Hi r/Cryptocurrency, let’s talk: State of the Subreddit, Mod AMA, Reminders

Hello everyone,

We've decided to make a post here to open a dialogue with you all about some concerns we have, a reminder of some rules, and give you the opportunity to ask us any questions.

The first thing we'd like to talk about is the responsibility of the Mod Team and the Users.

The Mod team is here to enforce these rules:

  • Reddit's rules
  • Cryptocurrency Sub rules
  • Community Governance rules

This means we have to remove content and action accounts that break any of these three type of rules.

ULTIMATELY, our goal is for the Cryptocurrency subreddit to be a place where genuine Redditors can organically discuss Cryptocurrency

What the users do is provide the content, and upvote/downvote other submitted content. This is where things are starting to break down.

Voting Behavior

Our subreddit ranks among the worst on Reddit for the ratio between comments and upvotes.

Thanks to u/finitelite for the analysis

I've been on Reddit long before I was interested in Cryptocurrency, and I continue to participate in other communities. If I look at my comment history I am surprised when I see comments with +50 or +340 upvotes. But then I remember that this isn't the outlier, this is the norm, and it's our community that has such abnormal voting behaviour

What's going on here is fairly obvious. Generally, people are not upvoting other people because they (incorrectly) perceive it means less Moons for them.

The latest distribution had 989k karma split across 7,243 users. Upvoting more people won't even push the needle in terms of getting less Moons for yourself, so don't be afraid to upvote comments or posts that you think provide good value to the space.

We have seen far, far too many really well written and researched posts get between 10-30 upvotes. Meanwhile, it has 380 comments and the top comments have 4x as many upvotes as the OP.

If a user takes the time to research, verify and present a topic, what kind of a reward is it to get a pittance of votes? Meanwhile the guy that just read the title and dropped a vapid joke in gets quadruple your upvotes.

Sorting the Subreddit by top-month shows just 10 posts received >1,000 upvotes. In a month. On the CasualUK subreddit, there have been 93 posts with >1,000 upvotes in one week.

Finally, users are regularly complaining about “downvote bots” in the Meta subreddit. This is an issue, but one that's entirely caused by this subreddit's strange attitude towards upvoting other peoples content. If a comment engages with the discussion, it's not a quick lazy comment, then PLEASE, upvote it!

As per Rule 5: Content Standards – Moderators will be more active scanning and removing low-quality top level comments that aren't actively on topic, are short one line jokes, or are irrelevant to the topic being discussed.

Rules and bad actors.

“Health and Safety rules are written in Blood” – Our rules are written in response to bad actors.

As with any system that provides rewards, there are always incentives for people to try to cheat the system. There is a constant war being waged between Moderators and the people who try and scum more Moons than normal out the system. We have banned thousands and thousands of accounts over the past few years who thought they could avoid detection.

99% of you play by the rules set by Reddit, by the Mods and by the Community. You participate, provide content, build a sense of community and are rewarded with Moons every 28 days.

A small subset of users think they can bypass our tools & Reddit's tools to earn more Moons than they should.

The following actions will lead to a permanent ban, with no warning or appeal for malice:

  • Paying for Upvotes on Posts and Comments
  • Using multiple accounts to bypass Governance rules such as comment/post limits, or the karma cap
  • Participating in private groups to perform vote manipulation
  • Using new or bought accounts to bypass subreddit bans
  • Content theft, or the use of ChatGPT & other AI tools to produce content

We have Moderator-built and Reddit-built tools to detect these, and every round users are banned and removed from Moons distribution. We have dedicated channels and discussions about every ban among the mod team members. There is not an automated ban system other than for referral codes and scam sites.

Unfortunately, we have detected and banned members that were well-known and respected in the community. This one really sucks, and because we don't show leniency – if you break the rules, you go.

Users can appeal their permanent bans as long as they have not misrepresented their actions to Moderators. However, users that continue to try to bypass bans will never be allowed to participate in Cryptocurrency.

Any new information that is passed to the Moderation team which results in positive action being taken against bad actors will be rewarded.

Moderation improvements

We're only human and sometimes we get things wrong.

As activity rebounds from bear market lows, we have ramped up post removals that violate rules on quality content [Rule 5]. Interpretation of rules can be subjective and we understand that some rules are lengthy. Users can therefore be confused or unhappy about the specific reason their content was removed.

We're going to try and make removal reasons more transparent, recently we have included links to the Coin Limits page when topics are removed for exceeding the Coin Limit.

Ultimately, the majority of post removals are correct, and it's up to the whole moderation team as custodians of the subreddit to decide what level of post quality is appropriate in accordance with the three types of rules, listed above.

Recently we have been flairing posts about historic events as “Legacy” and introduced a limit on how many of these can be active at once, this is an example of what we are doing to try and create a diverse selection of posts on the front page.

AMA

Please do feel free to use this post as an opportunity to ask us anything you have on your mind about how the subreddit is ran, any concerns you have etc.

Alternatively, if you have any larger questions feel free to make a post on r/cryptocurrencymeta

You can use the Meta sub for a variety of things:

  • Concerns with moderation
  • Suggestions for subreddit improvement
  • Suggestions for Subreddit or Governance rule amendments

TL;DR

  • Please upvote good content that helps you out, engages with the topic, or provides quality information, and downvote lazy, cheap and repetitive content. If you see examples of users breaking the rules, please report it to the mod team.
  • While the vast majority of users play by the rules, some don't and do end up banned. We want to remind everyone that we do have in-house and Reddit-developed tools to catch people who break the rules, and really don't want to see long-standing members of the community be tempted into breaking the rules.
  • We're open to any improvement suggestions you have, we run this subreddit for you. If you feel like we're getting it wrong, bring it up in the Meta sub.
  • Don't be shy – come and ask us anything.

Thanks!

  • Cryptocurrency Mod Team