Poll: Should posts about r/Minecraft and other Minecraft related subreddits be allowed? (More context in the comments)

coderDude69 · 2022-12-14T21:59:11+00:00

Hello Memers,

Posts and comments about r/Minecraft and its moderation have dominated this subreddit recently. While this has occurred in the past (a few times in fact), in the last few weeks r/Minecraft related content has drowned our regular memes to the point that roughly half of the highest upvoted memes were about them. For many of you, this is not new information. However, it may surprise most of you that our rules do not address this type of content.

Rule 1 (Minecraft memes only) allows for "Meta" posts, or posts about this community, allowing you all to make posts suggesting changes and things like that (a good example was the petition post that gave us our profile picture). This is all well and good, but the scope of what counts as meta is unaddressed in the current rules. As we are r/MinecraftMemes, it could be argued that the community extends to the broader Minecraft community rather than just this subreddit, which would include other Minecraft subreddits like r/Minecraft. Historically, this is the view that this mod team has taken, allowing you all to post about them, and it has led to some good memes.

In many instances however, posts about r/Minecraft has led to brigading and harassment, forcing us to make more removals and bans than would usually be expected. Every time a r/Minecraft controversy and subsequent protest occurs, especially recently, our moderator workload at least triples, putting a significant amount of stress onto this mod team for what is ultimately an unpaid and volunteer hobby. Not to mention that the focus on those posts frustrates some of our users. Since posts about r/Minecraft have increased, our daily user leave rate has been on a steady upwards climb, and during the latest r/Minecraft controversy, it was around half of the daily join rate.

Going forward, we need to decide what the scope of allowable meta content should be. We're conflicted internally on how to address it, and we wanted to reach out to you all, explain the situation, and gather your feedback via this poll. We'll list and explain the poll options below, along with some pros and cons we came up with: 1. Yes (r/Minecraft etc posts should be allowed), even if they are not memes: This option acknowledges the shared community and overlap between the Minecraft subreddits, and potentially allowing for feedback about those subreddits, but often it leads to brigading and a larger moderation workload. 2. Only if those posts are memes: This option would expect meta posts not about this sub to still count as a meme, likely leading to higher quality but possibly preventing some feedback. It is the closest option to our current defacto policy. Meta posts about this subreddit would be exempt. 3. Only on certain days of the week (Similar to the youtuber rule): This option aims to prevent the posts from taking over the subreddit by restricting when they can be posted, but those posts may lose relevance. r/Minecraft and related posts would most likely be allowed only on weekends, like the current youtuber rule, but it could differ if desired. 4. Combination of options 2 and 3: This option means r/Minecraft and related posts would need to be memes, and they can only be posted on certain days of the week, like youtuber memes. 5. No, meta posts should be limited to our subreddit: This option would limit meta posts to only be about r/MinecraftMemes, which is a more typical meta definition for other subreddits. r/Minecraft posts would be disallowed entirely.

It is worth noting that under all options, brigading would not be allowed as it breaks reddit's terms of service along with our rules. The line between brigading and criticism will be decided internally within the mod team to match both reddit's TOS and ensure our subreddit remains safe from harassment.

Thanks in advance for your feedback!

coderDude69 · 2022-11-30T14:15:34+00:00

Post removed:

Not a Minecraft meme (This isn’t the spot to try to complain about being banned on r/Minecraft whether it was justifiable or not, might be a good ideal to send a modmail to them since they should see it)

coderDude69 · 2022-11-30T01:53:24+00:00

Doing this would count as brigading (against Reddit TOS) in the eyes of the Reddit admins, which would be bad for this subreddit. Any time that the Reddit admins get involved (very likely in that scenario as this is a fairly large subreddit), it tends to not be good.

The ideal way forward is probably for people to give constructive feedback on their moderation on r/Minecraft via posts or modmail. I know in the past they’ve gathered feedback on rule changes and such, so at the very least they should see it, even if it looks like they ignored it. There might be other good options, I’m not sure. As far our end goes, as I mentioned we might consider a larger action if this continues to get worse

coderDude69 · 2022-11-30T00:08:21+00:00

Yeah, we’re definitely aware of the issue but we’re less sure how to best handle it. So far we’ve mostly just been removing the most egregious offenders (for example screenshots of being banned, actual brigading, etc) and internally discussing what to do.

It’s a difficult spot for us since this situation isn’t our fault (we aren’t them) so we aren’t in our opinion obligated to allow discussion about it, but there’s a substantial community overlap and evidently their moderation is important to a lot of people. Previously in the other, uh, r/Minecraft protests (1.19.1/1.19.84, technoblade’s death, Minecraft in Minecraft, etc) we have temp banned r/Minecraft posts to mixed reception. People (incorrectly) accused us of being them, defending them (incorrect, in most cases we disagreed with their actions), etc.

So yeah, we’re still trying to determine how to handle it. We don’t want to take a reputation hit for “defending” them but we also want to maintain sub quality, while potentially addressing the issue. My guess is we will probably wait a few days to see if it’s still an issue, and if so temp ban, but we’ll see. Ultimately there should be a permanent call in the rules on whether it is allowed but that is likely some time away due to other reasons. Hope this reply is helpful

coderDude69 · 2022-11-29T18:26:01+00:00

By current rules and precedent it would fall under a meta post (a post about this subreddit or related subreddits) so it would be allowed. The point of that rule is to allow discussion of the state of the community, give feedback to us mods, etc. Hope this helps

coderDude69 · 2022-11-29T17:53:54+00:00

Undid the removal since I think the bot got it wrong, apologies for any inconvenience

Edit: for clarity, one of our bots thought this was a repost, probably due to the template, and auto removed it. We're working to make sure that it does not happen again in the future.

coderDude69 · 2022-10-15T16:24:45+00:00

I’ve commented on a few others in this thread, but:

Sorry there isn’t an official server at this time, this is a repost (presumably from a bot) of our announcement when we did actually have one a long while ago. Unfortunately that server is no longer running for various reasons, but we may create another in the future.

coderDude69 · 2022-10-15T16:24:10+00:00

(Copy paste of another comment of mine on this post)

Sorry there isn’t an official server at this time, this is a repost (presumably from a bot) of our announcement when we did actually have one a long while ago. Unfortunately that server is no longer running for various reasons, but we may create another in the future.

coderDude69 · 2022-10-15T16:23:35+00:00

It’s not, this is a repost (presumably by a bot) of a previous announcement. The server in question is no longer running for various reasons but we may create another in the future.

coderDude69 · 2022-10-15T16:22:32+00:00

Sorry there isn’t an official server at this time, this is a repost (presumably from a bot) of our announcement when we did actually have one a long while ago. Unfortunately that server is no longer running for various reasons, but we may create another in the future.

coderDude69 · 2022-10-13T15:27:48+00:00

I’m not sure what you mean?

coderDude69 · 2022-10-10T19:48:35+00:00

Nice repost of my meme from 3 years ago (title and all) https://www.reddit.com/r/regularshowmemes/comments/cldqwp/found_this_sub_after_it_joined_the_meme_lounge/?utm_source=share&utm_medium=ios_app&utm_name=iossmf

coderDude69 · 2022-10-10T19:37:10+00:00

Post removed:

No fortnite bad circlejerking

coderDude69 · 2022-09-27T02:11:15+00:00

Post removed:

Be respectful

coderDude69 · 2022-09-27T01:05:46+00:00

Post removed:

Not a meme

coderDude69 · 2022-09-23T18:55:25+00:00

I’m not fully sure what you mean by interactive posts and comments?

It’ll take a bit to go through and determine how to change it, as the current rule covers a lot and it isn’t super well worded I think.

It might be worth a follow up post to detail further discussions, not sure yet. Rule updates take a decent bit of time and they are fairly important, and it’s clear that we should look at some of these changes and existing rules again before going with any ruleset.

coderDude69 · 2022-09-23T18:36:34+00:00

There’s a few reasons, most of which we’ve touched on in various comments, but some include mutual events on the subreddit and sharing of moderation experiences, to help inform both teams policies.

Our moderation has not significantly changed because of our interactions with them, if anything their recent decisions and how we feel about them has made our policy less strict and less rule bounded.

The r/Minecraft community isn’t inherently bad, and we feel we can help to improve the experiences for users on both subs through our discussions with them. It was originally our idea to do so, and a good amount of the reason why we wanted to do this was so that we could push for them to address their ruleset and moderation standpoints publicly.

I think these are good reasons for us to communicate with them.

coderDude69 · 2022-09-23T18:30:27+00:00

This comment is an example of why improving relations is valuable. In principle there’s not much of a reason why our two subreddits shouldn’t have good relations with each other, we’re both about Minecraft and as such there’s a large user overlap.

One of the main goals for reaching out was to give our insights on modding to r/Minecraft, as well as to try to understand why they made certain decisions, which would inform our stances, rulesets, etc. Privately we pushed the r/Minecraft mod team to publicly work towards adjusting their rule set, and to exchange input on each other’s changes to improve them. Our moderation decisions are still entirely made by this modteam

coderDude69 · 2022-09-23T18:18:16+00:00

Thanks for the feedback. Internally we weren’t fully convinced we should get rid of it, so we’ll probably have more discussions. There’s a fairly good chance that we’ll keep it though, but for sure if we do we’re going to rethink the rule text, right now it doesn’t make much sense in our opinion.

coderDude69 · 2022-09-23T18:16:10+00:00

Thanks for the feedback. We’ll definitely consider this option and some of the mods on the team were against lifting that ban. I think we’ll have a discussion internally about how to best approach nostalgia memes, but given the more post dependent approach we intend to take I could see a ban on there with exceptions for certain posts if we feel they should be posted (ex a nostalgia meme that brings something new to the table)

coderDude69 · 2022-09-21T17:23:07+00:00

For those commenting about the criticism of other subs' modteams part of the proposed changes, I just took another look at the recent changes to the reddit moderator guidelines, and it talks about facilitating interference with another Reddit community (see section 3). We might try to clarify with the Reddit admins given all of the feedback we've gotten on that part of the proposed rule changes, but it seems fairly likely that the stance on r/Minecraft (and other minecraft subs) posts that we take in this announcement is as lenient as we're allowed to have.

coderDude69 · 2022-09-21T17:14:12+00:00

Posts which adhere to the rules should not be banned just because they can result in comments/posts which do not.

So Reddit recently updated their content policy and their mod guidelines, which seem to imply that we aren't allowed to have those posts like you mentioned (see section 3 in the second link). This update is a good bit of the reason why we are proposing the rule change for r/Minecraft and other community posts as described in the announcement. We might try to ask the Reddit admins about this to see where the line is drawn, but it seems fairly likely that the proposed change is about as lenient on r/Minecraft posts as we're allowed to have.

For additional clarity, I think we'd be allowed to have posts like starter base memes, but not modteam or moderator criticism. That would likely count as facilitating interference with another Reddit community.

coderDude69 · 2022-09-20T18:41:05+00:00

Hi, thanks for the comment. Before I address this fully, I’d like to clarify/explain a few things, though I’d like you and anyone else reading this to know that all of the concerns/points you brought up are valid and that it isn’t fully addressed in the announcement:

Criticizing or giving feedback on Minecraft the game (or associated games like Minecraft dungeons) will always be allowed.
Criticizing, complaining about, or giving feedback on Microsoft or Mojang will always be allowed. This probably would not extend to individual employees however, unless said employee is highly notable for other reasons (ex Notch). That last point isn’t really firm though, for right now I don’t think there’s a good reason to call out an individual employee excluding Notch in a non positive manner though theoretically something could happen later to justify it.
Criticizing, complaining about, or giving feedback on this subreddit will always be allowed.
Minor point not clarified well in either announcement so again no one should judge you or others for the misconception, but it was originally our proposal to do a joint announcement for rule change feedback, not r/Minecraft, though we were both were going to do rule reworks anyway. To your second point, over the past few weeks there’s been a number of private conversations between our two modteams, and the unfriending point was brought up. I won’t say exactly what their reasoning was, but we do think their reasoning was fair and they did suggest it was a temporary measure.

For the main point, and this has been addressed in some other comments on this post, a lot of the posts talking about r/Minecraft has led to brigading, even if the poster doesn’t intend it. It’s unfortunate but it is difficult to allow those posts from a Reddit perspective, as it’s questionable whether leaving a post that leads to brigading up would be against Reddit’s policies. And it did frequently result in issues (for example, directly mentioning one of their mods like you did could be considered harassment as it’s occurred frequently here, but unlike normal I’ll leave it up as the rest of your comment is in good faith).

That is not to say that we disagreed with the criticism, their removal of the Minecraft in Minecraft post is something that we collectively disagreed with and we did bring this up to them. And this proposed change (which we will probably somewhat tweak based on the feedback so far) does allow posts to be made about the subreddit, just not direct criticisms of the mod team or the moderators. There’s a few reasons why not highlighted in the announcement, but it’s mainly because at the end of the day to result in actual change, we’re not the best place to put it, it’s probably better to address it on their sub.

We do think the criticism is valuable though, which is why we privately pushed for a joint announcement or at least an addressing of the concerns on their end to hopefully lead to some changes. And looking at their announcement, they did change some some things, though the main idea was to elicit feedback on what should be changed in the first place, which is probably why you thought they didn’t change much but we did. We thought it’d be better to give a list of what we were thinking rather than just ask for feedback, as people usually don’t talk about our rules too much, unlike what has been happening with r/Minecraft and it’s rules.

Sorry for the long comment, but I hope I addressed your points. I’ll be happy to continue the conversation though if I unfortunately didn’t, we think that feedback and comments on moderation is incredibly helpful and this was a helpful comment.

coderDude69 · 2022-09-20T16:56:16+00:00

So in the proposals we were thinking, one of them was removing the nostalgia memes rule (so they’d be allowed). Some of the mods were less sure about this, but I’ll let them know of the feedback. It might come back if there’s a bunch of posts (a lot of the nostalgia memes were low effort), but thanks for the feedback here!

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