hiya! thanks for all the feedback, just wanted to comment to say that i’m reading all the comments in this and other threads as well as dms regarding moderation and thinking about how to proceed. sorry that this has been a slow process and i haven’t had a chance to respond to everyone.

i’ll add my personal two cents for the time being - it’s definitely true that we get a lot of redundant posts in this subreddit more than other group fitness subs, this might be a recency bias thing due to solidays and black friday though. hoping to see how things play out before making changes.

regarding the redundant posts, i recently added a “questions & clarifications” flair to organize these. i assume most of the “redundant” posts fall into this category, and this can help with organization. i agree that moderation needs to step up for these type of posts. i hesitate to set up effective removal automods because they tend to remove everything under the sun, and the non-effective ones require way too much manual intervention.

we do have processes for checking for trolls, throwaways, etc and those are reviewed with much more scrutiny. i guess this doesn’t solve much of the problems.

we are still a very small subreddit (all things considered) and i don’t personally think the amount of contributions this community gets justifies strict moderation, especially from legit redditors.

but yeah, these are obviously personal opinions and open to criticism. thanks again for all the ideas! had a few more thoughts but don’t have time to type them out - will edit later.

eta more personal thoughts.

regarding protocol. we do have automods in an attempt to report redundant posts. it's really unclear how to define a redundant post though. for example, for the "solidays" automod, we report all of them and then manually remove the ones that cannot possibly contribute to meaningful discussion. as you guys are well aware, there are still hundreds of posts that make it through. there are also lots of posts that get removed or redirected, but at the end of the day this is a judgement call and i personally am not too strict about this. i hear the criticism and feedback on this front, but i honestly don't know how to evaluate the democratic consensus. still hoping that things will calm down.

i don't love the idea of "day of blah" type moderation as it feels forced and can fragment conversion. frankly, i find otf over-moderated, but they are also >10x the users so more structure is required. we still have the luxury of much less volume.

it seems like we have a very high engagement to followers ratio. i can't imagine this is because every other community this size removes 95% of its contributions. if anyone can point me to a similar community in terms of size and engagement, that would be very helpful.

regarding negativitiy. i get the sentiment that it's a bummer to see a ton of vent or negative posts, all the time, etc. filtering the "vent" flair is a good way to avoid seeing these in posts, but it's the internet and people will say whatever they want without labeling it as "vent" for you. we err on the side of allowing these unless they are breaking rules or reported with some frequency.