Hello from the mod team!

First of all: Thanks to all members on their behaviors. You’ve been great! Please keep that spirit.

At the same time, we’d like to announce that we have updated the rules for this community, based on experience gained, recent events, and your feedback.

What’s new?

The following is a summary, along with some reasoning. The full rules are in the sidebar of the community, as always. :)

  • We are clarifying that this is an English-language community. If you create a post linking to a non-English source, please provide a full-text (automated) translation. This rule is a result of existing moderation practice where we already deleted some stray non-English comments and asked for the translation of a foreign-language link. (Nonetheless, we do love all European languages.)
  • When posting a link to paywalled articles, we’re now asking you to also link to an archived version of the article.
  • Infographics must now include a source and a date (year). This rule is a result of the critical feedback we got on a few infographics that were not exactly wrong, but definitely outdated.
  • We are clarifiying the rules regarding acceptable behavior in discussion: be kind & argue in good faith. These rules more or less explicitly lay out existing moderation practice.

Finally: Want to join the mod team? Please apply — we’d be especially happy to have more mods with a feddit.org account, since mod queue federation is a bit lacking currently.

  • federal reverseOPMEnglish
    1•2 months ago
    • I have no expectation that the new rules are perfect. No doubt there a traps we will fall into.
    • The full rules are a little longer than the summary above.
    • For the most part, human communication is pretty hard to regulate using absolute rules.
    • @JubilantJaguarEnglish
      1•2 months ago

      EDIT. Sorry, this comment was intended for someone else but whatever. The general point stands.

      Disagree somewhat. The gold standard of communities is the techie forum Hacker News. Even even after years of existence, and repeated influxes of the great unwashed from the R-site, the quality of conversation on HN is still astonishingly high.

      The magic formula appears to be (1) a simple mandate for participants to show an interest and assume good faith, (2) a forgiving attitude to transgression which involves privately asking miscreants to behave themselves, and (3) an activist moderator who is always there to jump in and push conversations gently back on the rails.

      Admittedly, Hacker News has specialist subject matter, which always raises the quality of a forum. But even its politics-focused discussions are generally civil, so something else is clearly going on. Most people agree that the moderator there is unusually effective, but the other elements also seem to be playing a role.

      It should not really be surprising. Decent leadership, assuming good intentions, forgiveness, reform rather than retributive punishment - these things tend to result in better communities in the offline world too.