CryptoCurrency

We are considering some large changes in r/CryptoCurrency. Nothing is decided, but your feedback will help us decide what to do.

Some of us moderators are not satisfied with the type of posts that make their way to the frontpage every day. They often are borderline low-quality, related to some daily drama, or related to a specific project without much interest to the rest of the community. We want to encourage people to participate in more discussions than simply projects people hold or hate, and we want to better protect the subreddit against vote manipulation.

I personally believe that r/CryptoCurrency moderators have done an exceptional job limiting community interference. We have a world-class team with years of experience spotting brigading and other manipulation. We have automated tools that send us notifications of suspicious activity, and we have taken aggressive action to prevent sources from taking advantage of you. But we want to do better.

There are many sources that are in a weird middle ground, and they are over-represented on this subreddit. I'm referring to blog spam, articles that wrap other news in a shill package, and Twitter drama. Many of these sources are used as reference points for discussion when there are many other better journalism articles that could paint these perspectives in a more accurate light than @superPAMP6969 on Twitter.

We are considering some options to help increase the quality of posts on the subreddit and to encourage discussion outside of mini-silos. Some are small and iterative, and others are large and expansive.

1. Tighten low-quality rules. We have many low-quality rules already, and we can start by enforcing these better. We can add a few more for the egregious violations. This is the smallest change and should have a small positive difference. However, our rules are already complex, and many users complain about the difficulties of navigating them. Furthermore, they are difficult to enforce. "Low quality" is relatively subjective, even if we outline requirements and examples. It also requires a lot of manual intervention.

2. Create a greylist. We have spent several months reviewing most links that have been submitted and evaluating them according to a quality scale. We rate the news sources on a number of factors, including objectivity, interesting/unique points of view, conflict of interest transparency, and research depth. We can take those with a low score and begin imposing more restrictions. They may be limited to one post every week, for example. This would have a moderate improvement in the quality of content. However, it is difficult to fine-tune the restrictions to be appropriate. Ideally, we would only allow the "good" posts and not allow the "bad" ones, but this is essentially impossible. This would require moderators to maintain a list of these sources on a scale, each with different levels of restrictions.

3. Create a whitelist. On one extreme, we can only allow external links to the best whitelisted domains. We will do our best to incorporate sources from a large number of points of view, and we will include an application process (we already have one drafted). However, there will inevitably be some cases where quality sources will be undiscovered. Self/text posts are not affected, so people can always create a discussion that links to other non-whitelisted sources as long as they provide the required surrounding context. This is probably the lowest-effort method for us moderators. Ideally, us moderators would no longer be the gatekeepers of specific content by instead asking these whitelisted news sources to be the gatekeepers, but moderators will still have influence over the chosen sources. To mitigate the chance of malicious behavior, we propose a transparent accept or reject decision for each source application in r/CryptoCurrencyMeta. Users can see the reasons and comment on the decisions.

We're open to other ideas to make this subreddit better for everyone. There is a lot of additional nuance for each of these, so please comment on ways you would improve any of these! We can make reasonable adjustments.

And of course, please subscribe to r/CryptoCurrencyMeta, where we occasionally have meta discussions about the subreddit and answer questions. It's the best way to get in touch with us about an issue that impacts the subreddit and to help keep us honest.