Want to get yall’s feedback on community squatting.

There are a good amount of communities with zero posts, comments, etc, as well as some users who have created communities but aren’t trying to grow them or even post to them in any way.

I’d rather have the creators of communities be someone who’s at least contributing to them.

Some options are, occasionally deleting communities with little to no activity, or limiting modship to a small number of communities.

  • AgreeableLandscape
    15·
    5 years ago

    Reddit has /r/redditrequest which grants change of ownership of subreddits with either no mods or mods that have been inactive on the entire site for a period of time. People can request a subreddit, and if the conditions are met, ownership is transferred to them. This model can be automated with server-side code (I’m pretty sure Reddit does this) and modified with additional (or fewer) requirements.

    I don’t think it’s a good idea to unconditionally autodelete communities with low participation, because some communities are naturally niche and are expected to not gain a lot of subscribers (for example a community dedicated to a small content creator).

    • DessalinesOPMA
      5·
      5 years ago

      Ya I don’t wanna remove communities for low participation, that’s certainly not to be blamed on the creators. This is mainly for communities with ~0 zero posts.

      • AgreeableLandscape
        2·
        5 years ago

        Then what’s to stop community squatters from flying under the radar of an automated system by making a post and commenting something random in it every few days if they really want to deprive others of the community?

        A solution for this might be to have a report button for communities, which will alert admins of behavior like squatting and perhaps more importantly, communities dedicated to content like hate speech and trolling.

        • DessalinesOPMA
          5·
          5 years ago

          If they’re contributing to the community, then they probably shouldn’t be removed :) . I imagine bigger moderation problems should get escalated to the instance admins, the final say is really with them.

          I might consider some kind of report button, but also you can just be able to ping instance admins from anywhere and get their feedback.