Let me start off by introducing myself and getting my bias out of the way up front. I'm a moderator of /r/ainbow, a community which frequently gets linked to /r/SubredditDrama. As a result, most of my examples will be drawn from that.
Secondly, I apologize for the wall of text. I'd appreciate it if you'd take the time to read it despite the density; where possible, I tried to break it up into bullet points for easier digestibility. Thanks!
What harms do meta-subreddit invasions cause?
There are two main issues here: voting and commenting.
On voting:
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A meta-subreddit's users, when voting on a linked thread, may vote in ways opposite from the trend in the linked community.
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Comments may be flipped from positive scores to negative, or vice-versa.
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This makes it appear as though the linked community supports views it doesn't, and that it doesn't support views it does.
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In turn, this makes the subreddit feel hostile to members of its own community.
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Users who have good, positive, well-received-by-the-community things to say may be discouraged from contributing. Users who have bad, negative, poorly-received-by-the-community things to say may be encouraged.
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Users may leave entirely.
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Newcomers and outsiders get the wrong idea, again seeing the subreddit's community appearing to support things it doesn't.
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Users who would have been positive members of the community may be turned away; users who would not may be likelier to stay and participate.
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This leads to an increase in hostilities and tension and drama, which may cause more linking from meta-subreddits (e.g. /r/SubredditDrama, /r/ThePopcornStand, /r/RedditDrama, etc. may link because drama; /r/BestOf may link because look at someone putting someone else in their place; /r/WorstOf and /r/ShitRedditSays may link because look at someone saying something terrible (and in the case of SRS, look at "the community" upvoting it - although those votes may be from external subreddits)) - causing the cycle to perpetuate itself, and the subreddit to descend into nastiness over time.
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Here is a very dramatic example of a meta-subreddit reversing the views of the community to which it linked. You can find more in /r/MetaLog, or in this comment (which has some overlap with the MetaLog submissions).
These effects are likelier to matter if your community is smaller - particularly if it's smaller than the linking subreddit, obviously, but also small enough to really have a community. For example, I don't think anyone takes seriously the idea of an /r/pics community that holds aggregate views; if you're a moderator of a default subreddit, you may not be concerned about the prospect of your community's views being misrepresented by the votes of outsiders. But if you moderate a smaller community, it may be a bigger deal for you. This is especially true if your community surrounds any sort of niche interest, anything that causes aggregate opinions to skew differently from those of reddit as a whole.
On commenting:
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Often, users from a linking subreddit will post replies on linked comments threads.
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This frequently derails discussions, particularly if these users receive upvotes from the meta-subreddit they came from.
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Sometimes, this results in confusion - when people show up to try to get participants in the original thread to continue an argument that they had dropped some time prior.
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Here is a list of users showing up to comment on an at-that-time month-old thread in /r/pics, linked by /r/SubredditDrama.
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Meta-subreddit links can also, more importantly, lead to harassment of users.
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Here's an example from /r/ainbow (original thread) where a bunch of people show up to spout nasty, violent shit at users they don't like, four days later.
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Here's a really terrible example from /r/AmIUgly, where a user was told among other awful things to "take 15 steps back from your computer and fuck yourself in the face you whale bitch" and to "kill yourself". Note that that latter response was left by a user also called out in that /r/ainbow thread I mentioned - 4 months ago. So they've been using /r/SubredditDrama as a way to find people to be assholes to for at least that long.
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The /r/pics example, above, also includes a few pretty nasty harassing comments.
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I won't link this, but we had another user some time back in /r/ainbow who got dogpiled on by SRD users and ended up posting a comment implying heavily that they were going to kill themselves. Days went by, then weeks. We eventually heard from the user and were really glad to know that they were all right, but the harassment they received was honestly very serious, hurtful, and damaging to them.
The derailing-of-comments effect may or may not be something your community cares about. Again, to use /r/pics as an example, this may not really be a big deal there, as discussions tend to be large and meandering to begin with. If your subreddit is at all topical, however, this can definitely impact the quality of discussions for your users.
The harassment issue is something that impacts potentially any subreddit, and in fact I would argue that the larger your subreddit is, the greater the chance that someone will get hurt. This isn't something that's easily resolved by moderation, either, because you need to rely on someone reporting the comments - especially in a big subreddit.
A solution? Or at least an improvement?
A couple of months back, /u/KortoloB hit upon a pretty nice way to address this: a short bit of CSS that makes it so that anyone visiting a subreddit where it's installed via a link to http://np.reddit.com/r/SubredditName would be prevented from commenting, submitting, or voting. (Click the link and you'll see what it looks like, applied to normal CSS.) This is quick and easy to do, and carries virtually zero costs.
By "virtually zero costs", what I mean is this:
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Subscribers to a subreddit using No Participation will never see a difference. NP is set up to show the normal CSS to subscribed users, regardless of whether or not they're visiting via an np.reddit.com link.
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Non-subscribers coming to the subreddit via any other route will also never see a difference. This means that if threads showing up on /r/all and drawing in people from reddit at large is important to your subreddit and a way that you gain new members, for example, NP doesn't affect that. It only applies to subreddits linking to np.reddit.com/YourSubredditHere.
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It doesn't affect your CSS in any other way. Visitors coming through np.reddit.com links will see all of your fancy custom CSS, if you have any.
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It's easily reversible, by the simple expedient of removing the CSS if you decide you don't want it after all.
One argument I've seen raised about this is that it doesn't solve the problem, because it's easily circumventable in a couple of different ways. This is certainly true. But the perfect doesn't need to be the enemy of the good, and if this mitigates the problem, if this makes a community seem a little bit less hostile to its own members, if it prevents even just one instance of harassment that would have happened impulsively had the opportunity been easily there, then I'm in favor of it.
And the point has also been raised that this CSS makes it so that invading users have to take an extra action in order to do what they're going to do - an action that forces them to acknowledge directly that they're actively disrespecting the wishes of the community that they're visiting. That, too, might provide a bit of a deterrent effect.
But this requires that meta-subreddits choose to implement policies that mandate np.reddit.com links!
It does indeed. One way that that becomes likelier to happen is if more subreddits install NP, and let the meta-subreddits know that they would like them to respect their desire for non-interference. The more people that get on this bandwagon, the more influence it will have.
As a moderator of a meta-subreddit, why should I require np.reddit.com links?
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Because you should respect the wishes of other subreddits' communities. Not every subreddit to which you link will install No Participation, and if they don't want to and don't mind your users voting and commenting, that's fine. But if they do mind, certainly you should respect that choice.
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Because it will make your subreddit look good. Nobody likes a vote brigade, and implementing an np.reddit.com-links-only policy will show the rest of reddit's users that your subreddit is doing everything in its power to prevent its users from doing that.
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Because you don't want other subreddits misrepresenting your community's views with their votes, and the more meta-subreddits that adopt the policy, the greater the pressure on others to do so as well.
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Because reducing the amount of vote brigading on reddit would have the secondary effect of reducing the petty tribalism that's been infecting the site: the us-vs.-them they're-a-brigade-so-we-have-to-brigade-back mentality.
Current support for NoParticipation
This page shows a list of subreddits currently using the NoParticipation CSS, as well as subreddits suggesting or requiring that their users submit meta-posts as np.reddit.com links.
Edit: Final note, for moderators of meta-subreddits: A suggestion on using AutoModerator to help users out when submitting links that get removed, by linking them to a pre-filled-out form with the right URL
I've been interested in this fork which is happening this Friday. This fork is unique and to my knowledge the only coin to hard fork where there are two different sets of changes, not one set of changes that the miners disagree / agree on like was the case with the original bitcoin cash fork.
What are your thoughts on Bitcoin ABC and Bitcoin SV? it seems the community is quite split on this. SV proponents claim that this is sticking to Satoshi's ethos for bitcoin, it is strictly for payment, brings back some old BTC opcodes increases the potential block size to 128mb. While ABC, along with CTOR, will allow a new opcode OP_CHECKDATASIG which will permit the validation of messages from outside the blockchain. This will enable uses such as the use of oracles and cross-chain atomic contracts. This new opcode appears to be the most contentious issue surrounding ABC (are there more?)
