This is essentially a followup to the last meta post.
Big scary updates are done and seem to be fine, but our volunteers have been going absolutely mad with minor updates. Which is great! We have a bunch of people contributing tons of valuable tweaks and fixes and improvements to the codebase, thank you, I literally could not do this without you.
I'm just gonna repost this again because it worked the last time:
Are you a software developer? Do you want to help? We can pretty much always use people who want to get their hands dirty with our ridiculous list of stuff to work on. The codebase is in Python, and while I'm not gonna claim it's the cleanest thing ever, it's also not the worst and we are absolutely up for refactoring and improvements. Hop over to our discord server and join in. (This is also a good place to report issues, especially if part of the issue is "I can't make comments anymore.")
Are you somewhat experienced in Python but have never worked on a big codebase? Come help anyway! We'll point you at some easy stuff.
Are you not experienced in Python whatsoever? We can always use testers, to be honest, and if you want to learn Python, go do a tutorial, once you know the basics, come join us and work on stuff.
(if you're experienced in, like, any other language, you'll have no trouble)
Rules Changes
Thank you for discussion on the rule proposals! Here's what we ended up with.
Courtesy: Keep to a single account
We strongly discourage people from making alt accounts without good reason, and in the absence of a good reason, we consider alt accounts to be bannable on sight. Alt accounts are almost exclusively used for mod evasion purposes and very rarely used for any purpose that helps the community; it makes moderation more difficult and it makes conversation more difficult.
If you do feel you need an alt account (most commonly, if you're a well-established user who wants to post something that can't be linked to their public persona), please ask the mods.
If you don't want the mods to know about it either, be aware that there's a good chance we'll find out about it anyway.
Content: Post on multiple subjects
We occasionally have trouble with people who turn into single-issue posters, posting and commenting only on a single subject. We'd like to discourage this. If you find yourself posting constantly on a single subject, please make an effort to post on other subjects as well.
This doesn't mean you need to write megaposts! This can be as simple as going to the Friday Fun Thread once in a while and posting a few paragraphs about whatever video game you last played. But this community is fundamentally for people, and if a poster is acting more like a propaganda-bot than a person, we're going to start looking at them suspiciously.
This rule is going to be applied with delicacy; if I can find not-low-effort comments about three different subjects within your last two weeks or two pages of comments, you're likely fine.
These are still prototypes, if you have objections they can still be changed, without objections they'll get added to the Official Rules probably in a week or so.
Private Profiles
Again, thank you for discussion! I refined the planned system a bit (original plans: "remove private profiles".) The current system is that private profiles are available to established users or on request. We're leaving "established" intentionally vague, but it's basically a measure of how much you've been contributing. If the system considers you established, the checkbox will be in your settings; if the system doesn't consider you established, it'll be there, but grayed out and have a link to contact us.
(This is using roughly the same standard as our filtering system, but with much bigger numbers.)
We've also grandfathered in everyone who had a private profile, even those who don't meet the bar. This was definitely a carefully-considered decision! It has nothing to do with me not wanting to write the SQL query to revert profiles.
That said, if you're a newbie account that gets yourself banned, don't be surprised if a mod also resets your private flag.
Long Comments
A while back there was a meta post where I proposed relaxing the comment character limit. I came up with a proposal, people on the dev discord convinced me to relax it even further, then it just sorta sat there and moldered in the Issues queue for a bit because it wasn't the priority. Then I wrote an effortpost and said "shucks, this is over the limit! Okay, I'm going to just go and implement that long-comment request now so I can post my megapost for the good of the community. Aaaaand also so I can post my megapost."
Then one of our volunteers, without any knowledge whatsoever of the above decision, sniped it out from under me and implemented it, like, two days before I was going to sit down and do it.
Anyway, it's in now! The new limit is . . .
. . . a little more complicated.
The new limit is 50,000 characters if you don't want to be filtered. Are you okay with your comment being filtered as if you were a new user? Well, good news, the new limit is 500,000 characters. Yes, this is literally enough to post an entire novel, albeit a short one, as long as you're OK with the mods seeing it before the rest of the userbase does.
This is experimental; if it gets abused, don't be surprised if this gets changed.
This is now a general-purpose feedback post. Let me know how things are going!
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I want to reheat this spat I had with @Amadan about moderation, in the context of someone calling an outgroup artist a "leftist creep". At the time, I was quite taken aback by Amadan's assertion that this is in fact considered to be within the rules, and if it now is, I want to propose changing the (interpretation of the) rules so that it is not. I don't think it's hard to derive a prohibition of this from "Be no more antagonistic than is absolutely necessary", or "Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion", and my understanding of moderational standards at some high points of the Reddit era is that it would have been.
Generally, I feel like we have been drifting away from the "police on tone, not on content" ethos that had made this community great. On one hand, policing on tone has become anemic, as can be easily told from the near-complete absence of the formerly ubiquitous subthreads where people complain about having been policed on tone when their tone was more than justified by the ABSOLUTELY OUTRAGEOUS conduct of the outgroup (a good sign that something is being done). On the other hand, community sentiment and moderation conspire to increasingly channel us into what feels like a consensus position for some sort of "bourgeois rightism", which affirms common right-wing social and economic positions and muscularly asserts its aesthetics while putting a lid on tendencies (excessive HBD and antisemitism, but also the idea that elites are above the rules) that are seen to mark the threshold of a slippery slope towards intemperance and extremism. This window is bounded to the right by actual moderator action (like the latest crusade against "JQ-posting"), and to the left by the anarcho-tyranny of giving the existing majorities a lot of slack in bending the rules when responding to deviants.
That being said, I do not even get the sense that this was at any point decided as explicit policy. Rather, it seems like it simply arises as a blind spot, because our moderators, while generally doing a genuinely admirable job of keeping their personal opinions concealed, have personal positions that are close to the space described above, which removes the first-line instinctual response towards casual "microaggressions" directed at the outgroup. Moreover, the community has already self-selected so far in the same direction that any opposing feedback tends to come from people who are at the threshold of flaming out like I have been for the past few months, and therefore don't come across as the most level-headed dispensers of advice. Please, assuming you still want conflicting opinions, try to at least consider this as a plea to allocate a few more cycles to imagining the experience of the community for someone who is at odds with the above whenever you make a policy decision.
I agree in principle but call for a carve-out localized to this specific matter, (which I suppose is obligatory for someone who actually did it). I chose the word creep because I spent about 10-20 minutes looking through his Artsy page and that's the word that most fittingly described it in my mind. I challenge anyone to spend 20 minutes looking through the pages of his work and thinking this a normal person. Now maybe artists in general aren't 'normal'. But Cleon is pretty abnormal. There's a kind of malign energy that seeps through his work and it's not just hidden in the subtext.
Furthermore, I didn't raise the topic in the first place! If I had put that on the top-level, then sure, it's boo-outgroup. But it was someone else who raised it. The original post is now deleted which I think is bad play but it was defending Cleon as an apolitical surfer bro or saying he could be interpreted in an altright way! This is a huge deception, which I was rather unhappy with. Maybe that's why the post was deleted. In the now-deleted context I think my post was reasonable.
If we have a rule against doing what I did, then can we at least have some kind of rule against deleting posts, or at least deleting toplevel posts (mods excepted).
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Yeah, I think I agree with you; I'd be much more fine with "I feel like Cleon Peterson is a leftist creep" but I think this is too far. Gonna talk to the mods and see what they say.
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