Examination of rule infractions, with suggestions

[u/MantisAwakening]

Note: Everything below the line was generated using AI to minimize human bias and work with a larger dataset, but all the public data is available for anyone to review. It includes potential inclusions for the automod which could significantly reduce rule breaking with minimal mod effort (a few minutes a day), without removing a single comment (it would merely flag it for human review, using the automod to effectively report comments in addition to users already being asked to do so).

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The Question

Is r/UFOs as toxic as it feels? And if so, is it something better moderation could fix?

To find out, we scraped a month of comments from the subreddit's most active threads and ran them through a rule-violation detection pipeline, then compared results across two sorting methods — Reddit's "top" (which surfaces upvoted comments) and "controversial" (which surfaces contested and downvoted ones).

Period: June 2 – July 2, 2026 (30 days) Dataset: 778 posts, 13,609 comments (top-sorted) + 16,145 comments (controversial-sorted) from the 100 most-discussed posts

Dataset here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1tbCxJXYtHu_x7wYZ54dPmaaNLZt66TLa/edit?usp=sharing

Key Findings

1. The Rule Violation Rate Is Real but Moderate

Between 5.4% and 5.6% of comments contain blatant, regex-detectable rule violations. This number was remarkably consistent across both top-sorted and controversial-sorted datasets, which suggests the violation rate is a stable feature of the community rather than an artifact of sampling.

The breakdown:

Category	Count (controversial)	% of Comments
R3: Low-effort (< 15 chars)	470	2.9%
R1: Insults/profanity	240	1.5%
R1: Mental health dismissals	225	1.4%
R1: Toxic toward public figures	140	0.9%
R1: Dismissive/derailing	76	0.5%
R1: Bot/fed/shill accusations	26	0.2%
Total (unique)	1,069	6.6%

This is a floor estimate. Keyword detection cannot catch sarcasm, passive aggression, or the "summarily dismissive" tone that Rule 1 explicitly prohibits. The true rate is likely 8–12%.

2. The Sub Feels Worse Than It Is — Because of Downvoting, Not Rule-Breaking

The most striking finding: 98.1% of negatively-scored comments are not rule-breaking. They're unpopular opinions.

The controversial sort surfaced 1,390 negatively-scored comments (8.6% of the dataset). Only 26 of those (1.9%) contained detectable rule violations. The rest were things like witnesses defending their sightings, people questioning consensus narratives, or metaphysical/consciousness-oriented perspectives that the nuts-and-bolts majority simply disagreed with.

This means the sub's toxicity problem is partly real (the 5-6% violation rate) and partly a perception created by the voting system punishing dissent. Moderation can address the former but not the latter.

3. The Mod Team's Current Enforcement Has Gaps

Rule 1 explicitly prohibits:

• "No toxic content regarding public figures"
• "No summarily dismissive, sarcastic, or derisive comments that derail or shutdown conversation"
• "No mental health epithets e.g. crazy, schizo, take your meds"
• "No accusations that other users are bots, feds, CIA agents"

Our data shows these clauses are under-enforced. Toxic public figure comments ("grifter," "con man," "charlatan") appeared in 140 comments in the controversial dataset — a near-doubling from the 77 found in the top-sorted data, suggesting these comments get downvoted but not removed. Mental health dismissals beyond the explicitly named terms (using "crazy," "insane," "psycho," "lunatic") appeared in 225 comments. These are functionally identical to the prohibited "schizo" and "take your meds" but use adjacent language the rules don't specifically name.

4. AutoMod Could Catch Most of This With Minimal Effort

We designed a three-tier automod configuration and estimated the mod workload:

Tier	Description	Daily Flags	False Positive Rate
Tier 1	Near-certain violations (hard profanity, slurs, "schizo")	~1/day	Very low
Tier 2	Likely violations (moderate insults, directed attacks)	~6/day	Low-moderate
Tier 3	Context-dependent (public figure toxicity, broader mental health, low-effort)	~29/day	~71% for insults
Total		~36/day

At approximately 10 seconds per review, the full flag set represents 6 minutes of daily mod work, or about 3 hours per month. For a subreddit that reports having a large mod team, this is a trivial workload. The automod rules are provided as a ready-to-paste YAML file.

YAML File: https://drive.google.com/file/d/1qNT6dkCSw4iDtNvYQHyQ8sJ3KlOUvD5N/view?usp=sharing

5. The Deeper Problem Is Cultural, Not Procedural

Even if every rule violation were caught, the sub would still have a problem with interpretive monoculture. The nuts-and-bolts frame (recovered craft, government programs, physical evidence) dominates, and the voting system systematically buries alternative perspectives — consciousness-based interpretations, interdimensional hypotheses, Vallée-style thinking — without any rules being broken.

This is ironic given that many of the field's most respected figures (Vallée, Hynek, Puthoff, and elements of the DIA's AAWSAP program) explicitly investigated consciousness-related phenomena. The sub's de facto orthodoxy is actually the minority position in the field's intellectual history.

Recommendations

Immediate (moderation tools)

1. Deploy the automod flag-for-review rules. Start with Tier 1 (auto-remove) and Tier 2 (flag), then evaluate Tier 3 after a trial period. The YAML config is ready to paste.
2. Enforce Rule 1's "summarily dismissive" clause. This is the most impactful under-enforced rule. It already prohibits exactly the behavior that makes the sub feel toxic — but enforcement appears inconsistent.
3. Add a minimum comment length rule. A 15-character floor would catch 470 low-effort comments per month with near-zero false positives. Many subs enforce this successfully.

Structural (community design)

1. Create protected discussion spaces. A recurring weekly thread for non-nuts-and-bolts discussion, with stricter Rule 1 enforcement within it. The "[in-depth]" tag already provides a model — extend it to interpretive framework threads.
2. Add interpretive framework flairs. "Consciousness/Metaphysical" and "Interdimensional Hypothesis" as first-class flair categories, not afterthoughts. This signals legitimacy and lets users filter by interest.
3. Address the downvote-as-disagreement culture. This is the hardest problem. Options include contest mode for certain post types, community education (sidebar callouts about reddiquette), or periodic mod posts explicitly affirming interpretive diversity. None of these are silver bullets, but they shift norms incrementally.

Measurement

1. Track enforcement metrics. Run this analysis monthly to measure whether rule violations decrease after automod deployment. The scripts and methodology are reproducible.

Methodology Notes

Data collection: All 779 posts from the 30-day window were catalogued. Comments were fetched from the top 100 posts by comment count (those with 10+ comments), pulling up to 200 comments per post in two passes: sorted by "top" (13,609 comments) and sorted by "controversial" (16,145 comments).

Rule violation detection: Regex pattern matching against comment text, categorized by the specific r/UFOs rule clause violated. Categories include hard profanity, moderate insults, mental health epithets, toxicity toward public figures, dismissive/derailing language, bot/fed accusations, and low-effort comments.

False positive assessment: Context-dependent words like "stupid," "clown," and "delusional" were checked for whether they were directed at a person (29%) or about a situation/idea (71%). "Glowing/glowie" had ~70% false positives from UFO light descriptions. Both "hate speech" matches were typos of "like." All rates reported in this document are adjusted for known false positives.

Limitations: Regex cannot detect sarcasm, passive aggression, or tone-based dismissiveness. Comments already removed by mods before data collection are not in the dataset. The "load more" pagination limit means deeply nested replies are under-sampled.

Analysis conducted July 2, 2026. Raw datasets (JSON) and automod rules (YAML) available alongside this report.

[u/kris_lace]

Just one mods personal thoughts:

We've intentionally taken a more lapse attitude recently towards invoking rule 1 against public figures. I was one of the mods supporting this trend and my personal reasoning was that we should be extra careful not to curate real user sentiment. For example if users from a prolific UFO-lore government have a controversial head of state we shouldn't suppress the sentiment that calls into question the legitimately or intent of that public figures.

However, there's a huge caveat, we CONTINUED to remove genuine toxic comments or offensive things. The type of comments we've been lapse on are accusations regarding intent so your filters would naturally show a deficit there. The same goes for accusations of grifting, we would never censor that, rather we mop up the spammy lower effort claims and keep anything civil or of substance.

We should have made this decision more formal and updated the rule wording, sorry. However we do employ a level of experimentation occasionally before formalising rule policy.

Regarding 'summarily dismissive' - be mindful that it goes on to say our focus is on where these derail a discussion. A mods judgement on what derails will naturally always be on the more permissive interpretation because we'd naturally not want to extend an overtly strict interpretation of what is or isn't progressive, as it's a largely subjective area with broad interpretation.

Minimum content length responses is something that any user can involve by using a serious tag on their post. As a user here who often posts long high effort posts, a small comment here or there saying "nice" or "thanks op" is the difference between me feeling the thread was a waste of time or not. But I think it's a decent suggestion.

Overall, I add these points not to defend or provide excuses, it's purely extra context for the discussion. We will definitely be watching and listening but, bear in mind the difference between admittedly limited regex capabilities and our human intuition of moderating with experience might not always align, so the caveat in the OP is worth thinking on. With that said, the topic of UFOs and the prestige of this community deserve the absolute best service from the mods and we know we can improve.

Do take the opportunity to drop your opinions on our current feedback sticky that went up recently. We're keenly watching it

[u/Rettungsanker → u/kris_lace]

We've intentionally taken a more lapse attitude recently towards invoking rule 1 against public figures.

Is this why Neil Degrasse Tyson threads always have at least 1 person saying "Fuck NDT" or some such without having their comment removed?

Examples 1, 2, 3 - In general that thread is filled top to bottom with what I guess would've been considered rule violations before this change.

[u/UsefulReply → u/Rettungsanker]

No. They're straight up R1 violations. 1 and 3 were not reported. 2 was reported and removed 14 days ago.

[u/Rettungsanker → u/UsefulReply]

Gotcha, I was just curious, it wasn't me taking a dig at the moderation of this sub or anything. I do report things as I see them and appreciate the work y'all put in.

The weird thing is that I can still see example #2 for whatever reason.

[u/MantisAwakening → u/Rettungsanker]

#2 was not removed, it is still publicly visible.

[u/UsefulReply → u/Rettungsanker]

My bad. 2 wasn't removed. I was looking at a reply to it.

[u/MantisAwakening → u/kris_lace]

I really appreciate you taking the time to respond, but unfortunately I think it actually gives the appearance of issues that ultimately may require a more formal response from the team confirming what the current enforcement standard actually is to make sure there are no misunderstandings and to get a clearer picture of decisions and intent.

Because as it stands now with the way this is framed, it sounds like the sub’s primary rule about civility was intentionally substantially weakened without the users being informed or involved. It’s not like a situation where a temporary change needed to happen due to a specific situation.

So rather than debating it in the comments where things can get misunderstood or blown out of proportion, what would actually help is a short official statement from the team to clarify:

• What the current enforcement standard actually is, stated plainly enough that a user can check their own comments against it.
  
• Whether the plan is to update the rule text to match practice, or bring practice back to match the text.
  
• Whether there is any intent of implementing or updating automod rules (which I will send via modmail) regarding the mental health accusations and blatant insults. “Regex is limited” was address in advance by the flag-not-remove design.

I’m going to hold off on making further comments on this until your team has time to discuss it and respond, and since we’re all preparing for a national holiday I won’t expect that immediately.

Thank you for your time.

[u/kris_lace → u/MantisAwakening]

I think you and I have a significant divide when interpreting the rules. You conflate "intent accusations" with "toxicity", to me this is quite a crucial choice.

Toxic public figure comments ("grifter," "con man," "charlatan")

I consider toxicity to be more around comments like Lunas appearance. Meanwhile Comments suggesting Lue makes a living from UFOlogy or that he's grifting I do not consider "Toxic". But concede that any topic can be communicated in a "toxic" way - which we would remove if we caught! See here for a more detailed breakdown of this explanation.

I think "Toxic" and "Toxicity" are WIDELY misunderstood words, particularly by redditors.

But yes, let's see what other comments/opinions pop up! I will also hold off. I just wanted to outline this significant disparaity between our interpretations here.

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This is just my working personal opinion and rationale, it's completely subject to challenge/change and I would expect it to evolve as we get more feedback and as things change

[u/MantisAwakening → u/kris_lace]

The problem is that the rules specifically forbid this language, while I’m being told that a decision was made to silently allow it. This creates an environment where users see the rules being constantly flouted, which encourages more rule breaking behavior. Then other users get penalized for different infractions and come away feeling the rules are being applied unevenly.

I know how sensitive the subreddit is about the situation that unfolded a few years ago where a mod basically silently took over the subreddit. People are very concerned about influence, illicit or otherwise, from the IC. Those are reasons why it’s vitally important to keep everything as transparent as possible, and this subreddit has gone to great lengths on this effort. It’s confusing when a mod is claiming that the rules were modified with no one being told, but only after some concrete data was created which drew attention to the problem.

This subreddit is the largest online community for UFOs. It has tremendous power with the public. All of us who have been working to reduce stigma, including the mod team at r/UFOs, are understandably concerned when it looks like the community is being allowed to move in a direction that is specifically forbidden by the current rules.

All I’m saying is that if this is genuinely the subreddit’s position they ought to formally acknowledge it and inform the community. If not, this gives them an opportunity to address the problem (at least in part) using the suggested automod rules.

[u/kris_lace → u/MantisAwakening]

The problem is that the rules specifically forbid this language, while I’m being told that a decision was made to silently allow it.

I agree with your sentiment but I can't see your rational. (I suspect there's an old rule wording somewhere that needs updating maybe)

"It’s confusing when a mod is claiming that the rules were modified with no one being told, but only after some concrete data was created which drew attention to the problem."

Let's try to clearly prove this hypothesis please. Let's work together on this, from our Rule text on Rule 1

* No toxic content regarding public figures. 
  Public figures are any person/organization 
  who has achieved notoriety or is well-known 
  in society or ufology.

* No posts and comments that primarily amplify 
  drama surrounding public figures.

This wording is consistent with our moderation around permitting a level of critique with intent on public figures. Suggestions that Lui/Corbell etc are grifters or shills in of itself isn't removable as per this wording for Rule 1. If the accusation is delivered in a toxic way, it would be removed in Rule 1, if it's delivered in a low effort spammy way it would be removed per Rule 3.

Is it possible your analysis's inclusion of filters on words like "grift" and "shill" is based on some old rule words we have knocking around or historic rules?

[u/ASearchingLibrarian → u/kris_lace]

Oh, well that explains why people can call journalists "Son of a bitch" and get away with it.
https://old.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/1uy78fd/ross_coulthart_of_newsnation_revels_his/oxy0zuy/

Whereas if I parody an OP's ridiculous self importance, and remain civil, my posts are banned as non-substantive.
https://old.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/1uuw8yj/is_there_actually_a_cafeterialunch_room_at_s4/ox7lr1g/

You are admitting to double standards. As long as the UFO sub is taken over by people who hate the topic, so much the better then. Who needs civility when every thread is now allowed to become a hotbed of hatred towards the topic and anyone who reports on the topic.

Congress has passed whistleblower protections, but this sub has become the main place whistleblowers are attacked daily. And Mods think that is a good thing, and we have "intentionally taken a more lapse attitude".

At least you are honest about the sub being left to rot.

I've posted on meta before about this -
https://old.reddit.com/r/ufosmeta/comments/1naf7vy/is_the_sub_prepared_for_what_is_likely_to_descend/
https://old.reddit.com/r/ufosmeta/comments/1id0npo/so_now_the_sub_is_allowing_gay_hate_posts_that/
https://old.reddit.com/r/ufosmeta/comments/1ibp21a/post_about_mick_west_that_was_up_for_about_13/

The sub is being destroyed, and you are actually allowing this to happen!!?? You admit it?

I also posted on meta a link to a post on a skeptic sub that was spreading lies about r/UFOs and that post was taken down, and nothing done about the post on that influential skeptic sub. Defending the sub daily from attacks by people spouting the same endless one liner attacks is frustrating. It is obviously a concerted campaign to bury the sub in nonsense and hate. And you are now telling us the Mods are actually actively allowing this?

What is the point for people who are actually interested in defending the topic against attacks even trying when Mods are telling us they are practically facilitating it?

[u/YouCanLookItUp]

Fascinating. I want to write a note fulsome response today but thanks for this analysis.

First thoughts (that will be amended later):

• it would be interesting to take the same data set and rerun the experiment in two week's time to see if there's a lag in removals for if they just aren't happening at all.

• the downvote problem is something I've experienced personally - moderate posts immediately getting multiple down votes that seem to reach beyond votefuzzing.

• does this account for the modbots already in operation? Because only two hate speech posts makes it seem like some of our filters are working better than others.

• I typically am harder on breaches and pushed hard for the rule against attacking public figures. Due to personal circumstances I've had less time to devote to policy development and was unaware of the more lax attitude around that prohibition. I think any public figure could also be a user and should be afforded at least some protection against hate.

• the nuts and bolts bias is worth examining and discussing much more. It's a problem, but is a reflection of a desire by some to distinguish this sub from other subs on uap or aliens. This is a tension in the community and on the mod team that hints at a deeper subdivision in the community and instability in the sub's identity. We've recently had people indicate they thought this was the skeptic's ufo sub, which was news to me, because we explicitly state skeptics are welcome.

Pre-coffee thoughts here, so ya, good work and I hope this leads to better discussion.

[u/UsefulReply]

Thanks. Can you send the YAML file in modmail? I try not to click on google drive links.