Earlier this month, /r/cats removed itself from /r/all. Now we'd like your feedback on how it's going. Details within!

Greetings, programs fellow cat people!Earlier this month, the modteam announced that /r/cats had removed itself from /r/all. Now it's time to review that decision and get community input on whether it has been good, bad or indifferent. Also, we'll discuss what alternatives we see moving forward.OverviewFirst, the decision was not taken lightly. Reddit is a remarkable platform but there are a a lot of utterly horrible people, and those who may not be horrible but are willing to be horrible to others, usually for nothing other than their own twisted amusement. While posts in /r/cats were generally quite positive in their tone, if a post was even remotely popular and started climbing to /r/all, it would begin to attract attention from redditors who were not self-selected members of our community.Some of the things the modteam have seen (and this is not an all-inclusive list):Vile abuse leveled at people for their appearance.Incredibly inappropriate and skin-crawlingly creepy responses to pictures featuring a female human.Less frequently, but no less creepy and inappropriate responses to pictures feature a male human.Extremely over-the-top abusive posts directed at posters for everything from letting their cats out to having cats at all.Comments encouraging or showcasing animal abuse (you would not believe what we have been subjected to, and I hope you never have to know).Now, that said- not everyone on /r/all is a sexist boor intent on abusing our members, or a maladjusted child trolling us because mommy and/or daddy doesn't give them enough attention.But there sure are a lot of them.What's Changed?Here's what's changed in terms of traffic since we made this change.Per the charts we have available, here's some estimations. The January charts appear to not be complete, probably because they're not updated fully for the month.Unique views per month are down from around 200K from August-Oct, 160K in November, down to 125K in January- I don't think this is completely accurate and will be more accurate when the chart is updated in the coming days.Pageviews per month peaked at 1 million in July, and ramped down to about 800K by December. In January the count is 750K.Unique views by day and Page views per day are both down slightly- from about 6K to 5K for the former, and 25K to 22K or so for the latter.Subscriptions per day have not changed appreciably. We were seeing about 500 to 600 new subs per day in December. After January 8 (the day we removed ourselves from /r/all), subscriptions per day are about the same, perhaps down by about 25 or so every day.More detailed data here- with numbers showing specifics since the date of removal from /r/all.http://ift.tt/2jRBClf you can see, there appears to be very little effect from our removing ourselves from /r/all in terms of traffic or discoverability. Subscriptions per day are down very slightly, so is traffic- but it does not seem that being on /r/all has had a significantly negative effect on either traffic or new members.Anecdotally, I haven't seen any changes in the amount of upvotes on posts- we routinely get posts with 3-5 thousand or even more upvotes.Options Moving ForwardWe have a few options. We'd like your feedback on which we should take up.First, we can do nothing. Leaving things at the status quo means we just stay out of /r/all and keep going the way we have for the last few weeks. We can continue to monitor traffic and subscriptions to see if there's long-term decline in traffic or new users.Second, we can undo the change. Put /r/cats back on /r/all and go back to how it was before the change. We can also make some modifications to automoderation to remove posts that receive many reports, and so forth. We can mitigate the damage the trolls and abusers do in this scenario.Third, we can undo the change and add a bot to emulate what /r/pcmasterrace does- which is once a post gets popular enough, to post a sticked comment to the thread advising users of our rules. We would combine this with new automod rules per the second option.The first option is obviously simplest. The other two take more effort to implement, but if the community feels one or the other is worth it, we'll seriously consider it.So, there you go. We removed ourselves from /r/all and now we'd like your feedback on how it's been going.Thanks! via /r/cats http://ift.tt/2jRLjjN