Post-Meta Thread: Summer 2023

Back during the summer, the mod team at /r/soccer hosted one of our semi-regular Meta Threads, which can be found here.

We have taken some time to look through all of the feedback and discussions in the thread, and would like to properly feed back to the community our response on some of those issues, and any adjustments to the community rules and moderation policies going forward.

Some of the matters raised in the thread we have not yet been able to address - or are ongoing issues which we do not yet have the answer to, but conversations are always ongoing amongst the mod team about how we can make /r/soccer better, and we will continue to keep the community updated with progress

#Key topics

##Locking threads:

In general, we avoid locking threads whenever possible - it is a last resort.

Increasingly, certain topics (especially relating to racism, LGBTQ+ issues, and women) have seemingly been heavily brigaded by non /r/soccer regulars. We provide our current stance, below.

Israel and Palestine:

Since we held the meta thread, the escalating conflict between Israel and Palestine has made this even more of a pressing issue in terms of how we moderate it.

These topics are ones relevant to football, and ones we want the community to be able to discuss. There is a point where the discussion goes beyond the football context - this is /r/soccer and not /r/worldnews. If the politics becomes the focus and the thread becomes out of control due to brigading or the mutation of the discourse, then we may take action by locking the thread.

We escalated this policy with the Israel and Palestine conflict - taking the decision to automatically lock threads on the topic, as the discourse was just too degenerated for us to reasonably moderate, and the discussions being had were not ones that are football-related.

Similarly, just because a footballer/football club says something, doesn’t make it football related. For example, a player posting a statement supporting either of Israel/Palestine is not about football. UEFA postponing matches because of the conflict? That is. Hence, we decided to start removing those.

We prefer in general to not have too strict a stance to locking threads - but the Israel/Palestine discourse is arguably like none other in terms of emotion and toxicity, and we think this approach is justified.

Sexual assault cases

Initially when these cases first came to light, we had locked threads as we were uncertain of the legality of speculating about identities or jeopardising court cases. We clarified with the admins and liaised with mods of other major subreddits to confirm that there is little risk of legal issues for any users - so hence do not auto-lock them currently.

We have locked certain threads where the discussion spiralled out of control in terms of brigading and misogyny. We have been accused of double standards with this in that we lock the ‘accusation’ threads more than the ‘exoneration’ threads - but this is simply because the ones when the individuals are cleared legally tend to attract more misogyny and brigading.

Reddit has in-built tools such as “crowd control” to attempt to limit brigading. This works to auto-collapse comments from low karma accounts, and accounts with minimal previous participation in the given subreddit - but does not remove them.

A user suggested in the meta thread we have a “white list” of approved users - but in a subreddit of 5 million users, we do not think this is possible to maintain. Our hands are somewhat tied.

##The rising anti-Saudi Arabia and anti-Arab sentiment

The recent expansion of the Saudi Pro League further in the world of football has been a big recent topic of discussion in this subreddit and elsewhere.

It has led to much debate relating to complex issues - such as sportswashing, and human rights. These are valid points of discussion, and we have long welcomed this discourse on the subreddit.

However, as these topics have become more prevalent, we have also seen a rise in negative sentiment towards users from Saudi Arabia, and other users and people from the wider Arab world.

From the Meta Thread:

People agreed that toxicity was increasing
Clarity was asked on line between criticising people and criticising a nation - this is explained below;
A user responded they do not think we apply the same moderation to anti-Israel sentiment, to which we assured them we have a zero tolerance to anti-Semitism, but that criticism of Israel is not against our rules, just as criticism of Saudi Arabia is not

###We would like to make absolutely clear, as the /r/soccer Mod Team, that we will be showing zero tolerance towards anti-Arab discrimination, and any hostility, abuse or personal attacks directed towards Arab users or people.

This is the same stance we apply for everyone, regardless of their ethnicity or country of origin.

As with all nations, criticism of a government or country is valid. When this tips over into problematic is when it becomes criticism of people of that country or users from that country, due to their shared characteristic of nationality or religion.

For example:

The anti-LGBTQ+ laws in Saudi Arabia are homophobic and unacceptable

= Valid criticism

Saudis are homophobic bigots

= Not acceptable; you are in of yourself being discriminatory here

You are a Saudi shill, and a bigot

= You are getting banned for a personal attack.

We apply this rule for all nations - and try our best to moderate accordingly. We require the help of the community in moderating this - report offensive comments, or message Modmail about frequently problematic users.

We will take a ‘case by case’ basis when there is uncertainty (and do this by discussing with the users in question via Modmail)

##Transfer Talk

As always, how transfer news is moderated is a key issue in the subreddit.

From the Meta Thread:

Most discussed topic by far
Divisive - some wanted more stringency, others a more relaxed approach, so it was difficult to establish the consensus
We generally find in meta threads people want a stricter approach - but then in reality, we get a lot of complaints we are too strict.
Many people asked for more restrictions to prevent ‘sagas’ - but others pointed out that the hundreds (if not thousands) comments in these repeated posts show that there is interest, and hence appropriate to allow.
Some people suggested a daily stickied thread in which all transfer talk is restricted - which we have decided against. The subreddit clearly wants multiple threads on individual rumours, and so we do not think a daily thread allies with the community consensus.

###As such, we aim to stick to the rough policy of “one post per day per saga" - unless there are several significant developments. What constitutes a “significant” update is subjective, and we will try our best to apply common sense.

We accept we will make mistakes - but we will try our best, and this policy is one which is under constant review.

##Re “tiers”

We do not have a tier system in r/soccer, as although it can work well for club subreddits, the variability in reliability between journalists and clubs means we feel it would be near-impossible to have an overall tier system (one journalist could be Tier 1 for one club, and Tier 3 for another). We also think that allowing a tier system would mean that comments would focus on the tier system itself rather than the substance of the transfer rumour.

##Major tournament moderation:

Following feedback from the community, and our own internal discussions about recent major tournaments, we consciously adopted a ‘hardline’ approach to the 2022 World Cup.

This consisted of a tougher-than-ever stance on xenophobia (which breeds toxicity and damages discourse) - and increasing our account age and karma thresholds to enable users to comment on /r/soccer threads, to filter out trolls and bad faith users. Following the tournament, we relaxed these thresholds back down to the normal levels. This was to help manage with the influx of non-regular users, many of whom do not come to the subreddit in good faith for major tournaments.

We also diversified our moderation team, in order to gain a broader variety of perspectives as a mod team - as well as recruiting some temporary mods to assist with the increased workload during the tournament.

Furthermore, we began sticking match threads, as requested for major tournaments.

From the Meta Thread:

Positive feedback about this approach, which tallies with our view that the approach went well
We will therefore take a similar approach to future tournaments
One user suggested we give more coverage to the Women’s World Cup. We felt we had stepped up our representation already, as we had arranged and promoted a preview series in keeping with those done for the men’s tournaments - as coordinated by /u/AnnieIWillKnow and with a variety of community contributors. We also stickied match threads for knockout games.

##Moderation of the Daily Discussion Thread

Over the past year, we have adjusted how we moderate the Daily Discussion Thread. We have shifted towards a stricter stance, in order to try and improve the quality of discourse - in response to community feedback.

This includes stricter moderation of troll and bait comments (especially repeat offenders), using AutoMod to remove certain trigger phrases, and a minimum character count.

We have also started more strongly enforcing the rule of “not using the DDT as a match thread” - a frequent complaint from users. As such, these comments are now removed whenever possible, with escalating to temporary bans for persistent offenders. This is a clear policy, and one which will be enforced.

From the Meta Thread:

There was pushback on how strictly the “not using the DDT as a match thread” rule is enforced - people in particular thought it could be relaxed for games where there is no match thread or not much engagement with the match thread.
There was some good discussion on our strict stance on keeping meta discussion out of the DDT. This is because it derails discussion, and can lead to harassment and witch hunts - and we prefer you to contact the mods via Modmail If you have queries over moderation or post removals. Some people felt this was undemocratic.

As such, we will slightly relax our moderation of the DDT/match thread rule. The rough guideline being that it is focused mainly on games from the top 5 or 6 European leagues, and less strict with other countries/lower leagues which may not have active match threads. We will also show some flexibility if people are having general conversations about teams currently playing, e.g. “Wolves look in real trouble this year, what do people think of GON?” This is because of the spirit of the rule - we have it in place to prevent spam/low effort comments in the DDT.

Re meta discussion - we reiterated that this rule will be enforced, but could also take a “case by case” approach if any meta conversation was productive and in good faith. In general Modmail remains the first port of call.

##Daily stickied threads

We wanted feedback on the current rotation of stickied threads (in addition to the DDT) - and the start time of Free Talk Friday

From the Meta Thread:

The top comment in response to summarised well what we feel is the best current approach to FTF start time, and hence we will continue with the current scheduled time:

If you change the time by every hour each week the daily discussion will just be a lot of “where is free talk friday?”. The Daily Discussion works at rotated times because it’s being replaced by the Daily Discussion, whereas FTF would be replaced by whatever the Saturday daily is so it would lose time for no real reason.

As such, Free Talk Friday will continue to be posted at 9:00 UTC

Re ideas for new daily stickied threads - there was a suggestion to move Sunday Support to Wednesday, but we would lose the Non PL DDT, so there was no real movement for this. Somebody suggested a “Statistics Saturday” thread - but we felt there were too many popular stats posts to be concentrated in one weekly thread, so this would not be popular.

###Thank you if you did take the time to read such a long thread (if you managed it)

###We hope that provides some transparency into the discussions and decision-making behind the scenes, and we welcome any further questions or comments below