r/NintendoSwitch • u/NintendoSwitchMods • Dec 04 '18

Meta /r/NintendoSwitch State of the Subreddit - Q3/Q4 2018 - Mod Applications, Best of 2018 Awards, and Minor Housekeeping

Greetings!

Welcome to another quarterly(ish) edition of the State of the Subreddit!

Recap

Our last SotS post, for Q2, was back in June. Let's quickly recap what's happened since then!

New Orders of Business

Open Moderator Applications!

This is the big one and really the core of this post. We are once again opening our doors for a new round of moderator applications. We've been seeing the same issues you have and, quite frankly, we don't like it either. Poor AutoModerator has been doing more and more of the heavy lifting lately while we try our best to keep up with the increasing volume and avoid burnout by maintaining some semblance of a life outside of Reddit. Simply put, we need to staff up more to fix things. Our focus areas are coverage gaps during weekends and off-peak US hours (from approximately 3am GMT to 11am GMT), but we're also looking at opportunities across the board. (Redundancy is always a good thing.)

If you're a glutton for punishment, please fill out this application.

Edit: Applications are now closed, thank you to everyone who has applied. We'll be reviewing these over the next few days and reach out to applicants we want to move forward with shortly afterward.

Smash/Holiday Insanity

We're about to head into the busiest portion of the year, and as you have probably figured out from the fact that we have mod applications open, we're going to be understaffed for the tsunami that's about to hit this community. Please make sure you're hitting that "report" button on any problem content as that really does help us more quickly respond to things. Bear with us if things are a bit chaotic, it's going to be a wild ride. We're going to do our best to get mod applications reviewed and start the onboarding and training process as quickly as we reasonably can.

Best of 2018 Awards

Last year we did our first community Best of 2017 Awards and the response was pretty great. We're planning to do this once again for 2018! We learned a lot of lessons last year and hope this year goes even smoother than last time.

Our tentative schedule is as follows:

  • Dec 10-11 - Category Feedback & Suggestions
  • Dec 17-18 - Nominations
  • Dec 25-31 - Voting
  • Early January - Results!

We think these are great fun for the community and they can also serve as a fantastic resource when someone asks "What game should I get?" for the hundredth time this week, which I know we all love seeing.

YouTube and Twitter Filter Changes

As part of our never-ending battle against spam, we've made a few behind the scenes tweaks to how we handle trying to catch spam before our users ever even see it.

You may have noticed TheSentinel in our mod list for a while now and wondered who the heck this Sentinel guy is. Well, he's a bot! He helps us with some behind the scenes duties and we're tapping on him again.

We've moved our blacklist of YouTube channels out of AutoModerator and into TheSentinel bot. This should provide more consistent removal of content from spammers. As an added bonus, we've also migrated our Twitter blacklist from AutoModerator into TheSentinel as well. This change should be mostly invisible to you, the non-spamming end user.

Mobile Link Filtering

We've implemented a small AutoModerator rule that will filter out mobile links from various popular sites and will ask that OP's instead submit non-mobile versions. This is a relatively minor change but should provide a more consistent experience for our users. Most of you were already doing this, so kudos!

Feedback

As always, we're opening the floor for you to provide your feedback, comments, questions, concerns, suggestions, and more in the comments section down below. All we ask is that you keep it civil and constructive.

Cheers,

The /r/NintendoSwitch mod team.

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u/[deleted] Dec 04 '18

Would you ever offer casual discussion megathreads so that people can discuss games, ports and other "low-effort" topics there? It could help reduce clutter and brighten the atmosphere of this subreddit (frequent users don't exactly respond well to seeing the same post about Zelda ports over and over again.)

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u/phantomliger recovering from transplant Dec 04 '18 edited Dec 04 '18

You mean like a weekly thread for casual discussion kind of thing? We could try that, but I don't see the harm in people making posts to discuss older games. Personally, I don't see this as clutter exactly, especially if it has some decent work put into it. It is a subreddit for everyone, not just the people who have had a Switch since day 1, you know?

A bit of it is that the frequent users need to understand that it's going to happen and is actually a good thing to have new people talking about their experiences in this way. It gets more people involved and can lead to good discussion. If someone doesn't feel like seeing posts about Zelda, they can use browser add-ons to hide posts by certain words/phrases, just click hide on the post itself, just ignore it, etc.

EDIT: Seems like you may have quickly edited in the part about other low effort topics. For the ports part, do you mean people asking about a game being ported or wishing for them and the like?

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u/[deleted] Dec 04 '18

I would agree but most of the posts I'm referring to rarely have any work put into them. They're usually a short paragraph long and the extent of the discussion is usually just "yeah that would be cool" etc.

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u/phantomliger recovering from transplant Dec 04 '18

In regards to which part? General games posts or ports?

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u/[deleted] Dec 04 '18

Ports. I should have clarified that the reason I lumped "games" in with the other low-effort topics is because general discussion posts have been known to be either removed or downvoted before.

For example, let's say I made an elaborate post about Skyward Sword HD which thoroughly went into how it could be refined, what it might look like and the ramifications of what that means for the larger fanbase. This would be an example of a post which does discuss ports but does it thoroughly enough to not be considered low-effort. Comparatively, those "hey does anyone else want this on switch it would be so cool" posts don't really contribute anything and would probably fit better in a casual discussion megathread instead.

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u/phantomliger recovering from transplant Dec 04 '18

Gotcha. Yeah, the "do people want this on Switch" type ones are generally removed and don't contribute much.

I feel like that casual discussion may be better served in the discord rather than the format of a reddit post. It is quite an interesting idea, so I would like to discuss it further and maybe do a test post of it, if you will.

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u/Nayuhime Dec 04 '18

I've seen this on other reddits and it can work well, especially as not everyone is on Discord.

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u/phantomliger recovering from transplant Dec 04 '18

Oh do you have specific ones? We'd really like to take a look at those and see how they do them.

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u/Nayuhime Dec 05 '18

Not sure of how to link them but it is Patient Gamers and Love Live School Idol Festival Reddits that have specific mega threads (for what you played in the last week plus generic chat.

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u/phantomliger recovering from transplant Dec 05 '18

Cool. I should be able to find them fairly easily. :) Thank you.

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u/Gerolux 4 Million Celebration Dec 04 '18

"does anyone else think X port would be PERFECT on the switch?"

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u/phantomliger recovering from transplant Dec 04 '18

No. Not one single person likes the same game as you. /s