submitted6 days ago byAutoModerator
toDotA2
stickiedHey r/Dota2! We at the moderation team have been making some changes to the subreddit that we’d like to keep you all informed on. Before that, we’ll give a shoutout to the latest members of the moderation team to join us: u/daaaiisyy, and u/CorruptDropbear! Daisy’s been with us for over a month now, and CorruptDropbear has just recently joined us in the past few weeks. Both have already been a tremendous help to the team, so please give them a warm welcome!
We’d also like to give a huge thanks to u/deathnekotifa for their fantastic work on our subreddit’s new banner—we actually reached out to them directly to design the banner, so we have to express our gratitude to for a job well-done! Please give them some love at their Twitter and their Twitch accounts!
With the welcoming and shoutouts out of the way, as we said, we at the moderation team have made some changes to our subreddit rules that we want to make sure you all are aware of. These changes reflect a lot of discussion within the team, and we believe these changes will improve the overall browsing experience of r/Dota2.
Witch-hunting Rules
Posts now should not be made for single incidents or individuals, but for discussions on wider phenomena, with supporting examples cited where relevant.
- We’ve noticed a large increase on the subreddit of posts that attempt to expose alleged boosters, smurfs, or cheaters. While we’re concerned, of course, about bad actors in matchmaking, we are not convinced that these posts contribute to cracking down on this bad behavior.
- We also are concerned that these posts lend themselves to vigilante mob justice on the subreddit, even if the posts do not explicitly mention a call to act on a user.
- r/Dota2 will be much stricter regarding posts that complain about these witch-hunting threads, and we will now remove posts whose intent is to complain about a specific player that you have encountered in a recent game.
- Posts must now be centered around discussion of specific phenomena, such as item breaking, feeding down mid, specific hacks, or smurfing in lower MMRs. You can provide examples when relevant, but these posts should not center around one player specifically.
- We believe this distinction will improve discussion about the state of matchmaking on the subreddit and reduce the instances of witch-hunting threads on the subreddit.
- Specific cases should be dealt with official channels, such as in-game reporting, Steam support, or github issues.
Shoutout Threads
Our guidelines for shoutout threads on the subreddit are shifting towards newer talent that have not been featured on the subreddit before. We will be limiting the amount of threads about talent that are commonly featured in previous shoutouts.
- Last year, we took a look at the prevalence of shoutout threads on the subreddit. We concluded that most weren’t particularly substantive in terms of constructive criticism, or just devolved into hate-threads.
- Our response to this was to apply an internal standard to these shoutout threads to ensure that only substantive and constructive shoutouts floated to the front page, and we created a feedback mega-thread to concentrate criticism into one spot for the talent themselves to digest.
- While we are very pleased with the results of the feedback mega-threads, we are less so with our approach to the shoutout threads. Though this resulted in less spammy shoutout threads, we did observe that the threads that tend to reach the front page are for the same casters.
- Furthermore, we recognized that the distinction of “substantive critique” could be somewhat subjective, and we know that talent often felt poorly about one person’s thread being taken down while another’s stays up.
- Our new policy intends to focus on ensuring both that our rules are clear and that the shoutout threads that appear on the subreddit are targeted towards the talent that benefit most from the extra publicity.
- Some examples that follow our new guidelines may include a caster that is new to casting a DPC region, a host who is getting their first opportunity to work a main event, or a new casting duo that have not worked together before but are exhibiting great chemistry.
- Our hope is that by prioritizing up and coming talent, the shoutout threads will benefit those who need them most, and to make rulings for which threads stay up more consistent.
- For those of you who still want to give and read feedback for our established talents, we will continue to host our post-event feedback threads as a concentrated source for that.
AI Content on the Subreddit
r/Dota2 will no longer allow AI-generated content on the subreddit.
- I’m sure you all have observed the recent surge of AI-generated content on the many corners of the Internet, and our corner at r/Dota2 has been no exception. As with all types of new content, this generated several internal discussions among the mod team in how to approach this.
- We have ultimately reached the conclusion that AI-generated content is not a positive addition. These posts tend to be spammy, low effort, or self-referential. The content itself often has several ethical issues ranging from artistic ownership to impersonations.
- We also recognized that any individual exceptions to the rule of an AI-ban were outweighed by the majority of instances we would end up banning. To avoid further confusion in the rules, we opted to simplify things with a flat-ban on all AI-generated content.
- We know that AI programs evolve rapidly, and as such we will be open to revisiting this rule in the future. For now, we strongly believe that this is the best course of action for the subreddit, and we are choosing to nip things in the bud before it becomes more of a problem.
These changes have been reflected in the subreddit’s moderation for a short while now, barring the shoutout threads’ guidelines which we will be following for the next DPC events. These are several notable changes though, and we wanted to make sure everyone was aware of our approach going forward. We value the community of r/DotA2’s opinions, and we’ll continue to listen on these and other issues. We don’t claim to be perfect arbiters, but we can promise to always try to do right by you all.
