Super quick improvements SW should make before Group Restructuring

I definitely think way too much about this stuff 😆 but I care about this site and I wanna help in my own littol adorbz way 🥺 so here’s me typing an essay into the abyss 👀

So group restructuring is clearly a big project that’s gonna change the way groups and post categories work and hopefully make the whole site more intuitive to use for new members and encourage a lot more topic discussions for regulars. But judging by how quick updates usually are this is at least a few months away from now and SW has a few issues that have been brought up before that feel kinda essential at this point and would surely not take much time to fix.

1) Remove the inappropriate groups

Currently there is a Report Group button so that we can tell mods when we find a group that breaks the TOS. But these reports hardly ever get a response, and there is so many illegal groups that the report button alone is nowhere near enough to make any effect on them all.

I don’t know how difficult it is to remove a group page but it’s definitely possible and presumably only actually takes pressing an unpublish button? So could admins just spend a couple of hours one day searching terms that break the TOS and removing a whole load of these groups?

For emphasis - it took me less than a minute to take these two screenshots:All of these are obviously against the TOS. And having a webpage encouraging potential predators to “Add a story, a question, an experience, a thought” on these topics is surely very counter productive to enforcing the rules.

I know that the group restructuring will deal with this problem anyway - but it shouldn’t take very long for a huge dent to be made in these search lists if group deletion is as easy as I imagine it to be. It would massively improve the look of the site in the meantime and send the message that the pedos and predators are not welcome here.

2) Add a Politics tag for posts with an optional filter

Most regulars are at the point now where they’ve blocked or been blocked by most users whose posts they don’t want to see, but new users do not have that privilege. Without having so many people hidden, their main feed often looks a bit of a toxic cesspool, mostly due to the ton of American propaganda spam by a few blank looking profiles with no discernible personality.

This is surely why so many new profiles disappear after a few days, how are they going to get to the good bits when they have to manually sort through all that rubbish?

The admins have said before that group restructuring will solve this problem too as we’ll be able to block groups but a politics tag would solve this problem in the meantime.

SW already has the means to do it I mean it would probably just be copying the code from the other auto-tags and changing the trigger words. Even if this just included it would massively filter out the spam for new members who aren’t interested and make the actual core community on SW more visible.

3) Community engagement from admins

It’s super rare to see admins and mods posting on SW and when they do, there are some users that just immediately hurl abuse at them. This might be partly explained (not completely, some people will always be like this...but partly explained) by the fact that admins don’t really act like people on here. To most users admins seem like invisible ominous ghosts lurking in the background and therefore, naturally, assume that they can’t trust them. People react angrily to any change because admins are seen as a threat. There’s probably a few easy ways to get average users back on side...

• Announce changes in advance -
When post moods and comment censoring were first introduced people had absolutely no idea they were coming. They took everyone by surprise and they reacted badly. So show what’s coming and ask for feedback! It takes like 2 minutes to make a post like this and I think it would go a long way with some people
Even with boring background features people will be interested in the changes you’re making and will feel like they’re being listened to when you ask for feedback.

• Be a little more transparent
Updates and fixes are slow on SW and report responses are slow and there’s a lot of unfinished features. A lot of users immediately assume that this is because you don’t care, or some even think you’re being cynical, that you secretly endorse illegal content on SW, that you’re part of some evil liberal big tech conspiracy.....

But none of that is true at all. Things are slow and unfinished on SW because it’s a side project run by a tiny team of volunteers. Admins and mods don’t have time to work much on SW and have far greater priorities most of the time and that is obviously totally okay.

It’s great that SW tries to look big and professional and like other social media but people will be more forgiving when they can see that there’s humans running this site manually and that they aren’t being rinsed for traffic and profit. So talk, make a few normal posts too, apologise when updates are slow and explain why, and people won’t mind at all. Even the crazy ones love this site and we would love to engage with you. It only takes a few minutes but would make a huge difference.

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This took me ages to write 😆 idk if it will make any difference to anything. But I always feel like SW is slowly sinking, people are leaving way way faster than they’re joining. This site helped me massively through lockdowns and I know it’s helped a ton of people much much more...I hope it turns around and begins to grow again.