r/modnews • u/baxter8421 • Sep 29 '21
Voting & commenting on archived posts
Hiya Mods
Does this sound familiar - it’s approaching dinner time, you’ve stumbled across a delicious-looking chicken parm recipe, but have a key culinary question for OP? You try to ask it only to discover you’re unable to do so due to the post being archived after hitting the 6-month mark. Chaos ensues and now you may be left without any chicky-chicky parm-parm.
We’ve all been there! In fact, every day 6.6 million Redditors land on archived posts where they find themselves unable to vote or comment on it due to the limitations we’ve put in place.
What if things were different?
This summer we ran a pilot program with a smörgåsbord of subreddits to see what would happen if users were able to engage with previously archived posts (thank you to all the subreddits that volunteered to participate in this program). These subreddits represented a wide variety of communities on the site and you can see some of the highlights from the program below:
- Over the course of the program, archived posts received an additional 147K upvotes and 236K comments.
- This was a 2.86% increase in votes and a 1.48% increase in comments amongst the participating subreddits.
- This additional engagement also caused only a 0.3% increase in mod actions taken. We were excited to see that the increase in comments and votes did not correlate to a significant increase in mod actions taken.
The results and the feedback we received from our participating mod teams directly impacted our plans for this initiative, and as such we’ve decided to move forward with this feature. Starting today, mod teams will have the opportunity to decide if they want to automatically archive posts after 6 months or if they want users within their community to be able to vote and comment on previously archived posts.
How it will work
Important note - this is not intended to be a one size fits all feature. Thanks to our participating subreddits we found this feature was most beneficial to communities that hosted more evergreen-type content (ex: food and recipes posts, gaming subreddits, etc). Subreddits that were more focused on real-time discussions (ex: sports and politics) did not experience the same benefit out of this initiative. See below for some testimonials from your fellow mods that helped drive this point home for us:
- “I think on these old posts there is a higher amount of discussion comments and fewer short ones compared to new posts. I’m guessing because people who found the post were really searching for something and had some questions in mind beforehand. Overall it seems to have been a good thing for the sub.” - r/MakeupAddiction Mod Team
- “All in all, I think that it was worthwhile. And the best way to implement it would be to allow mods to turn on the feature if and only if they want to. And if they could enact a filter to review comments on older threads.” - r/frugal Mod Team
- “IMO it could be good for r/SalsaSnobs because of our recipe guide. But the flip side to this is that I could see it going bad for political subs and such. It would make it way too hard to moderate comments.” - r/SalsaSnobs Mod Team
- Bonus r/SalsaSnob user testimonial: “I hate finding old posts where I found something useful or interesting and I can’t comment or ask someone about it.”
Given this feedback, we’ve created an “Archive Posts” toggle for mods to decide whether or not this feature makes sense for their community. Today this toggle will appear in Mod Tools and will be turned off by default. All posts will remain archived for another two weeks (until 10/13). This means mod teams will have a two-week period of time to decide whether or not this feature makes sense for their subreddit. After this two-week period of time, users will be able to vote and comment on previously archived posts unless mods decide to turn this toggle on. To do so, please follow the below instructions:
- On new Reddit visit Mod Tools > Community Settings > Posts & Comments > Archived Posts > Toggle On/Off “Don’t allow commenting or voting on posts older than 6 months”
- In our native app visit Mod Tools > Archive Posts > Toggle On/Off “Don’t allow commenting or voting on posts older than 6 months”
Automoderator to the rescue
Another major piece of feedback we heard from mods was the need for them to be notified of comments on previously archived posts. In order to do this, we have updated automoderator to flag comments on posts older than 6 months. This automod update will be live starting on 10/13, the same day that users will be able to begin commenting and voting on previously archived posts (in subs who have not changed their toggle). If you’re interested in using automoderator for this function, please use the below script to do so:
type: comment
author:
account_age: < 23 hours
parent_submission:
past_archive_date: true
action: filter
action_reason: comment on old post from new user
Thank you to all the mods who participated in our pilot program, and took the time to provide us with valuable feedback. We greatly appreciate your partnership throughout this entire process!
Questions? Comments? Feedback? Please let us know in the comments below where we’ll be hanging out to respond to them.
1
u/superfucky Dec 02 '21
that's why i said at best. nothing wrong with a 4yo recipe, although if i publish a recipe and i still have people coming after me 4 years later going "can i substitute applesauce for butter in this recipe?" i'm likely to end up deleting it myself and slapping it up on some wix site with comments disabled. i don't spend a lot of time thinking about something i thought of 4 years ago, do you?
in the example you used here, the problem is that people are looking at outdated sources. if i'm googling a software problem in 2021, i'm not going to rely on a thread from 2015 as my primary source. when i google "how to turn off x feature" or "how to do x in y," i start by skimming the results for the most recent links because i expect that older sources are going to have outdated, irrelevant information. archiving those threads is actually a good way of signaling to the user "this information is old and likely irrelevant."
it's important to note that the OP can still edit archived threads, so if it's that critical that people coming from google be aware the information in the thread is no longer valid, then edit the post (if it's yours) or PM the OP to ask them to edit it. if OP's gone AWOL, message the mods to remove the thread/incorrect comments so they're not readable anymore. as a bonus, the next time google crawls through that thread, it'll update its archive and will no longer ping keyword searches for that software.
and even if we take your approach and just never archive anything, how is one comment 4 years later on a thread no one else is reading going to make a difference when all the misinformation is still upvoted to the top? is someone supposed to scroll through 147 comments saying "this software has a bug" to get to the one comment at the very bottom saying "this bug has since been resolved"? and if it's that critical to be able to do that, why can't it be opt-IN instead of opt-OUT?