r/Cardano Subreddit - Discussion about Rule 4 - No spamming, advertising or low value content

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There has been a recent discussion on Twitter regarding the rules applied to NFT projects on the r/Cardano subreddit. The rule in question is this one:

  1. No spamming, advertising or low value content

This includes (but not limited to); stake pool advertisement, NFTs, NFT games, reaction gifs, memes, speculation/hype, old or duplicate links/content.

For stakepool advertisement use r/CardanoStakePools.

For NFTs and games use r/CardanoNFTs.

For memes use r/CardanoMemes and r/ada_meme.

In addition, posts including referral links, involving solicitation, requesting donation, phishing websites, or affiliate links will be removed and repeat offenders will be banned.

Let’s take this opportunity to openly discuss the current rule and try to understand eachothers perspective and find the best way forward.

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Im not a moderator on Reddit but im also moderating the forum and also some channels on Telegram. I think its important to explain why we have such rules on those platforms.

It is important to have platforms where all the people can have proper discussions about complex and important stuff. Imagine there are no rules regarding promotion of NFT-projects or stakepools. Those platforms would be absolutly flooded by such promo posts and couldnt be used anymore because not only every thread, but probably also every post would include promo stuff.

I do agree that we probably have to adjust this rule regarding projects building on Cardano but even there its not that easy as our main goal is to protect our community. So if we allow promotion for projects building on Cardano, we would probably have to allow it for EVERY project on Cardano and i assume that everyone is aware how many scams, frauds and rugs there are in our space. Do we really wanna let those projects promote their projects aswell on those platforms?

Now you could say “why dont you filter them or do some due diligence”. Sure but the question now would be “who is in charge to say which project may be a scam and which one isnt?”. Often its not 100% clear which projects may turn into a rug pull or a project which seems to be a scam at first glance turns out its totaly legit but the marketing team failed abit.

My proposal would be something like keep the restrictions for NFT-collection or stakepool promo but open the platforms and allow some sort of promotion for projects which are building on Cardano. Let them update the community once per month about their progress or something like that.

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Perhaps it’s best to start with some context so anybody reading this has the right background for the discussion.

How the rule was made

This rule was partially created and rendered controversial when stake pools were added to Cardano. Many posts on Reddit were just “Delegate to my new stake pool!” and that’s it, which was very spammy.

A decision was made to disallow all pool advertisements. However, this didn’t fix the situation because many projects decided to hide their stake pool advertisements inside sloppy educational content. They would make a factually incorrect “educational” piece in 5 minutes and slap their stake pool at the bottom.

To fix this, it was decided that stake pool mentioned (even if educational content) was not allowed. This, of course, hurt genuine creators who made very helpful content just because they wanted to mention their stake pool in their hard work, leading to some being upset

However, since not everybody on the moderator team can reasonably be technical enough to decide if something is technically accurate or not, the rule stuck

How it extended to NFTs

During the NFT bull run, many people would make post saying “My NFT is minting starting today!” which again, is not super noteworthy because there were collections being minted basically every day. Now, of course, some collections are more notable than others but this is hard for the moderator team to evaluate. Since now NFTs are also often embedded in games, the rule was extended to games as well

Do we even need this rule? Aren’t Reddit upvotes meant to solve this?

Reddit is itself a curation platform, so you could definitely argue that the moderation of the quality of the content should be left to the users if the goal is purely to differentiate between real content and spam. However, Reddit is not perfect at this. To know if a new post (which starts at 1 upvote) is good, it has to show it to at least part of the community to give it a shot and see what users think. So if a subreddit is 90% garbage and 10% quality, the algorithm has no choice but to show a bunch of garbage to regular users to try and filter out the 10% quality content that it should push out to the larger user base. That means basic moderation can help improve subreddit quality (and thus user retention) a lot

Note that this also means you need to prune these posts as soon as possible. That’s why there is a Cardano auto-moderator tool that looks for key words like “NFT” and “Stake pool” and automatically deletes these posts. The algorithm strongly encourages you to delete first, ask questions later (instead of being permissive and deleting if found to be poor quality)

As a side note, this auto-moderation also applies to comments which are often auto-deleted as well.

So why some quality posts kept in a deleted state?

A few factors come into this:

  • Not every moderator may have the technical ability to know if you content is good
  • Not every moderator may feel empowered to act (they have an incentive not to risk it)
  • There are not that many moderators especially after CF did a moderator purge earlier this year. Some of the people removed were actively approving posts and comments, but things have gotten worse after their removal
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Thanks for the context about this rule.

Just to be sure, who exactly has been removed as moderators? As i said im not really active on Reddit.

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IOG, EMURGO, dcSpark and every other entity other than the Cardano Foundation. The only ones left at the CF itself or CF-appointed Ambassadors for moderating the subreddit

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Any specific names? Because i never heard that any of those (expect you) were moderating the subreddit or any other platforms.

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Off the top of my head, keishadepaz, makimukai, benohanlon, danny_cryptofay, vantuz-subhuman, sebastiengllmt

You’d have to ask the CF for the full list though because I can’t cross-compare (since people removed no longer appear). It’s not really the point of this thread though, but it may partially explain why people are more critical now given this rule has existed for a little while now

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Yes you are right, thats why this is my last post about this.

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Hello Sebastien,

I cannot understand your criticism here, but I am willing to address it as the person who carried out the “purge” you referred to. Just to clarify, the purge was not at the beginning of the year but two weeks ago, and I contacted you at that time to explain why it was necessary.

As you mentioned, Reddit is supposed to be in the hands of the Ambassadors, which it was before, to some extent. Since I conducted the cleanup myself, I know exactly who was removed, and the only people I removed were you and vantuz-subhuman, who was completely inactive.

Regarding the quality of moderation, I reviewed your moderator log before the cleanup and saw that in the past three months, you only made 13 moderations, all of which were related to your own Paima posts. Therefore, the quality of moderation could not have decreased significantly.

Regarding your question about why members of IOG and Emurgo are still on the moderator list, I already explained to you that they are there to manage the flair badges, which was already the case before the cleanup. None of them have been actively moderating. For keishadepaz, makimukai, benohanlon, and danny_cryptofay, absolutely nothing has changed.

I hope this clears up any confusion, and please let me know if you have any further questions or concerns.

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all of which were related to your own posts

This is presumably the case because all posts I make are auto-approved and not me doing anything manually. There was only one case of any disagreement on a Paima post, and I discussed it with another moderator at the time. None of the Paima posts break any rules anyway, so even if these were manual, none of them would be inherently wrong. Paima is not an NFT, it’s not a game, it’s engine to build onchains Web3 apps and games. It’s the same reason jpg.store posts stay up, but NFT mint posts get deleted. Same reason posts about Unity integration tooling stay, but posts about games that use the integration get removed. One is tool/platform, the other is an NFT

Also, this is empirically not true because I’ve probably approved hundreds of accidentally removed comments in the subreddit by the automoderator

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I should also add that if you wanted to talk, you know how to reach me on any platform at any time. If your opinion is that it’s unclear whether or not a framework for creating games should be lumped in the same bucket as NFT announcement posts, you could have messaged me anytime on Reddit, Telegram, Slack or started a thread like this to discuss with the community

Instead, you blatantly lied to me in a DM to pretend this is some policy change whereas in reality literally the only person affected by this “policy change” is just me (with the addition of Ruslan after you saw my reply). If this “policy change” was not motivated by secret disagreement on the interpretation of the rules, you could also have simply asked if dcSpark wanted to become an ambassador to comply with this new policy.

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Hello all,

My first observation about this rule is that “low value content” is not a helpful way to dismiss some of the posts from hard-working dev teams that have been moderated out of the forum. It carries a negative connotation that might make those developers feel unsupported.

Advertising is a quite vague term at the best of times, and by some interpretations, links to interviews with a single project team talking about their product could be seen as meeting this criterion.

In this context, you can hopefully appreciate why some projects whose posts are dismissed for the former are upset when a post containing only a single link to a youtube video with a long interview talking about one particular project is also not rejected.

Having worked in tool development for games for over twenty years, the rationale of ‘tooling for games’ vs ‘NFTs for games’ being the differentiating factor between ‘low value’ posts and posts that pass censorship is tenuous as devs use NFTs as tools to facilitate gameplay elements within games.

I am not suggesting that r/cardano becomes a free for all. Far from it, having attempted to onboard many IRL studios onto Cardano rather than Polygon in the last 12 months, I have found professional touchpoints for the game industry are non-existent in our ecosystem. So we do need a curated element for any outward-facing platform.

I am interested in listening to other perspectives before suggesting my own. This might be an excellent opportunity for the folks at CF to get some of the wider game dev community on board to have their say about this. It is a small part within a far larger picture that is starting to form, but I am sure that people would welcome the chance to have a say.

Andrew.

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Although I’m not a Reddit mod, I wanted to share my thoughts on the matter.

Given that about 40% of the ecosystem is comprised of NFT/NFT-related projects, if you open the door to allow them to promote their projects, there’s a high likelihood of flooding the platform with all sorts of NFT-related spam.

In my opinion, to safeguard the 690K Reddit Subs, it might be wise to limit advertising for NFT/NFT-related projects in the general subreddit.

What about creating a specific subreddit for the Cardano NFT Ecosystem?
A subreddit that each NFT / NFT related project can dedicate to help grow.

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There is a subreddit for that called /r/CardanoNFTs

Notably, here is the list of alternative subreddits for other topics that are excluded from the main subreddit for reference

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Of course the main problem with these subreddits is that many people don’t know they exist

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I would argue that CardanoNFTs is not necessarily Game Dev specific.
CardanoDevelopers is also likely not appropriate - seems blockchain dev centric.

How well used are each of these channels? CardanoTrading seems to be hardly used at all other than the daily market update. 1-2 upvotes per post…

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Thanks @SebastienGllmt
While they may currently be relatively unknown, I believe this is all the more reason for the Cardano NFT world to invest significant effort in building and promoting this ecosystem, and dedicating themselves to raising awareness. Doing so would undoubtedly benefit all Cardano NFT and NFT-related projects.

Given that Cardano is an ecosystem comprised of multiple smaller ecosystems, it’s wise to consider categorizing them as they continue to grow and evolve. I guess this is why we are seeing these dedicated subreddits for the different categories such as Stake Pools, Developers, Trading, NFTs, and hopefully more to follow.
(It’s also a way to allow the community to self-organize themselves - something we should continue to encourage - especially in a decentralised world.)

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Hey team,

Appreciate everyone’s input here. I believe the current r/cardano rules are restrictive to the point of making the subreddit largely worthless and there is substantial room for improvement. I’ll outline a few points below as well as propose a few solutions:

  1. r/Cardano is the largest Cardano community on reddit. It is in effect the “front face” of Cardano for the entire reddit community (Reddit has 430+ million monthly active users).

  2. Inability to post about major network participants like Stakepools, NFTs, Games is severely limiting the utility of the subreddit. I understand the desire to keep spam/low qual content down, but we’re at a point of restriction that I liken to going to a restaurant without being able to discuss the food.

  3. Current policies have also allowed and heavily promoted high profile public multi-million dollar rugs (see Ardana). This preference for Defi, Tooling, integrations etc. over games and NFTs doesn’t actually stop bad actors, it just shows preference for specific types of bad actors.

  4. The mods are simply acting on CF policy guidance. There have likely been instances of abuse here, but the likelihood of abuse will go down if we simply change policies and open up a bit.

  5. These conditions necessitate a policy change for CF. as the mods are simply enforcing current policy.

Proposed policy changes:

  1. Allow Stakepools, NFTs, Games, Defi, any Cardano projects to post.
  2. Restrict the amount of posts by projects to something reasonable - Maybe 1/day? This can be adjustable. For example, if 12 people are posting about the same project one day, pick the highest quality post and leave it, scrap the others.
  3. To cut down on “new” projects just scamming liquidity, maybe require 3 months + of activity or similar.
  4. Regularly hold policy reviews.

If nothing else I think that’s a good place to start. It’s important to remember that everyone wants to see Cardano succeed, and we all have different visions of what that looks like, but we are broadly aligned toward the same goals. Wishing everyone well, and looking forward to making r/cardano a more welcoming and useful place for newbies and builders alike.

Cheers,
Chris
Cardania

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We should just combind all the types of sub posts into one reddit. Label them as Stake pool post, NFT posts, Meme.

In my opinion it’s not relaistic to have a casual audence split between 4 subreddits.

Limit the posting ablity of new projects to 1 a week or something. When it comes to “Whats happening in Cardano” This 4 page set up isn’t it.

preventing spam is a balence and it seems to be set on strangle anything new or isn’t a “friend of someone I know”

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I kinda like the idea Sebastian proposed to leverage the power of reddit in regards to upvotes to decide which posts to promote and demote. However, from experience I know people will also downvote things out of spite. If the votes matter for listing in the main reddit I am sure scam / spam projects will also give out bounties to upvote posts. Or how to we prevent bots from manipulating votes?

Does anyone know a good example reddit which found a good solution in managing this? I love the idea of giving more power to the people but worry the system is too prone to manipulation.

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The cardano community has broken up into a dozen different silos.
People who wanted to see blockchain infrastructure are now in the WMT and EMP discord groups, People who want to trade NFTs presumably hang out somewhere else (i dont do NFTs). people who want to talk about markets are on the Trading telegram chanel.
People who want to talk about cardano development have been split in many different sections, from Catalyst to Plutus Devs, or the group who are writing the cardano constitution and so on.

This is fine but it is hard to actually find the ‘cardano community’ anywhere.

I like the idea of this forum being where ‘real’ cardano discussions are done, while the reddit sub can become more of a ‘News’ focused page, which includes things like NFTs, development, ISPOs etc…and if the tourists hang out there for a while and want to get more involved - then they can be directed here.

Whilever this bear market crabs along and the world still thinks crypto is for cocaine and guns. I am all for lowering the quality of the content on the sub - because at the moment there isnt really any content there at all. If there is another bull run and another generation of gamblers flood the sub, then it can get restricted again.

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