This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.

The original was posted on /r/philadelphia by /u/AutoModerator on 2025-02-05 15:01:54+00:00.

State of the Subreddit

Hi folks, it’s probably overdue as usual, but it’s time again to touch base about the state of the subreddit and put forward some changes and revisions.

Getting the hot button issue out of the way, based on feedback and recent events twitter (X) posts are no longer permitted on the subreddit. We would have announced this sooner, but with the other announcements and changes we felt there was prudence in lumping everything together. Automoderator was configured to filter them last week the day that it was first brought up in the subreddit and there was near unanimous support to make the change, so you have already been living with this change for two weeks. Exceptions may be made for official accounts related to the city or city officials, but it is unlikely that there is not a better source for information, such as .

Our next major change is two-fold, the first being that posts will now require users to assign Flair. While this may seem annoying, our reason for this change is related to change part 2: Karma Limits will now be public. How are these related you may ask? The past year Reddit introduced the ability to filter by karma specifically gained in a subreddit, as opposed to site-wide karma. This has let us use post flair to determine how strict automod is when removing comments. General posts, such as the chat threads, questions and “non-serious” topics have a low, site-wide karma requirement. “Serious” topics, such as politics or crime threads are limited to those who have participated in the subreddit before. We have similar, not as high limit for making new posts on the sub. All accounts are required to be 30 days old. Since we’ve started this practice, we’ve actually had far less content removal, bans and bad-faith interactions and allowed us to spend more time trying to answer modmail, which is probably the most time consuming part of moderation. The karma limits are as follows, and will be posted to the sidebar and welcome message:

Posting to the subreddit: 100 subreddit karma

• Commenting in a chat thread: 50 karma
• Commenting in a “non-serious” thread: 200 karma
• Commenting in a “Serious” thread (Flaired with Politics, Crime Post or Serious): 200 subreddit karma

We dont feel these limits are onerous, and encourage people to participate in the multitude of positive content about our city as opposed to just being miserable, shitposting in crime threads. We realize that having the karma limits hidden in the past has been a source of frustration for new users, and we are hoping that this will help things moving forward - while making serial ban evaders work harder to get through and eventually banned again.

That said, our flairs could probably use some updates, and we are open to suggestions. Probably the most notable omission is a LGBT flair.

Event Posts:

Our thursday event/self promotion thread doesn’t really get much action. We are suggesting doing away with the prohibition on event posts and self-promotion to see how it goes, but again are open to suggestions from the community on how to limit spam. Some subreddits require a certain ratio of comments:self promo - would that be the way to go here? Give us your thoughts.

Rule 3/Rule 9 Consolidation:

Use the weekly threads for common questions such as moving, cheesesteak recommendations, vacation planning or other low-effort content. Lost, found, for sale or wanted (posts dealing with property, labor or goods) should be posted on r/phillylist.

Lastly, less of a change and more of a reminder. In the wake of recent events, there has seemingly been a spike in inflammatory content. It sucks, and it’s horrible that the current social climate is such that people feel emboldened to be assholes, but engaging with them only serves to bring ourselves and the subreddit down with them. Please dont feed the trolls, and do your best to downvote and report content. We rely heavily on reports for moderation, and they help us quickly identify content that needs to be removed. We aren’t perfect, so if you feel like we are failing to address something, feel free to contact us in modmail to discuss.