All I ask is you leave your feedback on the questions / thoughts below. I bolded the key parts if reading a wall of text isn't for you.
We usually involve the community before we're ready to implement a change, but without much feedback you can kinda expect we might plow through some big changes.
1) Moving on from being an "Advice Forum
It is my personal opinion that we're not good at advice. We love to poke fun at personal finance subreddits, but frankly they do seem to do a better job of helping someone with the very basics. That's simply what they like to do in those subreddits - so we can't really be all that surprised that they get more in-depth in responses than we do. Plus, honestly, I don't think dealing with these basic questions is the intended purpose of this subreddit. So, I am asking, why does the modteam cater to basic advice questions here? Is that a good thing?
For a while now we have pushed people to the "Daily Advice Thread" but that feels more like sending people off into the abyss. I think doing that we are doing them a disservice, and we should just be sending them to another subreddit. The modteam is thinking of tightening up the rule on "generic advice threads", and simply outright banning them.
A "Generic Advice Thread" is a grey area definition. We feel it is any question that does not tend to generate any discussion or "ideas" because it is so basic and common that people simply parrot the same generic response. Certain questions do tend to generate discussion, ideas, or shared perspectives - these questions would not be banned.
2) Politics and You
At this point we're struggling with politics. We have been trial running AutoModerator leaving a generic comment on certain threads to mixed results. It is currently a little bit misaimed (at this point it doesn't need to trigger on Tesla topics anymore). This comment from AutoModerator basically asks people to act civilly, for OP to ensure their topic relates to investing, and for top level comments to be about investing.
This trial has been largely successful when the comment actually shows up on a thread that needs the reminder, in my opinion (but I am biased). I think the quick reminders in that comment set a much needed tone for the thread.
We are curious for the communities thoughts on politics in /r/investing. We have been taking more frequent actions lately (in the past year) since this was previously a non-issue, and this is a chance to get feedback on how you think things have been going.
Furthermore, is this AutoMod comment annoying to you? Should it show up less frequently, or more frequently? Keep in mind that the functionality of AutoMod itself is very limited to simply keywords (or every thread).
3) Revisiting the discussion about Link Posts
Link posts have been banned here for like 1.9 million years now. We don't do them because of the viewpoint that they tend to be corporate news rather than investing focused, or they get spammy (blogspam, garbage websites, or poorly considered articles). However, primarily, I think people just like to hang out in the comments section rather than browse to links. We do still allow links in the body of a post.
I will add that leaving out link posts obviously means a few disavantages too - it's not as friendly to browse and it probably generally discourages just posting news articles (as people feel like they must add something to the body to make a post here).
We brought this forward maybe 2-3 years ago now, and the community asked for no change. I am simply asking - stay the course? Yes or no?
4) Daily Casual Ticker Discussion
If we push advice out of here that removes most of our recurring sticky posts. I propose we replace them with a daily casual ticker discusion thread. The idea behind this thread is that all top level comments are required to be JUST the ticker, and information about that ticker (links to current news articles, corporate releases, and so on). Then, responses can be normal /r/investing discussion. The idea is that you can visit this thread and have very casual discussions about specific popular tickers that day.
This would spur casual discussion, hopefully. Sometimes you want to comment on a ticker, or ask something about a ticker, without having a whole thread. Sometimes there was a price movement you want to comment on that doesn't have it's own thread (and you don't want to post one).
We would not automate this right away. It would just be posted daily, asking people to restrict top level comments to a specific format. We could figure out a bot later maybe.
Do we want to replace Advice Threads with Casual Ticker Discussion?
Looking forward to comments.
Submitted May 21, 2019 at 06:38PM by CrasyMike http://bit.ly/2JRRH80
