26
votes
Suggestion: When unsubscribing to a group have an optional "Reason for leaving" field. For example: If a large percentage unsubscribe for 'toxicity' that's valuble information.
The idea is to help combat the echo-chamber effect, if a group goes toxic then rational people are likely to leave, further concentrating the negative users left in the conversation.
So the idea is that if there's a large exodus of people unsubscribing then that's valuable information if we can determine the cause. Hence if there's an option to explain why you're leaving it can help flag a group as in trouble, first to the moderators and then to the admins that "are these moderators doing their job".
Now the parties leaving could show their protest in comments or threads, but if they're already leaving then they've already forgone that option. I know on reddit I'm not going to try help a dieing subreddit, I'm just going to leave.
Interesting idea, but I think people would end up using this as a way to attack groups they don’t like (by joining and then leaving with a reason like “toxicity”).
Once reputation is implemented you could filter the list to only show the messages of high rep users that decided to leave the group.
That plus I am a huge fan of Honeypots. Let people hang themselves and destroy their account's trust by getting caught abusing systems like this that have no real tangible effect on anything important. ;)
If someone joins and leaves within 5 minutes that should have less weight than someone who's been there 5 years. There's always some attack vector, you can abuse the 'report' button for example.
I've already unsubscribed from half the groups here. In all cases, my reason for leaving is the same: "Not interested in this topic". Does Deimos really need to see hundreds of notifications like this? How will that help?
If the problem is toxicity, that should be dealt with differently.
With a decentralised moderation model using teams of trusted users in each group, they should be able to act on toxic behaviour before it becomes widespread and problematic. Rather than report a whole group, you would report individual comments to the trusted users' attention. They can then nip the problem in the bud. If they're not able to handle things, they can escalate matters to Deimos, who can step in as a last resort.
It's far better to prevent toxic behaviour before it takes over a group, rather than try to address it after it's so widespread that people are leaving.
He wouldn't see "hundreds of notifications", he'd see statistics about each group represented by the "reason for leaving", and could set flags to notify him if there's an alarming jump in stats.
Of course but lets not delude ourselves that whatever trust model we implement is going to be bullet-proof, people are unpredictable and Deimos himself is learning as the community forms what the best way is. Yes this is not the ideal solution to a problem but it doesn't hurt as a backup plan.
You can always message @Deimos or any mods he appoints in the future about issues you see with certain groups, topics, or comments.
Or, if you want your complaint to be public, post a topic on ~tildes about it.
As a moderator of two not-small subs on reddit, this would have been a great tool to have. I've never been unhappy with having more analytics at our disposal, even if they went unused 90% of the time.
When there was an attempted terrorist attack locally, we were able to demonstrate a problem through the huge upswing in new accounts joining to post in our sub and solve that with a temporary new account filter to stop people spamming false information or racist nonsense. If we had the ability to see what the biggest reasons people were leaving our community were, again, it might go unused 90% of the time but if we suddenly saw a bunch of people citing the same reason it would empower action. If we were losing subscribers over something like "The sub just turned into people posting pictures of the city skyline" that might be a valid complaint to be acted on, but not really something I think should be addressed at the top levels of the site's administration.
If it showed up only as a statistic (drop down menu options, "other" short answer field that could be expanded) then I'd think it would be unobtrusive and difficult to abuse in a way so as to actually be annoying or a hindrance to good moderation.
I'll preface to say I'm quite disillusioned with Tildes so this'll probably be pretty negative.
I'm glad someone thought it was a good idea, sometimes I feel like people are deliberately difficult or trying to make this place worse, when I post a good idea and the top posts are "it could be abused" and "it would just become spam". Either people lack imagination to see the potential use, they're blatantly pessimistic and not constructively thinking about solutions, or they're actively trying to drag this place down. Not the first time either, if I had a "reason for leaving tildes" box it would say "because constructive intelligent conversation is not the majority". I mean I'm not stupid enough to think that my ideas will get universal support or that they're perfect, but I put thought into them and peoples replies are picking holes with solutions that take 2 seconds to imagine. At least they could come up with serious issues.
I think the trouble with this place is there's always some filter towards what people join and why, this is pretty much people fed up with reddit, it's not drawing from an existing community or building up from some shared interest (other than free-speech and privacy). I guess what I'm trying to say that I feel the whole place is a little too general interest.
I only came back to check the GUI, but thanks for posting a constructive comment, made me feel a bit better that my efforts aren't completely in vain.
You're right, but I guess I overlook the upvotes because I don't put much value on them, a vote doesn't indicate that someone put thought into it, it's possible that their kneejerk reaction was to upvote it solely based on the title. I guess I also wish the constructive and thoughtful voices were louder, I can handle criticism just fine, what I can't is when people criticise with an obvious lack of thought.
Then again I must be displaying some cognitive bias here, I probably wouldn't feel so negative if people said positive yet non-constructive things although they'd be contributing the same as the negative non-constructive. Food for thought.
These stats seem like they would be a good way to help mods not miss anything