Month: September 2016

Changing how we deal with sites that are designed to go viral.

Hey all, the mod team has decided to change how we handle certain sites that have a history of spamming the sub.Unlike traditional spam sites that have employees or bots make a lot of accounts and post low value, low effort content, these sites have some kind of business plan to try to ‘go viral’ instead.A couple of common examples would be sites that run a contest and offer you more contest entries for every person you get to sign up to the contest, a site that offers to pay you a small percentage of sales revenue for your design but you have to do your own advertising, or a site where you can get a great deal on a cool product if only enough people sign up to buy that product – but again they don’t have the money to advertise because their prices are so low.On the surface most of these sites aren’t actually bad, even if a few of them have some questionable business practices, and several of them have content that would benefit the sub.The problem is that we have ~58,000 readers, and these websites are designed to try to get each of them to make at least a post, most are designed to encourage posting a few times a week or more.Posting something cool once or twice is good and benefits the sub. Posting it fifty thousand times a week or more achieves the same results as a concerted spamming campaign – it floods the subreddit and buries otherwise relevant content under a virtual sea of what is effectively content that is being promoted by a third party.Up until now the approach of the mod team has been to treat these sites like any other spam site, but that has presented a few problems.Most people who are participating in this activity don’t know they are doing anything wrong unless we stop doing anything. They just find something they think is cool and want to share it (and perhaps make a buck themselves.There are more people trying to post than there are moderators, so we can spend hours or days working on new solutions to keep people from posting this stuff and someone will find a new way around it- we also aren’t employees of reddit so we work other jobs and do this because we like the sub and use it ourselves.Starting now we are trying a new solution.Rather than banning these sites outright, we are setting automoderator to respond to posts about them to try to educate people about the problem.We hope that this will achieve a few things.Allow genuinely beneficial content to be shown on the sub.Shed light on questionable business practices.Encourage people who aren’t making money from these sites to use other services – it’s just a personal opinion but I think crowd-sourcing your advertising budget is a terrible way to do business.As always, we’re making an effort to be open and upfront with the community, which is why we are making this post! Feedback is welcome! http://ift.tt/2c2j52d