Hello everyone! If you have not yet seen it, @ernest has handed over moderation to @Drusas @Entropywins @ Frog-Brawler (the tag system consistently messes up the link to FB’s username lol) and myself here in !politics.
First order of business is for you all to weigh in on the community guidelines that you would like to see here. As the mod team, we will weigh all suggestions and then add them to the side bar as magazine/community rules. I’m going to give about 48 hours for users to see this thread and add a comment or discuss.
Please know that the goal is not to create an echo chamber here in !politics, but we want to ensure that there is not an encroachment of rage bait and toxicity. It brings down the quality of the magazine and it discourages community engagement.
For the time being, the mod tools are pretty sparse, so I want to manage expectations about the scope of moderation we’re able to do right now. For now, our touch will be light. Expect increased functionality as time progresses, though. We have 3 weeks of reports on file, so please know we see them. Give us some time to establish how to handle those before you start to see any movement.
“Be Civil” is the core value for me.
I also have a question, rather than an answer. Should all posts require the URL of an external article? Or are people allowed to post “topic for discussion” and personal opinion posts? There needs to be a place for that, I’m just not sure whether this is it. So far I haven’t found a good venue for that.
This is an excellent question and is really up to us as a community to establish. The thought had occurred to me that there’s room in our magazine for:
It’s just a matter of community members saying what kind of content they want here and us establishing Badges (we can do that as mods, kind of like post flair).
I certainly don’t insist that opinion posts need to be allowed here, but I think there needs to be somewhere they belong. I guess the question is whether this should be primarily a place to find news or a place for taking about it.
I’m really open to this place being a location to receive information and a place to discuss it, even at a meta level.
Check my response to CurrMudgeon above for my preliminary views (subject to input!) on how we can provide this expectation in the community rules.
Politics is all about opinion. We all have different opinions on how society should be run. If we only allow fact-based reporting, this magazine might as well just be /m/news. Opinion pieces should definitely be allowed. Maybe limit it to external opinion pieces from established institutions to keep content quality high.
I agree with all this. Let’s see how other community members chime in.
Based off Rule #3 I would believe that it’s unspoken. However I think it should be added. I for one liked that r/politics had this rule. This magazine doesn’t have to mirror that, however I believe it’s worth consideration.
That said, Rule #3 could be extended to editorialized media, unless specified that the “editorializing/opinion/commentary” is OP’s. That’s something that should be included.