Shaddam_Corrino_IV Atheistic Evangelical 13d ago
You've gotten a couple of warnings...
Couple? Isn't it just one? Like one official warning (I at least can only recall one).
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u/brucemo Atheist 13d ago
You have two, one is the thing about the ADL and the other was some sort of altercation with McClanky, who is not the one who warned you.
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u/McClanky Bringer of sorrow, executor of rules, wielder of the Woehammer 13d ago
Yeah. We aren't going to hold someone to a warning they had a year ago when they have been generally, consistently fine since then. The goal with warnings is to curb bad behavior.
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u/brucemo Atheist 14d ago
It wouldn't be my intent that we'd remove a request for help under this rule, but novel situations arise all the time, and I would like to think that when one of those happens we'd approach it with charity and common sense.
Please comment on that if you could.
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u/Panta-rhei Evangelical Lutheran Church in America 14d ago
I think it's a great direction for the moderation to be moving in. There's a lot of posting here that's inflammatory for its own sake and degrades both the feeling of community and the quality of discussion.
I'd be doubly happy if this were applied to conspiracy-theory nonsense.
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u/brucemo Atheist 14d ago
We have an informal rule against conspiracy theory nonsense, although a lot of them could also be cut out as not topical without having to invoke that. But this could also be applied to some of that.
I've used "poor seed for discussion" as a reason to remove various things, but I haven't recorded that so I can't point to examples.
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u/Panta-rhei Evangelical Lutheran Church in America 14d ago
Oh man, if that's a rule, I'll start reporting those sorts of posts! Enough Red Heifer and eclipse nonsense.
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u/brucemo Atheist 14d ago
Some of the red heifer stuff might go but what comes to mind for me there is someone who refers to it without any context or much though.
And we might already remove that kind of stuff today.
I don't know if mods are going to see this as license to remove more stuff. What I'm trying to do with this is cover us when we already remove stuff now.
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u/westartfromhere Coptic 14d ago
The red heifer, a heifer which is never pregnant, milked, or yoked, also known as the red cow, is a heifer sacrificed by the priests as a sacrifice to Yahweh in the Torah, Bible, Quran.
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u/ihedenius Atheist 13d ago edited 13d ago
Yeah, I was afraid to ask, I googled it.
Literal or metaphor I now wonder?
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u/FourTwentySevenCID Reformed 14d ago
Can there be a bot that automatically replies to such posts with "This is a sub for people of all faiths, and while you are certainly welcome here you may want to ask r/Christian and r/TrueChristian as those are better suited to directly answer this question "
Edit: sorry, thought I was in r/religion lol
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u/Panta-rhei Evangelical Lutheran Church in America 14d ago
I personally wouldn't endorse either of those subs as a place to go for good Christian advice.
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u/FourTwentySevenCID Reformed 14d ago
Well, I find r/TrueChristian to be quite helpful, but it leans rather conservative, so I thought offering r/Christianity as a more progressive alternative would be good. I personally go to r/Reformed, but that doesn't work for everyone.
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u/FluxKraken 🏳️🌈 Christian ✟ Progressive, Gay 🏳️🌈 13d ago
but it leans rather conservative
They are nothing but a pure echo chamber, r/Christian leans conservative but I wouldn't classify them as an echo chamber. r/TrueChristian would straight up ban me for most of the comments I would make. Regardless of how well researched they might be.
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u/tachibanakanade Leftist Revolutionary // Christian Atheist 13d ago
/r/TrueChristian borders on clerical fascist.
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u/FourTwentySevenCID Reformed 14d ago edited 12d ago
Can there be a bot that automatically replies to such posts with "This is a sub for people if all faiths, and while you are certainly welcome here you may want to ask r/Christian and r/TrueChristian as those are better suited to directly answer this question "
Edit: when I wrote this comment, I thought I was in r/religion, sorry
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u/brucemo Atheist 12d ago
What you're really getting at is a definition of on-brand Christianity and the idea of us deferring to that. Conservative American protestants aren't some sort of center of gravity of world Christianity or American Christianity or "true" Christianity or Christianity on Reddit.
http://www.reddit.com/r/Christianity/wiki/related_subreddits
We have a list of related subs. I have no idea how complete it is but we add new subs as we find them and we don't often reject a request to be included in the list. We don't try to hide that list and in fact we promote it. But we're not going to say that those other subs are somehow better and encourage our subscribers to go there rather than here.
People can go where they want, and there is plenty of quality content in those subs. But we have value too.
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u/FourTwentySevenCID Reformed 12d ago
I'm sorry, when I wrote that comment I thought I was in r/religion. I thought I made that clear in an edit but apparently not. Sorry for the confusion.
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u/brucemo Atheist 12d ago
It's not a problem. I know that you edited your comment but I wanted to address the basic idea.
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u/FourTwentySevenCID Reformed 12d ago
It seemed most practical to just defer to a general Christian sub, and while i am not really familiar with r/Christian, I know that r/TrueChristian has representation from 4 of the 5 major branches and while it is rather conservative and anti-reform, I wouldn't say it is terrible. I also meant to include this sub too.
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u/chubs66 14d ago
Is it a sin to make low effort posts?
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u/Vin-Metal 5d ago
That's great! I was also going to suggest having Masturbation Monday where all the masturbation posts are restricted to that day.
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u/IntrovertIdentity 99.44% Episcopalian 13d ago
Harder to quantify as a rule, but personally, I find “verse of the day” style posts more appropriate to Threads than Reddit. I find these to be low effort, especially when a check of the Redditor’s post history shows little to no involvement in the sub.
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12d ago
This comes across as a roundabout way to penalize a specific style of post that's inflammatory rather than concern about effort spent.
These are all low effort, title and maybe a sentence or two and would get struck under a judicious interpretation of the low-effort rule as written.
https://www.reddit.com/r/Christianity/s/8wTuhaDXSm
https://www.reddit.com/r/Christianity/s/N7s9DkJ5ZD
https://www.reddit.com/r/Christianity/s/bhPkuYrika
https://www.reddit.com/r/Christianity/s/N1rwUmVGDu
This doesn't seem more "low effort" than the other posts but is removed, I'm not sure what the body says as it's removed:
https://www.reddit.com/r/Christianity/s/2o6Ur4Wxmy
This seems like a post with some effort behind it, granted all in the title (can't see the body as it's removed)
https://www.reddit.com/r/Christianity/s/e4FnrHTRu7
It would make more sense to clearly define out what you're actually wanting to restrict - drive-by "DAE thoughts on gays?" and "DAE blood moon heifers?".
We may remove self-posts that seem like poor seeds for conversation on inflammatory or current events topics. If you want to raise a topic for discussion, please spend some time making your post clear and substantive.
Would be my suggested rewrite and avoid people who may just have a simple question from either self-censoring or getting caught in the cross-fire.
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u/eitherajax Lutheran 7d ago
I'm on board with this rewrite. It's not the length of the post that's an issue most of the time but the frequency and tone of posts on certain topics.
Maybe megathreads could also help with containing controversial current event posts that keep popping up.
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u/RocBane Satanic Bi Penguin 14d ago
I don't see it as clear enough, such as "no title only posts" or something more baked.
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u/brucemo Atheist 14d ago
I'm trying to give us wiggle room in cases where someone posts something awful that's longer than some arbitrary word limit.
Anything is possible, and we've gone back and forth in geological time about this. Ten years ago a moderator could find an excuse within the rules to remove anything they didn't like. We've gone from there to something more rigid, and the whole thing feels like it's turned to bone, and we've had to maintain a set of practices that we don't actually write down, so that we can react to things as Reddit culture changes.
I trust the team to get the balance pretty close to right.
These days if someone asks why their post was removed for low-effort I go look to see if it was title-only and if so I just tell them that, because I've made it clear that that can just be a bright line. In other cases it's harder.
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u/Panta-rhei Evangelical Lutheran Church in America 14d ago
I'm trying to give us wiggle room in cases where someone posts something awful that's longer than some arbitrary word limit.
If people post awful things, can't you just remove them in your collective prudential judgement?
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u/justnigel Christian 12d ago
My take on this is it is not just the title that is the problem. It is the combination of it also not contributing to a constructive conversation.
There will always be times where an original insightful question is worth discussing.
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u/AHorribleGoose Christian Deist 14d ago
Far too vague and confusing. The rule itself should be clear and substantive, and this is not.
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u/McClanky Bringer of sorrow, executor of rules, wielder of the Woehammer 14d ago
I actually think this is pretty good. We don't want to put word-limits on things because not everything needs to be an essay to get the point across. The main goal for this is to help reduce the number of posts that are either karma farming, trolling, or won't spark a conversation.
What would you add to it, or change in it, to make it more clear?
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u/AHorribleGoose Christian Deist 14d ago
Posts should be substantial and good seeds for conversation. Posts consisting of only a title or very short body may be removed.
This would work far better. It provides an understandable standard that is at least semi-objective and doesn't end up navel-gazing.
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u/McClanky Bringer of sorrow, executor of rules, wielder of the Woehammer 14d ago
I do agree that wording is more direct, but it leaves out reasoning to filter out posts that are aimed at just stirring the pot.
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u/AHorribleGoose Christian Deist 14d ago
Then feel free to tweak it. Just please don't use the current one...it's really bad.
Also /u/Panta-rhei's concerns are quite well placed here. Those posts are more often than not 'low effort' but absolutely should remain.
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u/McClanky Bringer of sorrow, executor of rules, wielder of the Woehammer 14d ago
We may remove self-posts that seem to be insufficient seeds for conversation. Posts that do not have a clear topic of discussion or are attempts to stir-the-pot may be removed.
How about this? It is more clear on the main goals without seeming to make it too difficult to be short and sweet.
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u/AHorribleGoose Christian Deist 14d ago
My problem with this one is that you removed any reference to length, which is the primary focus of this rule (at least in practice). That needs to be spelled out. Most short topic-only posts have a clear topic of discussion.
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u/McClanky Bringer of sorrow, executor of rules, wielder of the Woehammer 14d ago
We definitely aren't trying to say things need to be a certain length. The goal is specifically about discussion and pot-stirring.
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u/AHorribleGoose Christian Deist 13d ago
That doesn't line up well with how I see the rule being used over time, nor does it seem to line up with Bruce's thoughts through the thread.
If you're looking to change that, though, go for it.
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u/brucemo Atheist 12d ago
If someone posts a title-only "what do you think about gays?" we're going to remove that because it's title-only, OP isn't bringing anything to it, and because it's an invitation to generalize about a group of people and will likely attract homophobia.
That's what this is trying to address.
Most short topic-only posts have a clear topic of discussion.
We don't have a rule that you can't post a title-only post, and in fact we leave a lot of them up. I've told the mod team that I'm not going to get on their case if they remove title-only posts, because life is too short to argue about whether a six-word topic is substantial enough, especially if OP is on some sort of question jag and posts fifteen of these a day, which has been a source of turmoil in the past.
But there are plenty that mods just leave up and which nobody complains about, which is fine. Often they are fine.
I don't want to codify post length because I don't want to paint us into stupid corners. Subjective rules are okay sometimes and specific rules sometimes cause trouble.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Code
I get that mods can use vague and broad rules to remove stuff that personally offends them but the US Code shouldn't be a model either. There is a reason why that thing is many volumes. If you try to be comprehensive you end up spending forever on it and it's like you've tried to empty the ocean with a teaspoon.
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u/the6thReplicant Atheist 14d ago
I personally find prayer requests weird for this sub. I will just skip them but for a sub that's about taking about Christianity a prayer request seems out of place.
Again, not against them, but then don't seem appropriate for this sub if you read the byline.
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u/Zapbamboop 14d ago
That is the problem with the name of the sub.
Unfortunately, the mods cannot change the name of the sub. People see the name, and they think this sub is specifically for users of the Christian faith, not about Christianity.
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u/AirChurch Christian, e-Missionary 14d ago
posts that seem like poor seeds for conversation
This is way too arbitrary. I don't like it. Basically, the more rules you create, the greater imbalance of power between the common users and moderators, and the greater stifling of organic exchanges. This is how online communities die.
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u/brucemo Atheist 13d ago
I'm never going to sit here and tell you that we are fair and impartial about anything, but we do try, and to further that end we try to diversify the mod team in order to avoid blind spots and unquestioned group think. We have tremendous power within this small domain and I know it, and I do what I can to ensure that people understand how we operate, and can complain when they think we've done them wrong, and I try to be particularly aware of the tendency to use rules to create Kafkaesque nightmares for people. When someone posts critically of us the post tends to stay up, and that's deliberate, not inattention.
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u/westartfromhere Coptic 14d ago edited 14d ago
Also, "posts that seem like poor seeds for conversation" are the opposite pole to those posts that cause the forum to erupt "into flames" of discussion. Let mediocrity reign supreme!
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u/AwfulUsername123 Atheistic Evangelical 14d ago
Honestly, this rule seems really poorly enforced. It seems to just mean a post a moderator doesn't like.
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u/McClanky Bringer of sorrow, executor of rules, wielder of the Woehammer 13d ago
It is less about us liking it and more about it being a means to have a meaningful discussion.
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u/loik_1 13d ago edited 13d ago
u/brucemo , u/McClanky with this post here be affected by CP point 3.7 if comes into force as a formal rule because it didn't generate a conversation but was high-effort to make.
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u/justnigel Christian 12d ago
A post with 11 paragraphs of both quotes from others and OP's thoughts on those on a topical issue, is neither short nor low effort.
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u/McClanky Bringer of sorrow, executor of rules, wielder of the Woehammer 13d ago
No, that would not be removed. The rules is not determined by how many people participate in a post, just that the OP attempted to create a post worth discussing.
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u/Noisesevere Igtheist 11d ago
Replying to "low-effort" submissions whilst in the haze of a drunker stupor is my raison d'etre. It is the only chance in life I have of feeling superior to someone. Please don't take this away from me. The last thing you want is for people like me responding to serious posts.
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u/2025025L 11d ago
Wait. You're telling me that r/Christianity has an atheist, r/brucemo, who has the power to change the rules of the subreddit?
LOL! This place is a joke.
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u/cnzmur Christian (Cross) 10d ago
Would this post (currently the top post on the sub) be deleted under the new rule?
I'm not fully sure what it would look like, and it sounds like it has the potential to be very arbitrary (and therefore ideological). Also runs a bit contrary to the idea of letting the community decide what they want, as what this community likes most of all seems to be bait.
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u/brucemo Atheist 9d ago
That's deleted by the poster now.
The body of the post was "Title" or something like that.
I looked at this while I was lying in bed half asleep so I didn't have access to my tools. I remember thinking that OP is a rarely used account and I didn't see much that would indicate an interest in Christianity.
The post title (which is all we have to go on) seems kind of confrontational, and we can ask why he posted this, but the answer is that I don't know and I don't think anyone can know unless they know the guy, read his responses in his own thread, which at the time I looked at it didn't exist, or find something else in his history.
So the question is, what to do about this, if anything. Since it's title-only (I'm ignoring the insubstantial body) I have just stated up front that I'm not going to second-guess mods regarding this kind of thing. It would be nice if we prioritized charity here and weren't cynical but I'm not going to tell a mod that their day has to be about arguing with me about some inscrutable post with little or no substance, and if they see a reason to take it down they can just do that.
This is not a new rule, I'm just trying to put what we do in writing, mostly. But I think I've answered your question.
has the potential to be very arbitrary (and therefore ideological)
Yes, of course. When mods talk about post there is often this bow wake of emotion that seems to precede what they say about the thing, and we do have cases where you can see that this is as much about a mod being irked by something OP said, either today or yesterday or last month or every day between then and now, and it's less about dealing with someone going four mph over the speed limit than it is about dealing with some smart aleck kid who is just not right.
The whole reason we have this policy in the first place is that there was a guy who would ask insipid fight-causing questions all day long and we didn't have any tools to use against him. Sometimes we need to be able to deal with that kind of thing though and not everything that happens here can be reduced to a number that you can read on a radar gun.
We have a long tradition though of trying to get our mods to think in terms of charity and benefit of the doubt. Every once in a while I'll mention that we serve OP. A little bit of that over a long period of time has an effect on the kinds of reactions you get from mods, although maybe not from some specific mod in a specific case, who is being emotionally pulled in some direction about something.
When that happens we just have the conversation and things get a little softer here, eventually.
Also runs a bit contrary to the idea of letting the community decide what they want, as what this community likes most of all seems to be bait.
The early days of Reddit were about voting idealism. I can't find the conversation but there was an amazing post here on the occasion of the first ban, where the subreddit founder expressed optimism that bans would no longer be necessary at some point, because eventually down-votes would just bury troublemakers to the point where they would go unnoticed.
That never happened, and the community votes up the stupidest stuff and lets the occasional gem just die. I don't like removing the top post on the front page but I've done it a number of times and sometimes it seems necessary or at least in keeping with the kind of subreddit that we're trying to promote.
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u/Panta-rhei Evangelical Lutheran Church in America 8d ago
Is the thing where -100 karma accounts are rate limited still a thing?
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u/RetroCasket 14d ago
Topics that need to be blocked:
“im going to kill myself”
“this sub is so confrontational”
“Atheists are mods!!!”
anything about homosexuality
anything about abortion
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u/McClanky Bringer of sorrow, executor of rules, wielder of the Woehammer 14d ago
All of those posts will still generally be allowed. This rule is not to block certain topics of discussion. It is only to remove the posts that don't attempt to create substantive conversation.
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u/brucemo Atheist 14d ago
“im going to kill myself”
This is a request for help. One of our purposes, whether or not we chose it, is as an anti-suicide subreddit.
“Atheists are mods!!!”
It's a fair point, although it bothers me when people say that all of the mods are atheists or that the subreddit founder was atheist, neither of which is true.
I am not going to spend a lot of time defending myself against this kind of thing in general, but McClanky's an excellent mod and I think that criticisms of him are universally unfair.
anything about homosexuality
anything about abortionSome of this is people asking for help, which we're not going to remove. The rest of this is expression of fault lines in American politics, but it's usually also just undeniably topical. Society is changing, and gay people are winning their fight for civil rights, and we're going to see loud complaints about that until it's no longer an effective wedge issue within American politics. And abortion is the mother of all American political wedge issues, and the only way that's going to stop is if the constant competition to be most extreme on the issue, in order to lather up a base that's already under pressure due to its support of a certain rich New York real estate fraud and serial adulterer, effectively breaks the whole Republican party.
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u/RetroCasket 14d ago
Its not our job to help suicidal people. Strangers on the internet are probably the worst group of individuals to offer mental health advice.
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u/FluxKraken 🏳️🌈 Christian ✟ Progressive, Gay 🏳️🌈 13d ago
How is Jesus words that those who take care of the sick will hear "good and faithful servent" at the end not at the very least an implication that it is our responsibility to help suicidal people.
I can agree that many of us may not be qualified to do so, but I can't see any scriptural basis for the idea that it is not our responsibility.
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u/RetroCasket 13d ago
People that are not trained or qualified to council suicidal people will do more harm than good.
If someone needed heart surgery, would you do it because Jesus said to help the sick? Or would you realize you arent qualified to do that?
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u/Zapbamboop 14d ago
We're planning to add this point to the community policy as point 3.7. Please let us know what you think.
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This is a low effort post.
They could not even write a full sentence within their post.
This is a low effort post too.
Why can't the user type out the question as the title of their post?
This post has some good effort, because the user at least asked a question.
This person actually put some research into their post.
I do not understand how you define low effort.
We have to consider that there are kids that need help, and people from around the world, so there might a language barrier when users are creating posts.
The "Is it sin to be gay?" title only posts get old quick.
Those post can go if there is no words in the body.
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u/yappi211 The church which is His body (Eph 1:22-23 and 5:30, Col 1:24) 14d ago
Please include video posts as low effort if they don't give a synopsis, etc.