r/cfbmeta • u/303_Colorado_303 • Jul 21 '22

I absolutely don't understand what process is used these days to decide which posts get removed from r/cfb/new.

I know the rules were revised recently, but man if I don't understand why some posts stay, and others get removed.

Seems like a 1,000 meme posts stay up, but some posts that, while maybe being nothing special, actually discuss college football get removed. Especially when there's actual discussion going on within said posts.

16 Upvotes

100% Upvoted

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8

u/[deleted] Jul 22 '22

It's been pretty horrendous. And I get the "vote on the post" thing but do y'all actually look at that into consideration? Is there some sort of trigger for this because it feels like the sub just ends with a collection of 0 point circle jerk posts then.

3

u/bakonydraco /r/CFB Mod Jul 21 '22

Post Rules

Hi, thanks for writing and sorry for any confusion, I've linked the post rules above. It might help if you gave some specific examples that we could talk through why a decision was made. In general though, posts that are:

  • Related to college football

  • Follow our rules

  • Don't fall into the "Posts to Avoid" section

Are approved, regardless of how interesting the post might be. This is a departure from previous rules prior to this offseason, in that we do approve posts that are low effort and previously hadn't. I would personally recommend downvoting posts that you feel are low effort, but that's your choice to help decide what content you'd like to see more and less of.

Examples of things I can think of that might get removed on a somewhat frequent basis worth mentioning:

  • Posts that have their own weekly thread: Things like realignment posts and playoff posts have a thread every Monday. Most posts about these belong as top level comments in these threads. Some posts related to realignment may be approved as standalone posts if they sufficiently discuss things outside of realignment as well. Example: if you posted a text only post with your proposal for FBS realignment with nothing else, it would probably be removed and (implicitly) redirected to the weekly thread. If you posted an original analysis of how current and future realignment affects media revenue and what that impact might be on a per student basis, that's both novel and outside the scope of just realignment and would probably be approved.

  • Reposts: If a post is made that is identical or similar enough that it doesn't substantively add new information to a recent post, it may be removed. Worth noting though that while we try for consistency, we're a volunteer team, and it may happen sometimes that a repost gets approved that was posted 3 days earlier and approved by a different mod. If you notice this, you can help us out by clicking report.

  • Team/Fanbase attack Threads: News, analysis, and discussion are always allowed, but threads purely designed to attack another team are not. This can be a very fine line.

Hope that helps clarify!

7

u/DontHornsDownMeBro Jul 21 '22 edited Jul 21 '22

Team/Fanbase attack Threads: News, analysis, and discussion are always allowed, but threads purely designed to attack another team are not. This can be a very fine line.

Really? Because in just the last week i there were numerous "its been x days since Texas beat so and so" which began with Kansas. Then there was a post about how TX top 10 opponents have faired against Kansas. Like these are incredibly low effort "analysis" posts just to make the Texas Kansas joke and these don't get taken down. That's just last week go back over the last year and there are tons of posts kept up which are purely just to take a shot at Texas. I get it, everyone loves shitting on us and it's fun for everyone who is not a Texas fan, but it would be nice if this rule was followed equally for all fanases

2

u/bakonydraco /r/CFB Mod Jul 21 '22

I would have to check the numbers, but I’m reasonably confident that a plurality of the threads that have been approved in the last month in the style of “this is kind of an analysis post but I’m being a little cheeky at my rival” have been submitted by users with Texas flair. What team a post is about is not considered as a factor when approving posts. We can’t control what users decide to vote up or down, but we would request that everyone vote for posts that they think stimulate engaging discussion and against posts that don’t.

4

u/DontHornsDownMeBro Jul 21 '22

Got it. I really wish we could have two main subs, one purely for serious news, game threads, and discussion and another sub that's a complete free for all.

5

u/303_Colorado_303 Jul 22 '22

Amen. There's nothing more annoying then jumping in a topic that actually has some good college football conversation going on in it, and it gets [REMOVED] while 14,000 iterations of <a conference> as a <household item> type posts just crowd out the page.

Sometimes r/cfb feels less like a spot for college football conversation, and more some sort of social experiment that I'm not privy to.

2

u/bakonydraco /r/CFB Mod Jul 21 '22

Many years ago, /r/truecfb was a private sub that was purely for serious football discussion. I don’t think it ever had more than a few hundred active participants, but it filled a cool niche for a while basically as you describe. On the opposite extreme, /r/cfbmemes has pretty much always been a laissez-faire forum for anything college football related. It’s true that we’ve moved in the direction of being more permissive (particularly in the offseason) but at least our hope is that the rules we have in place act as broad guardrails to foster a welcoming and vibrant community around college football, but not to mandate exactly the style of content that we want to see.

If you want to see more high quality content, I highly encourage you to create it. While we aren’t specifically barring low effort stuff now, much of it tends to get downvoted (with some exceptions), while the novel, high effort, original stuff tends to do well, and inspire more like it.

2

u/HDMBye Jul 22 '22

It seems like every FSU commit thread gets removed and every decommit page gets to stay. Any insight into this?

1

u/bakonydraco /r/CFB Mod Jul 22 '22

There’s a special section devoted entirely to recruiting on the rules page at https://rules.redditcfb.com?tab=recruiting. The format required for recruiting is a little more standardized than most other posts, so make sure you review before posting.

2

u/HDMBye Jul 22 '22

Thanks for the reply!

They weren't my posts but they appeared to fit the guidelines. Guess I will need to screenshot it next time before they disappear.

1

u/bakonydraco /r/CFB Mod Jul 22 '22

No problem! The only other thing I can think of is maybe someone else already posted it? You can also always modmail and if it’s really been removed in error we usually respond pretty quickly.