How to Prevent Unethical Practices on Sites like Reddit & Quora

How can unethical practices on sites be prevented on sites like Reddit & Quora?

To help website owners with limiting unethical practices on their sites, we asked online business owners and marketers this question for their best advice. From filtering bots to providing training, there are several actions that may help you manage practices on your website for a safer online presence. 

Here are 7 tips for preventing unethical practices on sites like Reddit & Quora: 

  • Filter the Bots
  • Accepting You Cannot
  • Reputation Management
  • Establish Firm Guidelines
  • Discourage Anonymity
  • Use Moderation Bots to Block Spam Responses
  • Provide Training

Filter the Bots

One of the most common unethical practices on sites like Reddit and Quora is plagiarism. Bots scrape forums and repost popular comments and answers to earn karma and views. By creating programs that are able to more effectively identify and filter out these spam accounts, these sites can preserve the authenticity of the content and keep the pages valuable for visitors.

Michael Alexis, TeamBuilding

Accepting You Cannot

The issue with Reddit and Quora is the open forum style of the sites. In order to prevent and keep the protection of patients and keep a positive value is to heavily monitor your page’s conversations and be clear with the rules on your page. Even then, people are able to converse about anything on your page; that is the beauty and horror of Reddit and Quora. Pay attention to employee emotions and try your best to ensure a safe space within your work culture, but overall it can be difficult to prevent unethical practices.

Michael Jankie, Natural Patch

Reputation Management

When it comes to how sites like Reddit and Quora can impact your business, the best way to monitor and manage unethical practices is by engaging in reputation management.  This could mean anything from hiring an outside firm, to monitoring and responding to false threads, to giving the responsibility to someone in house.  Depending on your business, this could be something that needs to be done daily and you can also employ automated methods (Google Alerts is a good place to start) to flag any issues that you might need to review.

Sylvia Kang, Mira

Establish Firm Guidelines

When you establish firm guidelines, you promote knowledge on the behavior that is expected from users. And often, it is essential to let users know in advance what they can and cannot do so that there is no place for ethical oversight. This is especially essential for sites like Reddit and Quora, where users are often known to break the rules. In the presence of firm guidelines, the chances of unethical behavior are greatly reduced.

Krista Haws, Dripped Coffee

Discourage Anonymity

If Reddit or Quora did not allow users to post content without having their real names attached, people would have less incentive to engage in unethical practices. Reddit has always been associated with anonymity, allowing users to post material under a nickname. In some cases, this leads to good outcomes, such as protecting whistleblowers and allowing the oppressed to speak out freely without fear of reprisal. However, it also creates a culture where people feel more at liberty to commit unethical acts.

Chris Thompson, Backdoor Survival

Use Moderation Bots to Block Spam Responses

Spam messages are the most common unethical practices that you will encounter on sites like Reddit and Quora. Such unethical practices continue to prevail because the algorithms on these platforms fail to identify the spam accounts and responses by them. However, using conversation moderation bots available on these platforms allows you to describe spam much better, hence avoiding unethical practices from occurring in your conversations. Additionally, reading through conversation and group regulations such as frequency of posting, the nature of response you can give in a conversation and qualifying contributors helps to prevent unethical practices on these platforms.

Ryan Yount, Luckluckgo

Provide Training

Instead of giving out generic and vague tips on how to stay out of trouble, a detailed training session on the difference between ethical and unethical behavior goes a long way in keeping things clean. Unethical practices exist because users have not been regulated or haven’t been apprised of the rules of the game. In providing training and educating users through real examples, users gain more knowledge and can align their behavior accordingly.

Eva Taylor, WP Buffs

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