Introducing unexBot, a new bot to improve the quality of this sub

Hi everyone, Over the past months there have been many complaints regarding the quality of the posts on this sub. And they are right. ###Often times posts reach the front page without something unexpected happening in the video/GIF. Before introducing a possible solution to this problem let me explain why this problem occurs:

  1. Quite a lot of people upvote submissions not based on whether it is a fitting submission for this sub but rather on whether it's a nice or entertaining video/GIF. This requires us moderators to make a tough decision: Do we let a post stay up, even if it's lacking quality in our opinion, or do we delete it and potentially ignore thousands of votes that might indicate that this is indeed good post and we moderators just don't "get it"

  2. We lack the manpower to oversee everything and delete the post early on. Now, you might say "That's easy to fix, just get some new moderator onboard". Besides the fact that we are constantly trying to recruit more moderators, adding more moderators also means adding more potential for fuckups. Each moderator need to trust each other at least somewhat and especially new moderators need oversight at the beginning. This naturally limits how many moderators there can be, while the amount of posts is constantly raising.

###Ok, how do we plan to tackle this problems? Over the past couple of weeks I've written a bot that will hopefully take of the weight of our shoulders and improve the quality of this sub. This it how the bot (u/unexBot) will work:

When you submit a post, the bot will write you message. If you want your post to stay up, you'll have the answer the bot with an sum-up of what is unexpected in your submitted GIF within 10 minutes. If you don't reply within this time frame, your post will be deleted temporarily, if you reply within the next 1h 50 minutes your post will be approved automatically. Please keep in mind that while your post is deleted, it won't collect upvotes so the faster you answer, the higher are your chances of reaching the frontpage. Also, your reply will be cut off after 500 Characters (So that mobile users don't have to scroll endlessly because someone had to write a 10 000 character essay). Your reply will be posted & stickied by the bot under your submission with a call for rating the submission by up-/downvoting the comment of the bot.

All time variables (and pretty much everything else) is subject to change as we will continue to tweak everything.

###So what's that all for?

  1. This will filter out a lot of low effort content, since most of the people that post these won't bother to reply quickly.
  2. It allows us to collect data. NO, not the personal kind of data that would fall under the GDPR, but rather information about what makes a submission a good submission. When your post is approved, the bot will for a specific period of time create snapshots of the post and the top comments and save those information in a database. We will use this data to analyze this sub submission and further improve this subs quality.

###Will posts be autoremoved if the comment get a too low score? No, at least for now. Since autoremoving submissions is a very delicate thing to do, we first want to collect some data, so that we have a foundation we can base possible thresholds for deletions or other measures on.

###So can I ignore the comment from the bot? No, PLEASE VOTE. Voting via the bot-comment is an easy way for everyone to directly contribute to the quality of this subreddit. If you don't tell us what kind of posts you want to see, we won't be able to steer the sub in the right direction.

###Can I answer the bot rubbish? No, please don't. We hope that this won't be a big problem, but if it is, we might have to take action and temp-ban people (you don't want that, do you?). But this will probably be a temporary problem, since when autoremovals are enabled, there is an incentive to write good sum-ups.

###How can I help? Well, the two most important things are writing good sum-ups and voting on them. If you still want to do more than that, you can check out the github page for the bot (https://github.com/Artraxon/unexBot) and contribute.

###I'm the headmod of a subreddit and would like to use this bot, what do I have to do? If you want to host your own version, there is both a fat-jar and a docker-image available that you can simply download and run. If you also want to contribute the data of your subreddit, you can contact me via PM and we can figure something out together.

###When will the bot start running? I will start the bot at 15:00 UTC today. So get ready.

Edit: Added the spoiler Tag since so many requested it

Posted Oct 27, 2019, 2:49 PM UTC · edited

43779
unexBot•

OP send the following text as an explaination on why this is unexpected:

You see? This is what it looks like


Is it a good post? Then upvote this comment, otherwise downvote it.


Look at my source code on Github and give me a star ;)

38
chris-tier•

Uh.....

explaination

Explanation?

25
vxx:DidNotExpect:•

Wow, I've read the message so often...

Well, the explanations should be plain and simple, right?

18
chris-tier•

True :-P

I also just noticed:

OP send

Shouldn't it be sent? Otherwise, the sentence sounds weird.

13
vxxMOD:DidNotExpect:•

Thanks, it will get fixed. Looks like we were worried about so many other things, that it went right past us.

14
[deleted]•

[deleted]

1
Ryan778•

Sounds interesting! Is there any plan for marking what's "unexpected" as a spoiler or not sticking the spoiler on the top (ie, a subcomment)? It seems like the current setup can easily spoil the unexpectedness by accident.

24
ArtraxaronOPDidn't Expect ban•

Well, not sticking the comment makes it impossible to find. But why would you look at the comment section before looking at the post? In most cases, a look at the comment section would give it away anyway

13
Ryan778•

Good point. As you've said most of the out of place posts that go to the top are from people scrolling through their homepage. I guess my viewpoint is coming from the fact that a spoiler tag wouldn't harm anyone - though arguably it's not really necessary. Just food for thought.

7
vxxMOD:DidNotExpect:•

We actually had it as a spoiler for a while but for other reasons. I thought we could make the spoiler short and expand into the full text.

Well, after we figured it doesn't work that way, we scrapped the spoiler completely.

I also got the feeling after a quick test, that spoilers doesn't work that well in the official app, and that's where most of the traffic is coming from atm.

We might change it when demand arises.

3
asailijhijr•

I don't know reddit css, but I know in html css it should be possible to do what you describe with spoilers only in the bot's comment. But I don't know how that would render in any of the mobile apps or pages.

1
FennlyXerxich•

Let’s hope this doesn’t turn out like the bettereveryloop bot.

23
mridulpjDidn't Expect It•

What happened to the bettereveryloop bot?

8
FennlyXerxich•

Actually I can’t remember if it was that sub or gifsthatkeepongiving.

Either way, the bot would ask for an explaination from the poster of why it fit the sub, but the explainations given were pretty much just “it fits because of the way it is”. So everyone found the bot to be useless.

19
asailijhijr•

If we have that then we'll need a second bot reply comment that asks us to vote on the quality of the explanation.

7
[deleted]•

[deleted]

1
vxxMOD:DidNotExpect:•

We could always remove those posts and shoot a warning. It only happened twice so far. Users are really awesome with their replies.

6
[deleted]•

[deleted]

1
Ineovas•

Get rid of this bot again please, its literally just spamming the comment sections with useless comments

7
Bardfinn•

This is a good approach. Well done.

6
rednecksteve•

Want to improve... Stop Reddit from becoming goddam tic tok. Everyone posting tic tok video.. its not Reddit anymore

6
vxxMOD:DidNotExpect:•

Reddit is the frontpage of the Internet. It's a content aggregator.

Vines have been a thing before Tiktok.

We realise a lot of stuff there is just reuplaoded reposts, and we try to sort them out, but we won't ban an entire domain just because of some bad videos.

4
rednecksteve•

No one said ban or bad videos... Tic tok is taking over Reddit...seems every video is a tic tok video now

3
vxx:DidNotExpect:•

Vine was pretty similar, and I don't see people in r/videos complaining that 99% are videos from YouTube.

2
Philippe23•

"Will posts be autoremoved if the comment get a to low score?"

  • too low
5
asailijhijr•

too low a score *

5
Norway313:snoo_dealwithit:•

Outstanding move!

5
Etsyturtle2•

This boy is already stupid and pointless.

5
vxx:DidNotExpect:•

You hate the bot, but this bot filtered 180 posts in 7 days, presumably from repost bots and spammers. (or users that changed their mind about how Unexpected their content really was)

This is only from the Captcha function (the explanations), as the "too many downvotes" function isn't even implemented yet.

It seems to work even better than intended.

7
PaleProgrammer•

The wording in the bot's question should be changed from "is it a good post?" to "is the post unexpected?". People already have a hard time understanding the purpose of the bot, and this only makes it worse.

Many think the bot's purpose is to explain what is unexpected to people who don't get it (especially with the spoiler tag and all), which gets on their nerves, especially when it's very obvious why it is unexpected (which is 90% of the time). In the comment I would add a short explanation of what the bot does, along with a link to this thread for more information.

The question "is it a good post?" is ironically completely missing the point of the bot, which was exactly to filter out the good (funny, interesting) posts which are not unexpected. So many people will see that question and answer "yeah, it's a good post alright, so I should upvote this comment", without at all thinking if the post is expected or not.

4
ArtraxaronOPDidn't Expect ban•

Thats a valid concern. I changed the text (and made a couple of other changes), let's see how it goes

1
asailijhijr•

I've seen a lot of complaints about reposts. Usually I ask the person complaining to link the original and then I'll report the repost. And when I see a same-day repost myself, I'll comment in the repost with a link to the original.

Can I get a mod to tell me that this is a good practice (or that it isn't of it isn't)? And/or to encourage others to do the same?

3
ArtraxaronOPDidn't Expect ban•

This is by far the best practise since we often can't recall if something was already posted. Many people report something as a repost because they've seen it somewhere else on reddit beforw but not on this subreddit.

So keep it up!

5
asailijhijr•

Thanks!

1
ookillemayy•

I like the idea of the bot! Quick typo fix. On 1, Quiet should be Quite. Keep up the good work mods!

2
ArtraxaronOPDidn't Expect ban•

oh, thank you!

1
Midnight-Q•

aaaaaaaaaaaand the bot is useless

2
Green4BluePoggers•

intriguing

1
vxxMOD:DidNotExpect:•

Alright, here we go.

Fingers crossed that it has the intended effect.

Thanks for the hard work you put into it, u/artraxaron!

Edit: After a week I can already tell that it seems to work as intended.

1

So in a way this bot is a "captcha" of sorts where you must fill it out to get the post approved. Eliminating repost bots. Pretty cool idea. Hope it works out for you. If it does I may consider using this bot in a number of my cat subs.

8
vxxMOD:DidNotExpect:•

Yes, Captcha is actually its main purpose. It's incredibly time consuming to go through each profile by hand, so we figured we would try this.

You really don't have it easy with cat subreddits. I use them to determine how likely a user is a Spammer/account farmer.

Goifld luck!

8
htmlcoderexe•

Super cool!

2
MyNameGifOreillyI Like Tacos•

I'm sure this will help a lot , Also if you need more man power to help I have time to dedicate just an FYI

3
Loveinthemud•

The only thing is people don’t upvote the comment, they upvote the post. So many good post will actually be taken down.

1
vxx:DidNotExpect:•

Now you're just making things up to win the argument.

2
Loveinthemud•

No, isn’t that what happens? Like better every loop. I once had a post with a few 100 points get taken down because of the comments vote didn’t get 4 upvotes only three.

1
vxx:DidNotExpect:•

We do everything possible to prevent this. This isn't a copy of their bot, it's only inspired by them. Our bot is way more elaborated (I guess), and the function to remove posts isn't activated yet for that particular reason. We're only going to activate it once we are confident it will make the right calls.

2
sezar4321•

Apart from Collecting data part the rest looks great, i just wish you could skip that part. That's kinda scary and i wish you could remove it as a feature of your bot.

1
ArtraxaronOPDidn't Expect ban•

Well, it doesn't collect data that isn't available to the public anyway (except the sum up, but that is also posted). The reason we do it now while letting the but run is that the reddit api wouldn't allow us to fetch such a large amount of data in a acceptable time frame

2
sezar4321•

Even if the data is available to the public it is not concentrated in one place, the potential to earn some money hacking into your database is still there.

0
ArtraxaronOPDidn't Expect ban•

na, not really. I mean, the dataset is maybe interesting for us or from an academic point of view, but not more. Besides that, the DB isn't reachable from the internet and I can't see how an SQL Injection attack should be possible

7
asailijhijr•

Well now that you've said it someone'll try. But at least we know how you pronounce SQL.

3
Random_Deslimef•

Hopefully the sum-up will be in a spoiler tag so people who use card mode on mobile won't get the twist ruined

1
[deleted]•

[deleted]

1
Mary1337•

There is one sub where comments to the bot are hidden, but one votes up or down basically in the comment to the bot (if it fits or doesn't fit).

1
vxxMOD:DidNotExpect:•

There is one sub where comments to the bot are hidden

We might lock the comment in the future so people can't reply, but we decided to allow them for now.

I don't mind if people voice their opinion about the bot, and it's better they do it directly to the bot instead of cluttering the rest of the comment section.

A quick check suggests, that the bot filtered 180 posts in 7 days, just from the Captcha function.

5
ArtraxaronOPDidn't Expect ban•

This is basically what this bot does, it's just that this one also has a "captcha" built in

1
Mary1337•

Yes but without the comments showing. I see more people complaining and crying in the bot comment than people appreciate it.

I really like the explaining bot function lol

1
GRANDADDYSHOUSE•

@mods it wont let me upload

1