Comment pins are broke, so see below:
OK, here's the first second draft of the new rules. Everyone made thoughtful contributions - thank you.
- Do not advocate for illegal violence or post other illegal activity. (Be aware of your local laws.)
- Don't be a fag, a psycho, or anything else that breaches the community's standard of conversation. New users will be held to a higher standard.
- Do not post porn.
- NSFW content must be flaired NSFW.
- No vote manipulation. Do not break communities.win's features.
- No spam or reposts. Do not make more than 5 posts a day.
- Do not post falsehoods and hoaxes that are obvious to an uncontroversial degree.
Notes:
- R16 has to go. That much is obvious. Anyway, the mod team is already diverse by 4chan's standard, not reddit's.
- "illegal violence" might seem redundant, but there are a million cases of civil/legal advocacy of violence, such as supporting the invasion of Venezuela. On the other hand, advocating for assassination can understandably earn you a visit from the Secret Service.
- R2 has replaced the original R3 and is specifically tied to the "community standard" as a minor safeguard against mod abuse. As many have noted here, we need a general purpose "don't be a fag" rule.
- The spam rule has been expanded.
- R7 is to prevent low IQ posting. It has been slightly retooled to, again, add a minor safeguard against mods banning posts due to differences of political opinion.
- The original R7, the brigading rule, has been deleted. This community is too small to brigade even random Twitter posts, and if we get raided then the new R2 will cover it.
A notice at the top: we are now able to handle content violation reports regularly with six people on the mod team, so please make sure to use the report button where appropriate and one of us should get to it. It's a work in progress.
As far as the rules, this is our current list:
- Do not post Illegal Activity, or criminal manifestos.
- Do not engage in speech that promotes, advocates, glorifies, or endorses violence.
- Do not threaten, harass, defame, or bully users.
- Do not post involuntary Salacious Material.
- Do not post Porn
- NSFW content must be flaired NSFW.
- Do not post Facebook accounts or twitter accounts with less than 500 followers, and personal information.
- Do not intentionally deceive others by impersonating another.
- Do not solicit or engage in transactions that are federally regulated by the US govt.
- No vote manipulation. Do not break communities.win's features.
- Do not post spam.
- Do not post intentional falsehoods or hoaxes.
- No reposts
- Do not post more than 5 posts a day to this sub.
- Do not direct particularly egregious identity based slurs at users.
- Do not attack entire identity groups as inferior or conspiring.
What deletions, additions, and modifications do you have in mind?
Just spitballing here:
Is "manifesto" (R1) a sitewide or actually illegal violation? If not, I think they should be fair game. I hate censorship, and those are always relevant for discussion.
We could roll R1 and R2 together to "Do not advocate for violence, or post other illegal activity." R9 is redundant with R1 too.
We could roll R3 and R8 together, and do away with R15 entirely, changing to to "Do not threaten, harass, or impersonate fellow users."
R7, small accounts, could potentially be lowered slightly, if people wanted. 250? 300? Could just leave at 500 too.
R10 and R11 could be combined, potentially, but I'll leave them distinct for now.
R12 is tricky, since it's open to interpretation, but could be left for now, maybe with the edition of "obvious," although that's still vague.
So, again, spitballing, the simplified list would look like the following:
R1: Do not advocate for violence, or post other illegal activity.
R2: Do not threaten, harass, or impersonate fellow users.
R3: Do not post porn.
R4: NSFW content must be flaired NSFW.
R5: Do not post Facebook accounts or twitter accounts with less than [XXX] followers, and personal information.
R6: No vote manipulation. Do not break communities.win's features.
R7: Do not post spam.
R8: Do not post obviously intentional falsehoods or hoaxes.
R9: No reposts
R10: Do not post more than 5 posts a day to this sub.
And I think that's it. Cut it significantly, and could be further tuned. Did I miss anything?
Combining R1 and R2 makes sense. They're the same rule. Likewise R3 and R4 could also be combined as "don't post porn, and label other NSFW content."
R5 is kind of silly imo. There's virtually no risk of brigading from here.
I would want to change the current rule 15 to "don't be excessively hostile or obnoxious." Would probably be good as R3.
I will say, keeping some similar rules separate is still good practice since, even if they sound alike, they cover different things. So it can actually be more clear to be seemingly redundant.
Porn is pornographic content, which is different than simply "NSFW" stuff, for example. I don't think those should be rolled into one, since they're covering different things.
And I just did away with R15 entirely. Like you said, it's covered by overly harassing users.
And I think R7 (my R5), is more to protect us, than others. But I can see doing away with it as well. Like you said, low risk, so maybe we should just be allowed to talk about literal whos on Twitter. It was a holdover from Reddit. We could always readjust if it becomes an issue down the road.
My R7 and R9 could be combined as well.
I have ideas to trim it down even further if needed, but for now let's go with, something like:
R1: Do not advocate for violence, or post other illegal activity.
R2: Do not threaten, harass, or impersonate fellow users.
R3: Do not post porn.
R4: NSFW content must be flaired NSFW.
R5: No vote manipulation. Do not break communities.win's features.
R6: No reposts or spam threads.
R7: Do not post obviously intentional falsehoods or hoaxes.
R8: Do not post more than 5 posts a day to this sub.
A big issue is interpretation. The first rule on your list is fine if it's being applied in good faith. Where is the line drawn though? Can we make fun of retards whose ideology got them killed for example?
Same with the second rule on your list. I think it's fine for egregious cases but the culture here generally allows people to be assholes to each other since we lose less from that than we would from making it into a hug box.
The only thing I'd add is finding a way to make it easier to get rid of bad faith posters. Think Bluestorm or a version of Imp that bothers to rules lawyer. There's no reason to put up with that shit for months on end.
Sadly, that will always be the case, though. But, yeah, as little room for bad interpretations as possible is a good goal.
Similar to now, we can have shortform and longform versions of the rules. I think "don't advocate violence" is a fine shortform rule, and then we can spell it out further in the full rules.
Personally, I view advocating as direct calls to harm others, but not gravedancing. I find the latter very distasteful, personally, but don't view it as violative of any rules.
I don't view "retard fucked around and found out" or something to that effect, as breaking any rules. While something like "do this to all retards" would be a call to violence.
True. It's complicated, but the very fact we've had these rules and they haven't been enforced regularly is a good sign. We can definitely keep iterating though, but I think something like it should be there. Like you said, for the especially egregious cases.
Any suggestions?