Is there option for preapproving/hiding comments from new users in a subreddit? I'm thinking of a certain regional politics sub where on the main page, you'll see XX number of replies, open the thread and it be completely empty for a couple hours.
Yes, I mention this in the talk at 14:50 [1]. A year ago Reddit upgraded its "Crowd Control", which once only collapsed comments from new users. The feature was bad enough in its initial form. Now it can also remove comments. When they announced it, I said it was like automod on steroids [1]. Now I call it Crowd Control with Prejudice [2], and it's only one of many dystopian tools.
Subs can choose to turn it on, and more and more are doing it in order to make their jobs easier. Between mods acting largely based on user reports, and tools like Crowd Control removing all commentary from new users, there is an absolutely massive amount of content authored by real people being secretly removed from Reddit every second, and that's a single platform.
The irony is, the more they secretly remove, the more people stay put and the bigger the groups get. So, there is then more content for moderators to review which means more work for unpaid volunteers. Or maybe it isn't irony because a bigger userbase is better business. I have no problem with platforms making money, but I do take issue with their systems which lie to millions, perhaps even billions users about the visibility of their own authored content.
[1] https://youtu.be/aCadmiIfbcI?t=890
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/reveddit/comments/qi1r55/fyi_crowd_...
[3] https://www.reddit.com/r/reveddit/comments/sxpk15/fyi_my_tho...
There is also the "approved users" feature [1], but it requires manual intervention for every particular user, and I am not sure whether it practically serves any purpose in public subreddits. Reddit claims it does, but when we tested it a few years ago, it did not work correctly. In any case, I do not recommend it for public subreddits with more than 1k daily users.
[1] https://mods.reddithelp.com/hc/en-us/articles/360009164452
https://www.reddit.com/r/reveddit/comments/sxpk15/fyi_my_tho...
Glad to hear it. Some of this, such as the way user blocks now work, isn't controlled by mods.