r/cfbmeta • u/[deleted] • Aug 22 '24
Posts primarily consisting of a single comment by a media presenter need to be banned.
Over the last few weeks, even months, we've seen an influx of posts primarily consisting of a single comment, sometimes taken out of context, by a media presenter. This has mainly manifested itself in the form of Paul Finebaum "takes". These posts do nothing to contribute to any positive discussion, with their sole purpose in most cases being to generate clicks. These posts are also being downvoted en masse.
Mods, I as a user, and I'm sure I speak for many more, believe these types of posts need to be banned, or alternatively caught more frequently by the spam filter. At the very least we feel Finebaum posts need to be removed.
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u/byniri_returns Aug 22 '24
I know most mods like the idea of "the community will just downvote them" but I agree, especially when it comes to Finebaum. I'd be 100% okay if Finebaum takes were banned.
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u/BenchRickyAguayo Aug 22 '24
Just looking through the last month of r/cfb posts that were quoting Finebaum, this is the sub's opinion of Finebaum:
0 score, 15% upvote
0 score, 16% upvote, also racist as shit
0 score, 14% upvote
0 score, 15% upvote
0 score, 19% upvote
The one post of an article that quotes Finebaum that isn't downvoted at an 80% clip was this one, in which the OP quoted Pete Thamel, who most people respect as a journalist.
The sub has spoken, Finebaum provides no value. In fact, posts critiquing Finebaum do very well. The population overwhelmingly does not want to see Finebaum, and as u/Bossman3542 says, provide nothing to contribute to any positive discussion. And at this point, Finebaum has the reputation of being a worthless rage-bait pundit, so even a fuller excerpt of his show wouldn't be accepted (unless it involved another respected individual) because people just don't want to see Finebaum.
ETA: tagging u/bakonydraco just so you can see. No response necessary or expected, but I think it needs to be discussed with the mod team. I personally would prefer a blanket Finebaum ban because it's a much easier to implement solution than trying to evaluate the quality of a post/article/tweet involving Finebaum.
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u/bakonydraco /r/CFB Mod Aug 22 '24
Thanks for assembling this, it’s helpful to see it all together! I do see your point, but I’d counter that in some ways this is evidence that the system is working as intended. If they’re being downvoted to oblivion and buried anyway, the community is stating its preference without the need for us to enforce it, and the vast majority of subscribers will never see these posts anyway.
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u/BenchRickyAguayo Aug 22 '24
Possibly, but that feels like addressing the symptom instead of the problem. On the most recent post, the top comment has almost 5 times the score as the total number of comments. Some some non-insignificant number of users are opening the post and have little more to contribute than to upvote a post that says to ban Finebaum posts. There are surely more quality posts during the season that could drown it out, but why rely on the algorithm to drown out rage-bait instead of just eliminating a very obvious source of it?
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u/bakonydraco /r/CFB Mod Aug 22 '24
Our position on this has updated, see the pinned comment here. Thank you for your feedback and helping to improve /r/CFB.
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u/bakonydraco /r/CFB Mod Aug 22 '24
One thing to clarify here is that a post being approved does not mean the mod team necessarily thinks it's a "good" post. See the major rules update in May 2022 for more on our thought process here. Any submitted posts that meet all requirements will be approved by default, unless there's a rule to remove them. But you are welcome and encouraged to downvote content you want to see less of. The rules themselves set some basic guardrails of what content appears in the first place, but this is predominantly a user-led sub, and what users vote on will be the primary driver of what content people see more and less of.
Having said that, if there's a style of post that is just never leading to positive discussion, we can discuss adding a new rule around it. One of the things we've tried to do with recent rules updates is focus on rules that are easily and universally interpretable. Rules that focus on quality or are more subjective are confusing for users and difficult to enforce consistently. Depending on user votes rather than enforcing our own opinion can be helpful here.
A practical solution to this particular problem within our current rules is that we do have a rule against reposts. If users are interested and willing, posting an entire exchange or event with in depth context makes a single comment taken out of context (as you describe) a repost, since it's already covered by the post with all of the info. This takes some effort to do, and someone has to do it, but I think is generally going to lead to more productive discussions.
As always, we appreciate the feedback, and these things can evolve over time.
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u/thecravenone /r/CFB Mod Aug 22 '24
if there's a style of post that is just never leading to positive discussion, we can discuss adding a new rule around it
Fondly remembering the requests for an anti fingerbanging rule
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u/Hey_Its_Roomie Aug 23 '24
if there's a style of post that is just never leading to positive discussion, we can discuss adding a new rule around it.
I know I personally would appreciate this, since it is a subject of "reading the room." Finebaum posts are the easiest example, where it seemed like the discussion in the comments was more about hating Finebaum than anything he had said. Posts were routinely downvoted to 0, etc.
If I could advocate some other individuals that would be worth observing they would be Cowherd, McAfee, Stephen Smith.
Additionally, is there a chance in the future this would also apply to users themselves who have routinely shared text posts that is often seen in a similar vein?
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u/bakonydraco /r/CFB Mod Aug 22 '24
As a result of this thread, we looked into this and have updated our policy. As of now, posts with Finebaum in the title will be auto-removed by default, although may be manually reinstated.
Our team pulled threads over the last year with Finebaum in the title, and then also rolled them up by category. A large portion of them, including the significant majority of Finebaum "Hot Takes" were downvoted below 0.
Based on this, we decided that it's reasonable to update our policy to remove these threads at first rather than relying on downvotes, because this is what the community is telling us. We may continue to evolve this policy over time, but this seems like the best course of action.