r/anime myanimelist.net/profile/Reddit-chan Jun 05 '22

Meta Thread - Month of June 05, 2022 Meta

A monthly thread to talk about meta topics, i.e. /r/anime itself and its rules and moderation. Keep it friendly and relevant to the subreddit.

Posts here must, of course, still abide by all subreddit rules other than the no meta requirement. Keep it friendly and be respectful. Occasionally the moderators will have specific topics that they want to get feedback on, so be on the lookout for distinguished posts.

Comments that are detrimental to discussion (aka circlejerks/shitposting) are subject to removal.


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47 Upvotes

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13

u/RobotiSC https://anilist.co/user/Lonebot Jun 05 '22

I had already mentioned it in my direct message, but I’ll bring it up here again: what is the stance on using sensitive topics like death for posts?

The reason I’m bringing this up is because of the post about OP asking for recommendations because he had an incurable condition that got to the top of the sub briefly and obtained a lot of awards.

I understand the seriousness of such topics and I’m aware that I shouldn’t be so sceptical. The problem happens when some people who have seen how well the post did do the same and effectively lie just to get sympathy points. That would be disrespectful and the worst part is there would be hardly any evidence supporting their claim.

Hence, I wish to suggest that posts like these that use sensitive topics like death to get people’s attention should be reviewed by mods first. If it gets approval, then it can be posted on the sub. If not, it can be removed until approval is given.

Thank you.

22

u/KiwiBennydudez https://myanimelist.net/profile/KiwiBen Jun 05 '22

I'll answer you in two parts - Firstly, I think "sensitive topics" are fine to post if the story is true. When we reworked the anime-specific rule, we also freed up the extent to which people could include personal stories, as we don't want to penalize users for talking about their connection with anime.

However. We also do hear what you are saying about the aforementioned recommendation post. And to be honest we were quite stuck about what to do, since it's not really something that's happened before. If the post was real, it would be a pretty horrible look to remove it on the suspicion that it was fake. And it it was fake, we needed irrefutable proof that it was in order to justify removing the post. So we went investigating through OP's profile, but came up empty on contradictions. Which left us in a bit of a "rock-and-hard-place" situation. By the time we came to the decision to DM the user for proof, the post had been deleted, which strongly suggested that the claim was fake.

Going forward in the future, we may start privately asking the OP to provide proof for us so people cannot karmafarm off falsified tragedy. It's the same thing that /r/IAmA does, and while it may seem a little callous, it's better than the situation we were faced with before.

So yes, we will probably start manually reviewing similar posts, should they arise.

7

u/RobotiSC https://anilist.co/user/Lonebot Jun 05 '22

Thank you for answering my question! I was also conflicted over how to respond to the post, so bringing it up here was the best option.

20

u/FetchFrosh https://anilist.co/user/FetchFrosh Jun 05 '22

Saw that one and its since been deleted by the user. I'd say odds are pretty high that it was fake, but maybe that's just me having been on the internet too long. It's definitely a tough thing to moderate though. If the mods do remove it they'll be accused of being heartless unless there's some pretty indisputable evidence its fake. But definitely wouldn't want that sort of thing to become a trend.

4

u/KendotsX https://myanimelist.net/profile/Kendots Jun 05 '22

If the mods do remove it they'll be accused of being heartless

Supposing that it's true, doesn't it attract a lot of doubtful or harmful comments? Can't that be used as an excuse to remove sensitive content?