This is going to be a long post between survey results, some of our answers to the write-ins on the survey, and the AMA announcement.
So I'm just going to put a tl;dr for what most of you are here for!
A.) Aadam from Physiqonomics will be doing an AMA here with us on July 28th at 3pm EST/7pm GMT.
B.) The survey results can be found here
C.) We've implemented some basic changes on the subreddit, mostly to do with automod, that should improve the quality of life within the subreddit. I'll sticky a comment later today with the full overview of what we've changed.
We received nearly 2800 responses, which is the most we've ever received in any survey to date. I felt like it was important to answer some of the most common concerns in the write-in portion of the essay. The following text will be just that, our responses to your concerns. If you have any other comments, questions, or concerns, feel free to leave a comment for us down below.
Keep the challenge posts stickied longer!
Give us more stickies to work with! I’m picking on challenges here, but in general, we want X, X, and X stickied is the most common suggestion and has always been on these types of surveys/suggestions post. I’m actually moving this response up to the top in hopes more people see it. We’re allotted two stickies as a subreddit. One is always taken up for our guidelines/link post (off topic but a new guideline/link post is being made and will be posted soon). The other is either a challenge post, or one of the daily threads. If I had one wish to make this sub better place, it’d be 2-3 more stickies. I’ve already pleaded my case with people that can make a difference and got no response other than this is the way it has been, and that’s the way it is.
I think it'd be nice to have a network of people who're maintaining on r/loseit! I know that's not really the purpose of the sub, but I've made a lot of friends through the challenges and I'm sticking around to lend a helping hand to those who need advice. It'd be great if I could meet people like myself!
This is a common suggestion. According to this survey, 5-6% of the people who lurk or participate within /r/loseit are maintainers. If this sample size holds true, there’s thousands of maintainers out there. The issue we have is keeping participation up from this group of people. We’ve had a few users try to spark a weekly post about maintenance and the challenges faced within it. If it became popular enough, we could totally make it an automod weekly post about maintenance, the issue is if you struggle to get even 2-3 people posting, it doesn’t exactly turn out to be worth one’s while.
We do really appreciate the maintenance view point on this subreddit. I strongly believe this subreddit is as successful as it is, because in a lot of ways it mimics group therapy. There’s newbies, people at all stages within the process, and people that have completed the process leading by example. It’s fantastic to establish reference points, because you can learn from each others mistakes, and you can get a rough idea of what it’ll be like each step of the way.
There are many moderators, but only a couple are consistently putting in effort
There are 2 founding/legacy moderators - they’re inactive and don’t participate at all. Of the 10 current moderators we have enlisted - 1 in is inactive, and has been inactive for a little less than a month. Just because some mods choose to be less vocal than others, doesn’t mean they aren’t still contributing behind the scenes. Everyone regularly participates and offers their 2¢ in the mod chat. Banning users or removing comments can easily be done discreetly and privately.
The tracking post on Thursday drives me nuts! I’d like to see it revamped; either to make it clearer that people should post under the relevant comment, or to change the default comment sorting, or something!
Yeah this drives us nuts too. We’ve implemented a change with automod that should prevent this from occurring. We had complete success this Thursday. The changes we made prevented anyone from posting outside of replying to the automod.
“Automod was a BOSS thursday. I don't think we're going to have any issues with it.”
Probably impractical, but a hand me downs system based on location for fellow losers to pay it forward
It exists! /r/LoseItClothingSwap - but it’s inactive! It just needs regular contributions. We get this suggestion a lot. Someone else will have to take it by the horns, and be the change they want to see.
I'd like to see some rules about how the sub deals with people who potentially have eating disorders or are trying to lose weight unhealthily - I feel like their posts/comments are often downvoted (especially if they attempt to argue their position) which is unlikely to be particularly helpful when it comes to getting them help.
I think this subreddit largely handles potential ED cases well enough. It’s not perfect, but I think the system we have in place tends to work out well in most cases. We often let users point out the signs, and we’ll leave a mod comment stickied if we’re genuinely concerned for the OP’s health. On the rare occasions where the OP is combative or resistant we often will lock the thread once we think there’s nothing more for them to hear that they haven’t already heard. Downvotes most likely come from lurkers who disapprove of their methods that aren’t comfortable/willing to comment. That’s just the nature of reddit, and there’s probably not going to be any changing that anytime soon. The flip side of that would be if everyone upvoted it and a potential ED case makes front page, now it looks like the subreddit would be condoning that type of thing. I personally ignore upvotes/downvotes on just about anything, but I realize that most people don’t think that way.
It’s probably also worth pointing out that a lot of people are turned off by these posts, because the sidebar clearly indicates that /r/loseit is a place for anyone to talk about healthy and sustainable weight loss. So when you have a guy or gal coming in talking about their 500 calorie daily goal or month long water fast...it’s not exactly going to receive a warm welcome from anyone that’s a regular.
At the end of the day, we leave it up to the community and the mod team spectates from a distance. If we feel like talks are unproductive we shut it down. I don’t think /r/loseit is a replacement for a doctor or a psychologist, any discussion in ED posts should probably end in suggesting that the OP seeks professional help.
The following questions/concerns will be about posting guidelines and the content we’re hoping to see on /r/loseit:
I do feel current posting guidelines are a bit strict. It seems difficult to actually get a post through to the main page. I also feel like it can be difficult to build community and actually get to know other subscribers.
We’ve been playing with automod /u/ClaytonRayG has been playing with automod, and has been updating it to hopefully better filter out lower quality posts. This is an ongoing thing that we’ve been playing with for awhile now. There’s going to be hiccups, but our ideal goal is to continue to make /r/loseit a great community filled with substantive weight loss discussion.
I’ve personally lurked or participated in /r/loseit since it had about 200,000 subscribers. I think the community was a little closer knit back then, but the subreddit has had an enormous upsurge since then. I still recognize users that have been around since then, that tells me a lot of our older subscribers still find reason to post, even after all this time and growth. I think the best way to get to know each other better is to participate in the challenges and add each other on social media by using the Track With me Thursday threads. You will see regular users posts all around the subreddit, but to really get to know someone, I strongly believe you need to put yourself out there and make some friends through other platforms. Reddit is really not a great friend making platform, you need a stepping stone to make the connection.
Definitely more encouragement for well written, detailed posts. I know you can’t control the upvotes, but it’s frustrating to see short silly posts get thousands of upvotes and some well written longer posts get 50 type thing.
Some of the best posts on this subreddit receive the least amount of attention. That’s sort of the nature of the internet, though. Short and concise posts with a beginning, middle, and end often receive a lot more attention than a longer, more thoroughly explained post. Even though 9 times out of 10 the longer, more thorough post will have much more valuable information. We encourage more well thought out posts by utilizing an automod filter, but at the end of the day, it’s the community that decides what reaches the front page. Sure, we have the ability to remove/suggest edits to a post through our moderator capabilities, but we’re easily overshadowed by the power of the masses.
I am very happy with the state of the group. I do believe that people complaining about SV/NSV are not being very fair, and I don't have any problem with them: if people post them outside of the daily thread, it is a major event for them and unless an individual abuses the privilege, where they can be individually censured, I don't believe the chance of hurting someone's feelings/motivation is worth having one extra post. I know I've posted to the daily SV/NSV post a little late in the day and gotten no feedback, which is a lil harmful to the self-esteem. Maybe as a compromise, we might have two per day, a morning and an evening one, so people can comment more frequently?
The issue isn’t necessarily the daily post timing, it’s the fact that at less active hours fewer users are online to interact. The sub is active 24/7 but if you’re posting at like...3am US EST, chances are you’re going to be waiting until users start to get online before you receive much activity on your post. It’s a delicate balance we’re trying to strike, that in all likelihood will never be 100% perfect and it will never make everyone happy. The results are in and the overwhelming majority of the decided voters believe removing NSV/SVs that lack detail removes clutter on the front page & should be moved to the daily thread. The following question…removing an NSV/SV diminishes a users accomplishment, regardless if it’s breaking the guidelines - majority of decided voters - Yes. So people want less front page NSV/SV posts that lack detail, but feel that removing an NSV/SV diminishes someone’s achievements. Hopefully you see the problem we face here.
My biggest gripe with people suggesting that nsv/sv/day1s/questions belong in their respective automod post is the problem that it means nothing if people don’t go and interact with those posts. If posting in one of the dailies feels like you’re talking to a void, then why would someone post in a daily post? All of the current daily posts are active, and aside from the Q&A where it’s rare to see a question go completely unanswered, I see a lot of lonely posts with little to no interaction throughout the day. I strongly encourage everyone to upvote the automod posts, even if you have any plan to interact with them past that point. It helps keep the subreddit organized, and it helps users find the correct location to place their post.
Miscellaneous concerns/suggestions
Challenges seem to die out after the first few weeks/lack participation on the team subreddits.
Keep in mind, we’re /r/loseit moderators. While one of the /r/loseit mods is a challenge admin, you should voice these concerns with the challenge admins. From my limited participation with the challenges, I can tell you there is usually a discord or chat associated with each team that is way more active than the actual subreddit is.
Overall i think the mods are great but i would like to see them chiming in more often.
As far as modding goes, each mod has their own individual style. Some like to keep moderator duties contained/discrete to DMs/modmail. Others are more for publicizing and making things as transparent as possible. There’s really no right or wrong approach, each has their own benefits and shortcomings. I will say all of the mods are contributing in some way; we pick and choose when and where we distinguish comments. We don’t distinguish comments when we give any random opinion or input. We’re no different from any random user in that regard. We distinguish comments when we feel there is subreddit wide importance to our comment, or in some way the comment is explaining/enforcing guidelines.
I wish there was a stricter rule for people when they post pictures that they cannot show their pubes or at LEAST have a towel around their waist.
We’ve always allowed nudity, as long as they have the post marked NSFW. If it’s not marked, please report it so we can mark it NSFW.
With over 2700 entries to the survey, there was a lot of write in responses as a result. I’m sorry if I didn’t answer your question. I really just took the most frequent ones I found and I felt that I could adequately explain. I read them all closely. Thank you all for your continued participation in the subreddit.
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