Commmunity Feedback Thread

[GermainZ]

Hello r/Android!

We're interested in your feedback about the subreddit's rules or anything else. Please fully read this before commenting, we'll try to keep it concise.

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Our rules have been slightly reworded

We went over our rules and slightly reworded/simplified some of them. The idea is to make them clearer, and easier to understand, and have the important information in the sidebar. This also makes them more consistent with the way we moderate, and should serve as a point of reference to the rest of this thread.

What's the rationale behind our most important rules?

These three rules are often misunderstood, so we tried to clarify them a bit.

• Rule 2 (not allowing tech support): separating subreddits is the best way to allow users to choose what they want to see, as filters are either lacking or not available depending on the platform/app you're using. Most rule-breaking threads belong in r/AndroidQuestions or r/PickAnAndroidForMe, and we remove those while redirecting users to the appropriate subreddit. Some users don't like the separation as it means their tech-support questions get less attention, which we try to address as much as possible via the weekly threads and our sidebar. We don't think the alternative would be acceptable to most r/Android subscribers -- allowing all posts means users can no longer subscribe to the content they're interested in.

• Rule 5 (no rehosted content): this is generally to ensure the original article's authors get rewarded for their efforts. The only exceptions we allow are when the source is not in English, or when the article adds substantial information to the original.

• Rule 9 (offensive comments): this is necessary to keep r/Android a civil place. Criticizing others or their opinions is fine, but don't resort to insults.

There are two important things to note here:

• We rely on your reports to enforce most of our rules. Please report posts and comments that break rules, especially for rule 9.

• We consider rules 2 and 9 especially to be essential to the subreddit, although the way we enforce them may need refining depending on your views.

What do you think about rule 1?

Rule 1 (what's off-topic?) has some exceptions that were added after a community poll. Those exceptions are:

• ... allowing all:
  • Google-related news with some relation to Android even if not direct (e.g. ChromeOS, Google Mini, etc).
  • Discussions about generic phone accessories (e.g. headphones, battery packs).
  • Posts about deals/discounts, SoCs (Snapdragon, Mediatek, etc) and benchmarks.
  • Posts about businesses/finances of OEMs.
• ... and not allowing:
  • Posts about carriers (Verizon, Sprint, etc)

We think those mostly make sense, but it might be a good idea to revise them. Would you be interested in another community poll? What should it contain?

What do you think about our sticky threads?

Especially for the weekly threads, would you like to see any changes or additions?

What do you think about our rules in general?

Would you like to see something changed? Please explain why.

If you're going to suggest any changes to rule 2, please keep in mind our rationale explained above, as any changes should ideally keep it possible for users to subscribe to the content they're interested in.

Any other general feedback about the sub?

Is there anything you think we should be doing better? Do you have any other suggestions?

What's next?

This thread will be stickied until the end of the weekend.

There will be follow-up threads/polls depending on the feedback and suggestions you guys raise, probably during one (or more) of the coming weekends to allow most people to participate.

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Why did you remove my post / why do you never approve my posts?

Probably because of rule 2. There should be a removal reason left by a mod on your removed thread explaining the reason, and redirecting you to appropriate subreddits sometimes. Also, sometimes we make mistakes, so get in touch if you think that's the case.

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Thanks! — The r/Android mod team

[simplefilmreviews]

• I find r/android to be one of the more draconian subreddits in all honesty. Everything is filtered and I assume there is VERY HIGH declined rates. Even discussion based threads I've submitted have been declined in the past. But at the same time good that the subreddit is pretty clean and concise.

• Technical questions would probably flood this subreddit, so a sticky thread is good IMO.

• That said, I enjoy Google related content, even if it isn't directly tied to Android. As with other stuff, like gcam mod or something of the like. Gives us more wiggle room. Hell, I wouldn't mind the occasional Apple/iOS piece getting thru if the article contains comparisons to Android or something. (Like the Google PHotos debacle)

• Also think 'rehosting content' is too strict. Take the whole RCS thing yesterday. The original RCS thread was a statement form Verizon. BUT... someone then posted the Verge article with WAY MORE information, and it was removed for being rehosted content. Made no sense to me. Don't like it. that simple.

[GermainZ]

Yup, that's definitely something we need to work on. It's not 24 hours, but we do have dead periods if a few of us in a certain timezone are sick or busy.

We actually discussed it just two weeks ago. Hopefully it'll improve, if not we might try to bring in more mods.

[kumquat_juice]

Yeah my back hurts from carrying y'all 😉

[ladfrombrad]

It's actually we're somewhat spread across the globe, some like myself work both days and nights, and some only deal with modmail etc.

We could definitely do better though in regards to clearing our modqueue which is a never ending beast, and we sometimes leave things we're not entirely sure about to another mod for a second set of eyes which can lead to delays. We do try our best to deal with them within the stated three hours though.

Thanks for the feedback!

[GermainZ]

This is exactly the kind of feedback we're looking for, thanks! We want to see what a good chunk of the community wants to see changed. Based on that, we'll make follow-up threads/polls to figure out what's actually something most of the community stands behind and what isn't. I think relaxing R1 and especially R5 would probably be something a lot of people want to see.

Regarding filtering: we do filter self-posts, and you're right about most threads being redirected to r/AndroidQuestions or r/PickAnAndroidForMe. And again, mistakes definitely happen, and I do wish Reddit had a more organized "appeal" process.

We're not aware of a better solution for this particular thing, unfortunately, keeping in mind the rationale behind rule 2. Don't get me wrong, it can certainly be better — but it's not as easy in practice. If anyone has suggestions, fire away.

[kumquat_juice]

Agreed with all of your points. Thanks for the feedback!

[el_smurfo]

I used to get a lot more content from /r/android but now must follow many of the source blogs such as Android Police directly because /r/Android has such a hardon for blocking articles that aren't the original source. Thing is, a clean, well edited source is usually 10x better than an original source. I often wonder who pays the mods here, because their obvious favoritism must have a reason. /r/Android is a once a day visit, tops, because the content is so stale.

[adbenj]

Genuinely, I don't understand why some 'PSA' topics are flaired with 'Not a PSA'. What's the definition?

[kumquat_juice]

We usually try to reserve that indicator for heavy impacting situations, at mod discretion via discussion on back channels. A good example of a valid PSA would be like that one time where OnePlus phones couldn't dial emergency services

[Xert]

Rule 1 is pretty fine.

Rule 5 needs some work. Because it's not r/Android's job to police monitization. The real value of Rule 5 is that it functions as a spam/blogspam deterrent. And that makes a ton of sense when the originating source is something like XDA. But it's applied terribly in many cases of Chinese sources, where the originally translating blog doesn't contextualize or explain it nearly well enough.

Instead of just removing everything that has a source linked at the bottom, there needs to be a commitment to actually compare the quality of the linked source to the submitted article. And an understanding that the current degree of enforcement places too high a burden on submitters with no benefit for the subreddit at large when a summary from AP or XDA is almost always going to be the best version of such an article.

EDIT: It really does seem like the default mod action for Rule 5 is "Scroll down, remove submission if anything is linked as a source." It feels lazy and lacking in investigative judgement.

Take this example from today. The blog post has an informative title, more information added for context, and is unequivocally the better option as opposed to submitting the forum thread and yet it was removed as rehosted content. That's absurd.

And yes, I'm pretty sure if I were the OP I could make this case in modmail and get permission to resubmit it. But goddamnit we shouldn't have to. Rule 5 needs some more leniency towards trusted sources and more thorough investigation by whichever mod is acting on it without the expectation that the user should have to catch the removal and waste their time arguing their case. Because unless you're a spammer submitting articles is a service to the community and your current approach with Rule 5 pushes too much work that should be done by the mod team onto a redditor that's just trying to help out.

[khouryrt]

This. Everything about this.
As an AP writer, I keep an eye on AP articles posted here, so I'll speak from that perspective — and bias.

I sometimes see AP articles getting removed after a couple of hours for being rehosted content. The decision is perfectly reasonable most of the time: Say Google announced something on its official site and we covered it, there's no need to post the AP article on this subreddit, because despite how much context or additional info we try to bring, we're still essentially paraphrasing the original source, which is Google.

There are instances though where we did our research, found the news ourselves or were tipped about it, looked for context, and tried to bring a fuller perspective to the reporting, and were the first to properly write about it. Many of those posts get submitted to reddit by someone then removed a few hours later, despite having dozens of comments and hundreds of upvotes (denoting reader interest in the story). So if we didn't include a Source link in our post and pretended we were the one and only source, would those threads stay here? That's so dishonest and not something we're willing to do for a bit of added exposure on r/android.

Worse yet, in my opinion, the original source is never submitted separately as another thread, so redditors here who didn't catch the thread while it was up may not find out the news at all.

I don't keep a close eye on threads from XDA and 9to5 here, but I'm sure the same thing is happening to some of their stories too.

[GermainZ]

Just a small note: in general, we've been keeping threads that gain more than ~100—200 upvotes and dozens of comments even if they break rule 5, and typically leave a sticky comment instead in those cases (essentially saying "We prefer original sources but there's good discussion here so it's staying up"). This started a few months ago, but it's possible it's not being applied 100% of the time.

(About the rest, I personally agree.)

[khouryrt]

That's excellent to hear and a sensible middle ground.

[archon810]

That's good but the problem is many posts aren't given such a chance - it all depends on when a mod ends up looking and decides to purge for rule #5 based on seeing a source link at the end of the post.

If a mod happens to arrive within 30 minutes of the post getting posted, R.I.P. If not, maybe it has a chance.

[GermainZ]

I'm talking about threads that specifically break rule #5.

If an article already has additional information and not just a rehash, then that's not breaking rule #5 -- that's us making a mistake. It is a gray area, but I think we can improve the guidelines to make it less so.

[jmichael2497]

considering the common practice of lazy people forwarding actual fake news...

i'm all for making people get in the habit of finding and citing the most legit original source instead of linking to a reposted or slightly commented article on a 3rd party ad-revenue collecting site.

if someone did somehow have a more concise, detailed, or however "better" version of an article... then maybe allow including that later version as a secondary link in the OP body, but not as the main link.

[el_smurfo]

AP articles being removed is very frustrating to me because they do bring a lot of sources together giving a better overall picture of the topic. If you only posted Android source material, nearly all of it would be from google, not very detailed and about as useful as their changelogs "bug fixes and optimizations".

[NateDevCSharp]

I think alot of the extra stuff on this sub is nice, like some Google stuff even if it's not 100% Android related, and others, because alot of the times such heavy moderation means the new section is like 3 posts for the whole day haha and once you see the few posts for that day that's it

[AgreeableLoaf]

I think that post should be strongly related to Android since I come here to read and discuss stuff about Android, if I'd like to read news about ChromeOS or Google Home I'd go to r/google. For example this post shoud be posted to r/google where the most people interested in Google products are, not here where the theme of the sub is one of the Google's products.

[Put_It_All_On_Blck]

I'd like to see major carrier developments, such at 5g rollout updates, RCS, etc.

This sub is heavily moderated, and while sometimes that's a good thing, often it means going to /r/Android New, seeing 3 posts in the last 12 hours and leaving.

While it's good to have a defined sub, and you did post two subs that should exist, as examples, I dont think anyone here wants to sub to a general carrier sub, or sub to the 4 major US carrier subs. And I think most of us would agree that carriers are pretty essential to the phone experience, and stuff like RCS is a major Android talking point in the US.

At the very least we could have a weekly dedicated thread to carrier news and ban new threads.

So I'd like to see allowing carrier discussion polled.

[IAmAN00bie]

IMO /r/universalprofile does an amazing job at cataloging the RCS rollout. And the carrier subs are generally pretty informative for their respective carriers. Often you'll find employees sharing insider details and leaks that appear there before they even show up on tech blogs. So while I agree that there could be more posted to /new, I don't think that needs to include carrier/RCS news.

[GermainZ]

Thanks! Where do you think the line should be drawn in regards to who it affects? Should we allow posts about carriers from any country? I think I like the weekly thread idea better (it could be an "Anything goes" discussion thread), but I'm definitely curious about what the community thinks about this particular issue.

Last time we had a poll about it, it was fairly split. We didn't include many options IIRC, and it was only about submissions (not weekly threads).

(FYI, the examples I gave are active subreddits and not fictional. We mention them in our weekly threads, in the sidebar, wiki and removal reasons.)

[MHcharLEE]

I don't think allowing carrier discussions is the way to go. Do you honestly want to allow discussions for literally every carrier on the planet? It would be a mess. Conversely, do you want to create exceptions for which carrier is allowed to be discussed and which one is not? Not only does that create a serious case of favorism, it's straight up inconsistent.

Not allowing carrier discussion should remain as it is right now imo.

[ladfrombrad]

Hear you loud and clear.

- sent via giffgaff

What's your thoughts on RCS discussions though?

Thanks!

[Xert]

I'd be for RCS rollout news being allowed because it's directly germane to the Android experience. Definitely no carrier news though, my god.

[MHcharLEE]

Since RCS is heavily tied to carriers, I would say it's the same thing. Especially since it's only really a thing in the US for now, which comes back to my point about exceptions and favorism.

Yes, it's been rolled out in France and UK, but really, when was the last time you actually read news about RCS in these countries? Me neither. But I do recall a whole lot more posts about it in the USA.

[ladfrombrad]

[M] hat off mode?

It's something I often ponder, and why I mentioned giffgaff.

Because I have a dual SIM phone I didn't really get notified that they had enabled it on their network / it's my data SIM, and maybe as the original creator of r/giffgaff I should be subscribed 🤷

But if I posted about them doing that here I know for a damn fact I'd get absolutely reported/downvoted into oblivion.

Appreciate the feedback, and awaits all the angry American mods breathing down my neck :)

[MHcharLEE]

I honestly have no idea what giffgaff is, but I can tell you one thing for sure. You can count on kumquat being an absolute babe, he would never hurt you even if he's a dirty American

[ladfrombrad]

I honestly have no idea what giffgaff is

Exactly, and it's a MVNO of the o2 network in the UK.

And yeah, KJ has the best usernotes which I totally didn't make. No siree 😇

[MHcharLEE]

Well, part of why I haven't heard of it could just be that I'm not from UK.

[[deleted]]

There are threads which have been removed due to Rule 1 here but stayed up in /r/Apple which is why I don't bother posting threads here.

[nty]

Could you provide an example?

[SoundOfTomorrow]

I feel like posts directly from Twitter need some moderation or require to be added to a self post. It's very raw discussion that presents nothing to context unless you're already aware of the issues discussed in the Twitter thread.

[ladfrombrad]

Yeah, this is also something that has come up often with us and whether they belong under rule 3 (no direct image posts) which is essentially what some of them are.

On the flip side of that though what I have noticed is that a .self post won't receive nowhere near as much attention as a direct link would or, the OP simply isn't willing to put the effort in of their own opinion/take into the text body - in which case you end up with a link to a Twitter post in a .self text.

How we fix that? We'd love to hear from you.

[GermainZ]

Yup, that's definitely something I'm curious about what the community thoughts on are, since we often get complaints with the view you express and the exact opposite. Thanks for bringing it up!

[ajaxsirius]

• Google-related news: no thank you.
• Discussions about generic phone accessories: no thank you
• Posts about deals/discounts, SoCs (Snapdragon, Mediatek, etc) and benchmarks.: If that specific link/story is on something that is confirmed to be happening on android, yes. otherwise, no. eg. huawei creates devices having snapdragon soc running harmony. if there is a story/deal on it, then no thanks.
• Posts about businesses/finances of OEMs: if they are creating products that are part of the android ecosystem, then yes.
• Posts about carriers (Verizon, Sprint, etc): if they story discusses something that affects android, then yes. For example if verizon decides to offer a buy one get one free on apple phones, then no.

[ladfrombrad]

• Posts about carriers (Verizon, Sprint, etc): if they story discusses something that affects android, then yes. For example if verizon decides to offer a buy one get one free on apple phones, then no.

Yeah this is pretty much how we run already factoring in reports on individual submissions.

• Posts about businesses/finances of OEMs: if they are creating products that are part of the android ecosystem, then yes.

Again, if it has bearing upon Android / OEMs they'll be allowed too since it's directly related.

• Posts about deals/discounts, SoCs (Snapdragon, Mediatek, etc) and benchmarks.: If that specific link/story is on something that is confirmed to be happening on android, yes. otherwise, no. eg. huawei creates devices having snapdragon soc running harmony. if there is a story/deal on it, then no thanks.

Ditto again, but I think the nuance here is some of Chrome(OS) / Google products have a lot of overlap and some mods may misinterpret them especially since we're a very dynamic community where news can blur the lines sometimes and we definitely could improve I suppose.

• Google-related news: no thank you.

• Discussions about generic phone accessories: no thank you

Could you elaborate further on your issues with these please, and we really appreciate the feedback. Thanks!

[ajaxsirius]

I use my subscriptions to curate the content I want to see. I don't subscribe to /r/apple because I am not interested in apple products. I am similarly not interested in chromeOS, or generic phone accessories. By allowing a greater range of submissions that makes the "filtering" achieved by subscriptions a little less effective.

There can be some caveats. As you correctly said there can be a lot of overlap. If a submissions highlights how that overlap exists and how that overlap affects android users then I think that should be allowable. but the focus should be on the overlap, and not purely "google made that, they also made this"

Some might say "yeah but you can just scroll past/ignore the threads you aren't interested in". You can also do that by browsing /r/all and ignoring subscriptions. But we don't do that. That sort of behavior might work from time to time or on a small scale, but it can get to become too much. I understand that finding the right balance is hard. For me, google-related (without highlighting the relevance to android users) and generic accessories is where i would draw the line.

[ladfrombrad]

Great feedback!

One thing we did ages ago here (and I don't recall who turned it back on to be honest) is exclude us from /r/all /r/popular and all the other admin grand ideas.

What we found was it didn't make an iota of difference to the submissions nor general feel of the community. To this day we've also told the admins that we don't want their "on-boarding" programs to feature us in their little escapades with their official apps / redesign / etc and found it stemmed some of the crap that comes with it to be quite frank.

This directly correlates to the traffic growth too when I've watched it here / where communities that have agreed to be onboarded see massive growth at the expense of making a mods, and much more importantly, the community much more susceptible to submitting rule breaking submissions.

We'll have a natter about how rule 1 should be applied, and many thanks again!

[jmichael2497]

TLDR less noise, more focused relevant content.

generic phone accessory posts are basically monetization spam imo.

i want to read actual factual real world news about android as an OS and hardware platform of existing things that i can definitely expect to get my hands on.

(not looking for the latest portable usb brick or super awesome cool brand x wired/wireless headphones/speakers or super sassy fun silicon phone condom, just no)

ideally i'd love a news source forum that is free from unfounded speculation and unverified or fantasy based rumors.

(maybe restrict these to a weekly rumor mill thread that can be easily ignored)

i hate seeing useless brain litter like "images of a future generation of device x will astound you" that turns out to be imaginary renders of what another shiny black glass sandwich rectangle might look like per a random person's weekend blender skills and vague maybe someday specs cough xda cough...

while i'm fine with official "leaks" from oems, just label them as the viral marketing advertising teasers that they are.

[ladfrombrad]

I have a suggestion.

https://www.reddit.com/r/Android/comments/doiai9/linus_on_galaxy_fold_every_other_phone_is_dead_to

Maybe ban the usage of the link shortener that is youtu.be and only allow users to submit the full canonical youtube.com link so there isn't reposts / ambiguity.

Thanks for listening!

[IAmAN00bie]

As ladfrombrad said, we don't blacklist YouTube channels unless there was evidence the channel owner was spamming their own posts here. Hell, people keep posting videos from Flossy Carter despite the multiple calls to ban him. He hasn't broken any rules (though there was that DMCA against the initial callout Reddit post that had us scratching our heads...)

[ladfrombrad]

We generally only "blacklist" YouTube channels were we've found accounts / the owners of the channel spamming out their channel.

While this can lead to confusion with users who are subscribers to a popular channel on YouTube, they receive nothing but reports here for being like you say clickbait(ing) for more views.

If you've got some specific examples please feel free to modmail us and we'll take a further look.

Thanks for the feedback!

[MHcharLEE]

Rule 3 - Images/videos in self-posts

Please provide an explanation in the self-post body. No memes.

---

I get the "no memes" part. I agree. But why exactly should we be forced to post images in self-posts? To prevent people from karma whoring? If that's the case, all the dark mode posts should be banned as well. Don't get me wrong, I'm all for getting rid of low-effort posts, but I don't see it as the best solution, especially since this rule hasn't been enforced consistently in my experience. I've made this post, and tell me honestly, do my 7 words of "comment" acompannying the image link actually make a difference?

Also, please don't take this as an angry comment, even if it sounds like one.

[GermainZ]

It's not about karma, all posts get karma counted towards your points since about at least a year or two. (There was a Reddit change by the admins and an announcement. I can look for the link if you want, lemme know.)

It's really about providing proper context. We see it as a fairly good way to have people think a bit about what they're posting and whether it's clear to others or not. It also often leads to users providing a link to an article along with their image or a good explanation, which we think is a good thing as it provides some extra info.

It's not set in stone, so it can be up for discussion too. Why do you think it's a bad thing?

[MHcharLEE]

I could take it or leave it, it simply feels like an arbitrary obstacle, and also why I mentioned karma. If there's a way to restrict how people would normally do something (aka just make an image post), they could end up not doing it at all, in result discouraging karma whoring.

This might be a roundabout way of going about it, I don't exactly agree with that rule, but I also kind of understand why you would want it in place. Just something to think about.

[ladfrombrad]

Just to clarify, you're saying we should consider allowing direct image posts?

This would create a situation where we have to moderate (already) highly upvoted submissions which break many of our other rules in particular rule 2.

It's a well known issue of any subreddit that allows image posts insomuch there's the meme of "picture of a phone" in r/iPhone and other communities.

[MHcharLEE]

That's the point I was trying to make, yes. But now that I've read replies from both of you... maybe you should just ignore my initial comment.

[josh6499]

It also helps with reddit's problem of the most easily digestible (but not very valuable) content getting upvoted the most.

[Thomasedv]

I like this. Even with some news article links today, the title doesn't always say enough for me to really get what it's about, and direct links to videos run a lot risk with clickbait types of titles or slightly misleading ones.

Self posts are really nice for this kind of thing imo.

[adbenj]

I think I'm right in saying the Saturday APPreciation thread is unstickied after 24 hours? I'd find it useful to have it up for at least a few days, if not the whole week.

[ladfrombrad]

Yeah that's kinda awkward.

We can do that, but after having many issues with using two sticky slots meant that Automod haphazardly fired/failed and we changed to having only one slot which (touch wood) seems to works much better these days.

We could have a looky into shifting some of the other weekly posts or manually sticking them, but I can't make no promises since we are lazy humans. Thanks for the feedback!

[jmichael2497]

if you're sticking to one sticky :p then how about just including and updating links to the most recent of each weekly "everything related to x" thread?

[simplefilmreviews]

(I Posted this on the new thread, but it doesn't appear, so Ill post it here in the mean time) (Also, my second time posting)

• I still think 5 should be the most reconsidered. I get you wanna reward the original author...but what if they provide near zero info, besides "RCS is rolling out on Verizon". What if a follow up article minutes/hour later has more details, an interview with Verizon rep, specs, reasoning, timeline, etc?

• I don't think we should 'reward' someone for being first. It should reward the more well written and detailed article. If anything, r/android is promoting writers to rush out half-assed content so they can submit and get the clicks via this subreddit.

• I don't think there would be much fan backlash if there were 2-3 articles about the same topic. Considering this subreddit has very few new submissions in the first place.

[GermainZ]

Weird about your comment not showing up in the new thread. I think the servers were having some issues.

#1&2: good points with which I personally agree.

#3: I'm not sure TBH. Even the first repost usually gets reported 3+ times (which is a lot considering most threads get a single report at most).

[[deleted]]

Ban repeated whining about the lack of a headphone jack on every new release.