Daily Tildes discussion - on civility, political content, and over-extrapolating
Geez, I said I was hoping to keep these daily discussions a little "lighter" on the weekend, but that's definitely not working out this weekend. Yesterday's thread is getting awfully large, so I...
Geez, I said I was hoping to keep these daily discussions a little "lighter" on the weekend, but that's definitely not working out this weekend.
Yesterday's thread is getting awfully large, so I think it will be good to use this one to continue with some specific topics from that one, instead of trying to keep it in there where it's pretty unwieldy (I definitely need to do some work on handling large threads better).
There are 3 things I want to try to clarify and start discussion on:
- Whether someone is civil or not is absolutely not the only factor in whether they're going to be welcome. Multiple people in the other thread seem to be jumping to the conclusion of "this means that as long as someone says it politely, they've got free rein, and we have to treat all their statements as valid!" That's not true at all. So how can we try to make this more clear? Are there particular rules or guidelines that we could put in place to help separate reasonable conversations from "just asking questions"? Are there existing communities that you think handle this well that we can try to emulate?
- To be completely honest, I probably haven't been paying enough attention to the political threads that have been posted so far. I'll spend some time today looking through some of the existing ones to see if issues are already coming up. We've talked previously about why political content is difficult—should we consider something like just banning "overly political" threads (at least for now) to prevent the site's culture from getting too adversarial initially? Again, is there anything else specific you think we can do or emulate to help the situation?
- Please try not to extrapolate too much immediately. Tildes has "really" been going for a week, I've taken one moderator/admin-like action, and there are people acting like that's already defined the site's entire future. I know everyone here is pretty passionate and excited, but try to relax a bit—the site's brand new, still very tiny, and a lot of things still need to be figured out (both for mechanics and policy). Things like "one user might be getting away with being a troll" doesn't mean that it's doomed to turn into "polite Voat". I'm not going to let that happen, but if you don't believe me that's fine—the only way I can prove it is through what actually happens, and that takes time.
So... that's pretty scattered, but hopefully it's a decent starting point to talk about some of these topics. Let me know what you think, I definitely appreciate everyone's input so far, and it's going to be important to keep getting it regularly to make sure Tildes can stay on the right track.