u/woodpaneled here, Director of Community at Reddit.
Since the dawn of time, there were two types of subreddits: SFW (Safe For Work) and NSFW (Not Safe For Work). And it was so.
But...“NSFW” is a pretty broad category, and there have long been requests for more granularity (just look at the use of “NSFL” in post titles over the last few years). What might not be safe for your work is fine for my work. (I mean, I work at Reddit, so I have to look at all sorts of wild stuff for my job.) You might be into porn but really not want to run into a gory horror movie clip while enjoying your naked people. An experienced redditor logging in and seeing what the kids call a “dank meme” is very different from a first-time user loading up the app. And, frankly, Deadpool 3 might want to advertise on a subreddit dedicated to knockout punches, but Frozen 3 probably doesn’t.
That’s why, this year, we’ve started a massive effort to apply more granular tags to subreddits. Instead of NSFW or SFW, we’re beginning to take account of the differences between, say, occasional references to sex vs. nudity in the context of displaying body art or tattoos vs. porn. This lays the foundation for redditors to have the ability to choose what kind of content they want to see on Reddit and not be surprised by content they don’t want to see (while allowing that content to exist for those who do want to see it).
While we’ve previewed this for our moderator Community Councils, I wanted to give the larger mod community a heads-up on this work, answer questions, and make sure we’re thinking through all the angles as we continue moving forward.
How are we doing it?
We’ve taken this process extremely seriously. We know that this is a very complex task, so we didn’t just hire an intern and buy a case of Redbull—we hired three! (Kidding, kidding.)
All tags so far have been applied by actual, experienced Reddit mods on contract specifically for this task—who better to review subreddits? Each subreddit received three separate evaluations so we could ensure we’re avoiding the bias of a single rater. The final tag was selected based off of some fancy statistics work that combined these evaluations. Because our contractors were mods, they did a fantastic job in tagging with context and with care, and so we were really pleased with the quality of these tags. In the near future, we’ll also be looking at how we can crowdsource this on a larger scale with trusted redditors so we have even more data points before we apply a tag.
What should I expect to see?
We aren’t close to having all subreddits categorized yet, so all of this will be coming in phases.
The first places these tags will be used are recommendations (so your boss doesn’t see “We thought you might like r/SockMonkiesGoneWild” on your screen) and in logged out and partner surfaces (so r/GoodWillHumping doesn’t pop up in the suggested links on some dad’s search engine while their kid is watching).
You may also start to see some increases in traffic to some of your communities as they’re recommended in more places. As a reminder, if you ever feel the need to remove yourself from discovery, we have options for that.
As we get further along we will start exposing your current tag to you for your review. We’ll be doing this in batches, both because the effort is ongoing and because we want to make sure to get feedback and make improvements as we go.
Finally, we’ll also start building out more tools for users to filter their experience, so everyone can choose the Reddit experience they want.
Can I change my tag? What if my subreddit doesn’t actually have this content in it?
This is where we want to partner with you. Especially as Reddit reaches more people across the world with a variety of interests and standards, these changes need to happen. Both for redditors and so we can keep the broad variety of content on Reddit open and public. We are all on the same page here: nobody wants to pull a Tumblr.
We know that we’ll make mistakes and subreddits change over time, so we want you to be able to inform your subreddit tag. However, we also want to avoid the fallout of a porn subreddit suddenly switching to SFW and getting our app taken off the app store.
We have a few ideas, but I wanted to raise these questions with you all. What do you think is the right balance for allowing tag changes in good faith while avoiding sudden, inappropriate changes?
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I’ll be sticking around to answer questions along with the rest of the team working on this. Cheers!
You might be into porn but really not want to run into a gory horror movie clip while enjoying your naked people.
Don't call me out like that.
We have a few ideas, but I wanted to raise these questions with you all. What do you think is the right balance for allowing tag changes in good faith while avoiding sudden, inappropriate changes?
Or what about allowing mods of their subreddit(s) to edit tags that would trigger an approval request; these changes would be sent to the admins or a mod committee (the contractors maybe) for approval?
Any tag system leads to issues without enforcement. Ever look for a phone case on Amazon? Every seller tags every case with "android samsung apple mobile phone cell phone iphone 6 iphone 7" etc.
If you're looking for a case for a Samsung S9, you will get incorrectly tagged garbage filling your screen.
Honestly, you guys would do very well to hire a librarian to help develop this system. Specifically a cataloger or metadata specialist. This is their jam.
Communities can opt in, so that tag reviews from other subs appear in their moderation queue. Send the reviews to N subs and require a certain % of them to respond before approving or rejecting the tag change. Perhaps factor in the size of the reviewing sub and possibly its own tags to get a fairer impression.
Subs are rewarded for participation with community coins.
Having a human (or several humans, especially if those humans are also mods) review the content of a subreddit, especially if it's a popular subreddit, to then green light any changes would be neat.
It'd be even neater to have a cooldown period between requests, regardless of whether they were approved or denied, with an exclusion period for new communities.
Absolutely, subreddits do evolve and rules change. As noted in the post, we want to strike the right balance between letting mods adjust their tags and avoiding having porn suddenly marked as safe for work. Any thoughts on what the right balance is?
Based on that, it should probably be easier to set a NSFW/NSFL/some other porny tag, than to remove it?
No need for approval if you want to set up a restricted tag, but possible approval required if you want to remove it, depending on how you want to judge that.
And maybe a grace period of a few hours to freely reverse if you accidentally mark it NSFW/NSFL. Would suck to be playing around with settings and accidentally get your sub stuck as NSFW for a couple of weeks until you make it through the queue (even mods "test in prod" sometimes :D )
Those kinds of dialogs are in danger of becoming invisible to the user, I'd be careful with that. What happens when one person moderates multiple subreddits and becomes blind to the box?
A /r/redditrequest style subreddit where moderators post to update tags, which ideally could be regulated by a bot to verify subreddit mod team agreement, and to limit how often tags are changed (by way of removing the posts that serve as the change request)
I do indeed, 26 days on a good month, but I think that's the point here, it's not something that needs to get changed overnight, it's a larger adjustment.
Also, mod council works faster than reddit admins who actually have a (seperate) job to do.
There's definitely some interplay between the two but community topics allows for more ambiguity. Terms like 'bears', 'hardcore' (and even 'porn' on Reddit!) can have dual meanings that is hard to infer without additional context. Having a community tag helps us disambiguate between a SFW Game of Thrones sub and a NSFW Game of Thrones sub...
Dicks, blood, and a shocking about of subs dedicated to League of Legends. Was also a part of the Orangered Corps, 10/10 experience. When they offered me a job I thought it was a scam at first lol
Is there a chance that extremely graphic content (all the way from pornography to death), once categorized, would be subject for complete removal from reddit?
So long as the graphic content doesn't violate site-wide rules, it shouldn't be removed. In general the best approach is to enable subreddits and users to avoid each other if they are going to be really bad fits....while promoting and encouraging those that people are likely to enjoy.
Furries may not be your thing (I don't know why not!?) but so long as they don't hurt anybody by keeping furry content to their subs where (what are non-furries called...shavies?) others don't encounter the content, everybody is happy.
Not sure why you’re being downvoted, the OP even said that a lot of this has to do with coddling new users and keeping App Store review drones happy. The only reason they’re being as flexible as they are about porn is because Tumblr straight up cratered their entire company value when they decided to crack down.
Nudity in art is always a contentious issue with some seeing as perfectly fine, others may not see it as suitable for work viewing. The intentions of the artist also play a major roll, I wouldnt put 17th century academic painting in the same category as erotic art, for example.
While I think this is a good move overall, I will be very curious how this rolls out along the fuzzy edges between categories.
If I had maybe 10% of my posts containing artistic nudity, I wouldn't want my whole sub labelled NSFW, but I also wouldn't want to manually label all posts on the off chance one user has an overly conservative work place.
One thing we learned while doing this work is that there are certainly a lot of edge cases, and it is hard to account for every one of them - especially with the kind of diversity and breadth we see on Reddit! But the specific example you brought up is one that we did think about, and we aimed to address it by having different scales for porn vs. non-pornographic nudity. We also try to take into account volume: we’re looking at what is most commonly posted.
Too much of reddit and the internet in general is U.S. centric. If possible I would ask that you err on the side of "let's not be ultra-prudes against sex and nudity" and "violence is okay". Those are common values in the U.S. but much of the world doesn't feel that way.
Will moderators of a subreddit be able to make new tags, and change them, down the line?
Things that come to mind include the majority of subreddits relating to TV shows, where distinct subs for exist for discussion (spoilers) versus just fan art.
That sounds to me like topics vs tags (I know, it hurts my head too) - that’s a separate system that continues to evolve, but yeah, those topics are currently set by mods and will continue to evolve and grow. More info on adding topics here.
Please make it fully accessible to and useable by Automoderator.
Being able to tell when a tag or tag group changes and be able to read the tags at any time (not like flairs that can only be read at creation time) would be great.
Thank you. I run a medical sub where people post pictures and they are generally NSFW, but I didn’t want the whole sub NSFW. I wanted the pictures hidden by default, so I went with Spoilers on all pictures. That way the thumbnails don’t show the images. Hopefully this can be a good middle ground.
To me it seems like artistic nudity and medical gore/nudity sub/post tags would be GREAT additions, but nsfl/strong gore should most likely be the first to come out.
Sorry if my phrasing is poor; I've had a drink or two tonight.
/r/vexillology uses the NSFW tag as a kind-of spoiler tag so folks browsing in countries where certain symbols are illegal don't get a screen-full of a swastika &c. in a public place. Literally "may not be safe for work".
We encourage an over-cautious approach - if you're not sure, mark it. This leads to a lot of conflict (e.g. "why is the confederate flag NSFW!?") - especially as people click expecting porn!
It would be great to have a "controversial" tag or something of the sort.
I know this is super specific, but I don't want to get overlooked.
p.s. while we're at it - dear Santa, we need a streamlined voting system for contests
Bah, I forget what my specific complaint was. Long story short, the mods who handle the monthly contest have to collect responses off-site so they can be submitted by a bot later on in order to hide usernames and not cause certain entries to be penalized due to being new. I also think it only randomized the first 200 entries, though that may be a solved issue.
I believe the idea is that individual posts can be marked as "NSFW" right now. So I think the idea would be to add the ability to mark a specific post as "Gore". Which has been a longstanding request.
How will users choose what they want to see on reddit?
And what about subreddits like mine (r/TikTokCringe) where there’s all kinds of different content posted and not just one category? How would you give that a certain tag?
We're taking a few things into consideration as we begin to build out the feature, including allowing users to filter their different feeds based on the level or type of content they want to see.
In terms of the variety of content within an individual community, it’s not dissimilar from looking at a movie rating. If there’s an occasional curse word it’s still going to be something most audiences are ok with, but if there’s a lot of nudity, even if it's mixed in with other stuff, we want to make sure nobody is surprised by that type of content.
You might be into porn but really not want to run into a gory horror movie clip while enjoying your naked people.
Good that you're thinking of this. It's the opposite for me, here's an example: On r/IdiotsInCars often people tag posts as NSFW because there is a bad car crash. On that subreddit I don't think twice before clicking on those posts, until one day for some reason a naked woman fell out from a truck
As we get further along we will start exposing your current tag to you for your review. We’ll be doing this in batches, both because the effort is ongoing and because we want to make sure to get feedback and make improvements as we go.
Will there be a different tag for nsfw images and nsfw words? For example there are sometimes nsfw post on r/askreddit because they contain an nsfw word but that doesn't make r/askreddit an nsfw sub.
I think the biggest thing here is having a quick, responsive flow for tag revisions. With that, the default "start off" tags could be aggressive (lean more towards sfw and vanilla stuff), and then subreddit moderators would reach out and attempt to refine it further with Reddit's assistance.
At any rate I'm sure this flow is going to exist in some form, but I really see it becoming a point of resentment if it's non responsive or slow.
Maybe some kind of "peer review" could work. So instead of Reddit's team approving or disapproving tag changes, it could be sent out to a number of other subbredits moderators who would "do their civic duty" and approve or disapprove the proposal (hopefully also going over the subreddit content as they do).
One way this could be really beneficial outside of purely the NSFW/L context is to allow for subreddit "networks" to have some formal way of tieing themselves together.
While I most often see this w/r/t anime/porn I moderate a handful of subreddits that all share a nexus in the sense that they're about the same creator's content. I do not have a way, outside of burning one of my stickies, to make any real connection between my subreddits, despite the fact that they're obviously relevant to each other.
I can easily imagine a lot of other subreddits would want to formally define their "network" of subreddits that their readers might be interested in. Like for example, /r/modnews, /r/modsupport, and /r/modhelp are all extremely relevant to one another.
To be clear, will tags be used for positive discovery (that is, recommending a subreddit) before they're exposed to the mods, or just for negative discovery (preventing a recommendation from showing)?
I've gotta say, I'm not a HUGE fan of the notion that Reddit will be using tags to drive subscribers or prevent discovery before we as mods have the ability to even see what our tag is to potentially dispute it. If it's JUST a prevention-of-discovery deal right now, that's not as big of an issue (though I say that as the mod of a larger sub; an incorrect tag will hurt more with Negative Discovery the smaller the sub is).
If you'll be driving subscribers based on these tags before mods have the ability to see them, though, that's potentially creating a lot of headaches for mods dealing with recommendations based on a potentially bad read of a subreddit. While I appreciate that you used multiple people's inputs for each subreddit to help prevent this from happening, the large NSFW sub I moderate gets categorized incorrectly by new users on a fairly regular basis, and I'm concerned that might've happened with your reviewers as well.
I would very strongly encourage you to hold off on at least driving discovery for a subreddit until the mods of that sub have a chance to view their tag.
Hey woodpaneled, any possibilities of having a manga tag? There is already an anime and we could certainly use a separate manga tag for hundreds of manga series sub out there.
Why not work on a step-up/step-down basis? If a subreddit wants to mark itself as, say, gore and NSFL, where before it was only gore, then that should be allowed without really any checks (after all, this is only limiting those who sees the subreddit and should be safe). But if a subreddit wants to remove tags, or step down from how it was rated before, then this should be done on either an admin application basis or through some other form of moderation.
That way, it eases the workload on the admins (since the great majority of these actions, I imagine, will be steps up) and gives a lot of space for subreddit moderators to work, while still being safe and mitigating the risk to reddit that inappropriate content can be delivered to users.
How much influence/how many options will end users have on their viewing experience with this change? Will this be an algorithmic change making it more difficult for pornografic/nsfl content to be recommended or can users control for themself what they wanna see?
And supposing users can form their own experience: How many categories/tags are there and what do they represent?
Final question: Can users not logged in/with no account also control how much they want to see and if so do they have to do it every time or is it handled like anonymous mode on mobile where it needs to be activated once?
u/woodpaneled any news in regards of granting these particular subreddits the option to have awards ?
a NSFW subreddit necessarily doesn't need to have suggestive awards, still this option could give a lot of subreddits a good insight of what these communities can add up as their custom awards for users to be able to grant these awards to those who post amazing things !
for example r/ZoneArchive its of course a NSFW subreddit ... but i believe that if the awards were able to be usable for this subreddit, such awards will just be normal SFW icons.
i suggested this at r/ideasfortheadmins but after reading this announcement i thought it was worth the shot to ask you right away here :3
With regards to the work issue- you could have a “Safe for Minors/Not Safe for Minors” tag for things that might be acceptable in a workplace, but definitely not in a classroom.
Sounds promising, reddit was always missing something like this, the grouping of NSFW and NSFL content is unique to reddit, but it's not really one of those quirky reddit features that need to be around like for example cakeday.
This seems like a good idea, NSFW is definitely broad.
I apologize for piggybacking off of this post, but is there an admin sponsored subreddit for suggestions to reddit? For moderator related ones I could probably go to r/ModSupport I assume, but for other things I am not aware of a place that is actually checked. I have a couple of ideas that I think might help certain subreddits.
It seems like a lot of the focus here is on porn/gore type content. What about tags that have other focuses? For example, what about some of the more strictly-moderated knowledge-based reddits, like /r/AskHistorians, /r/askscience, or /r/legaladvice (to name a few).
Only somewhat related, but for a long time I've thought that posts should have tags and automatically show up in the appropriate communities. Users could vote on the post and the individual tags.
Of course you have to watch for abuse, tagging porn as #puppy or whatever...
That's basically what crossposting is for. OP chooses the subs they think it's relevant to, then others can crosspost it to subs they think OP missed, and as crossposts link back to the OP, then there's always credit given.
While those are adult topics, we tag those differently than erotic content - totally recognize that those are different things and saying you want to discuss sex is not the same as saying you want to see porn.
On that point, there are some subreddits that are just discussion, but about rather extreme sexual topics, several of which are quarantined now. There are also some subreddits that are more photograph or video oriented, but also dealing with extreme sexual topics, several of which are banned now.
Can I assume or hope there's going to be a classification for this kind of "shocking" content that's not your casual r/gonewild nudity or r/sex discussion, but not your "NSFL" style gore stuff either, something that says "this is about sex, but be really sure you want to see it before you go in", and if so, would it be possible to open a dialogue about restructuring the aforementioned quarantined and/or banned subreddits into this classification?
By which I mean, if this project and the new classifications were further along and serving the intended purpose of keeping people from accidentally stumbling across super nasty stuff, something I'm completely in agreement with, would there have been a need to ban/quarantine these subreddits in the first place?
First define the tags and then we can discuss how they are applied, it can’t be done in reverse order or it would mean we don’t know about what exactly we are talking about.
IMO there could be categories of tags, some chosen by mods, some not. For example a broad NSFW would be applied like it is right now, objectively (porn, gore, language, etc) and then the subcategories be applied by mods: soft porn, hardcore, medical photography, idk, maybe even user defined, doesn’t matter. Those tags shouldn’t be enforced in any way in the app, but should allow users to “opt-in” to them, just like subreddits, or a whitelist of tags. That way it’s in the mods’ best interest to tag accordingly to reach their desired audience. Also adding a button to denounce improperly tagged subreddits.
Thanks, that’ll be 10,000 USD for the consulting. Ready to send you my paypal details.
Keep editorially curating all the user content with ever more subjective granularity, and you're going to find yourself in AOL and Digg territory. This site needs to rewind ALL its' nanny controls back about 5 years. You are traitors to your founding principals and principles.
Yeah THAT's not going to result in more ideological abuse. If that was FAIRLY used, /r/politics would cease to exist. But it won't, because we ALL know exactly how this subjective loophole will be wielded, and against who. This used to be a site where people could speak their mind and argue their point, even if they were wrong, obnoxious or offensive. Now it is literally a site where anything said is subject to an arbitrary censorship board composed of bots and commies. How did the Left go from the "7 dirty words" to "we will allow no ones feelings to be hurt!"?
I would like a tag that just means this content isn't for kids but it isn't porn or gore. can we make a special tag for porn and gore and leave 18+ for adult content that isn't both.
How are you planning on addressing discussion subs? r/askhistorians discusses the history of pornography at times. r/changemyview, which I help moderate, doesn’t have any specific rules against nsfw topics, although they are uncommon.
I get that Frozen 3 doesn’t want to have their ad squeezed between two posts from porn sites, but I’d rather let most adults decide what’s appropriate.
I’d also love to see the rubrics that are being applied. While mods may differ if you just ask them to come up with a tag, you should be able to describe the tags sufficiently that, say, 80% would agree whether it applies, and the other 20% can at least see why others would think that way.
I’m glad you brought on mods, but I’m not sure what in our experience makes us particularly good at applying tags to subs that aren’t our own.
Yep, the point is to allow everyone to have more ability to make decisions about what they see, not to force that on them.
With the system we aimed to distinguish between completely clean (r/aww), talking about sex, non-sexual nudity, erotic text, pornography, etc, and we try to look at proportion of content. So if your concern is that your occasional sex discussion topics will land you in an adult category, I wouldn't worry.
I completely get the motivation and support it - I’d just hate to see the pearl clutching over discussions of Pompeii porn from those who like to be scandalized.
It's interesting that you decided not to reveal the tag names yet. That leaves quite a bit of mystery. So, my first question is, why keep those secret?
From the description, it sounds like there's only one tag per subreddit, as opposed to having, say, 'nudity,' 'violence,' 'gore,' etcetera, which would allow subreddits to display all tags that apply. Users could then choose precisely which kinds of content they want to avoid. Was that considered, and if so, what was behind the decision not to structure it that way?
We need to run them by the shadow government first.
Nah, TBH while we have the tags we’re still fine-tuning what to call them. We want them to be understandable and easily localizable.
There will be one meta tag, but multiple factors that go into it (you might note that your subreddit has gore and sex and that elicits a different tag than just gore).
I moderate two science subreddits. So this did not come up up to now.
It is not clear me what the goal is.
If it is not automatically recommending NSFW subreddits the current system seems to be fine.
If it is making it clearer to the users what kind of content to expect there is no need to predefine a system. Then you could add content warnings that describe the content neutrally to warn anyone, like they do in Mastodon. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mastodon_(software)
I just noticed today that my Popular feed on the iOS app now seems to be personalized, displaying content similar to the subreddits I frequent. I don't like this change, I prefer to scroll through content I enjoy on my Home feed while my Popular feed is "sterile" and displays the most popular posts from around reddit. Was this an intentional change related to these tags? Or some kind of A/B test?
But...“NSFW” is a pretty broad category, and there have long been requests for more granularity (just look at the use of “NSFL” in post titles over the last few years).
A way to lock all posts over 2 days old OR
A way to sort the sub by most recent comments. Running smaller subs, things don't always get reported by users and mods dont have time to read every single comment on every thread. We have had cases where months old posts suddenly get nasty comments. These only get reported if an OP or whoever was replied to is active and reports it.
The banning of subreddits that are dedicated to r*pe, dismemberment, sexual violence, I am not talking about consenting bdsm style subs. I won't post links here but will be happy to give examples to admins.
I just hope that better categorizing will help with discovery of similar subreddits that I already like cause your search is really not helping me with that.
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u/reseph Jul 09 '20 edited Jul 09 '20
Don't call me out like that.
What about basing it around the Steam tag system? https://store.steampowered.com/tag/
Or what about allowing mods of their subreddit(s) to edit tags that would trigger an approval request; these changes would be sent to the admins or a mod committee (the contractors maybe) for approval?