State of the Subreddit | May 2019

Hi guys! Nobody here. You probably remember me from the last time I wrote the sequel to War and Peace, nearly two months ago. As per usual, I tend to write these things while I'm suffering and miserable— and right now, it's about four o'clock in the morning and I've been doing little but moving boxes and furniture for the past week or so. Still, the moderation team and I agree that transparency and openness regarding the moderation process is the easiest way to minimize the number of insults hurled at us via modmail, so let's begin.

Robocop

• We acknowledge that Robocop is inherently not a perfect system.

• Complaints of, and the overall presence of merchandise bots has decreased ever since the implementation of Robocop.

  • Posts not caught by the filter are oftentimes bot-voted to the top of the subreddit, and as such, need to be dealt with with machine-like efficiency and urgency. Twenty four hours a day.

• We apologize to anyone that ends up mistakenly queued in the filter, and we encourage those that feel they've been overlooked to use the moderator mail function to give us a heads up.

• Overall, we consider the implementation of Robocop to be a mission accomplished, and have no current plans for further modifications to its script.

Current Moderation Operations

• Complaints regarding "slacking moderation" seem to occasionally manifest whenever low-quality content/spam slips through the cracks for a few hours.

  • During American waking hours, the longest between any two acts of janitorial presence (at least, using today's statistics) tends to be around 3-4 hours. This is all while two of the six of the subreddit's moderators are out of commission.
  • For every merchandise bot or repostable that ends up on our hot page, there are probably more than fifty that've been sniped down by the moderation team. These guys make John Connor look amateur league.

• Complaints regarding "overly strict moderation" seem to occasionally manifest when someone posts a visually impressive, but thematically unrelated post on our subreddit that ends up reaching user feeds and/or /r/all.

  • This is not, and has never been a subreddit for pretty glowy light things. This is a subreddit for synthwave, fast cars, pulsing beats, alternative retrofuturism, chrome, and the related visual aesthetics that go with that.
  • We recognize that this may not be the reason everyone here clicked subscribe. Given that this subreddit has more subscribers than Carpenter Brut's newest tracks have Youtube views, it's more than likely that a certain population here exists because they appreciate the eye candy. I can't really blame them— the outrun community's artists are fantastic at what they do.
  • Still, with this in mind, it becomes apparent that the population of the subreddit, in surprisingly large part, consists of users with little interest in synthwave, fast cars, pulsing beats— and as such, it's not uncommon for posts that are pretty (with pretty lights and pretty colours) and yet thematically irrelevant to reach the top of the subreddit.
  • Some of these are from bot accounts that just repost the (previously popular) works of others for karma. Others are from individuals reposting the (previously popular) works of others for karma. In the case of the former, much like merchandise posts, it is very possible that the popularity these posts receive are not organic in nature.
  • While removing ourselves from /r/all is technically an option that could be used to make /r/outrun's voting mechanisms more reflective of outrun fans, we'd like to avoid enacting that. Exposing new people to new genres is cool, and I love the idea of this community being a part of the reason that people find artists that they love.

• The moderation team is looking to double down on our enforcement of Rule 8.

  • When there's been a flurry of posts and the pipes are clogged, we have a bad habit of pretending this rule doesn't exist.
  • When artists create outrun art and fail to receive credit, we prevent their careers from growing, gaining profitability, and overall discourage both the creation of good art and the creation of art within the outrun community. Enforcing a policy of crediting artists is necessary for this community to continue having content to feed on.

• The moderation team is looking to double down on our definition of "low quality content".

  • We've been sporadically sniping the plethora of eighties-themed beer cans for quite a while, now. Similarly, uninspired monochromatic sunsets, cyan/pink tile grids, glowing text, and other cliches are, while """relevant content""", almost never actually examples of quality content that the majority of people would want to come to this subreddit to see.

• The moderation team is looking to establish more concrete posting guidelines.

  • Allowing Notrun posts is a slippery slope— you've got the classic monochromatic sunset design, from which people start posting eighties cityscapes with sunsets, from which people post vaguely futuristic cityscapes with sunsets, to the point that moderators are sweeping the subreddit of people posting pictures of the sunset from their 2019 suburban backyards.
    
  • A lot of people compare us to the /r/cyberpunk subreddit. While we do share a similar affinity for the whole alternate 80's retrofuture, outrun is a thematically and aesthetically different genre from cyberpunk in more ways than I care to really list here. /r/cyberpunk tends to have 'lax moderation, which does result in lots of /r/outrun's content being posted there. Doesn't work visa-versa.

• Because of the above two points and the whole "people finding us on /r/all" scenario, it has become clear to the moderation team that it's necessary that we find a concrete and definitive way of defining outrun to serve as something that's far more definitive than the usual "chrome, synths, cars, beats, alt. retrofuture".

Sticky Posts

I'm going to keep this short— one of us on the moderation team was not-slacking for enough milliseconds to realize that we only ever really use one of the two stickypost slots that we have available to us. Some ideas have been:

• Stickying high-quality, new original content, hand-picked by the moderation team.

• Stickying one artist (whether musical or graphical) every week, and having a thread that week dedicated to appreciating their work.

• Stickying new synthwave works from popular musical artists in the genre, and having the sticky as a way to signal boost them additional love, support, and attention.

/r/Outrun Core Versus /r/All Demographics

This relates to some of the earlier talk regarding "strict moderation."

• Demographically speaking, we've more or less come to the conclusion that there are two primary demographics for the /r/outrun subreddit: "core users" (re: daily visitors, synthwave enthusiasts, etc) and the crowd that generally stop on by whenever a piece of pretty art gains enough traction to hit their front page and/or /r/all.

• When a thread becomes popular enough to reach the front page of subscribers, (or, in severe cases, /r/all) core users quickly become a minority to the masses. We believe community traditions like Music Mondays have done a noteworthy amount in keeping some core users around, and are looking into implementing similar ideas in the future.

  • Despite music being a large part of the subreddit's purpose and despite community moderator efforts, music posts tend not to get much attention on here.
  • This is likely because music takes a lot longer to enjoy than checking out a pretty picture for a few moments. Makes it more of a time investment.

• At the end of the day, this is community was designed with its core users— passionate synthwave and Drive-like fans— in mind, far more than it was made with the intentions of helping people gain karma by reposting pictures of the sunset in their backyard.

  • This community was not designed to be a place to post pictures of your backyard's sunset. Or someone else's backyard's sunset. Or a sunset in someone else's backyard that you drew.
  • If some of the "internet revolutionaries" want to rise up start a subreddit for sharing pictures of sunsets with cyan/pink/orange color themes, we have no intentions of stopping you from doing so.

Reporting

• To the people that take time out of their day to report rule-offending posts, you have no idea how much we appreciate you.

• To that one guy, like, three days ago, that reported eight different threads for being not relevant to the subreddit, you're the real MVP, whoever you are.

We Want To Hear From You!

• The moderation team is going to be watching this thread like lazerhawks. Suggestions will be acknowledged, questions will be answered, and I'm going to bed. Yeet.

Submitted May 22, 2019 at 11:59PM by netrunnernobody http://bit.ly/2X1DSYe