r/changelog • u/singmethesong • Aug 25 '21
Introducing Subreddit Forking
Hello, Reddit!
What did Obi-Wan say to Luke when he noticed him eating with his hands? “Use the fork, Luke.”
Now that we’ve got that out of our system - let’s get down to business. Today we’re excited to announce a new experiment aimed at helping communities get created and off the ground - Subreddit Forking!
Every day we see posts that generate thousands of comments. Some of those comments end up gaining enough traction that they end up “forking” and spawning their very own subreddit (check out r/birthofsub for more on this phenomenon). We love seeing these new subreddits sprout up which is why we’d like to test some ways to make it easier for these communities to do so.
How will this work?
Starting today, some users will begin to see a prompt, encouraging them to create a new subreddit should one of their posts or comments gain enough engagement. Depending on the subreddit’s size, we’ve created a dynamic threshold that these posts and comments must surpass in order to trigger this call to action. In order to prevent the spamming of new communities, when triggered this prompt will only appear to the OP and the top 5 commenters within a thread. We’ve also built in a frequency cap to prevent one user from spamming the creation of multiple subreddits.
What are we hoping to see?
Based on our r/birthofasub hypothesis, we’d love to see an uptick in the creation of successful communities over the coming weeks. If we see positive results we’ll begin to look into other ways in which we can support organic forking on the site (ex: when mods fork subreddits, creating larger community networks). We’ll be sure to let you know how our plans fork out should we decide to continue down this path.
Questions?
We’ll be pulling up some chairs in the comments to answer any questions or feedback that you have. Please let us know and may the fork be with you.
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u/Watchful1 Aug 25 '21
This is a terrible idea. As a moderator I absolutely don't want users in my subreddit to be encouraged to fragment and go create new subs.
This feels like a slap in the face for all the hard work moderators do to build their subs. What was the feedback on this feature in the mod councils?
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u/diceroll123 Aug 25 '21
This fancy if-statement may cause subreddit clutter.
I was expecting (as you kind of stated,) community networks being the real takeaway here. For subreddits with niche facets to them that have their own sub-communities, that kind of thing.
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u/lift_ticket83 Aug 25 '21
Subreddit networks are something we're interested in exploring further and a topic we've had a few internal discussions about. The results of this experiment will help guide/inform some of the next steps we'd like to take on this front.
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u/telchii Aug 25 '21 edited Aug 25 '21
I'm really not a fan of this. It feels like you're chasing a shallow growth metric rather than helping existing and established communities to grow.
Discoverability improvements need to exist before there's a push to spawn new communities. Otherwise, this will just generate more subreddits that die within a week, which will lead to more reddit requests. (It feels extremely counterproductive to the recent sub namespace cleanup.)
Since it's already in play, here's my questions:
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How will these forks be linked to the originating subreddit? Will I have control over which subs will be shown as linked to my sub? (I don't want to be automatically linked to a NSFL subreddit that someone decides to spawn off of my sub.)
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What kind of advertisement will happen to let others know about the sub's creation?
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What tools are in place to help these forks survive more than a couple of days?
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If someone creates a fork and isn't aware of the moderator queues and tools, how will this affect their account's standing when their sub inevitably gets spammed and banned?
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u/mookler Aug 25 '21
So a user posts a meme that gets really popular and..."Hey make your meme into a subreddit?"
I get the idea here but I'm not sure this is an AI solved issue, it normally happens organically in comments when merited.
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u/iBleeedorange Aug 25 '21
This sounds like something that will just annoy users. Users already complain about the amount of notifications you guys send to them already. I'm sure it will increase engagement and will be implemented because more engagement means more money for investors and an eventual IPO.
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u/BrainWav Aug 25 '21
Jesus christ no. This sounds like a terrible idea.
I've been a part of several small subreddits for a time. Usually, one of two things happens when someone decides to make a more narrowly-focused sub based on an existing one.
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The new sub withers on the vine, as there's just not enough content. You get a few holdouts trying to post there and their content is lost forever unless it's crossposted.
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The new sub does well, but now the original sub loses a ton of content. Sometimes, this can be good and other content takes the place of the lost stuff, sometimes it leads to the original sub becoming a shell of itself.
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u/SolariaHues Aug 25 '21
From answering questions from new mods on help subs it seems that some don't know everything they're signing up for when they create a community.
It says "Community names including capitalization cannot be changed" in the community creation workflow (though it could be more noticeable, and I don't see it in the picture here - is it not there on mobile?) but could it also say that subs cannot be deleted and that moderating a community is a commitment but help is provided (there are the community building cards which are helpful)?
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u/semi-confusticated Aug 25 '21
subs cannot be deleted
Wow, really? Seems like that would be pretty useful in some cases. I can imagine it would save a lot of trouble for all involved if the mod(s) of an inactive or dead sub could delete it. Then it wouldn't be as necessary for Reddit Admin to do huge cleanup sweeps like that last one they did.
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u/SolariaHues Aug 25 '21 edited Aug 25 '21
Yep.
Sure, but imagine one of the large subs with millions of members suddenly disappearing!
If it were ever to be possible there'd need to be limits on it, like once a sub reached # members it can't be deleted, or just have deletion be by request only. But even then you could be losing access to some good content even if it is already archived.
It's preferable for subs to be handed to someone else or adopted so the community can continue and there are subs to facilitate that. I've adopted a few and revived them via adoption :)
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u/HeyMickeyMilkovich Aug 25 '21
This makes zero sense. It’s completely unnecessary. You guys just got rid of millions of unused subs just to create more unused, soon to be abandoned subs. Seriously who thought of this and why are all your ideas so poorly thought through? Every single time you guys post something, I’m like who the hell thought of this and did they think for more than two seconds? Do you guys talk about these ideas before implementing them? It’s really outstanding how little thought goes into these huge sitewide changes.
You are creating more work for mods. Stop doing that. Stop making things harder for the unpaid volunteers that keep your site going. This is an outrage. It’s even more annoying that you decided to post this while completely ignoring the top post on r/all right now about covid misinformation on this site. Shameful.
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u/cahaseler Aug 25 '21
Sure, that's how a lot of new subreddits start. But The percentage of comments and posts that merit a new subreddit is tiny. For this to not end in spam you need to figure out what makes a comment or post merit a subreddit - and upvotes isn't it.
That said, subreddit discovery is so ineffective that you won't actually affect my experience negatively if you create a million spam subreddits tomorrow. But I'm not sure that's your goal.
Is one of your KPIs/metrics just to increase the number of subreddits? Because this will do that, but not in a way that's good for the site. Might want to rethink those metrics instead.
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u/AbouBenAdhem Aug 25 '21
Once the user confirms the prompt, is there any difference from if the user had created the new sub without prompting?
E.g., do subscribers to the parent sub get any indication of the new sub’s existence?
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Aug 27 '21
Why in god's name am I getting this on subs that I already mod? Why would I want to deliberately fracture one of my own communities?
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u/antihexe Aug 26 '21 edited Aug 26 '21
Neat feature. It's a nice idea designing systems to make communities. App users probably need a little more of a push to engage in subreddit creation. The way this is implemented seems intended to support organic generation.
Find it so interesting that the superuser-jannies don't like the idea of new subreddits that they won't control.
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Aug 28 '21
Boo. This is just an ad for Create Community. And it's going to be popping up and blocking view of posts for no reason.
I thought this would be more useful and actually allow users to create new communities when they comment things like 'r/ something' and that sub doesn't exist yet.
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u/creesch Aug 25 '21 edited Aug 25 '21
This is going to sound a bit cynical maybe but I do think it is a realistic scenario. How are you going to handle the thousands of subreddits that will be created by well meaning people who have no idea how much of a time and effort investment it is to get a subreddit to take off in the first place (not to mention the continued investment)? Considering the effort you recently did go through to clean up unused subreddits I'd think that would have been a consideration.
Looking at the prompt on the screenshot it really doesn't seem to do anything in regards to informing a user about what it all entails.
Next question, why does the screenshot show this for the mobile app? To be blunt, that is arguable the worst interface for people to moderate a subreddit on (even more so for the native app). I get that the mobile apps have the largest userbase but that doesn't mean they are the most suitable platform for everything. If you want people to create and moderate communities on the mobile platform you really ought to prioritize a solid moderation experience on there first.
Edit:
Also how did you take fragmentation in mind? It is nice that a post was successful but why does that imply that a new subreddit is needed? Isn't it entirely possible the post was also a success due to factors like the community of the subreddit it was posted on and the work the moderation team put into that subreddit?
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Thinking it through a bit more, this doesn't even make sense to me even if you ignore the above points. It is hardly ever that a new subreddit is created due to a post that has succes in my experience. More often than not it is because in the comments a discussion is started where at some point there is mention of "there should be a subreddit for that!". The only exception being drama and a meta post, but frankly that doesn't seem like the sort of post you intended this feature for.