Hi there.
A short introduction: This is an alt account. I’m a moderator here who has been unhappy with the state of news/political discussions here for a long time. The admins have kindly given me the opportunity to see if we can make some improvement the community here.
We will be doing some major revision of the rules left by the previous moderators and will use discussions in this thread as feedback on the direction we should take our community.
This will be an open discussion on the state of our community, the rules and our moderation practices. Feel free to give your inputs.
My goal is to foster thoughtful discussion in our community, and not let this place be a replica of r/politics.
First order of business, immediate rule change.
On [email protected], effectively immediately, we will no longer restrict political discussion to the politics of the United States of America. Discussion regarding of the state of politics from around the world is now welcome.
I will leave this pinned for 1-2 weeks for our team to take feedback and make our proposals then.
As far as the specific “no longer restrict political discussion to the politics of the United States of America” rule goes, I think that’s a positive change because in general I think the fewer rules and the more you let organic user behavior dictate the content on the community the better, but I also would not be too upset if this got reversed so long as there’s some other well populated community I can find to post politics around the world type articles.
As far as input goes, one idea I had (and by “I had,” I mean it was something I remember being a thing on reddit years ago and wish someone would bring back) was that it would be cool to allow text posts one day of the week so users could just submit their own original commentary or try to start discussions about things that aren’t getting reported on. That might be way too much work to moderate, but I’d be interested in what people would have to say.
Lastly, I think also having one day a week (or maybe one a month) where meta posts are allowed would be a good thing. The moderation here seems to have improved and be in a good place now, but I think a vital check on bad moderation is individual users having the ability to make their case in front of the whole community about whatever issue, because reports can get buried and a lot of people aren’t going to take the time to review the mod log and see what’s been happening behind the scenes. I think there is some risk that trolls could try to take advantage of a meta post day and stir up bullshit and misinformation, but I feel like this community has developed enough regulars with enough common sense that those sorts of things could be shut down without the mods having to get involved.
To address your points.
I think there should be a good justification for all of our rules. LW isn’t US based, many on the admin team are not even native English speakers, I see no good justification for us to restrict ourselves to US politics only. Of course, people upvote what they want to see here.
I don’t think we will be restricting text posts in the future, I would like to see it being allowed here in general. But changes should be implemented carefully but steadily.
I would like the feedback thread to serve the function of a general meta post on our moderation style. We’re all human, we make mistakes, but acknowledging them and correct them quickly would be our goal.
Ah, sounds like we’re basically doing all my ideas already then (I’ve always been a “make general pronouncements about how the world ought to be first, pay attention to what’s actually happening later” type of person lol). I do think there’s something to be said for allowing users to create new feedback threads/meta posts to ensure their viewpoint doesn’t just disappear into a thread with hundreds of comments most users won’t ever look at, but having one general feedback thread is probably more than enough.
At any rate, thanks for modding. I was a mod for a few years on a medium sized reddit page and it was an absolute nightmare pain in the ass that honestly kinda ruined my mental health by the end (after several months of arguing with a stridently libertarian mod and a bunch of troll users about the need for a “no bigoted comments” rule I just hated every other human on the planet and didn’t want to get out of bed for a while), so thank you for doing a necessary job I have no interest in doing myself.