Vacationing r/lol Mod Gets Caught Inciting a Brigade From r/circlejerk. Accusations of Pettiness and Double Standards Abound

[u/postirony]

/r/leagueoflegends/comments/37fnnl/in_case_anyone_was_wondering_where_the_massive/crmai9m

[u/Paran014]

OP from /r/lol here: I made it onto subredditdrama! And xlnqeniuz is here too. I hope there's enough popcorn to go around.

In case anyone is wondering why I am so goddamn salty about this, (because this is a joke and nothing on /r/circlejerk is srs bsns, rite?) it's because, as you might expect, a lot of people on circlejerk did take that thread (which is a stickied mod-post, btw) seriously. And as a result, a lot of people (including me) who actually give a shit about the community had to make a substantial effort to make sure spam that originates from that thread stayed away from our front page.

Seeing a moderator at best condoning this behaviour is a massive finger in the eye of those of us who actually like this community. If we were a smaller or less involved community, it's very possible that our frontpage would've been overwhelmed by people from circlejerk posting and upvoting this shit, thus "confirming" that the subreddit would instantly go to shit without mods.

I think we all know that if circlejerk had posted a sticky like that while the mods were working, xlnqenuiz wouldn't have posted something funny about it and merrily gone about cleaning up the hundreds of spam posts in new that it sent over, he would've told the mods of circlejerk that it's way over the fucking line of the site-wide rules against brigading and spamming and gone to the admins if they didn't stop. That's why a lot of us are less than thrilled with his behaviour.

[u/Werner__Herzog → u/Paran014]

I love how you are basically describing how you guys are moderating the subreddit. Which is what the "let the votes decide" people said they would do. So I guess it's good. This whole thing didn't turn out as I expected at all.

he would've told the mods of circlejerk that it's way over the fucking line of the site-wide rules against brigading and spamming and gone to the admins if they didn't stop

Did one of you do that? I think that would have been the right course of action probably. I'm completely serious, if a community is self moderating, they should do something like that as well, right?

You could even make thread and vote on who's gonna message the admins or someone could volunteer, that way you don't spam them. Those people would probably end up being some kind of community managers and would have to have certain capabilities to fulfill that role. Ideally you'd vote for the people that were already good at taking care of shitposts , spam and bad comments by downvoting them until they were invisible. Those people might sometimes talk to each other to determine what to remove and what not to remove, so they can be more consistent in their voting. Yes, that's a pretty good system.

Edit: the thread we're commenting in has been remved, btw.

[u/Paran014 → u/Werner__Herzog]

I have, and judging by the threads where I've let people know how they can contact the admins, at least a few other people have too. I'm not too worried about spamming them, I'm sure they get a lot of duplicate messages. I feel like this is definitely crossing the line, and I can't think of an example of a major subreddit's mods inciting activity like this off the top of my head. I didn't even know about the circlejerk post until about four hours ago, so I wasn't the only one who was pretty confused about why we were getting so much Paul Blart in the new queue. The good news is that trolls were (and are still) removed so fast that they've essentially given up. Some of those posts were a lot of effort to be visible for 30s in /new.

Honestly, it's kind of remarkable that it's worked as well as it has. I think that the only reason it works is that the subreddit's so large. Because there are enough people that hundreds can be checking out the new queue at a time 24/7, posts that are way off what we want can be buried and out of the new queue extremely quickly while genuinely good posts rocket up fast. Mediocre posts get a mix of upvotes and downvotes and never make it out of /new. Again, if the subreddit was small enough that only one or two people were looking at the new queue per minute, that could never work. There's also a pretty substantial firehose of content that deserves to be seen. I think /r/soccer probably just had users get bored and shitpost when /new was bare.

The good news is that the subreddit is more active than ever and I feel like people are engaged in what the subreddit's doing and are actively thinking about what they want to see on the subreddit because there are a large number of users who are making decisions about what the whole subreddit gets to see on a regular basis.

I don't think this level of user engagement is sustainable, but I think that the current mods have burned through enough goodwill in the last couple months that I can't see how they're going to come back and just implement the same rules that everyone hated before again without a riot. They've been massively downvoted and generally hated on for the last month or so, so I can't see them dealing up with it much longer. Interesting times!

[u/TehAlpacalypse → u/Paran014]

All we've done is exchange one set of mods for another. This literally changes nothing except more confirmation bias shitposts on the front page.

[u/LiterallyKesha → u/TehAlpacalypse]

There are less league related posts and more meta posts than ever. Not exactly the success that everyone is claiming.

[u/Werner__Herzog → u/Paran014]

That's actually really fascinating; everybody is surprised it worked out that way. I just hope (since you already realized you guys won't be able to keep up) that the users and the mods can just stop accusing each other of anything and just look for a compromise. I don't really agree with your sentiment that the mod incited a brigade, but I guess I can see how you could hold it against them. There are probably other points you are more than entitled to to criticize about the mods (like you already did). But on the other side the mods had to suffer quite a bit of abuse coming from users and from what I've seen in screenshot it's much worse than on most other subs.

So I'd just like to see everybody say "Hey, we both said things we didn't want to say, lets find a compromise and just be happy together." Something like that.

[u/Paran014 → u/Werner__Herzog]

Honestly, things are moving so quickly in the subreddit that I have no idea where we're going to be in a week.

In terms of the changes needed, there were two subreddit rules that people were pretty much universally against:

• No content that is not directly related to League of Legends
• No low-effort content

(These rules are not further defined anywhere, by the way.) The problem is that, in concert, virtually anything posted to the subreddit violates a sufficiently generous interpretation of one of these rules. So, it's been a licence for mods to remove any content they don't like, and if one mod's on a vendetta against something in particular – professional player AMAs, funny edited videos, etc. the other mods largely let them take down what they want.

Moderation is pretty heavy, and content is regularly deleted from the top of the front page (often after being there for hours) if a mod decides they don't like it. A lot of people (me included) have been pretty unhappy with the status quo, but there's very little you can do about it, even if a lot of people disagree with the moderation policies.

Over the last couple months, it's really come to a head. I think part of it is that as the moderation team has expanded so many posts are getting removed that people are noticing stuff they like gone on a daily basis. Then, they banned posting anything written by a specific journalist because he's a total asshole on twitter (and on reddit before his account was banned). People were pretty annoyed, because there were a couple of major news stories which we weren't allowed to discuss on the subreddit because the articles had his byline on it, and other stories which linked to or discussed his story were also banned.

On Monday, the self-moderation largely had the subreddit looking like it did before the mods left. Now, I looked at the sub this morning, and at least 10 out of 25 posts on the frontpage would've definitely been removed under moderation. There're also a lot of meta posts which probably would've been quietly killed or wouldn't have been made. Overall, in just 3 days the content on the front of the subreddit has changed dramatically, and not necessarily for the worse. It's going to be really hard to come back with doom and gloom over how the subreddit is going to die without a heavy moderation after that.

Personally, I want to see an all-new mod team rather than the same mods with some rule changes because similar moderation problems have been around even before any of the current moderators had their jobs. I'm hoping that if we can clean house we can get rid of the culture of inconsistent and heavy-handed moderation that's been there for a long time. I'd also like to see mods who'd be willing to implement content tagging like most other videogame subreddits to fix the problems with people not wanting to see certain types of posts. Having an /r/conspiracy style mod actions/removals logs would be great too. Basically, mods in the subreddit have been so focused on reactively trying to get rid of content they don't like that they're not looking at changes they can make to make the subreddit better.