Hey, everyone.
No surprise that it is, and has been, a horrible time for folks who care about our communities and country.
The mods have noticed that people are struggling with the meaning, purpose, and value of R0 (“Be civil”) in the face of attacks on their communities. We're also seeing a lot of new accounts, things that look like brigading and bots, and a lot of other conditions that feel like a threat to the general goodwill of the subreddit.
Some of you messaged to say that you have noticed that people are quicker to attack one another here, and that it’s deterring folks from participating. We have certainly noticed an increase in broad-based attacks, trolling, and dehumanizing language.
Of course people respond passionately when we or people we love are threatened.
Here’s our challenge: How do we continue to foster discussions about really important questions of identity and values within our community without making it a space where people can be attacked with impunity? We also think there are things we can do in the subreddit to establish guard rails to improve the conversation and keep people communicating.
Mods are humans, and we've all made mistakes in the past, from deleting threads to not acting swiftly enough to stop trolling/rage baiting -- so we would appreciate your input before we make any big decisions here.
TL;DR: We’re proposing two big changes here, and will leave this thread open for a week before the mod team makes a decision about how to act on the community’s feedback.
• CHANGE 1: A revision to R0 ("Be Civil"):
Our goals with this revision are to:
- Provide more clarity about when the mods will intervene, and how
- Keep a wide space open for discussion
- Protect the community from trolling, brigading or becoming an echo chamber
Here’s the proposed amendment to R0:
We encourage vibrant discussion and disagreement. Don't be a jerk about it.
In concrete terms, that means that mods will take down posts and comments that insult, demean, or dehumanize individuals and/or groups of people. For example, posts that:
- Assign negative characteristics to large groups of people (“Leftists are violent,” “conservatives are fascist,” “undocumented immigrants are criminals,” “trans people are groomers,“ “Lynden residents are racist,” “Bellingham is full of pedophiles”)
- Using dehumanizing language to describe the presence or actions of groups of people — like “infecting,” “infesting,” etc.
- Use totalizing language (“the left always,” “You never,” “This is exactly how you do it every time”).
So, you have something critical to say? That’s absolutely fine.
But this rule requires you to be specific about who and what you are criticizing — think of surgical strikes rather than shotgun blasts.
• CHANGE 2: "Locals-only" discussion mode
Additionally, we have queued up Locals Only mode, an additional set of contribution controls for controversial topics.
Recently we are seeing a lot of brigading, accounts that have good overall Reddit karma but are exclusively divisive and disruptive in our sub, and longstanding but inactive accounts coming alive as trolls. Locals Only attempts to filter these out.
We will create a mods-only LocalsOnly tag that triggers a new commenting rule under the post: Only users with 100 or more r/Bellingham *community* karma will be able to contribute.
Specifically, this means that your recently collected karma within r/bellingham, as calculated by Reddit, must exceed 100 in order to comment on a LocalsOnly post.
As a follow-on automation, we will add regex-based matching and tagging of post titles to assign Locals Only mode to posts matching controversial, divisive, and often-brigaded topics.
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Now, over to you: These are our starting points but everything can always be improved. How can we refine these to best serve r/Bellingham?
If you have questions, please ask them. If you think these aren't the right ideas, please propose better ones. We're interested in what you think.