r/ireland • u/AutoModerator • Jun 26 '24
š£ ANNOUNCEMENT R/Ireland Feedback thread
We would like to hear feedback from you all as to what is working well on the sub, what isn't working well on the sub etc...
Leave any feedback you have within this thread and we'll have a look through it.
We know you all love a bit of mod bashing, but try and keep things constructive.
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Jun 26 '24
Too much focused on news articles and not letting people express themselves more. Allow more questions I think would be great
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Jun 26 '24
People can express themselves as long as their opinions are the same as those of the mods.
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u/ZealousidealFloor2 Jun 26 '24
Too many posts being removed to r Ireland because they are deemed questions. Some of the best threads on this have came as a result of people asking stupid questions.
This thread gets much more traction too so is more beneficial than the Ask Ireland subreddit, it would also mean more posts as sometimes thereās not many going on here.
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u/Impressive_Light_229 Jun 26 '24
Iāve actually stopped using r/Ireland because of this. r/askireland is much better these days. The only thing r/ireland seems to allow is reposts of news stories?
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u/alfbort Jun 26 '24
Yep wall to wall news article posts with the odd OC picture thrown in. r/Ireland might as well be a news aggregator at this point
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u/fullmetalfeminist Jun 26 '24
And the news articles that get posted always seem to be bad news, and certain accounts here focus exclusively on reports of crime and/or problems with immigrants, asylum seekers and other "fordiners"
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u/ashfeawen Jun 26 '24
I tend not to see the sidebar of these related subs on mobile, so it might be good to have semi-regular threads that point in their direction. A round-up of the best discussions or questions of the week, in a similar manner to the Sunday thread
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u/TheChrisD Jun 26 '24
That would involve curation, which would require members of the team to make an effort to notice and update scheduled threads with that sort of stuff. Not saying it couldn't be done, but it would be a not-insignificant workload.
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u/wascallywabbit666 Jun 26 '24
Agreed. It's an auto mod thing, so the moderators may not even be aware it's happening.
There was a guy on here the other day saying he'd deliberately not used a question mark in the title of his post to avoid triggering the automod
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u/underover69 Jun 26 '24 edited Jun 26 '24
Iām fine with some questions.
Like āWhatās the worst deli roll order?ā or āWhat new Irish books have you recently read?ā
But we also get tons of āWhat do you think about Ireland being neutral?ā Or āWhat do your think of nuclear power?ā
Thatās not even including the hundreds of easily googled questions like āis there a paintball place in Kerry?ā
I personally respond to many every week that involve me just googling the problem and linking the first response from google.
Those users rarely engage further after asking the question.
But in general Iām up for more questions.
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Jun 26 '24
that involve me just googling the problem and linking the first response from google.
Probably wouldn't take a great deal for a developer to get a bot to do that.
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u/damian314159 Jun 26 '24
The issue is that this will lead to a lot of low effort or unrelated posts. I think it's a good rule personally.
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Jun 26 '24
Just avoid searching by new, let reddit do it's thing and allow the upvotes and down votes to dictate what appears and doesn't.
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u/DVaTheFabulous Jun 26 '24
PLEASE get rid of the "to the person who..." posts. Realistically they won't be seen by that person being referred to and oftentimes the stories are boring anyway. "To the person who held the door open for me.. thanks". We don't need that.
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u/badger-biscuits Jun 26 '24
Auto ban for whinging about the cost of deli purchases
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u/Popeyespajamas Jun 26 '24
Seconded. Every week, multiple pictures of 7 euro breakfast rolls. Not that cost of living isn't worth a post in some cases but deli is getting old.
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u/TheFreemanLIVES Jun 26 '24
8 Euros, it's gone up in the last hour.
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u/Shiv788 Jun 26 '24
Seems to be one mod in particular who just hands out bans to anyone they want for no reason, they banned some long term posters here for stating a politician sexually assaulted someone, despite there being a news article about it. Have seen a few threads on other Irish subs where its a wide spread issue of people just being banned for no reason, other than someone is on a power trip.
Even messaging about why posts are removed despite not breaking the rules get you responses like this
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Jun 26 '24
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u/sirfive_al Jun 26 '24
After he was removed from the mod team, the lad sent me a DM asking me to name a time and place so he could show up with his fists out
Lovely bloke ...
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Jun 26 '24
Did he have a good post history before the power trip got to him or were ye desperate for mods at some stage?
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u/lampishthing Jun 27 '24
He seemed ok in his mod application and had been ok when participating on the subreddit. Wasn't a first choice but didn't display any warning signs. Was fine for a couple of months after joining the mod team then a couple of prolific mods (including me) starting easing off and he was lifting much more of the load... without the supervision he became a cunt. I saw warning signs for a couple of months, being honest, but I had real life commitments and no one else in the team had the time to step up. Also he was terminally online so those that were on weren't seeing much action anyway, and new mods wouldn't have made a difference if he was there too.
In the end he banned someone very loud for some bullshit and we did a review and his actions were much worse than I'd suspected. The rest is public, really. The main lessons were that you need a larger cohort of active mods to watch each other than we had, and if someone is doing so much that the sub's state of mind isn't known to the rest of the team then they should be made to stop before something weird happens.
Anyway, this thread is locked. I'm unlocking it to send this because I regard the whole episode as a personal failing and feel like the community deserves explanation. DM me if you have further questions.
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u/RandomRedditor_1916 Jun 26 '24
Autobanning questions needs to go, within reason. this sub is basically just a regurgitation of the news.
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u/CyberCooper2077 Jun 26 '24
Be a bit more lenient when it comes to bans? Maybe give more warnings instead of outright banning.
People can make the odd stupid comment now and again ya know.
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Jun 26 '24
Remove more low effort posts.
Particularly ones that complain about the cost of things in places that were always expensive. Eg. Pints in Temple Bar, food at the airport, energy drinks in petrol stations, etc.
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Jun 26 '24
Why go to the effort of removing something that won't generate upvotes? Just allow the voting system to dictate what appears on the main and rising pages and what doesn't.
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Jun 26 '24
Not sure if anything can be done about them, but some of the posts about assaults or witnessed crime are fictional. They often come from accounts with suspicious history, and one of them a few days ago was a word for word copy of a popular post made last year.
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Jun 26 '24
You mean that time everybody said people were spiking people in night clubs with injections was false??!!??
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Jun 26 '24
I don't remember those specifically, but I remember during the pandemic when everyone got a bit screwy and thought that utility markings or litter on the street outside their house was a secret burglar code.
Time and time again, r/Ireland has had moral panics and Facebook style meltdowns about whatever boogeyman is in the news. This is regrettable but somewhat understandable as motivated by fear. However, anyone who is deliberately fabricating stories to further an agenda or just farm karma is being a dick.
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u/Bejaysis Jun 26 '24
Or the time hundrreds of SUV's in Dublin 4 were being vandalised by eco-warriors. Or the time schoolgirls were being preyed upon by teachers because they were sent a polite letter reminding them about the uniform policy? In fairness I think both of those were tweets scraped from the bottom of the barrell by Newstalk and given a full day of airtime on the radio.
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u/TheChrisD Jun 26 '24
and one of them a few days ago was a word for word copy of a popular post made last year.
Modmail us links to both the original post and the suspected repost, and we will take a look at it.
Obvious repost bots we generally yeet on sight.
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u/ubermick Jun 26 '24
Would much prefer the mods cracked down a bit less on people asking questions, and a bit more... well, a LOT more really, on posts moaning about the same stuff over and over and over and over again.
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u/dropthecoin Jun 26 '24
I get why some posts are advised to go to the other subs but some posts seem too quick to be pushed into the other subs like askireland or casual Ireland. Some of those posts are genuine, decent or funny.
As a result it feels like this particular sub has been repurposed to be only concerned with certain topics and narratives.
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u/spongebud Jun 26 '24
Can we bring back polls?
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u/TheChrisD Jun 26 '24
The way Reddit implements polls is really crap though. On most platforms, unless you have opened the thread directly, you will be presented with the poll options without the accompanying body text. It also means poll posts take up an annoyingly large amount of screen real estate in the post feeds.
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u/dentalplan24 Jun 26 '24 edited Jun 26 '24
I hate raising problems without offering a solution, but the sub is genuinely excessively negative most of the time. There's a strong vein of misery in Ireland's cultural identity (maybe we like it) but my experience of this sub does not match my experience of wider Irish society or even any specific communities in Ireland. There will always be some that view each topic through a negative lens and even a few who view every topic through a negative lens, but it's incredibly common to see cynical, dour, thoughtless commentary get highly upvoted in the threads here. I don't think it does anyone any good for the community to be constantly wallowing in misery and more than once it's made me contemplate the unsubscribe button.
I wish I could point to an easy fix for this problem, as I've perceived it, but there's nothing specific I can think of that I would be confident would help.
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u/Hardballs123 Jun 26 '24
We wouldn't be commenting on Reddit if we were all happy well adjusted people
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Jun 26 '24
I'm genuinely curious, if you have this opinion why do you keep browsing r/ireland? Nowadays it's only about news, something you can read somewhere else, all good conversations here either get downvoted or relegated to other subs.
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u/wascallywabbit666 Jun 26 '24
That's just social media though. Personally I find Reddit to be less toxic than others. Within that, r/Ireland is one of the more positive subs. But you're always going to have that negativity
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u/jocmaester Jun 26 '24
R/Ireland has cultivated a certain kind of member base, I'm not sure if mods are responsible but its somewhat an echo chamber in this subreddit, I'd prefer less moderation personally.
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Jun 26 '24
A Purge once a year where the Mods abandon the sub and anything goes for 24hrs.
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u/TheChrisD Jun 26 '24
Full disclosure: we almost had an instance like this fairly recently when Anti-Evil Ops sitebanned Farmer for a modmail reply to a deletion/ban that someone decided was "harassing" them.
It was only that they overturned the ban later that day after I sent a rather... stern message to the admins about it, that we didn't end up going ahead with it.
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Jun 26 '24
Can you either prevent premium articles or let people post summaries in the comments because it feels like every second post is a paywalled article
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Jun 26 '24
There are way too many article posts - most of the time itās just karma farming by posting a popular article, and zero input from the OP. I swear some posters just wait for a breaking news link and get it up here within seconds. A hard one to fix admittedly. Maybe a required amount of text to support the link?
Removing question posts is a poor choice imo. Half the time there will be healthy engagement and discussion under a question post.
Transparency - I find mods arenāt that transparent on why something is removed or someone is banned etc usually itās a sarcastic reply when questioned. Reminds me of boards when the mods used to write in bold and demand people play nice, āor elseā.
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Jun 26 '24
I swear some posters just wait for a breaking news link and get it up here within seconds
I often have interactions on this sub with OPs who clearly haven't actually read the article they have posted, even several hours after posting it.
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u/TheChrisD Jun 26 '24
There are way too many article posts - most of the time itās just karma farming by posting a popular article, and zero input from the OP.
Why should there be onus on the submitter to have an opinion on the news?
Maybe a required amount of text to support the link?
Given how we explicitly block self-text bodies for link submissions for 1) preventing editorialisation, and 2) allowing the link and the OP opinion to be voted on separately; that's not something we can realistically enforce.
I find mods arenāt that transparent on why something is removed or someone is banned etc
Are you referring to this as in modmail replies, or as in-thread notifications?
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Jun 26 '24
Why should there be onus on the submitter to have an opinion on the news?
Because Reddit is geared around opinions and discussions and ideally shouldn't just be a link post dumping ground. Obviously it gains discussion once submitted, but I do find there is an excessive amount Articles posted on here. Some days it's akin to an RSS newsfeed. My suggestion on requiring an opinion is to make it a small barrier so that the karma farming folk won't bother posting.
Given how we explicitly block self-text bodies for link submissions for 1) preventing editorialisation, and 2) allowing the link and the OP opinion to be voted on separately; that's not something we can realistically enforce.
Fair. I don't know what the easiest solution is, but it's an obvious pain point for a lot of users based on this thread. At the same time, there are good discussions on article posts so ĀÆ_(ć)_/ĀÆ
Are you referring to this as in modmail replies, or as in-thread notifications?
On-thread.
Curious on why you ignored the point around Questions posts? Is that something that will be coming back, it's popping up as an issue here a fair bit. I like how r/London does it, they allow questions (!) but lock repeated posts that ask a question asked many times before, e.g. "Can I live in London on X Salary".
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Jun 26 '24
weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeooooooooooooooooooooooooeeeeooeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeooooooooooooooooooooweeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeoooooooooo.
what? you said this was the feedback thread
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u/ashfeawen Jun 26 '24
unstraps a bag of oats from a horse
Ohh, I misheard what this thread was about
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Jun 26 '24
Mods out!
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u/x-di Jun 26 '24
Iād suggest add to the posting news headline rules that OP has to provide a first comment stating relevance or opinion on the subject.
Also with the general election coming up some time soon, would be good to have a complete ban on posting electoral material from any candidate/party unless itās a news headline or something. Posters, flyers, that sort of thing. Political discussion is healthy to a point, but we all know thereās going to be an influx of suspicious accounts promoting weird material posing as innocent bystandersā¦
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u/biggoosewendy Jun 26 '24
I donāt bother posting here anymore because I get shuffled over to other subs so thatās kinda boring. Sometimes I want the chaos from this sub in my answers!!
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Jun 26 '24
Get new mods. The power trips are unreal.
Stop removing posts that is a question. Most of the time it's not worth posting on here as chances are it would get removed anyway.
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Jun 26 '24 edited Jun 26 '24
Youāre trying to create an echo chamber of your own opinions which are not grounded in anything objective allow more dialog on contentious issues
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u/notacardoor Jun 26 '24
Yeah. This is fairly widespread on Reddit. every sub tends to end up on one end of the political spectrum. But it's not representative of Ireland. You don't even have to overtly and passionately assert your opinion, merely disagreeing with a perceived consensus is enough to get obliterated in comments and downvotes.
During the referendum I was voting no. We actually made that choice as an informed family as we look after a disabled child. Well, if I wasn't the biggest bigoted tradwife loving bible bashing misogynist according to this sub and it was tolerated by mods. That would never have happened the other way around.
And it's not like I was arguing even. I just stated I'd be more comfortable with a no vote. I'm ok even now with anyone that decided to vote yes. We have disagreements and that's ok. But the lefty, smug, gotcha style attitude of the sub is a little obnoxious at times.
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Jun 26 '24 edited Jun 25 '26
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u/zeldazigzag Jun 26 '24
Or at least an automod message directing them to r/Irelandsshitedrivers
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Jun 26 '24
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u/Comfortable-Can-9432 Jun 26 '24
Oh this, this, this!!! That was fucking woeful.
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u/irqdly Jun 27 '24
Hi all,
On behalf of the entire r/Ireland mod team - thanks for all the feedback.
All of your comments have been read by the team. We will now be locking this post.
If you have any further suggestions let us know via modmail.
SlƔinte