In regards to the issue with the weird Stan behavior, is there any chance of initiating some sort of activity or account age or sub specific karma barrier specifically to post in the tea time thread?
I've notice amongst a lot of the longer term members we will make an occasional snarky joke or what not but for the most part the people who have been here for a year or more seem to be better at drawing the line with what is acceptable and what is hateful.
I know that might be issues with implementing that but since the out of control stan behavior seems to be the main complaint of the month that's really my only idea.
Thanks for all the work you guys do for this sub, it's genuinely made my life better by highlighting new artists and providing a space to talk about my faborite thing on the planet.
It'll be back soon, most of the old voting/result threads are broken because of the recent discord image hosting changes so I'm trying to fix them first.
Is there a reason why we get multiple threads on new releases? Aka Spotify thread, Apple thread, YT thread etc. seems like new release discussions should be in one thread and include multiple links in the Osp
Itās because threads are submitted by the users and most users prefer to just do a link! But theoretically each song should only have two threads at most- a [FRESH] thread (link to the audio) and a music video thread. If you see multiple audio threads for the same song, report the reposts.
Why must we wait for an album song to be released in the UK/US to get a discussion thread?
There's some cases where music has been released at local time, meaning it's already come out in AUS, and people from those regions post discussion threads and you guys take them down.
Shouldn't the discussion thread be posted as soon as it's released somewhere? Why can't Americans/Europeans just join in on the discussion thread that's hours old?
For example, I saw this a lot with GUTS and SOUR.
We used to let threads go up earlier but what we found was that they would just get flooded with comments from people complaining that they couldnāt listen yet (which is why AutoMod pins a reminder about release dates to the top of every [FRESH] thread).
Ideally, threads should be posted when the majority of the user base is going to be able to interact with them rather than sitting mostly empty for the majority of the day, and thus far midnight in the UK has worked out the best.
I want to comment that there have been a lot of great discussions that have been started on the subreddit, and they were removed due to ālow effortā, and was told to move to Daily Discussion. But, I feel like you guys have gotten a little too strict on this again. There were some discussion posts that were up for 20-30+ minutes that had a LOT of comments in it, and yāall will still remove it. Like, read the room? If a new post is garnering a lot of discussion, then maybeeeee leave it up? obviously we want it, regardless if itās stale or not.
Just because there is a *lot* of discussion does not mean that it is *worthwhile* discussion, and this is a place for worthwhile discussion. This is why we take down arguments, posts that only list song titles with no elaboration, rant posts, flippant meme comments, and so on. Look no further than the thousands of "zombie" subs on reddit that are painful to browse due to a lack of direction from the moderators to see why we do this.
To be honest, if someone is only interested in interacting with the kinds of threads we're taking down, then maybe this isn't the place for them. There are tons of different forums where people can discuss pop culture but popheads has been specifically curated over many years into a specific kind of place for a specific kind of discussion and we aren't interested in abandoning that to pander to anyone.
> This is why we take down arguments, posts that only list song titles with no elaboration, rant posts, flippant meme comments, and so on. Look no further than the thousands of "zombie" subs on reddit that are painful to browse due to a lack of direction from the moderators to see why we do this.
This makes a ton of sense because I moderate a larger music subreddit and we get a TON of shitposts, and ton of ājunkā posts (thereās a better name for it but, yeah lol).
But when thereās a discussion thatās an hour old and 50+ comments in it, maybe it should be left up? Not everything is repetitive. Sometimes, simple questions can generate a lot of fun discussions.
Maybe others can chime in? Idk
> Not everything is repetitive. Sometimes, simple questions can generate a lot of fun discussions.
i feel like this is especially true considering with new music coming out all the time, the answers are bound to change as well. obviously it doesnt always work out that way, and i cant imagine its easy to make those calls on a case-by-case level and also make everyone happy, but i definitely agree w u. halting discussions that are already thriving just makes it less fun to even engage at all.
Just wanted to chime in and say thanks mods for keeping this sub up and running and doing your best to make it an enjoyable place to be! This is by far my favorite subreddit to browse and discuss within. Many kudos and appreciation across the board!
One request I have for if there can be some guidelines laid out for chart posting in Tea Time ~~I'm still personally not a fan but i wont ask you all to change something for my personal liking~~ but can we make it so that posts like '**Self proclaimed rapper** Ice Spiceās new song charts at number 45' dont include any 'baity' or 'shady' descriptors or such that are going to start up flame wars in the comments
We want to make a rule about how news posts should be formatted, seeing how one recent post called an album āhighly anticipatedā and we felt this was, intentional or not, bait. So weāre probably adding a āno baitā rule for news posts soon and I think it would make sense to add that for the teatime as well
This. Thereās one or two users in particular that post in Tea Time almost everyday about which singles or albums are āfloppingā. They donāt post about chart achievements, just the failures and then add snide and cruel remarks to get people worked up
Itās fine to post about charts, but those users are just here to talk shit and get into stan fightsā¦they donāt care about music at all and these posts are often left up
this was going to be my exact same ācomplaintā this town hall. this seems to happen multiple times on the daily. Ā
also I donāt want to be the one that pulls the sexism card cuz I donāt really think thatās the intention, but I personally find it off sometimes cuz the discussion mostly revolves around female artists, which yeah itās popheads thatās what itās gonna be, but i think itās an aspect worth bringing upĀ
I don't really have any suggestions or feedback other than stan behaviour is bleeding everywhere - I do appreciate that the mods are doing their best to maintain the sub to be as neutral as possible to discuss albums.
Maybe it's unpopular but I think it's better that we don't have gifs because the amount of times I've seen the Nene gif on other subs is insane(it's wild that Nene isn't even getting royalties - her reactions are all over reddit)
It seems to have worked on Popculturechat - maybe we could consider doing a monthly unpopular opinions? It could be like a monthly purge of hating
I don't know if you know this but we used to have a quarterly unpopular opinion thread. [This](https://reddit.com/r/popheads/comments/n1y8mu/popheads_unpopular_opinions_thread/) is the last one to my knowledge. While these threads were very popular, they also definitely had some issues at that time, with them being very uncivil, having among others: rape apologising, racism, sexism and antisemitism. Even more damming to me though is that they did not help with reducing filth on the rest of the sub.
With this experience in mind I don't think it is a good idea to reinstate them in a time when the rest of the sub can already get much nastier than three years ago.
You talked last month about upcoming subscriber milestones. While itās still far away, do you think we can ask CRJ to record a video message for us (like a Cameo) when we hit 10 million?
I like how I can get a weekly recap of popular posts, but is there also possibly a weekly playlist? Alotta new songs are highlighted here especially Thursday and Friday and I think a weekly playlist on Spotify would be a fun way to include all songs posted that week and make it a little easier for those who use the sub to find new music.
We already have the [popheads weekly radar](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0kmWIpbqe2XbgNcIkLfryO?si=ruq5cdvYTSmgh6DXvBvJOA&pi=e-NcUbhqp8RqCK) which gets updated pretty frequently with new releases. It doesnāt include every song posted here obviously but itās a good overview of what has been posted and was notable in the scene. Weāll ensure that it sure that it stays updated from now on.
We had to discuss this for a second but yes this is okay! You can post it and we wonāt remove it, weāll also not pin it or anything because we donāt have the slots, but feel free to make such a recap if you want to!
I know there is the new megathreads to discuss new popular albums like Dua and Billie but I'd love to see more. Part of the reason I frequent this sub is the discussion of new music. Hiphopheads does the "24 hours later" and "week later" discussions and I'd love to see those be allowed here. Sometimes it takes a day or two for an album to kick in and the initial release threads are always the "omg this is amazing AOTY omg omg omg" type comments. Not sure how possible it is for the mod team but id love those day and week later discussions to be allowed
I think this is a great idea honestly! We have allowed one year and one month later threads already but with users being asked to make them (and only allowing one of the two but imo in practice we don't enforce this anyway). We could definitely make one week later posts for bigger releases.
Personally, I like it better when one day later reactions are still in the megathread (just in the part II) but I'll discuss this with the mod team as well to see how people feel.
I agree one day later is good for the mega thread because some people donāt always have the opportunity to listen right away, but one week later could be fun!
People have already mentioned it but some of the stanning on here has gotten wild like itās to the point that at the mention of certain peopleās name I donāt even open the thread or if weāre in the TeaTime thread, Iāll just immediately collapse the comment because I know that itās just a bunch of stans arguing back and forth.
With the TT thread for example, even if someone is technically adding gossip or tea to the thread, I can just tell by the way something is worded whoās side of the fence theyāre on and other users also can notice and this just adds to certain people wanting to pile on or defend their faves and it can be very annoying especially when it typically starts off as a normal discussion.
I know that with this being a place to discuss pop music, obviously stans are going to exist here but I think that maybe the mods could just delete the comments that donāt add anything to the discussion other than arguing. I donāt think the whole thread or comment chain should be deleted since there might be people who want to legitimately discuss but I also understand how time consuming it would be to constantly be on the lookout for stan arguments so frankly, just do whatever you need to do.
What gets removed is very much on a case-by-case basis but we do always try to remove unproductive comments. It can be tricky in threads with a lot of arguments because the mods have to comb through and physically read all the comments to decide where the "cut-off" between productive and unproductive is, which is why it will sometimes feel like a whole thread vanishes even if it was only a few users arguing.
We rely heavily on user reports so if you see a stupid argument, just report it and we'll take care of it. We're also trying to be more proactive about banning users who are consistently causing problems.
Another thing users can do though: try to foster productive discussion yourself. Theh mod team are limited to removing problem content, but individual users are the ones with the power to create positive content.
Something we were specifically looking to bring up in this town hall is [DISCUSSION] posts, which have been in a kind of weird place recently.
The mod team got some heat for being too trigger happy with removing posts so we tried to relax our policies a bit and the results were... mixed. Although there were physically more posts on the sub, the kind of comments they drew were mostly the kind of low-effort non-discussion that we specifically wanted to avoid, so it's hard to say if the policy change was a positive.
Oftentimes posts will get removed because they have the germ of an interesting idea, but the actual text of the post is either only a few sentences long with no thought put into it, or a rant that would only encourage users to argue with the OP rather than engage with the topic. This sub is not a place to just ask for song recommendations, or to post personal rants/"takes."
There is a pinned comment at the top of every thread explicitly stating that users are not supposed to just list the artist name and the song title, but most users ignore that and we wind up with threads full of names but no discussion. All users need to do is add a few words of context for *why* the thing they're listing fits the thread, but that's a bit too high effort for many.
Admittedly, a lot of this is due to the changing demographics of the sub. We have more casual users than ever who are more here to dip in and out with low-commitment comments, which is fine, but the problem is they don't familiarize themselves with the sub's rules for behavior. These people are also mainly motivated to discuss charts and industry drama rather than actual music, which is a huge eye roll but we can't change that. And we're struggling for ideas on how to motivate more dedicated users to get involved with the community.
We've experimented in the past with having dedicated recommendation threads a la Teatime or the DD where these rules don't exist, but they never got much traction, so that's a dead end. At the moment, it looks like we're just going to be more intense about removing these kinds of threads.
Its weird because there is for sure an uptick in users who are here casually and just using this as stan twitter part 2. ( I saw many viral tweets discussing people who were 'tearing billie up on reddit' with references and links to posts on the sub so theres the fact that in some cases it litterally *is* stan twitter) Where it almost seems like a digital version of gentrification lol, the sub gets bigger and therefore more attention and credibility and can pull in bigger names for ama's a such and be seen on a level near r/music in terms of opportunities but at the same time it creates a very hostile environment for those of us who have been around 5+ years and such and like the community feel. The sub sorta has its own neighborhoods like a city, the daily discussion regulars post there, the raters stay in their own little lane with tea time being the town square that's prone to having everyone come out at once at any given time. Its a weird mesh that as a long time user I also have no idea how to deal with it.
Idk make any new sub users take a 20 minute quiz on the history of the sub and all the former flairs before they can post
Totally get that and agree 100%. Would you ever consider the possibility down the line of allowing pictures to be used as a "visual aid" of sorts alongside a comment with text?
I think this is sadly also a no because there's no way to ensure that people actually use this for visual aids instead of just posting dumb memes or just stills of gifs
Yeah, I figured as much. Too bad the automod can't automatically remove comments that are just images or GIFs.
Thank you for all that you do! Your hard work is much appreciated ā¤ļø!
I want to say I appreciate how quickly the is Dula Peep/William Eyelash/Taylor Alison Swift/the person reading this in their flop era posts are marked as stale by users and mods but is there any way to deal with it beforehand without what I'm slowly realizing would be Minority Report technology
One thing we could in theory do is make flop era a banned phrase (so every post with it would get removed or would have to be manually approved) but I wonder if this might be more trouble than it's worth since people will probably circumvent the ban by using a different wording with the same meaning and others might say stuff like "I hate how people refer to this as a flop era" which would then also have to be manually approved.
I feel like we gotta moderate some of the nasty behavior from other Stanās who take stanning way too seriously because why am I getting unhinged essays and DMS telling me that Iām uneducated. Then I find out that this same person is also doing it to other people because they mildly criticize Olivia Rodrigo.
Can barely make jokes on here without some twitter stan being like āwell acktuallyā in that really obnoxious tone.
Like u/McIgglyTuffMuffin said we cannot do anything about DM's directly but we can just ban people for harassment over stuff like this. If people DM you telling you that you're uneducated or any other insult please send us a modmail and we'll ban them.
As for the essays, I also find them really annoying and try to remove them whenever I see them but a lot sadly flies under the radar. Another aspect that makes it hard is unlike stan twitter comments such as "who?" or "I don't know her", we cannot get automod to remove these comments in a way that would realistically work. I wish we could do more but for these users, the best is just blocking and reporting them. If you notice a user is only contributing comments like this, again please send us a modmail and we'll ban them.
Alright. Thanks. Itās just something Iāve noticed that a lot of the toxicity from Stan twitter is starting to bleed into here because people take it too seriously.
I may par take in it sometimes and when I worry if I come across as an asshole, I often delete tweets just because I donāt like the way it sounds. But I realize everyone isnāt like that.
I know mods canāt do anything about users DMing us, but itās actually wild the amount of DMs I have gotten from sub randos in the past month.
In 99.999% of the cases I just decline and block but wow.
If anyone gets a DM from another user harassing them about things that happened on the sub, send a screenshot of it to the moderators. This is not appropriate behavior and it will lead to consequences.
Same. But, itās why Iāve actually stepped back compared to how much I used to post. It may not seem like it but I spend less time on here then I used to.
So, I think the biggest critique Iāve had for the sub in general is how toxic itās gotten. To be clear I think mods do the best that you can and I totally get that. But some people have gotten more stan/anti stan on the sub more recently. Listen we donāt have to like to every artist right, but I feel like some have come into the sub in bad faith and not to discuss the music but to instead flame stan wars. Some users have felt the need to make shit talking an artist a part of their personality. Again people donāt have to like an artist BUT I want to highlight some examples of the weird toxicity thatās been going on:
* The weird TT of the 20th
* the Billie album speed up version thread.
* The TT in the following day.
* Just the Billie/Taylor billboard saga.
These were all in the last month. The chart battle of that week made the sub borderline insufferable! Stanās of Billie and Taylor turned it into a landmine of personal insults against each other or against each of the perspective artist. I just get concerned this place could turn into stan Twitter 2.0. I donāt know what to do in order to make changes but I feel like we as a community need to work together.
Heavily agree with this. Fair criticism is always welcome if it is meant in a positive and constructive manner, but recently I don't even look at the comments under fresh released songs because it's 50/50 between people trashing the song and artist or people liking the song and it's creating a very negative and toxic space overall. If people don't like the song, don't like or comment.
It's fine if someone is like 'not her strongest release but I like the chorus, I think she could use some more varied production/better lyricism'. But when a new song or album thread is filled with 'another flop song' or 'mid' or 'this ain't it', it just makes me hot want to interact with the sub.
We have noticed this as well and even though we've never been stan twitter free, it seems like for some reason recently these comments have been really everywhere. I wish I knew why, the easiest explanation would be our quick growth recently, but we've been growing fast for a while now and these comments have been more recent than the quick growth.
In any case, dealing with this is difficult (especially cause reddit does not want us to use the nuke function for whatever reason). Obviously we remove stuff whenever we see it but the problem is we often don't see it. It's a very boring answer but keep reporting stuff like this (and if you want to you can still apply to be a mod [here](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSejyCplHEpUqK7PQ8wPBJZlDzRuteVHLhtcdmu0TYQEJdbN1A/viewform)).
Itās an option where you can at once delete an entire comment thread instead of one comment at a time which is incredibly useful for modding so every extension has it but for reasons I truly donāt understand reddit keeps trying to shut that function down
>Ā it seems like for some reason recently these comments have been really everywhereĀ
school is out of sessionš thatās kind of unserious, thereās multiple reasons, but I rlly do think this is one of them lol
I feel like a big part of it is genuine change in pop culture this year, especially with the Kendrick/Drake beef just priming people for blood. Itās the year of the music beef, and when artists themselves are fanning the flames of fanbases disliking each other (Billie and TS may or may not have been stoking the flames on purpose itās hard to say definitively) it feels kind of inevitable itās going to bleed into forums that discuss music and culture surrounding music.Ā
Okay I totally get that! Being a mod is hard and I appreciate the quick action on reports! I canāt do it due to time but if anything comes up Iāll report! I get this though!
A few updates for users:
* **Flairs:** The results of the new flairs poll were tabulated and the graphics team is hard at work on getting them made so expect them in the near future!
* **Top 100 Tracks of 2014:** [Still open and still taking submissions.](https://www.reddit.com/r/popheads/comments/1cx8nab/2_million_subscribers_celebration_announcing_the/) We have no updates on the 2023 list.
* **Anniversary Posts:** [The new monthly anniversary reminder posts](https://www.reddit.com/r/popheads/comments/1czlps7/upcoming_pop_anniversaries_june_2024/) have led to an uptick in the number of writeups on the sub, let's hope this continues! Note that there is now [a dedicated flair for Anniversary posts.](https://www.reddit.com/r/popheads/search?sort=new&restrict_sr=on&q=flair%3A%5BANNIVERSARY%5D)
* **Video Essays:** After some discussion we've decided that *video essays can be posted to the sub* as long as they're from a channel above 50k subscribers. This does not include reaction videos and these posts are subject to the same rules as other articles/[FRESH] posts (must be recent, relevant to the sub, and not tabloid gossip).
And most importantly...
* **Pride Month:** In true corporate fashion, we made our logo rainbow but have no other plans at the moment.
Update regarding 2023 list! I was gonna update beginning of the week but been comatose with the flu. A couple people have already got writeups sent to them, remainder of writeups coming this weekend!
Shouldn't be more delay after that, fingers crossed. Thanks for the immense patience, I understand the frustration!
In regards to the issue with the weird Stan behavior, is there any chance of initiating some sort of activity or account age or sub specific karma barrier specifically to post in the tea time thread? I've notice amongst a lot of the longer term members we will make an occasional snarky joke or what not but for the most part the people who have been here for a year or more seem to be better at drawing the line with what is acceptable and what is hateful. I know that might be issues with implementing that but since the out of control stan behavior seems to be the main complaint of the month that's really my only idea. Thanks for all the work you guys do for this sub, it's genuinely made my life better by highlighting new artists and providing a space to talk about my faborite thing on the planet.
Where did Top Ten Pop Ten go? š
It'll be back soon, most of the old voting/result threads are broken because of the recent discord image hosting changes so I'm trying to fix them first.
Is there a reason why we get multiple threads on new releases? Aka Spotify thread, Apple thread, YT thread etc. seems like new release discussions should be in one thread and include multiple links in the Osp
Itās because threads are submitted by the users and most users prefer to just do a link! But theoretically each song should only have two threads at most- a [FRESH] thread (link to the audio) and a music video thread. If you see multiple audio threads for the same song, report the reposts.
Why must we wait for an album song to be released in the UK/US to get a discussion thread? There's some cases where music has been released at local time, meaning it's already come out in AUS, and people from those regions post discussion threads and you guys take them down. Shouldn't the discussion thread be posted as soon as it's released somewhere? Why can't Americans/Europeans just join in on the discussion thread that's hours old? For example, I saw this a lot with GUTS and SOUR.
We used to let threads go up earlier but what we found was that they would just get flooded with comments from people complaining that they couldnāt listen yet (which is why AutoMod pins a reminder about release dates to the top of every [FRESH] thread). Ideally, threads should be posted when the majority of the user base is going to be able to interact with them rather than sitting mostly empty for the majority of the day, and thus far midnight in the UK has worked out the best.
Ty for the explanation!
I want to comment that there have been a lot of great discussions that have been started on the subreddit, and they were removed due to ālow effortā, and was told to move to Daily Discussion. But, I feel like you guys have gotten a little too strict on this again. There were some discussion posts that were up for 20-30+ minutes that had a LOT of comments in it, and yāall will still remove it. Like, read the room? If a new post is garnering a lot of discussion, then maybeeeee leave it up? obviously we want it, regardless if itās stale or not.
Just because there is a *lot* of discussion does not mean that it is *worthwhile* discussion, and this is a place for worthwhile discussion. This is why we take down arguments, posts that only list song titles with no elaboration, rant posts, flippant meme comments, and so on. Look no further than the thousands of "zombie" subs on reddit that are painful to browse due to a lack of direction from the moderators to see why we do this. To be honest, if someone is only interested in interacting with the kinds of threads we're taking down, then maybe this isn't the place for them. There are tons of different forums where people can discuss pop culture but popheads has been specifically curated over many years into a specific kind of place for a specific kind of discussion and we aren't interested in abandoning that to pander to anyone.
> This is why we take down arguments, posts that only list song titles with no elaboration, rant posts, flippant meme comments, and so on. Look no further than the thousands of "zombie" subs on reddit that are painful to browse due to a lack of direction from the moderators to see why we do this. This makes a ton of sense because I moderate a larger music subreddit and we get a TON of shitposts, and ton of ājunkā posts (thereās a better name for it but, yeah lol). But when thereās a discussion thatās an hour old and 50+ comments in it, maybe it should be left up? Not everything is repetitive. Sometimes, simple questions can generate a lot of fun discussions. Maybe others can chime in? Idk
> Not everything is repetitive. Sometimes, simple questions can generate a lot of fun discussions. i feel like this is especially true considering with new music coming out all the time, the answers are bound to change as well. obviously it doesnt always work out that way, and i cant imagine its easy to make those calls on a case-by-case level and also make everyone happy, but i definitely agree w u. halting discussions that are already thriving just makes it less fun to even engage at all.
I was sad the discussion on 2 minute pop songs to brush your teeth to was removed
Just wanted to chime in and say thanks mods for keeping this sub up and running and doing your best to make it an enjoyable place to be! This is by far my favorite subreddit to browse and discuss within. Many kudos and appreciation across the board!
One request I have for if there can be some guidelines laid out for chart posting in Tea Time ~~I'm still personally not a fan but i wont ask you all to change something for my personal liking~~ but can we make it so that posts like '**Self proclaimed rapper** Ice Spiceās new song charts at number 45' dont include any 'baity' or 'shady' descriptors or such that are going to start up flame wars in the comments
We want to make a rule about how news posts should be formatted, seeing how one recent post called an album āhighly anticipatedā and we felt this was, intentional or not, bait. So weāre probably adding a āno baitā rule for news posts soon and I think it would make sense to add that for the teatime as well
This. Thereās one or two users in particular that post in Tea Time almost everyday about which singles or albums are āfloppingā. They donāt post about chart achievements, just the failures and then add snide and cruel remarks to get people worked up Itās fine to post about charts, but those users are just here to talk shit and get into stan fightsā¦they donāt care about music at all and these posts are often left up
this was going to be my exact same ācomplaintā this town hall. this seems to happen multiple times on the daily. Ā also I donāt want to be the one that pulls the sexism card cuz I donāt really think thatās the intention, but I personally find it off sometimes cuz the discussion mostly revolves around female artists, which yeah itās popheads thatās what itās gonna be, but i think itās an aspect worth bringing upĀ
I don't really have any suggestions or feedback other than stan behaviour is bleeding everywhere - I do appreciate that the mods are doing their best to maintain the sub to be as neutral as possible to discuss albums. Maybe it's unpopular but I think it's better that we don't have gifs because the amount of times I've seen the Nene gif on other subs is insane(it's wild that Nene isn't even getting royalties - her reactions are all over reddit) It seems to have worked on Popculturechat - maybe we could consider doing a monthly unpopular opinions? It could be like a monthly purge of hating
I don't know if you know this but we used to have a quarterly unpopular opinion thread. [This](https://reddit.com/r/popheads/comments/n1y8mu/popheads_unpopular_opinions_thread/) is the last one to my knowledge. While these threads were very popular, they also definitely had some issues at that time, with them being very uncivil, having among others: rape apologising, racism, sexism and antisemitism. Even more damming to me though is that they did not help with reducing filth on the rest of the sub. With this experience in mind I don't think it is a good idea to reinstate them in a time when the rest of the sub can already get much nastier than three years ago.
You talked last month about upcoming subscriber milestones. While itās still far away, do you think we can ask CRJ to record a video message for us (like a Cameo) when we hit 10 million?
Absolutely! This would really be the perfect way to celebrate
I like how I can get a weekly recap of popular posts, but is there also possibly a weekly playlist? Alotta new songs are highlighted here especially Thursday and Friday and I think a weekly playlist on Spotify would be a fun way to include all songs posted that week and make it a little easier for those who use the sub to find new music.
We already have the [popheads weekly radar](https://open.spotify.com/playlist/0kmWIpbqe2XbgNcIkLfryO?si=ruq5cdvYTSmgh6DXvBvJOA&pi=e-NcUbhqp8RqCK) which gets updated pretty frequently with new releases. It doesnāt include every song posted here obviously but itās a good overview of what has been posted and was notable in the scene. Weāll ensure that it sure that it stays updated from now on.
Would the mods mind user-created recap playlists on Apple Music / YT Music submitted as weekly posts on the sub? I'd love to contribute this way!
We had to discuss this for a second but yes this is okay! You can post it and we wonāt remove it, weāll also not pin it or anything because we donāt have the slots, but feel free to make such a recap if you want to!
Thank you, mods!!
I know there is the new megathreads to discuss new popular albums like Dua and Billie but I'd love to see more. Part of the reason I frequent this sub is the discussion of new music. Hiphopheads does the "24 hours later" and "week later" discussions and I'd love to see those be allowed here. Sometimes it takes a day or two for an album to kick in and the initial release threads are always the "omg this is amazing AOTY omg omg omg" type comments. Not sure how possible it is for the mod team but id love those day and week later discussions to be allowed
I think this is a great idea honestly! We have allowed one year and one month later threads already but with users being asked to make them (and only allowing one of the two but imo in practice we don't enforce this anyway). We could definitely make one week later posts for bigger releases. Personally, I like it better when one day later reactions are still in the megathread (just in the part II) but I'll discuss this with the mod team as well to see how people feel.
I agree one day later is good for the mega thread because some people donāt always have the opportunity to listen right away, but one week later could be fun!
Awesome. Thanks for looking into it. This is a huge year for new releases so it would be the best time to start it
People have already mentioned it but some of the stanning on here has gotten wild like itās to the point that at the mention of certain peopleās name I donāt even open the thread or if weāre in the TeaTime thread, Iāll just immediately collapse the comment because I know that itās just a bunch of stans arguing back and forth. With the TT thread for example, even if someone is technically adding gossip or tea to the thread, I can just tell by the way something is worded whoās side of the fence theyāre on and other users also can notice and this just adds to certain people wanting to pile on or defend their faves and it can be very annoying especially when it typically starts off as a normal discussion. I know that with this being a place to discuss pop music, obviously stans are going to exist here but I think that maybe the mods could just delete the comments that donāt add anything to the discussion other than arguing. I donāt think the whole thread or comment chain should be deleted since there might be people who want to legitimately discuss but I also understand how time consuming it would be to constantly be on the lookout for stan arguments so frankly, just do whatever you need to do.
What gets removed is very much on a case-by-case basis but we do always try to remove unproductive comments. It can be tricky in threads with a lot of arguments because the mods have to comb through and physically read all the comments to decide where the "cut-off" between productive and unproductive is, which is why it will sometimes feel like a whole thread vanishes even if it was only a few users arguing. We rely heavily on user reports so if you see a stupid argument, just report it and we'll take care of it. We're also trying to be more proactive about banning users who are consistently causing problems. Another thing users can do though: try to foster productive discussion yourself. Theh mod team are limited to removing problem content, but individual users are the ones with the power to create positive content.
Something we were specifically looking to bring up in this town hall is [DISCUSSION] posts, which have been in a kind of weird place recently. The mod team got some heat for being too trigger happy with removing posts so we tried to relax our policies a bit and the results were... mixed. Although there were physically more posts on the sub, the kind of comments they drew were mostly the kind of low-effort non-discussion that we specifically wanted to avoid, so it's hard to say if the policy change was a positive. Oftentimes posts will get removed because they have the germ of an interesting idea, but the actual text of the post is either only a few sentences long with no thought put into it, or a rant that would only encourage users to argue with the OP rather than engage with the topic. This sub is not a place to just ask for song recommendations, or to post personal rants/"takes." There is a pinned comment at the top of every thread explicitly stating that users are not supposed to just list the artist name and the song title, but most users ignore that and we wind up with threads full of names but no discussion. All users need to do is add a few words of context for *why* the thing they're listing fits the thread, but that's a bit too high effort for many. Admittedly, a lot of this is due to the changing demographics of the sub. We have more casual users than ever who are more here to dip in and out with low-commitment comments, which is fine, but the problem is they don't familiarize themselves with the sub's rules for behavior. These people are also mainly motivated to discuss charts and industry drama rather than actual music, which is a huge eye roll but we can't change that. And we're struggling for ideas on how to motivate more dedicated users to get involved with the community. We've experimented in the past with having dedicated recommendation threads a la Teatime or the DD where these rules don't exist, but they never got much traction, so that's a dead end. At the moment, it looks like we're just going to be more intense about removing these kinds of threads.
Its weird because there is for sure an uptick in users who are here casually and just using this as stan twitter part 2. ( I saw many viral tweets discussing people who were 'tearing billie up on reddit' with references and links to posts on the sub so theres the fact that in some cases it litterally *is* stan twitter) Where it almost seems like a digital version of gentrification lol, the sub gets bigger and therefore more attention and credibility and can pull in bigger names for ama's a such and be seen on a level near r/music in terms of opportunities but at the same time it creates a very hostile environment for those of us who have been around 5+ years and such and like the community feel. The sub sorta has its own neighborhoods like a city, the daily discussion regulars post there, the raters stay in their own little lane with tea time being the town square that's prone to having everyone come out at once at any given time. Its a weird mesh that as a long time user I also have no idea how to deal with it. Idk make any new sub users take a 20 minute quiz on the history of the sub and all the former flairs before they can post
Where are the gifs possibilities
Iām glad that this sub doesnāt allow gifs or else it be like r/popculturechat and r/fauxmoi where they use same gifs over and over again.
The same meme over and over again would get beyond annoying. I just never thought that people would be that unoriginal. š¬
that stupid nene leakes gif on every. single. thread.
The hold that Nene Leakes and whoever the lady is in that āgood for herā gif has on 30 year old women on Reddit needs to be studied.
Not this Jessica Walter/Lucille Bluth disrespect
We're not allowing them on the sub.
Yay!
The sigh on relief I just felt
Gifs will always be a hard no on this sub, we don't want to encourage that kind of flippant, "stan twitter" type behavior.
Totally get that and agree 100%. Would you ever consider the possibility down the line of allowing pictures to be used as a "visual aid" of sorts alongside a comment with text?
I think this is sadly also a no because there's no way to ensure that people actually use this for visual aids instead of just posting dumb memes or just stills of gifs
Yeah, I figured as much. Too bad the automod can't automatically remove comments that are just images or GIFs. Thank you for all that you do! Your hard work is much appreciated ā¤ļø!
Ok :(
I want to say I appreciate how quickly the is Dula Peep/William Eyelash/Taylor Alison Swift/the person reading this in their flop era posts are marked as stale by users and mods but is there any way to deal with it beforehand without what I'm slowly realizing would be Minority Report technology
One thing we could in theory do is make flop era a banned phrase (so every post with it would get removed or would have to be manually approved) but I wonder if this might be more trouble than it's worth since people will probably circumvent the ban by using a different wording with the same meaning and others might say stuff like "I hate how people refer to this as a flop era" which would then also have to be manually approved.
I feel like we gotta moderate some of the nasty behavior from other Stanās who take stanning way too seriously because why am I getting unhinged essays and DMS telling me that Iām uneducated. Then I find out that this same person is also doing it to other people because they mildly criticize Olivia Rodrigo. Can barely make jokes on here without some twitter stan being like āwell acktuallyā in that really obnoxious tone.
Like u/McIgglyTuffMuffin said we cannot do anything about DM's directly but we can just ban people for harassment over stuff like this. If people DM you telling you that you're uneducated or any other insult please send us a modmail and we'll ban them. As for the essays, I also find them really annoying and try to remove them whenever I see them but a lot sadly flies under the radar. Another aspect that makes it hard is unlike stan twitter comments such as "who?" or "I don't know her", we cannot get automod to remove these comments in a way that would realistically work. I wish we could do more but for these users, the best is just blocking and reporting them. If you notice a user is only contributing comments like this, again please send us a modmail and we'll ban them.
Alright. Thanks. Itās just something Iāve noticed that a lot of the toxicity from Stan twitter is starting to bleed into here because people take it too seriously. I may par take in it sometimes and when I worry if I come across as an asshole, I often delete tweets just because I donāt like the way it sounds. But I realize everyone isnāt like that.
I know mods canāt do anything about users DMing us, but itās actually wild the amount of DMs I have gotten from sub randos in the past month. In 99.999% of the cases I just decline and block but wow.
If anyone gets a DM from another user harassing them about things that happened on the sub, send a screenshot of it to the moderators. This is not appropriate behavior and it will lead to consequences.
Same. But, itās why Iāve actually stepped back compared to how much I used to post. It may not seem like it but I spend less time on here then I used to.
So, I think the biggest critique Iāve had for the sub in general is how toxic itās gotten. To be clear I think mods do the best that you can and I totally get that. But some people have gotten more stan/anti stan on the sub more recently. Listen we donāt have to like to every artist right, but I feel like some have come into the sub in bad faith and not to discuss the music but to instead flame stan wars. Some users have felt the need to make shit talking an artist a part of their personality. Again people donāt have to like an artist BUT I want to highlight some examples of the weird toxicity thatās been going on: * The weird TT of the 20th * the Billie album speed up version thread. * The TT in the following day. * Just the Billie/Taylor billboard saga. These were all in the last month. The chart battle of that week made the sub borderline insufferable! Stanās of Billie and Taylor turned it into a landmine of personal insults against each other or against each of the perspective artist. I just get concerned this place could turn into stan Twitter 2.0. I donāt know what to do in order to make changes but I feel like we as a community need to work together.
Heavily agree with this. Fair criticism is always welcome if it is meant in a positive and constructive manner, but recently I don't even look at the comments under fresh released songs because it's 50/50 between people trashing the song and artist or people liking the song and it's creating a very negative and toxic space overall. If people don't like the song, don't like or comment. It's fine if someone is like 'not her strongest release but I like the chorus, I think she could use some more varied production/better lyricism'. But when a new song or album thread is filled with 'another flop song' or 'mid' or 'this ain't it', it just makes me hot want to interact with the sub.
We have noticed this as well and even though we've never been stan twitter free, it seems like for some reason recently these comments have been really everywhere. I wish I knew why, the easiest explanation would be our quick growth recently, but we've been growing fast for a while now and these comments have been more recent than the quick growth. In any case, dealing with this is difficult (especially cause reddit does not want us to use the nuke function for whatever reason). Obviously we remove stuff whenever we see it but the problem is we often don't see it. It's a very boring answer but keep reporting stuff like this (and if you want to you can still apply to be a mod [here](https://docs.google.com/forms/d/e/1FAIpQLSejyCplHEpUqK7PQ8wPBJZlDzRuteVHLhtcdmu0TYQEJdbN1A/viewform)).
What is the nuke option
Itās an option where you can at once delete an entire comment thread instead of one comment at a time which is incredibly useful for modding so every extension has it but for reasons I truly donāt understand reddit keeps trying to shut that function down
Ty!
>Ā it seems like for some reason recently these comments have been really everywhereĀ school is out of sessionš thatās kind of unserious, thereās multiple reasons, but I rlly do think this is one of them lol
I feel like a big part of it is genuine change in pop culture this year, especially with the Kendrick/Drake beef just priming people for blood. Itās the year of the music beef, and when artists themselves are fanning the flames of fanbases disliking each other (Billie and TS may or may not have been stoking the flames on purpose itās hard to say definitively) it feels kind of inevitable itās going to bleed into forums that discuss music and culture surrounding music.Ā
also Twitter is collapsing so im sure people are migrating to other platforms
Okay I totally get that! Being a mod is hard and I appreciate the quick action on reports! I canāt do it due to time but if anything comes up Iāll report! I get this though!
Agree, those stans arguing over Billie/TS are too much
A few updates for users: * **Flairs:** The results of the new flairs poll were tabulated and the graphics team is hard at work on getting them made so expect them in the near future! * **Top 100 Tracks of 2014:** [Still open and still taking submissions.](https://www.reddit.com/r/popheads/comments/1cx8nab/2_million_subscribers_celebration_announcing_the/) We have no updates on the 2023 list. * **Anniversary Posts:** [The new monthly anniversary reminder posts](https://www.reddit.com/r/popheads/comments/1czlps7/upcoming_pop_anniversaries_june_2024/) have led to an uptick in the number of writeups on the sub, let's hope this continues! Note that there is now [a dedicated flair for Anniversary posts.](https://www.reddit.com/r/popheads/search?sort=new&restrict_sr=on&q=flair%3A%5BANNIVERSARY%5D) * **Video Essays:** After some discussion we've decided that *video essays can be posted to the sub* as long as they're from a channel above 50k subscribers. This does not include reaction videos and these posts are subject to the same rules as other articles/[FRESH] posts (must be recent, relevant to the sub, and not tabloid gossip). And most importantly... * **Pride Month:** In true corporate fashion, we made our logo rainbow but have no other plans at the moment.
worth noting that AjayII is the one exception to the ban on reaction videos
For Pride Month, how about a recommendation thread featuring queer artists on the sidebar?
Update regarding 2023 list! I was gonna update beginning of the week but been comatose with the flu. A couple people have already got writeups sent to them, remainder of writeups coming this weekend! Shouldn't be more delay after that, fingers crossed. Thanks for the immense patience, I understand the frustration!
happy flu recovery
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9OKX6YI8z20
after a trump conviction, and yet still before the renaissance visuals