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ArchivedStickied post

Here is a quick run-up of expectations for moderators. Feel free to let me know if something needs to be added or updated!

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I was just watching this video about Bezos talking about Blue Origin. Which is massively underrated in today's world.

I was going to share it on Futurology but just remembered that an eye-opening video I recently posted was removed due to Rule 12 - Support Original Sources.

I don't think this rule should apply to videos. Sometimes video interviews like this one last hours and the original video may not even be online. Rehosted clips like this one help us share critical videos where important futurology related information is being discussed in short and convenient ways.

I would like to post the Bezos video clip. My suggestion is we not apply Rule 12 to videos like this one. There's tons of video clips out there with important figureheads discussing important stuff like this one. Let's make it easier to share them.

Thoughts?

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As many of you may know, AMA participation seems to be on the slide all over Reddit, and we’ve seen the same effect on r/Futurology & subs like r/Science have stopped doing them completely.

In the case of r/Science they blamed changes to reddit algorithms that stopped AMAs getting to r/all with any frequency, and thus made the time investment from AMA participants unprofitable.

In our case, people sometimes seem less interested than the days prior to us becoming a default sub when we had just 40K subscribers. That said a recent Kimbal Musk AMA bucked that trend & was one of our business ever and made it to r/all with over 1,200 comments & that with just 48 hours notice.

We’ve also been helped lately by Reddit admin u/Chtorrr, sending AMA’s our way & we’ve her to thank for Kimbal Musk & an upcoming very prestigious AMA with Vaclav Smil.

I’d previously gone the r/Science route and abandoned approaching AMA participants, as I feel if we can’t guarantee a certain amount of traffic to their site/book launch, etc - then there’s no quid pro quo reason for them to be interested in us.

But I’d like to have one more bash at trying to make AMA’s work & i’d appreciate feedback on what is appropriate/not appropriate.

In particular if we used Discord & posts to the sub to attract/organize a “Friends of AMA” group who would support AMA’s by upvoting (among other PR measures) - is this vote brigading/against Reddit guidelines, or is it OK?

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Hi fellow mods! Was wondering if I could get full config access. Wanted to add rules to filter ICO posts and what not. Please check out Discord for the recent discussion.

Edit: The ICO thing has been fixed now, but it's also more for the occasional things that creep up over the css occasionally. Like AMAs where things might need some fixing in the sidebar.. General cleanup and stuff, old things like the "Check out the Tech & Science Summary of the Week every Friday and Sunday!" still left over. So overall just stuff like that.

Also Abrown mentioned that we might need to take a look at the other mods who've been here a while and see what upgrades they can get. So this might be a good time to discuss that also?

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So we had been having this discussion over on Discord a few days back. About banning reposts completely due to the higher volume of active posts recently. The trend is only going to increase as the pace of progress speeds up. Also, a major nuisance is people taking up a month or two old super popular post and reposting it to farm karma. Another issue is heavily sensationalist coverage of the same story but posted after a week or two.

So, to curb all this, a simple permanent ban on all reposts should fix it. And Rule 13 can just stay fine, there are no issues as long as old posts are not reposts. A conditional exception to the Rule 9 & 13 could be predictions published in the past.

Edit: A repost would be defined as: Coverage of same story as original post with no new added info. Reposts of popular stories where you have several duplicates, the one that reaches >100 upvotes first would stay approved.

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The mod team has previously discussed and supported this before in our now superseded Slack mod channel.

We proposed to blacklist and ban tabloid news sites, usually U.K. ones.

The proposed list:

Dailymail.co.uk Express.co.uk Thesun.co.uk Mirror.co.uk Dailystar.co.uk Metro.co.uk

This current post reminded me of the rubbish and sensationalist headlines they use:

https://www.reddit.com/r/Futurology/comments/8h5a1z/time_traveller_shows_picture_of_mars_in_the_year/

Mods, please vote in this thread. I’ll give it a few days. If there is support I’ll add to the wiki and automod filter.

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They applied via Modmail, so all the details below.

https://mod.reddit.com/mail/all/3p9s7

EDIT: This is clearly a No - I've let the person know, and why.

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Hi everybody, I'm a newly joined mod specifically interested in increasing user engagement on Discord. You might have voted on me in the previous post. Thanks for all the positive support, I was quite overwhelmed. Also, as u/mvea suggested I'd love to help redesign our sub into a fitting futuristic theme, if you find some really cool looking wireframes please let me know. I'm down for it whenever we're ready for the redesign.

So as you'd have noticed on the discord server. u/lord_stryker just recently made an announcement:

A recent suggestion by one of our users was to allow the ability for someone to "mention" via the roles we have in discord (Currently Android, Space Explorer, Clone, etc.)... it was suggested that conversations can become difficult to follow in channels and a way to let people know a certain topic is under discussion is to let people use the @"role" to notify anyone who has that role in their profile that a topic of interest is under discussion..... So, we're putting it up for a vote to the community. Should we allow the ability to notify users with the @"role"? Users that have the indicated role in their profile and have their settings in such a way to be notified will receive notifications on discord whenever anyone uses the @"role" of a role you have included in your discord profile. There is some concern this could lead to spamming and annoyance, but could also let users be notified when a topic they're interested in comes up. Should we implement this, we will need to add many new roles (such as "Crispr","UBI", "cryonics", "post-scarcity", etc.). We would need community feedback on which roles (and in this case would serve as a topic of discussion) to be added.

So the poll was positive in favor of more than 3:1.

The question now is whether the roles should sound like titles or just indicate simply the topic name.

  • @Singularitarian
  • @AGI Developer
  • @Biotechnologist
  • @(Societal) Economist
  • @Energy Hacker
  • @Nanotechnologist
  • @Roboticist
  • @Space Explorer
  • @Cyborg
  • @3D-Printer
  • @Virtual-Realist
  • @UBI-ist
  • @Post-Scarcist
  • @Dark-Futurologist

There's been a little concern that it might be confusing, I totally understand that, but I feel the gist is clear and the titles(Biotechnologist) are more official and instill a sense of belonging like you can wear your interests proudly versus simply the bland topic name(Biotech). So what should we do? Sense of belonging/Cool titles vs Convenient simple words?

Of course, we'll also have some non mentionable cosmetic roles like @Android, @Clone, @Hivemind, etc.

So kindly vote with Title in support of titles(Biotechnologist) or Simple Topic Name in support of simple names(Biotech). Or if you have other suggestions, please let me know.

Edit: Please feel free to jump on Discord to ask me if you have any questions too.

Thank you!

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u/TransPlanetInjection has applied to be a Mod.

He's particularly interested in helping the Discord channel take off, and has been helpful there so far suggesting how to improve how its used & was the person who suggested using @roles there.

He's a Mod of r/Singularity & also a Front-End Developer. Coding user interfaces with CSS & HTML - which could be handy with the reddit redesign.

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I propose we change this rule to 7 days, instead of 2-3:

Avoid posting content that is a duplicate of a submission posted within the last 2-3 days.

We get a fair amount of reports on posts that our users consider duplicates but end up being older than 3 days.

We've gotten a few +1s on the slack regarding this change so I figure I'd make an official vote here before proceeding with this change.

/u/sirt6 mentioned having a threshold for number of upvotes on the first post. As in, if the first post has <50 upvotes, then the duplicate post is OK.

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As we've recently been discussing the shortcomings in keeping a record of site bans. I setup a private sub-reddit we can use for this.

I invited all existing Mods to be Mods of it, let me know if I missed anyone.

I suggest from now on we keep all discussion about individual sites in just one post. That way the search function allows us to quickly locate it and see everything discussed about it. If anyone accidentally creates a second post about site XYZ.com, we'll copy its contents and delete it.

The Wiki has a record of all sites currently banned.

I stickied as announcements 2 [META] posts where we can discuss how we administer bans & use the sub-reddit.

In the next few days maybe we should start creating posts for sites that are on the ban list, but no one can remember why & we can investigate if we should unban them.

I think we could do with clarifying some of our policies too - for example temp versus permanent bans - when to use & for how long ?

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Transparency, clear documentation and the ability of Mods to moderate other Mod actions is normally a given in how we operate, but it seems we sorely lack that when it comes to sites being banned as sources.

If you look through the banned site list on auotmod - I'm no idea why 95%-99% of those sites are banned.

What can we do improve this ?

Should we have a review & possible amnesty for websites where no Mods can actually remember why they were banned in the first place? It seems like Guantanamo Bay for websites otherwise.

Should we have time limits on new bans? How might we implement this?

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What'd you guys think of 'stickying' self.futurology discussions made by community members and maybe rotate them out every few hours (or day or so as they come in) if the question/statement/discussion topic is good?

Probably ask the OP if it's ok to sticky.

Maybe ask the community if this is something they'd be interested in.

Possibly flair the post differently (i.e. community discussion, interesting discussion, member question, moderator pick)

TLDR. Should we 'sticky' community discussions?

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Hi guys!

Since the alpha of the redesign is going to be gradually rolled out to users imminently, I have created the barebones of our look, just based on our old design. I also added menu links to represent the links we had at the top of our sub for navigation. For a laugh, look in Slack chat history to see the old version, it was super ugly!

What I didn't do is add any widgets or other fun design elements. I also didn't touch flair. We should look into these features and decide what we want to use.

Sorry if I overstepped by setting this up; we discussed briefly on Slack and decided we should at least have something before the roll-out to public.

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(If there are no further contributions or considerations, i will be posting this as a sticky with a meta flair tomorrow 3/15)

Here are some tips on how to find content to submit to r/Futurology:

Use the keyword list below to:

  • Set up Google notifications

  • Search #hastags around the web

  • Find topics on news aggregator apps/sites (i.e. Flipboard, Feedly)

Futurology keywords starter pack:
Artificial intelligence Augmented reality Automation
Biotechnology Brain–computer interface Cybernetics
Digital currency Futurism/Futurology Genetic engineering
Nanotechnology Quantum computer Robotics
Singularity Transhumanism Vertical farming
  • Follow futurist on twitter that usually post good content
Futurist on Twitter starter pack:
Garry Kasparov @Kasparov63 Martin Ford @MFordFuture [James Barrat @jrbarrat
Calum Chace @cccalum Eliezer Yudkowsky @ESYudkowsky Rohit Talwar @fastfuture
Gerd Leonhard @gleonhard David Pearce @webmasterdave Rodney Brooks @rodneyabrooks
Joi Ito @Joi Ramez Naam @ramez Kevin Kelly @kevin2kelly
Steve Jurvetson @dfjsteve Thomas Frey @ThomasFrey George Dvorsky @dvorsky
David Brin @DavidBrin Anders Sandberg @anderssandberg Peter Diamandis @PeterDiamandis
James Hughes @citizencyborg Nikola Danaylov @singularityblog Juan Enriquez @EvolvingJuan
  • Visit popular futurology related websites like
Futurology wesbsites starter pack:
https://singularityhub.com/ http://www.kurzweilai.net/ https://ieet.org/
https://www.singularityweblog.com/ https://futurism.com/ https://www.technologyreview.com/
https://spectrum.ieee.org/
  • Also join other Futurology related groups and communities on social media like Facebook, Google+, and reddit.

If you have more to add to these list please do so in the comments below.

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(In order to get more diversity of users to submit content to r/Futurology maybe we should give the community some pointers on how to find and submit content to r/Futurology)

Here are some tips and tricks on how to find and submit content on r/Futurology.

  • Set up google notifications for futurology topics (i.e a.i., automation, genetic engineering, etc)
  • Follow futurist on twitter that usually post good content (i.e. ramez nam, ray kurzweil, david brin, etc)
  • Join other futurology related groups on social media platforms like facebook, google+
  • Frequent popular futurology related websites like IEEE, singularityhub, kurzwiel.net, etc. etc. etc,

(What do you guys think? Do you have any other suggestions?)

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(Over on Slack a couple moderators and I have decided it might be a good idea to put together a futurology moderator AMA. This post is kind of a rough draft on how i think it should be formatted.)

Hi, we are the moderators of r/Futurology. Ask us anything about artificial intelligence, automation, climate change, etc.

Some of the moderators participating in the AMA are:

/u/moderator, /u/moderator, /u/moderator, etc.

This is also your chance to give us feedback on the sub and maybe some opportunities for improvement. (edit: this might have to be a separate post)

Thanks for being the best part of this sub.

Sincerely,

r/futurology moderator team.

(Please give feedback in the comments below and also if you're interested in participating in the AMA)

((Edit. We're scrapping this idea.))

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Should we vastly increase the amount of mods on our subreddit?

Pros: Better moderated discussions and submissions, new moderating ideas+collaborations, growth in futurology community members, more active image for subreddit users

Cons: More chance of power abuse, drama, more work keeping track of activity, and harder to reach >100 action quota

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u/Sirisian initiated a discussion on a topic we've discussed before.

The fact that some topics are so popular (Space Jesus, UBI, Renewables, etc, etc) that at times we seem to be swamped with repetitive identikit posts, that are just minor variations on a theme, but are always getting upvoted anyway, as the topics are so popular.

As u/Sirisian observes, this crowds out space for posts that "create new and original discussion in some way."

I remember from discussing this before, noting we don't lack for posts that create new and original discussion, it's just they don't get the attention.

So rather than tacking this problem my limiting the repetitive popular posts - perhaps we could go about this the other way around?

How could we distinguish and help posts with genuinely fresh & unusual view points?

CSS Color changes? "Interesting" Flair? Best of the weeks "Interesting" Post stickied every week?

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