The Reddit Automoderator bot is an obnoxious annoying turd.
I’ve never been too shy about my opinion of Reddit and most of its users. Hell, I’ve made an entire series based around it.
But it’s not just the users and the administration that make Reddit an unbearable shithole. There’s one giant automated asshole that really digs under my skin and annoys the everloving shit out of me.
I’m talking about the goddamn Automoderator.
This thing specializes in being an annoying cunt. I actually want to applaud the developers of this thing for their valiant trolling effort. 10/10, my jimmies are definitely rustled.
It feels like no matter where I go on Reddit, the Automoderator is right there just waiting to pounce with an automatically generated wall of text nagging me to read the subreddit’s rules or telling me some other bullshit I don’t care about. Because nothing incentivizes me to post on your subreddit more than being bombarded by automated bullshit the very second I make a new post. Redditors will defend this by saying that people don’t willingly read the rules in the sidebar, so by having Automoderator reply immediately to every new thread this encourages people to read them. If you need a bot to tell you the rules every time you make a new thread then you’re fucking retarded and you should get off my internet. People have been following internet forum rules for years without an Automoderator nagging them, seeing a giant wall of text at the top of every thread is unnecessarily obnoxious and makes me want to break the rules out of spite.
There’s nothing worse than looking up a computer issue or some other problem and finding a Reddit thread about it only to have to sift through an ocean of Automoderator’s “Your post has been removed because” bullshit. Why are you publicly posting this notification? For fuck’s sake just delete the post and fuck off. Send it to the poster as a DM and stop clogging threads with this irrelevant garbage. I’ve seen entire threads that consist of nothing more than deleted posts and replies from the Automoderator telling them that their post has been deleted for violating some stupid pointless rule. At that point just delete the fucking thread, it serves no purpose other than to infuriate people like me who stumble across it during a Google search.
Imagine, you come across a subreddit for your favorite niche hobby, Albanian box collecting. You don’t have an account, but you want to join in the conversation with your fellow Albanian box collectors so you create a Reddit account. You see a topic asking a question about a particular Albanian box that you happen to be very familiar with, so you use your newly created Reddit account to provide the poster with an answer. Within seconds your post is deleted, and you have a new notification. It’s the Automoderator, informing you your post was deleted because your account is too new and only accounts that are a month old are allowed to post.
You grumble a bit, but come back a month later. You check out the same thread, and still nobody has answered the poster’s question about that ultra rare Albanian box. You resubmit your answer, happy to have been of help to a fellow Albanian box collector.
The page refreshes, and again your post has been deleted. You have a new notification. Goddamnit it’s that son of a bitch Automoderator again, here to tell you that your post was deleted this time because your account doesn’t have enough karma (upvotes). At this point your only options are to go find other subreddits to join and post agreeable things to harvest the required upvotes, or simply not take part in r/AlbanianBoxCollectors. Any sane and rational person would choose the latter. I know I sure as hell would.
That one isn’t so much the Automoderator as it is the idiots running the subreddit, but it’s still ridiculous.
Whenever I see an Automoderator post, I go out of my way to downvote it. I don’t know if downvotes actually affect Automoderator posts and I don’t care, it feels kind of cathartic to hit that down arrow and decrease its karma by one. Why isn’t there a way to block this thing, or at least hide its posts? I can hide user posts, why can’t I hide posts from this obnoxious douchebot?
Others have asked this very same question, only to be told by snarky Redditors “You shouldn’t be allowed to block Automoderator because it’s important and gives you important information!” Bitch please, all it does is repost the same rules that are already on the sidebar and gatekeep the subreddit. Sometimes it’s also used to announce a contest that the subreddit is having. There’s nothing important about anything it posts, ever. I have never once read an Automoderator post and been thankful for the information it contained.
The Automoderator is hands down one of the worst things about Reddit. It’s annoying, it’s obnoxious, and it’s very off-putting. You know, kind of like most of the people who use Reddit.
Nobody wants to be automatically harassed every other time they make a post. Nagging your users is really only going to irritate them or make them reluctant to post and hurt you in the long run. It’s time to reevaluate the Automoderator and either give it an overhaul to make it less obnoxious, or simply scrap it altogether.
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