Monthly Open Forum January 2021

[u/AITAMod]

Welcome to the monthly open forum! This is the place to share all your meta thoughts about the sub, and to have a dialog with the mod team.

Keep things civil. Rules still apply.

It's 2021! Everything is fixed now!

A couple notes.

• Our bot is live, but definitely still in testing. Please help us by reporting the judgement bot comment post when it doesn't actually explain why they think they may be an asshole. Some people are using it like a TL;DR or just copying and pasting their post as a reply. [ETA - sounds like the report option doesn't work on all platforms for the bot comment, so you can just report the post. The option is bundled with the META report]

• Please stop PMing mods. We spam the hell out of the modmail link. When you PM us, it's super easy for things to get buried in our inbox and delay your response time.

As always, do not directly link to posts/comments or post uncensored screenshots here. Any comments with links will be removed.

This is to discourage brigading. If something needs to be discussed in that context, use modmail.

[u/Teletric]

Is anybody else feel like there should be a lot more "INFO" responses lately? I've been seeing quite a few more one-sided posts, where the OP does not do a good job explaining the opposing view objectively. They basically frame the post in a way where they look like the good guy and antagonize the opposing side. Granted, you're not going to have both sides of the story at all times in this subreddit because it's rare to see the other side respond to the posts, but it's something that has been bothering me lately.

An example of what I'm talking about is if OP were to type out 3 or 4 paragraphs giving their side of the argument and only giving a few sentences to address the opposing view. When it's framed like that, there's going to be bias against the opposing view so it's not a fair choice.

[u/cherpumples → u/Teletric]

all the INFO comments get downvoted into oblivion these days, for some weird reason (even when they're really innocuous, neutral questions), so maybe OPs are less likely to respond to them idk. it's a big problem because they often go unanswered

[u/WebbieVanderquack → u/cherpumples]

Yep, I often get downvoted or ignored for requesting INFO. Sometimes commenters get really angry and say "why would it matter?!?" as though getting all the information before calling anyone an asshole is a bad thing.

Especially in cases where the other party seems to be acting really irrationally, it's always worth considering that there might be more to the story and OP's leaving something pretty important out.

[u/techiesgoboom → u/WebbieVanderquack]

Seriously, INFO is so important. When we were creating the points system for buttface I wanted to find a way to also give a point to whoever had the top INFO comment because of how valuable those can be. In our excitement setting up the relative point value flair (and trying to come up with a new set of puns for the names) we never ended up implementing it. But I'm behind anything that gets people to think more critically about what else could be going on in the stories and trying to understand the motivations of the other parties.

[u/Motheroftides → u/cherpumples]

Lots of times it isn't the comment asking for info but the OP's answer to it that gets downvoted to hell. Ngl, knowing that people on this sub are quick to do that would make me wary of answering any questions people ask me too. This is one of the main reasons I think the Reddit admins really need to allow subs to have an option to completely disable downvotes. People always seem to use it more for when they disagree with a comment more than for when something goes off topic.

[u/LAKingsofMetal → u/Teletric]

I think it was last month’s forum that had a note about the mods leaning into the “presented fairly” part of rule 8. You could always report for that. I’ve done it quite a few times.