Problem

With the SERIOUS tag being implemented we are now starting to see some serious discussions take place in the sub. While serious tagged posts are meant to be held to a higher level of content standard this isn’t the easiest to moderate, after some time the higher level discussion does seem to make its way to the top of a post, but when you scroll down sometimes it’s hard to tell that it was tagged as a serious discussion.

Sometimes innocent but unnecessary and generic comments make their way in, which sometimes get removed, but not always. Comments such as “Great post OP” “This is the type of content we should see more of” whilst innocent in nature don’t actually contribute to discussion and end up getting upvoted simply because it is of positive sentiment.

Because of this, after a couple of days some SERIOUS discussions look no different to regular posts.

Considering comments within serious posts are eligible for up to 4x karma, I think it’s important to maintain a level of content standard.

Solution

I propose implementing the requirement that all parent or top-level comments to require 100 characters minimum, else be automatically removed by Automoderator.

Keeping in mind, Serious discussions aren’t a place for simple FAQ’s or generic statements anyway, it should not be difficult to attain 100 characters in a comment in response to the original post.

It is also the poster who is requesting that their post consist of more in depth discussion rather than short generic responses.

This change would only impact parent or top-level comments. This allows anyone who has a short but relevant questions to concisely ask if they need to as a child comment or within comment chains.

The 2 main pros I can see are;

• Helping reduce moderator workload by having automod remove of a lot of low quality comments
• Helping reinforce the concept that serious discussions are intended for actual discussion

The 2 main cons I can see are;

• Users can easily add filler words to reach 100 characters
• Users can still add short comments that don't necessarily add to discussion underneath parent comments

For context, 100 characters is easily attained, in fact this sentence contains 110 characters excluding spaces and formatting

And for final clarity this change is only to apply to SERIOUS tagged posts and remember that it is the poster who is requesting their post be marked as SERIOUS discussion.

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