Comment pins are broken, so I'm reposting this as its own thread. Everyone made thoughtful contributions - thank you.
edit: I will be updating the rules tomorrow
edit: I hear everyone with concerns over archiving and other norms, but I think it's better for the community to enforce that kind of stuff for now. We'll see how it goes - nothing will be set in stone.
This draft is a living document, unlike the US Constitution
- Do not advocate for illegal violence or post other illegal activity. (Be aware of your local laws.)
- Don't threaten, harass, or impersonate users. Also: don't be a psycho. New users will be held to a higher standard.
- Do not post porn.
- NSFW/NSFL 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 threads 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 abusenow tied to the "psycho" standard. 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.
For anyone confused about the "fag" and "psycho" discussion, these are previous drafts of R2:
- 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.
- Don't threaten, harass, or impersonate users, or anything else that breaches the community's standard of conversation. New users will be held to a higher standard.
I'm really happy with how this is turning out. The "don't be a fag" clause will require a lot of good faith on the part of the mods (anyone who remembers the dickwolf nonsense from half KIA can attest to that) but that's not something we're short on and the last several years have convinced me it's necessary. My only suggestion is more clarity on where the line in drawn for the new rule 1. Ableist's latest post illustrates the problem. I like the approach u/BandageBandolier took and I'm obviously an advocate of it being as narrow as possible, but regardless of where the line is drawn I think it should be clear to everyone. I think u/Kienan brought up the idea of short and long form rules, and the latter could be used to clarify things without making the former too verbose.
I already ruined and/or fixed that. Sorry and/or you're welcome.
Appreciate it! I hope to be able to both improve things and, more importantly, keep things running smoothly.
Personally, I just warned him, as I don't like censorship...but I'd remove the thread if it happened again. That shit just isn't productive, and is dangerous to the site if someone took notice...which they probably won't, to be fair. But it's still not a good idea.
That's likely going to be my approach in general, at least to regular users; warnings, but no action, but then removal of violative content if behavior continues and, hopefully, not having to even reach the point of time outs.
But, yeah, can't say I was a fan of that titling of that.
As long as the spirt of the rule lives on I'm good with it. I just don't want to see outsiders like Bluestorm shitting up the board for months on end again.
Which is a defensible approach. Less permissible than what I would want but I know I'm an outlier on the topic. It does a seem a little contradictory with BandageBandolier's approach which is why I'm bringing it up. It's probably a hard cases make bad law situation especially since he advocated for gay rape of all things.
As long as I live and breath, you won't see that repeat.
As I've said, shit like that (Bluestorm, Imp alts, pedo jeet, gore jeet, porn jeet, incel jeet, etc.), is the main reason I was interested in mod status at all.
I'd rather fucking not bother. But I like the community, and want to protect it. That's it.
Yup. Thankfully, I think we're all pretty restrained, but it certainly is interesting adding six new mods at the same time, who have no connection with each other outside of all being members here. I don't foresee any clashes of personality, but we will have to all decide how we want to handle these things.
I think Ableist's thread was clearly violative, so I see no problem removing similar ones in the future, but I hope it doesn't come to that. Thus, the warning. If he (or others, not trying to single him out) can't moderate their approach, that's on them.
I'm not after anyone and, just to be clear, even if it did happen again, I'm not even timing him out. Just removing the thread, and giving another warning. He'd be immediately welcome to repost with a nonviolent title. I'm not looking to declare war on anyone here, and want to be as hands off as possible.
"pedo jeet, gore jeet, porn jeet, incel jeet, etc"
Just put "No Jeet behavior"
This kind of insanity normally disqualifies someone from being a moderator.
I'll be honest, had I seen Kienan's sticky comment lower down the thread I probably wouldn't have offered another opinion. Not trying to give contradictory info, we've just been focused on figuring out the general rules to abide by and otherwise working autonomously on our own understandings of expectations without stepping on each other's toes until something gets formalized. It's part of why I've been very sparse with the mod marked comments so far, until the new rules are formalized I can't really say I speak for the moderation team as a whole.
I've already had the pleasure of banning the latest iteration of pedo-jeet, my bloodlust is sated now and I my primary interests are making sure no normal users are getting auto-filtered anymore and not doing anything irreversible until things are settled and agreed upon.
That's a good point as well. I just retooled it to be more specific and moderate (although I think "don't be a psycho" would cover 90% of the moronic posts here).
I do want to keep the "community standard" in there to prevent rules lawyering, though.
Yeah I'll be honest, I don't really know where I stand on Ableist's post. Lol.
Seconding Kieran on the putting the psycho bit back in. It's less vague than fag even though fag covers pretty much everything lol.
Lol OK, I tried adding it again.
Yeah, tbh psycho pretty much perfectly covers the edge case users I'm concerned about.
Sure, add back in the 'psycho' bit. Seems like a solid middle ground.
I think it was definitely violative. If I wanted to come down heavy, I could definitely justify removing it. And, as I said, I would remove it going forward, if he wanted to keep posting that sort of thing.
Oh he will lol. You know his history. Any time he gets into a dispute over loli he calls for his opponents to be raped and sex trafficked.
And, when that happens, I will have to time him out. I don't want to, but if he can't help himself, I will.
I'm happy to be soft on a lot of the other stuff, as I've said, but that sort of threat to other users here is just super uncalled for, and super disruptive. And he's been warned for it before, numerous times.
I think this is where the good faith of the moderators comes into play. Exercising enough good judgement to allow the rules to bend a little before dropping the hammer in order to gauge user intent. Someone stepping over the line is different from someone sprinting past it and the tempered response we've seen so far is encouraging. Whatever the final rules end up being I think it'll still hinge on you guys being good faith actors at the end of the day if we want any of it to work.
So you know, no pressure or anything.
That's what it's going to boil down to at the end of the day. As I've said repeatedly no ruleset would have stopped DOM from pulling the crap he did. The fact that the rules are even being discussed and the community is being listened to is more important than the exact details of the final ruleset.
As I said in the first rules thread, sadly, it's an unavoidable fact.
Just like with any political system. Democracy? Republicanism? Monarchy? Even socialism or communism. It all comes down to how the people wielding the power want to behave.
Thankfully, I do think we've got a good bunch here, but we should still try to set up a rule system where, if we were to abuse our power, it would be blatant and enraging, so the angry masses could proverbially cut our heads off.
It will always come down to the mod team, but we should still make the rules as clear as possible, to hold the mods accountable if nothing else.
Thanks, appreciate it, and that's exactly how I feel. I don't want to have to do anything to the steppers outside of a verbal warning, if they do be steppin'. My main goal is to stop the sprinters; outsiders who are here for bad purposes, and aren't members of the community. In the past, due to lax moderation, they have been given free reign for a while, before they were banned, letting them do much more damage than they should have. Stopping that has always been my primary intent.
100%. Just how things work, for better or worse.