Goodday everyone,

Now that we're in the summer break, we think it's a good moment to discuss some things related to the subreddit. There are a couple of things we'd like to discuss with you all, but feel free to bring up any other topic you want. Everything from simple remarks to thorough discussions is welcome.

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Moderation of this community

First of all, we'd like to ask all of you how you feel about the subreddit and the way we moderate it. We've put together a short poll with a couple simple questions. If you could all fill that in, it'd be very much appreciated.

Here is the link to the poll

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Apply to be a moderator

While a year ago we were sitting at a humble 230k subscribers, today our community counts over 400k members. As this community continues to grow, the mod team needs a couple extra members as well. That's why we'd like to ask all passionate members of /r/formula1 to apply to join the moderator team.

Link to application form

We want to make sure we're putting a robust team in place to ensure that your community runs smoothly, especially during the hectic race weekends. So, if you would like to help drive this community forward, if you have experience with moderating other communities, if you are ready to stay on that modqueue like it owes you money, then please apply above.

To be clear: You will not receive any form of compensation for moderating the subreddit.

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Toxic behavior

The next topic at hand is one that has already been discussed recently, but this seems like a good moment to discuss it a bit further. With the growth of communities, it becomes harder and harder to maintain a healthy community. Therefore, we'll be taking harsher actions against comments that attack entire fanbases. Think about comments like "Look at these salty <driver> fans...". More about this policy can be read in this announcement.

However, we'd also like to ask all of you to use that report button. It may feel a bit useless, since you don't really receive a lot of feedback on your reports, but they are very useful for the mod team. The subreddit is far too large for any team of moderators to browse through all threads every 15 minutes, so we really need your reports to bring unacceptable comments to our attention. Thank you all very much in advance.

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Hiding comment times

Subreddits have a setting that allows us to hide the scores of comments for a given amount of minutes. Basically this function causes other people to not be able to see if a comment is being upvoted or downvoted. It has been commonly suggested that we should hide comment scores for a given amount of time in order to decrease downvoting on the subreddit. Since the actual effect of this function is largely unknown, we decided to do some research into this.

The basic explanation is as follows: we used F1-Bot to track the comments scores of pretty much all comments on the subreddit for a month. Each comment was tracked for two hours, with its score being recorded every 15 minutes. To be clear: no user-related data was tracked. Every 6 hours we rotated the comment hiding times between 0 minutes, 30 minutes and 60 minutes. This cancels out any long-term effects. We dropped all data of comments which were posted an hour before we switched the comment hiding times. We sorted the data by race-related or not race-related, and we sorted the data by which comment hiding time was used. In the end, this gave the following results:

• Hiding comment scores does not reduce the percentage of comments with a negative score. Using 0 minutes of hiding comment scores we find that 9.3% +/- 0.2% of all comments receive a negative score, and using 30 minutes and 60 minutes of hiding comment scores this number increases insignificantly to 9.6% +/- 0.2%. We do see that more comments receive a negative score during a race weekend than during the rest of the week, but hiding comment scores in both cases does not reduce the amount of downvoted comments. It seems that the observation that hiding comment scores reduces downvoting is a typical example of observation bias: people do not see downvoted comments because the scores are hidden. However, comments are still being downvoted.
• We do see that hiding comment scores reduces the average amount of downvotes that a downvoted comment receives. Using 0 minutes of hiding comment scores, the average downvoted comment had a net score after two hours of -2.80 +/- 0.12, while using 60 minutes of hiding comment scores increased this score to -1.96 +/- 0.09.
• Unfortunately it also reduces the amount of upvotes that positive comments get. Using 0 minutes of hiding comment scores we find that the average upvoted comment had a net score after two hours of 7.11 +/- 0.10, while using 60 minutes of hiding comment scores decreased this score to 6.29 +/- 0.10.

Because hiding comment scores does not have the desired effect, we will be using 0 minutes of comment hiding time from now on. If there is anything you would like to discuss about this, please comment below.

Graphs for you to check out:

• Percentage of downvoted comments as a function of time. The top row shows data not related to any race weekend. The middle row shows race-weekend data. The bottom row shows all data combined. The data points are connected with a straight dashed line to guide the eye.
• Distribution of net scores for downvoted comments. The red lines show the average net scores of downvoted comments. All data was used.
• Distribution of net scores for upvoted comments. The red lines show the average net scores of upvoted comments. All data was used.

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Our connection to F1

For a while now, we've been cultivating a relationship with representatives of F1. And that relationship is paying off. F1 now has an official presence on the sub, and they helped us set up AMAs with Felipe Massa and Robert Kubica.

We have a common interest in making both the sport and this sub the absolute best it can be for the fans, so this is a natural partnership to keep working on.

The feedback from F1 has been very positive. They are very open to our ideas and requests, and it's clear they value this community highly.

From this relationship, we're confident we'll be able to bring you even closer to the teams, the drivers and the sport in general.

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Flairs

We know a lot of you have been asking for more flairs - and we have some good news for you: We'll be adding more!

We've cleaned up the stylesheet some more, so we have room. We haven't settled on an exact amount to add, but let us know what flairs you'd like in the comments, and we'll see what happens...

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Again, if there are any other topics you'd like to discuss, or if there's something you'd just like to mention, feel free to do so in the comments below.

Kind regards,

The /r/formula1 mod team.