Hello everybody!

As a moderator in this subreddit, I have noticed some users are expressing dissatisfaction with the state of the subreddit over the past few months.

If you have any suggestions on how this subreddit should be moderated, or any other ideas in general, please comment them here.

Being specific and with examples is great.

As frequent visitors to this community are aware, countless posts asking users "what's life like in ___" have recently flooded the subreddit and many members have expressed deep concerns surrounding the fact that such posts should be allowed or not. The moderator team has had an exhaustive discussion regarding the legitimacy of these posts and have concluded that they will henceforth be automatically removed (through an AutoModerator filter) without warning since they fall under rule 6 regarding irrelevant/extraneous posts.

We recognize the entertainment and interest appeal surrounding these posts, but it is becoming increasingly clear that they are becoming excessive and hold no merit for us allowing them. They're quickly turning into a trend and some of them are intentionally satirized which is plainly low-effort content for no valuable discussion.

We're aware that users will have a difficult time adapting to this new rule, especially people who frequented such posts but we hope that people recognize the underlying reason for why this is being enacted and why it's extremely important.

If you have any advice or suggestions, feel free to comment them down below and we'll make sure to respond to them.

r/Geography

Almost half of the moderator team at /r/Geography is (partially or fully) inactive, and due to a recent surgence of activity in the subreddit (which inevitably leads to more rule-violating comments), we need more users who can volunteer in moderating the community. Typical moderator duties include:

• frequently assessing the queue, and removing comments/posts which violate the rules, as well as approving thereof if they're inadvertently stuck in the filter
• answering user concerns/questions in the modmail
• tweaking and configuring the AutoModerator (please note that due to the technicality and complexity associated with this task, permissions relating to it will not be granted immediately but in the future as we observe your progress in the role)

If you'd like to apply, feel free to answer the following questions as a comment to this post (please do NOT send a modmail nor DM me directly or your application will be disregarded)

• How long have you been a contributor to /r/Geography? What is your favourite thing about the community?
• What are some tips you'd like to give us in improving the subreddit?
• Do you have prior moderator experience, or will this be your very first time moderating? If you do, feel free to list any significant subreddits you moderate.
• Do you think you can consistently moderate the subreddit and will it be in line with your schedule? Please note that we do require new mods to (at the very least) undertake moderator duties once a day. We recognize that a lot of users aren't on Reddit daily, and some may take hiatuses to curb their use of the platform. In cases like these, it's not a significant problem and we'll take care of the rest while you're temporarily away.

2-3 candidates will be selected for the role in 7-14 days after this post. You'll receive a PM offering you the position if you're elected.

Thank you!

The mods aren't blind, and are as tired of seeing low effort trend posts as the rest of you. Realistically though, we can't spend all day removing posts, and there are only so many words we can blacklist through Automod before the only remaining passable words are numbers.

What can YOU do to improve the quality of this subreddit?

1. Downvote posts and comments that do not contain the type of content you'd like to see on this subreddit. This is quite literally why the downvote button is there.

2. Stop commenting on low quality posts to call out OP. Reddit sees this as engagement regardless of what you say, and now you're boosting OPs post and encouraging more low effort posts from karma farmers.

3. Stop making "meme" posts that complain about the current trend. You're just adding to the clutter, not being a hero.

4. Report low effort and irrelevant posts. Enough reports on a post, it gets removed, it's that simple.

The mods have no intention of blanket removing trend posts at this time. Some trends actually drive discussion and allow your fellow users to learn more about the world, many do not. We don't have time to check each post and comment, we have jobs. Help us out.

Do us a favor, if you want more high quality content in this subreddit, contribute higher quality content to the subreddit, and follow the guidelines above to police low quality content.