Rant/vent
I could call this: The Chronicles of a Very Very Very Frustrated Reddit Moderator
I'm making this post because manually formatting is broken. From my knowledge, it has been broken ever since the useless formatting tool has been introduced to posts. To anyone who isn't used to manually formatting their texts, I'll explain: posts that can be edited are possible to be fixed by simply editing and removing the "/" that the tool has automatically placed on our format after posting. However, posts that cannot be edited after being posted are impossible to fix. We have to essentially not format an entire wall of text because the formatting tool doesn't let us format – how fucking frustrating and ironic is that?
I have tried to work with the formatting tool rather then against it. Thing is, we are restricted to the very few options available (on mobile) such as making titles, making bold and italic letters. And even then, it sucks at doing that.
First of all, nobody wants to be going over what they have written to format it. It is not convenient. Second of all, anytime I do try and go over my text to format it with the useless – sorry – formatting tool, it glitches and the whole post gets formatted into what I was trying to do with a single sentence.
Now, I understand the intention behind it. It was probably made so that people who don't know (or couldn't bother) to manually format, would have an accessible tool to use.
The problem is, it has completely ruined manually formatting posts AND does not even do a good job as it's buggy as hell. Whoever worked on it should still be working on it before releasing it. I've been seeing a pattern from Reddit with releasing unfinished things. But I digress.
I NEED an option to at least disable this tool and be able to manually format. Why are we making it impossible to manually format posts? You can try and offer a formatting tool that works without ruining it for people who are able and enjoy to manually format posts.
Thank you,
A Very Very Very Frustrated Reddit Moderator
TLDR: Point has been proven. You would have read this wall of text if I could have formatted it.
That's something I have experienced. Been accused of using AI 3 or 4 times on this platform for writing well and formatting my texts. I've seen other people/mods experience the same. Fucking sucks.
The use of AI has made us become suspicious of others instead of being able to recognise they did a good job. Just another reason for some people on reddit to become hostile and dismissive, specially when they can't believe someone was able to do something in a way they couldn't.
I made a post not long ago on r/modhelp, I believe, and I got two mods insisting that I was using AI despite me telling them I wasn't. And it was completely unrelated to what I was posting about.
As an artist who's completely against it, it just makes me hate it even more. I even said that and they kept going. Felt like at that point, they were just insisting on it not because they believed it to be true, but to upset and dismiss me. I looked through those mods posts and it's fair to say his posts were not interesting to read, nor did they have any format. Meanwhile I mod a single sub and he was a mod in several, lol.
Yup. The formatting tool they recently introduced makes it so any manual markdowns are prevented from actually converting to format, once the post is posted. It adds slashes everywhere.
Example:
When we add ** in between text it does this (when it works), but on posts what it's doing when I place this ** to make bold letters, it does this //instead// (can't properly show it here. It's asterisk, slash, asterisk, slash), to the code. And it shows the ** in the post, to other people.
This happens to everything, not just bold letters. Any manual format option (markdowns, subheads), it adds slashes and prevents the format from working.
Yes, exactly. I assume it must be related to the formatting tool. It simply does not let us do it manually at all. Before it was implemented, I had no issue whatsoever formatting my posts manually.
"Ah yes, that makes sense. If you have any posts where you've had any issues, or you can reproduce any of the issues with the editor, send us links here to help us further investigate.
We're chatting about formatting options with the team and we'll come back with more information, if we have any! Thanks again"
If any of you have posts where you tried to format and it didn't work, feel free to send them via Modmail to r/modsupport (linked in his message) with the title "Example of post/s that didn't format - to help admin investigation"
I personally only have one post I can send because I simply delete them and post without format once I see it didn't convert my markdowns. So I'm asking my peers to also provide their post links.
The dumbest part is that the "/" issue doesn't get applied to mobile text input, only desktop/browser (but mobile has worse space and return format auto-clearing). Reddit devs are simply embracing incompetence like Microslop and Google.
I used the F word once, stop being so sensitive. What I wanted to say is written. I talked about my experience, wanting to manually format and it not being possible. Didn't think I had to go in detail as English is my second language and there are certain formatting terms I'm not familiared with, but it includes every formatting option. None of it is possible to do currently due to the implementation of this formatting tool that is restrictive and does not effectively work.
I learned what "markdown" is today, due to this context. That's why I didn't call it that and called it "manually formatting" since that's essentially what it is. As I have mentioned in another comment, English is my second language. There are some terms that I have never had to use before so I wouldn't know it's called that.
Can you explain what I'm not doing? I used to be able to markdown posts and format them just fine before the formatting tool was introduced and started preventing any markdowns from converting. Unless what you're speaking of is a fix/alternative that I am not familiared with.
You can manually format in rich editor as well, that's what selecting what you wrote and changing its formating by clicking the right buttons is as you're doing it manually.
English isn't my native tongue either.
It all depends on what platform and reddit version you're using. I'm mostly on desktop with old.reddit so I don't have to bother with any of that new (or in this case sh. ) nonsense. If you're using desktop then here's where you switch to markdown.
She’s on mobile though as am I. When making posts there is no option to switch to markdown and the tool bar on mobile is very limited in what you can do.
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u/[deleted] Mar 25 '26
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