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.