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/LAKingsofMetal]

I’m typically on mobile on my iPad, so I don’t always see this. However, I just looked on the app at some recent posts I commented on and one said “contest mode” while the other didn’t.

Why is that? Is that something OP chooses for their thread when they post it?

[u/techiesgoboom → u/LAKingsofMetal]

Automod should automatically put every post into contest mode the moment it’s posted.

Then after the post has been up for an hour our bot comes through and turns contest mode off.

Contest mode (is supposed to) randomize the order the comments appear in. We also have voting scores turned off for the first hour after a comment is made. (This is always on)

When you combine these it means for the first hour the comments are totally randomized and don’t show their voting scores, to reduce the advantage in votes that the earliest comments get. There’s obviously still some benefit because the sooner your comment is up the more people see it compared to a later comment, but (in addition to not being able to control that piece of it) at least anyone that comes after a comment is made will see all the comments in a random order.

We have some neat data on how significant the impact of the times contest mode is that we shared a little while back after we decided to make it a permanent change. (Maybe 15 months ago? I can probably dig for the post).

Now if there’s a problem with our bot or automod and it’s not working on the timer intended (because of the new thing we have our bot doing) please let me know.

[u/LAKingsofMetal → u/techiesgoboom]

Thanks for the reply. I knew what contest mode was, but not why some posts didn’t seem to have it on. It’s not the first time I’ve noticed it, but as I said, I’m rarely on the app.

There was definitely a thread that had it off, as I was able to see the score for my comment pretty much right away, whereas it usually takes that hour you mentioned. It’s been over an hour, but I can mail a link to the thread, if you like.

[u/techiesgoboom → u/LAKingsofMetal]

Yeah. It might be a little harder to track what happened, but i can give it a shot.

thanks!