First off let me start by saying thanks to the mods for taking care of administrative tasks that help keep the sub clean. I know someone has to do it and I know you guys do a lot behind the scenes. Thanks.
That said, there's always room for improvement. Unfortunately, this is not just a “constructive criticism” post, where most of it will be positive with just a few grievances here and there. While I do recognize the effort it takes to moderate a community, as the title states, I feel that things have reached a tipping point where the role of moderators here has started to become a clear negative rather than a positive. This is a sentiment shared by several other users, all of us active in the /r/stocks Daily Thread. This has been a growing sentiment in that thread over the last few weeks and yesterday I finally decided to talk about it with these users and compile a list of our concerns.
Let me first summarize our grievances, and then follow-up with some specific examples that these users provided me with:
Main Grievances
- Moderation has become “overmoderation” and has started to have a negative impact on the community.
- High-quality and/or relevant content is regularly removed.
- High-quality contributors to both the sub as a whole and to the daily thread are regularly banned, temporarily and permanently, for trivial reasons.
Recent Examples
- /u/absoluteunitVolcker posted a WSJ article by a Pulitzer winning journalist on potentially $60B environmental damage liability by Telecom giants such as VZ and T. It got removed as “off-topic” – the next week both of those tickers tanked on that news. When he appealed, he received the following response from the moderation team:
“WSJ must be using chatgpt because that was boring af (not sorry). - Additionally, that investigative piece immediately led to downgrades in those stocks: “One research analyst downgraded AT&T; another said it could cost $59 billion to remove the lead cables left behind by phone companies” Source.
- /u/AP9384629344432 is one of the highest-quality, data-driven contributors in the entire sub. He regularly has his posts and comments removed, including this one in a recent daily thread: https://i.imgur.com/46PNfVC.png
- This thread about HBO shows appearing on Netflix due to a deal with Warner Bros was removed for not being related to the stock market. WBD and NFLX are stocks.
- I posted a thread about news related to Altria Group and even included the ticker (MO) in the thread title – it was removed.
- One user reports that non-US news that affects non-US stocks is often deleted. He states: “For example if Brazil were to raise their corporate tax that would get deleted despite effecting stocks like MELI and NU who operate in the country. Or if China were to pass a law despite it effecting Chinese stocks that gets deleted.” He also mentions that a recent thread about UK GDP was deleted by mods.
- Users such as /u/seank11 and /u/interrobangbros have been banned, apparently, for being “annoying”. Most users I talked to would like to see people like this unbanned and for mods to stop banning people for these supposed “offenses”. All of the users I talked to agreed that it would be better to just allow individual users to use the block feature at their discretion rather than mods making the decision for them.
- One banned user was banned because he called out another for ban evasion, and then was banned himself. The reported reason for his ban, ironically, was “ban evasion”.
What we propose
As one user put it: “Nobody is asking the mods to do more work, just do less. The quality of this subreddit worsens every time more users who aren't spamming / trolling get removed. Just remove the racism / hostile comments and the place is fine.”
Community, feel free to chime in with your thoughts and also to provide any examples you yourself may have come across. I would also like to receive a response from the moderators on this.
Regards,
/u/shortyafter (with the input of other concerned /r/stocks users)
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