Good Morning r/tories, and welcome to the mod war room, where we are wargaming our plan for the upcoming local and national elections. We felt that it’s better to tell you far in advance what we are planning for the year ahead rather than shock everyone by telling it a day before the campaigns start (and hopefully escape the inevitable criticism that we are doing this out of pure spite when we lose. But don’t worry, Steiner’s attack will save us all).
Our reasons are as below:
As a commenter (not modder) during GE19, my experience commenting here was not fun at all. We were constantly battling Corbynistas and Labourites side rather than genuine debate. The surge of comments we had did not correlate to good debating: in fact, I felt it was pretty toxic. Thus, the mod team are going to trial a new strategy for this local election to combat the rampant brigading that was prevalent in the last general election, in the hope we can take these lessons for the next GE to make it a more pleasant experience and have genuine debates rather than “All Tories and conservatives are bad” posts.
We have thought of the following options we can place during the election campaigns:
- Keep the subreddit as it is.
- Keep the subreddit as it is, but posts will Verified Conservatives Only flaired
- Move r/tories to restricted mode. This means although everyone can view and comment on posts, only approved members can post. The approved members list are drawn up by the moderation team. We have used it over the years to help approve members who are conservatives but often have their comments removed due to our automodding.
- Move r/tories to private. However, it completely disconnects the sub from the outside.
Keep note that this is only temporary, and a month after the election ends, we will lift these strategies so that r/tories return to normal.
What do you think? Please be aware that upvotes or polls will not be counted as opinion, rather comments and flairs so that we can see what is the prevalent mood in the sub. Voting manipulation is a genuine thing that we have appealed multiple times to Reddit to stop, but we don’t have or allowed the tools to stop them, such as disabling downvoting.