Reddit Assessments ‘Mod Notes’ to Present Extra Perception on Customers and Their Contributions in Communities

Reddit has launched an fascinating experiment which primarily offers recommendation and rankings on contributors to subreddits, enabling extra context as to how the person has contributed prior to now.

As you’ll be able to see on this instance, Reddit has launched a brand new check of what it’s calling ‘Mod Notes’, which allows moderators to create informational notes and ideas which might be then hooked up to a person profile for that group.

Right here’s one other have a look at the Mod Notes course of, which additionally features a full log of notes and mod actions utilized to a person inside a selected subreddit. 

As defined by Reddit:

“The profile hovercard might be your house base for accessing Mod Notes and any moderator with Handle Person permissions will be capable to put it to use.”

So it’s not meant to be a public-facing information supply, as such, however it’s designed to provide moderators extra context on every particular person person, and their actions inside the group.

Moderators are capable of mark every subreddit member with one in every of 5 labels:

• Useful
• Good Contributor
• Spam Watch
• Spam Warning
• Abuse Warning

That gives extra methods to not solely weed out probably problematic contributors, but additionally to acknowledge the highest members for his or her ongoing contributions.

It’s an fascinating strategy, which may present one other manner for Reddit, and probably different platforms which may look to adapt related, to share extra context about every person.

Twitter is definitely making an attempt one thing related with its Birdwatch experiment, which allows customers to go away notes on questionable tweets to offer extra context. Earlier this month, Twitter took that mission to the following stage, with some customers now able to view Birdwatch notes from other users on certain tweets.

Reddit’s Mod Notes are, once more, not public, so it’s not precisely the identical, however it takes an analogous strategy in enabling customers so as to add context and oversight to contributors, with the intention to weed out questionable posts and customers.

It’d really be fascinating to see Reddit make these notes out there to common customers, particularly after, say, a sure threshold of studies. If moderators flag a contributor with a number of spam or abuse warnings, they need to be both publicly highlighted, or the person must be eliminated, whereas the ‘Useful’ and ‘Good Contributor’ tags may add extra context to those customers’ feedback, and extra weight to their insights and notes.

The truth that these are allotted by the mods themselves may function each an endorsement and incentive, giving customers one other strategy to get credit score for his or her interactions.

And once more, that would work on different platforms too. Except for Twitter, Fb’s additionally testing up and downvotes on group comments, which may additionally function a way to flag good and dangerous contributors, and add a component of crowdsourced monitoring to its programs.

There are abuse dangers too, which is why platforms have to tread fastidiously (word: Reddit says the function has been in improvement for months). However in case you can allocate a gaggle of trusted overseers, like Reddit mods, or group admins, who can then approve such tags, it could possibly be a useful instrument in enhancing engagement.

Reddit’s Mod Notes at the moment are out there to moderators within the app.