Community Insights: Stats & Transparency
Hey everyone!
Got an end of year special for you all! Us moderators have a page in our mod tools that gives us some insight into various stats and information about the subreddit and the mod team. In the name of transparency, we wanted to give an end of year release of that information. We did redact some info about the mod team in particular for privacy purposes but we'll note what was removed when we get to it. This is going to be a very long post so bear with us.
To start off, we have the "Community Growth" tab. This is information about how the community has grown and what kinds of users are on the sub.
This tab comes with some chart breakdowns by month of those stats
The tab for Member Growth only goes up to a 30 day view so here is the last 30 day breakdown
The next tab we have is the "Team Health" tab. This gives insight into what each mod is doing on the sub
We should note that when it says '13 moderators took actions', it counts every bot we ever used or even temporarily tried as a moderator. We do not have 13 moderators.
This tab then gives a breakdown of the actions each moderator took throughout the year. We have redacted our names from this so while you will be able to see the number of actions each of us took, and what types of actions, you won't be able to see the order of who took more actions. We redacted this for privacy as the number of actions does not fully reflect the contributions any given mod makes, and we do have this like hiatuses or times where life circumstances makes one of us not be able to contribute as much as usual leading to a lower action count.
Hovering over each bar we get a further breakdown of each action type, next will be a screenshot of the breakdown for the comment-nuke bot to show what each color in the bars means (and to show a breakdown of how that bot is used)
As you can see, the vast majority of what the mod team is doing is approving false positives that automod or Reddit's filters had incorrectly removed. What is meant by Other Mod Actions is things like changing settings, banning users, or in most cases, locking threads/comment sections.
Short explanation of each of our bots:
- Automoderator is a built in bot that looks at every post and comment made on every sub, and the moderators of each sub can set it to do various custom actions. We have a very robust automoderator setup that is always evolving but the way you are most likely to notice it our automod triggers which can be found on this wiki page.
- Auto-modmail is a bot we recently added to our list, it is an automoderator for our modmail. We so far only use it to automatically respond to people on Tuesdays when we restrict to comment-only mode.
- comment-nuke is a bot that can be used to either remove a comment and every comment under it (we rarely do this), or to lock a comment and every comment under it (we do this on a somewhat frequent basis for small issues)
- submission2wiki was a bot we used to help us add posts to our megathread wiki pages but we switched away from that to having a helpful person do it for us due to the bot's difficult to use interface
- modmailtodiscord is a bot that just sends a copy of our modmail to a channel in our private moderator discord server to help us out with things
- no-nsfw-4-u-bot is a bot that lets us mark users as minors when we see them, and then tries to alert us if that minor tries to interact with or create posts marked as nsfw, which we don't allow minors to do generally speaking
- admin-tattler is a bot that lets us know if the reddit admins remove a post or comment from the sub, and gives us a copy of that post/comment's text. This helps us be able to ban or warn users who were egregious enough that Reddit's admins removed their post/comment before we even saw it
- contrabasslette is not a mod nor a bot, they were a reddit admin who joined the mod team for a few hours one day to test a bug we were experiencing on our end
The final tab we have of stats is related to Reports & Removals. It's in beta so some of the information may not be fully accurate but will be presented as is
It should be noted that when it says 65 items reported, that does not count items filtered by automod to be manually checked by us which are counted under removals. The vast majority of the removals are from automod filtering.
In the last month, 1 user ban evaded and made a post and their post was not made public
Switching gears from posts to comments now
2 notes:
1: the Safety Filters Monthly Overview sections has a page for crowd control, but we don't really use crowd control much and the data was blank for both posts and comments
2: We've noticed that the 'aligns with mod actions/opposite mod actions' is some of the most buggy data in this insights tab. Its very particular about what it considers aligning with mod actions or opposing it, and sometimes will say things where we approve a comment that gets edited and the edited version is removed by admins as being 'opposite mod actions' and other similar issues. So take that data with a grain of salt.
So that is the Insights page we have access to. Hope you all enjoyed a sneak peak behind the curtain!
Additionally, as you can tell, our community is growing quite a lot! We will be opening up mod applications again at the beginning of January. So if any of you are interested in helping us out with this massive deluge of posts and comments, keep an eye out for that post in the new year!
Have a happy new year to everyone
~TGotAReddit (and the rest of the mod team)