Submitted by AutoModerator t3_ysdocw in philadelphia
10/7 10/14 11/11 State of the Subreddit
Good morning all,
Sorry we are late providing this - it took a while to get our thoughts together and discuss what we wanted to present. When we hinted at it, we didn't realize several of us would be out of town and it took a while to get organized, so again, sorry.
Since our last StoS, our subreddit has more than doubled in size! We have grown from 200k subscribers to over 430k subscribers as of this post. With that growth comes new challenges and we are doing our best to adapt to them as best we can. As always, before we make any major changes in methodology, we would like to present them to the community first so we can hear everyone’s feedback and refine things as needed!
Part of why we took so long put this together is there is a larger number of items we felt we wanted to address, and honestly, we probably won’t get to cover them all in this post. We will do our best, however, to address things the best we can. Most of the items are clarifications or modifications to the existing rules, and hopefully they will alleviate some confusion and will be positive changes. In no particular order:
· Clarification to Rule 1: Follow Reddiquette – Tagging users in bad faith, i.e., to stir up arguments is generally considered against this rule and will likely result in comment removal.
· Clarification/restriction of Rule 2: Relevant to Philadelphia – Political posts that are general to a broader state level candidate, and not specific to the city should be directed to r/Pennsylvania or other political subreddits. Obviously during this season there is an increase in Political posts, and some have been tenuously related to the city at best and we haven’t been 100% consistent on this. Now that the election has passed, we would propose this be the criteria going forward.
· Rule 3: Sports Posts – Posts related to Philadelphia sports should go in their respective subreddits. Exceptions to this rule are significant events, such as playoff advancements or rallies.
· Expansion to Moving Monday Threads – We would like to include general neighborhood and area questions, such as “Is xyz safe?” to the Monday and general chat threads.
· Artist Self-promotion – We ran a trial of this with the Haunted Philadelphia author, and felt it was a success – but we would like to allow artists and other local Philadelphian’s to promote their work via AMAs in order to foster community engagement, instead of just spamming the sub.
· Clarification to Rule 3: Lost and Found: Lost pets are the exception to this rule and are permitted.
· Expansion of Rule 5: Sources – pictures/video taken while driving should not be encouraged and will be removed and result in a ban.
· Expansion of Rule 5: Sources – Twitter, Instagram, and other social media outlets are no longer a valid source, except in extenuating circumstances with active public safety issues. This is to prevent low effort, low information posts. Linking them in comments is fine, but as a Post they would be restricted.
· Expansion of Rule 8: Editorializing – News articles and similar posts should be submitted as Link Posts, titles should not be edited from the original article, and sub-headings should not be included. Alterations of the title on the publisher’s side would be an exception.
· Updated Flairs – Commonly filtered flairs (Crime Posts, Politics, Photo of the Day) will have emojis and coloration removed to aid users attempting to filter posts.
We also have a couple items we would like to hear your feedback on, as they are either becoming more frequent or represent a change in tone/content.
· “Best of” or “Favorite xyz” type posts – we’ve noticed an increase in general posts like these, and they seem to be generally well received with comment and vote interactions. Is this something we want to continue to allow on a provisional basis, or do we need to make an adjustment?
· Similarly, food pictures or reviews? We had restricted those in the past, but they’ve been popping up again and don’t seem to be a huge issue. We were thinking about allowing them but requiring some description or other text in the body to prevent low effort, “Instagram” type posts. Alternatively, r/PhiladelphiaEats has gained some popularity and we could talk to the mods there to see if they would be okay or want us to direct traffic there.
There is a bit here to consider, and we apologize for it being so long since the last one! The changes here haven’t gone into effect, we will give it a week for feedback and refinement if need be. There will hopefully be another StoS soon where we can hash out a few more things, but please leave your feedback or questions in the comments below!
-The r/Philadelphia Mod Team