📢 Community Update: 6k members. New Rules for r/privatepracticedocs
Hey everyone,
First off thanks for everyone who is a part of this subreddit. I really appreciate all of you and all the feedback that you all give me. I am doing my best to foster an environment where we can talk about everything private practice related.
We just hit nearly 6,000 members. That's incredible, and it's a testament to how many of you are serious about building and growing sustainable private practices. Thank you.
As the community grows, so does the noise. I've made some rule updates to keep this space high quality and actually useful for people in the trenches.
❌ Problems that I have noticed since last rule update:
➡️ I will admit that IMO, astroturfing and shilling is this subs biggest problem. This is an anon website, and as such part of the limitation is that ANYONE can join. This leads to many companies who almost daily trying to shill or astroturf their company on this subreddit. Please flag those users or members if you see these types of posts or accounts. I will be banning any account that is shilling or astroturfing on here. I have to ban about 10 accounts a week for this problem.
➡️ Along with that is a new problem. Some billing companies, RPM companies / or other businesses targeting medical professionals are creating their own subreddit and attempting to post low effort posts to their subreddit and cross posting to this subreddit to build engagement to their subreddit for their business. I view this as a hidden form of astroturfing personally. It is a smart way to try to circumvent the no shilling or astroturfing rule directly in this subreddit and I salute you for being crafty to try to get around the rule. However, that comes to an end today.
➡️Growth for posting and expert advice. A few of you have reached out to me to do an AMA for this subreddit. I have approved only one person so far to do the AMA in the coming future as of the time of me making this post. I get paid nothing from this person to do the AMA and have no conflict of interest to disclose with this person. I get paid nothing for modding this subreddit. The one AMA that I approved is someone who claims to be an expert at filing and hopefully winning IDR cases. I am not an expert in IDR and since we have quite a few surgeons on here, I figured it would maybe be helpful for them.
I will be listening to feedback from you all to see if you want more of these or less of these. I have put some criteria for this person. They need to publicly try to answer every question they can within reason so that every response is not (click my link to learn more). The responses need to be helpful, and they need to disclose their name and conflict of interest somewhere in their post.
I'm happy to listen to feedback on if the community wants more or less of these AMAs.
If someone wants to do an AMA, for now you can message the mod (me) and I will consider whatever the topic you want to talk about. The purpose of the AMA is to teach on the subject, not to just shill your company or recruit people to join your website / business / etc.
Other quick automatic updates:
➡️ I set up an automod. It was a bit overzealous flagging comments and I have been paring it back from flagging so many comments. I will continue to tweak the automod based on frequency of rule breaking behavior.
➡️ There is a karma threshold to now post here. Almost 100% of the time when I have to take mod action on accounts, it is for accounts with < 50 karma. I have set the threshold at 30 karma to participate in this subreddit and will adjust as needed.
Here's what else is changing:
🚫 No more cross-posts All cross-posts from other subreddits are now automatically removed because of the shilling problem.
🚫 No subreddit funneling I've been seeing low-effort posts designed to drive traffic to other subreddits. This community isn't a launchpad for someone else's audience for their business. Posts like this will be removed automatically by an automod. Repeated offenders will be banned.
🔍 Astroturfing & shilling will be auto flagged If your post reads like a soft pitch "stumbled upon this," "not affiliated but," "game changer for me" well, it's going in the mod queue. You may have seen some automod pending approval from comments. I will keep refining triggering words or expressions that I see commonly used in astroturfing or shilling. Genuine experiences are welcome. Disguised ads are not.
What we want more of:
- Real questions from people building practices
- Honest wins and lessons learned
- Pushback, debate, and experience-based advice
- Support (venting about a tough business event)
- Anything that goes along with starting, scaling, or running a private practice in any specialty of healthcare
Thanks for everything everyone, and as always I'm open to feedback on what you want me to change, see more of, or less of. Have a great day!