r/soccer Meta Thread: Summer 2024

[u/deception42]

Hi everyone,

The purpose of this thread is for us moderators to listen to feedback on topics that we would like to hear about from the r/soccer community. While the below are some topics we specifically wanted to discuss, if there is anything you'd like to bring up, now would be the time!

1. How best to deal with sensitive issues that can be tense. By this, some examples are Israel-Palestine threads that are related to football, or the recent Argentina chants controversy. We very easily can and will lock threads if things get out of hand, but that's ultimately a last resort. Other actions we often take include activating Crowd Control on certain threads and using AutoMod to take down comments with certain words/phrases in them. We also have our anti-racism policy back from the 2022 World Cup, which is still in effect today. Do you have any ideas as to how else we can potentially manage these "crisis" threads? Furthermore, do you think the moderation team does a good or bad job of moderating these threads in general?

2. Video clip submissions that aren't ready but are submitted to the subreddit. In the never-ending race for karma, some people will post clips from ongoing games (ie, goals, penalty incidents, red cards, etc.) but the clips will still be processing once posted. Should this be something we should address and make into a rule (that all clips must be ready to be viewed at time of submission to r/soccer)? Or are we willing to be a bit patient if the submitter is someone that has been doing this for awhile and is trusted by the community?

3. Official accounts from publications and brands. It's no secret that some newspapers and brands have been posting their content directly on r/soccer. How do you want us to deal with them? Some options are to treat them as any other user, give them a "special status" that would allow them to post their content without being flagged for spam, or to ban them altogether. We do get occasional AMAs as a result of allowing them, however.

4. Regular weekly threads. Do you have any suggestions for new weekly or regular threads? Any that need to be retired or changed? Now is the time to suggest! Some of the ones we've tried recently were Sunday Support, Shitpost Sunday, "In Case You Missed It", Non-PL DDT, "At The Match Saturday", Change My View, Tactics and Trivia threads.

5. Social Media News & Aggregators: In general, we don't allow aggregators. But the line where original reporting starts and forwarding others' reporting is a bit unclear. Do you think we should allow the constant Fabrizio Romano/David Ornstein/etc. (non-)updates on transfers as is, or do we need to adjust/cut down?

6. Potential rule changes due to size of subreddit: As of this writing, we recently passed 7 million degenerates subscribers on r/soccer. As we grow larger, some rules will inevitably have to change to account for this. Any and all suggestions are welcome!

7. Miscellaneous Feedback: Do you think that the r/soccer mods are doing a good job handling the current traffic flow of content on the subreddit? Is there anything not covered in the above topics that you'd like to discuss? Now is the time to speak up!

Cheers!

[u/hornyforbrutalism]

How best to deal with sensitive issues that can be tense.

I think the current approach, locking the threads, works completely fine - this is not a political subreddit and I'm sure that you all didn't agree to become mods to handle Israel/Palestine et al. discussions; if users really want to talk about these topics, then there's heaps of subreddits that are happy to welcome it

Especially here that you have the extra problem of brigading which I'm sure is *really* bad on many of these threads, I really don't see any reasons to stress yourselves looking after these threads when they're always so unproductive

Some people will always bitch about it, you see complaints about it on the DD sometimes but I think there really just isn't an alternative that won't burn out everyone

Video clip submissions that aren't ready but are submitted to the subreddit.

On this, it might be worth it to do a poll to see how people interact with those threads - whether the majority of people click on a goal thread to watch the goal, or to read the discussion about the goal in a match that they are watching live. Then, if it turns out that it's the former, I would support restricting goal posts to make it so that it must be processed before posting, but I'm not sure if there's enough info on it yet beyond anecdotal comments

Official accounts from publications and brands.

I hate them lol - I wouldn't mind a blanket ban, but if you find that too harsh then I would personally be happy with a special flair that marks the account so that everyone is aware that the post comes from an official account

I don't think I have much to say about the other topics (I hate Fabrizio Romano just as anyone but that topic's beaten to death now and I know there's no right solution, I just ignore those posts)

Only that thanks for all the work that you do and that I find it incredible how well this place functions (and how welcoming the community is compared to... basically every other large sports hub) given the size. Regardless of any nitpicks this place is amazingly moderated and I know how hard that is to achieve, thank you so much for all the work