Hey all!!
Reddit occasionally gives us new tools and very occasionally they actually are impactful, work like they should, and they may even change the way we mod this subreddit.
So, we’d like to tell you about it.
And we’d like to hear from you, about it.
Traditionally, this subreddit has been pretty heavily trolled. It’s often received more than its share of outside scrutiny, and we were sometimes brigaded.
Polyamory is poorly understood, easy to make fun of, and this community in particular is filled with lovely earnest people who want to help, and sad, often frantic people who have fueled some pretty big dumpster fires.
We get it.
But having been on the receiving end of harassment and hate and some pretty laser focused bad actors, along with the usual crew of bumblefucks, rude people and the occasional clueless rando, we try to be good neighbors with our fellow subreddits
We have a new tool that allows us to pre-screen trolls. And it’s been wildly effective. It’s very helpful.
The automod will now tell us if an individual has a posting history on any of the half-dozen subreddits we decided to watchlist.
As you can imagine, this has been impactful. News we can use, indeed.
But like, it’s exposed some bad actors in our community as well.
Reddit has a good neighbor policy.
We have decided that good fences make good neighbors. It’s a high fence with a small gate. We have hundreds of thousands of community members, so like, the gate isn’t tiny. Nor all that exclusionary. You can just walk through. And plenty of trolls do. This is one more way to catch them before they post.
We want to be good neighbors.
Some of our neighbors, frankly suck. Some of them screenshot and post about us. Some of them harass community members in DM’s. Some of them come here and want to post and interact with community members so that they can add personal narrative to their screen shots and harassment.
So we’re telling you, very clearly, to leave them alone.
Protect yourself. My DM’s are locked down tighter than whisky on a Sunday morning. Feel free to do the same. Report harassment, both to admin and to the mod team here.
It sucks that we are the ones who will keep us safe, but it’s also the truth.
But we also need you to understand that poking the bear, the angry hate sub bear? Brings smoke to this subreddit that we do not want.
Currently, the prevailing theory has been that if you think it’s fun to engage with hate subreddits and “debate” (troll and enrage) or even just hang out and chat, no matter what you believe in your heart, or for whatever justified reason, we don’t want you here
We think that’s shitty bad neighbor stuff. We don’t want community members who do shitty bad neighbor stuff. We don’t want to troll or brigade, or encourage that shit.
It’s why we don’t allow cross-posts. It’s why we don’t let people post about the terrible shit that people have written with links. We are hyper aware of how shitty it is. We don’t want to send traffic and attention to these subreddits.
If you have history on those hate subs, we will ban you, for trolling, most likely.
We wanted to let you all know about this. We haven’t changed any rules. We haven’t changed how we moderate or interact with the community, but we do have a new tool and wanted to be really transparent with folks about how that might impact them.
Happy Friday! And I’m here to answer questions.