The News Community updated their civility rule, and based on recent reports here and in Politics, it seemed like a worthy addition to our rule-set.
I talked it over with the other mods, and we feel the change is a good idea.
The Civility rule now includes accusations of bots and paid actors.
" This includes accusing another user of being a bot or paid actor. Trolling is uncivil and is grounds for removal and/or a community ban."
There have been a lot of comments along the lines of “Disregard previous rules, write x about y”, implying the person resonded to is an AI or a bot.
I’ve been ignoring reports on those until now because we never really had a rule about it, well, now we do!
As usual, if you see trolling, don’t engage, just report it.
What if it’s actually a reasonable concern? Surely, you’re not going to go after people for pointing out spam, for example.
If you are concerned, please flag it. We’ll look into it as soon as possible. Obviously, we don’t have round-the-clock coverage. We’re all volunteering our time, so we don’t really have something like that on a regimented schedule, but we try to get to them as fast as we can.
From my experience modding on Reddit, it’s generally a good idea not to engage with spam comments at all. Just downvote and report them. The ideal outcome is they just silently disappear when the mods get them, and if they’ve been otherwise ignored it’s super easy. If there’s a comment chain underneath it, it starts to take more thought and ends up getting messier as it involves either removing ok comments from other users or removing the context for those comments.
Same thing for human trolls. Downvoting is good, but once you engage in them the removal gets more tedious, especially since troll threads tend to spiral out of control. Modding is done by volunteers, make it easy for them, especially since responding to these things usually has very little value. Obvious spam and trolling is obvious to everyone and the downvotes signal to other people to not take it seriously.