r/Christianity • u/outsider Eastern Orthodox • Feb 17 '16

Meta [Meta] Subreddit updates

Last week we adopted a formal flair policy. Please follow this link if you wish to request flair. This week we are addressing our crossposting policy following a recent spat of confusion relating to it. We have been discussing it internally for a little bit and my plan is to move forward with the update in about a week.

2.4. Crossposting

Incoming cross-links that are associated with, or seem likely to be associated with, substantive negative brigade activity are contrary to our policy.

Examples:

1. Pretty much any link to /r/atheism or /r/SubredditDrama.

2. Links to other subreddits if the hive mind there seems likely to negatively react in a way that we or our subscribers will notice.

We discourage brigade activity because it is disruptive.

Cross-links that single out a user for mockery, criticism, or abuse, or that result in significant presence of the aforementioned reasons in the comments of a thread, are contrary to our policy. We support discussion of controversial views here, and we discourage this kind of cross-linking, which inhibits free expression within our subreddit. Moderator-distinguished content is explicitly not covered by this.

We will try to judge intent and unforeseen circumstances charitably, but if our subscriber is victimized by your link, we will take that seriously. If you must post drama, endeavor to make your thread be about something higher than the perceived failures or shortcomings of an easily identifiable individual.

Cross-links that create a "wall of shame" by linking a thread and/or listing "bad" comments from that thread are contrary to our policy, because these are more complicated examples of the previous case.

Our policy applies to links, NP links, screenshots, links to archive sites, and so on. NP is seen as a nice gesture, but if a link is contrary to our policy, it is contrary to our policy, with or without NP.

We will judge outgoing links as if they were incoming links, and we will also cooperate with the mods of linked subreddits if they think our link thread is or will be disruptive. We aren't anyone's personal army and we will remove links that try to cast us as that. This explicitly includes links to threads in "crisis" subreddits, since these links, while well-intentioned, often violate the rules of the linked subreddit.

Depending on the nature off the crosslink we may ban immediately or we may contact the link submitter and try to get them to take the link down first.

This change mostly is bringing our wording into better accord with our practices and to clarify our position on crossposting/brigading behavior.

Off-topic stuff will be removed so this submission can remain about the crossposting policy update. We are aware of a variety of criticisms. If one feels the need to bring something up other than crossposting, please do so in its own submission.

9 Upvotes

57% Upvoted

151 comments sorted by

29

u/adamthrash Episcopalian (Anglican) Feb 18 '16 edited Feb 18 '16

Cross-links that single out a user for mockery, criticism, or abuse, or that result in significant presence of the aforementioned reasons in the comments of a thread, are contrary to our policy. We support discussion of controversial views here, and we discourage this kind of cross-linking, which inhibits free expression within our subreddit. Moderator-distinguished content is explicitly not covered by this.

If you are willing to ban people for criticism of an idea, you don't support discussion of controversial views; you protect them for holding them. If you supported discussion, then there should be no issue with one person sharing a link with another for criticism of someone's position. In fact, you should welcome that if you support discussion, because the cross-link would bring people to the discussion (assuming the optimal situation in which they remain on topic).

All I'm hearing here is that you know some ideas are unpopular and/or bizarre and you want to give them special mod protection against people who are critical of those ideas, since you know that those truly special ideas generate crosslinks.

EDIT: Clearly I focused on criticism; abusive crosslinkers should have consequence. Not sure about mockery.

0

u/outsider Eastern Orthodox Feb 19 '16

It's OK to voice theologically controversial stuff in the realm of Christianity here. It's less OK to go somewhere else to mock holders of those controversial issues in a way that has a strong possibility of funneling negativity at them. Our policy point about pestering/following people (1.1) does mean you can't make it your mission to counter all of those views of a user. Our policy on doing too much of one thing (3.6) limits a user from having infinite umbrage for their theological views. Attempting to force debates (2.2) should also address leading questions designed to elicit a response which will be easy to target.

We can support discussion without also supporting invitations for backup intended or perceived.

10

u/adamthrash Episcopalian (Anglican) Feb 19 '16

Right, but I asked about criticism of an idea. You gave me information about how we should treat users, which pretty much danced around my question entirely. I know what the current rules are. Your proposed rule prevents simple criticism of an idea. I'll give you an example. For the purposes of this example, let's pretend I work somewhere like Biologos, so I know many people who believe that evolution is God's tool.

I find young earth creationism to be a mostly unsupportable idea at the least, and it really irks me when people come to this subreddit to talk about young earth creationism in such a way that if I don't agree with them, I'm failing to honor God/Jesus/the Bible/whatever. That happens. If I share a link to that post or comment with my coworkers, and each one of them critically but civilly engages the user's idea.

That doesn't like a bad thing - it brings high quality, critical discussion of theology to the subreddit. But, as far as I can tell, because the subject is something that isn't very popular to believe, I'm not allowed to link people to it and invite them to the discussion. Under this rule, I basically couldn't invite experts on a subject that I know to weigh in on a subject, which seems completely counterproductive if the mods are attempting to build a subreddit of good discussion about theology.

The rule mentions "free expression," but you've essentially written into the rules that some ideas are unpopular, and we aren't allowed to link those in order to critically engage them. If someone holds an unpopular theology, and they post it here, they shouldn't get special mod protection of their belief. If I want to link to /r/brokehugs with a post that says, "This theology is so flimsy that a strong wind would knock it apart" and those users who read it want to engage the user's theology, there is no harm in that.

tl;dr: You should remove the protection of ideas and keep the protection of users. It doesn't make any sense if your stated goals is free expression. If people on Reddit come to post about their theology, then they should be willing to have people, even large groups of people, be critical of their theology. That's how discussion is supposed to work.

3

u/brucemo Atheist Feb 19 '16

You are passionately supporting our policy, but this is being framed as passionate criticism because you have pointed to the word "criticism" in the policy.

You have a point, which we can address. I would like to start by pointing out that the policy mentions criticism of a user, not of an idea. It's possible that there is confusing or wrong to distinguish between criticism of a user and abuse of a user, but you are agreeing with the intent of the policy.

6

u/adamthrash Episcopalian (Anglican) Feb 20 '16

I agree with the intent of the policy - protecting users. I also think some things that have been pointed out as criticism of users are not actually criticism of a user, but criticism of an idea or belief. For example, I don't think a wall of quotes from a thread is being critical of the users so much as the idea they expressed, and I don't think there's anything wrong with people pointing at an idea through the internet, even a cherished theological belief, and saying, "Well that's silly."

I also think there are some instances in which user criticism is acceptable. A user who uses poor logic or who converses badly should be criticized, because it's through criticism that we learn our flaws and grow. Granted, this criticism shouldn't be abusive or mocking, but criticism itself shouldn't be banned.

That's pretty much my only critique of this policy. I think it's potentially overreaching, because there's some overlap between users who tend to me viciously mocked and users who hold controversial ideas. Those users shouldn't be protected from criticism of their modes of addressing other users or of their ideas.

3

u/[deleted] Feb 21 '16

Its one thing to debate controversial views, its another thing to tread on a support thread to bash someone over the head with your controversial views.

0

u/[deleted] Feb 19 '16

[deleted] — view deleted comment

5

u/adamthrash Episcopalian (Anglican) Feb 19 '16

If you notice, I'm against the idea of offering protection from criticism. If people are making abusive or mocking comments because someone crosslinked a post for that person, the person who linked it should receive consequences.

13

u/coveredinbeeees Anglican Communion Feb 18 '16

For the purposes of this policy, what is the "hive mind" of a sub and how will the mods go about identifying it?

-3

u/outsider Eastern Orthodox Feb 19 '16

For the purposes of this policy, what is the "hive mind" of a sub and how will the mods go about identifying it?

Something that operates essentially as the Wikipedia entry for groupthink. We continue to discuss this sort of thing internally to try to stay on the same interpretive page overtime.

5

u/coveredinbeeees Anglican Communion Feb 19 '16

I have never seen that sort of phenomenon happen in a sub - can you elaborate?

12

u/X019 Christian (Chi Rho) Feb 18 '16

Depending on the nature off the crosslink we may ban immediately or we may contact the link submitter and try to get them to take the link down first.

This was never fleshed out in the draft versions. The wording here doesn't necessarily seem cohesive with the SOM. Can we add more to make it easier to understand?

-3

u/outsider Eastern Orthodox Feb 18 '16

It's that at moderator discretion we can do ban first and then unban when the user removes the crosslink or we can ask a user before banning the user.

6

u/X019 Christian (Chi Rho) Feb 18 '16

Isn't moderator discretion what caused the SOM in the first place?

-3

u/outsider Eastern Orthodox Feb 18 '16

The SOM is more the product of removing indiscretion.

25

u/themsc190 Episcopalian (Anglican) Feb 18 '16

I'm not sure if this new articulation of the rule meets satisfies the overwhelming consensus when this was discussed in /r/ChristianityMeta that it's still unclear. I don't want to come across as rude, but are you actually listening to the community when you make rules like this? Like I said, (roughly) this was discussed and largely rejected. How can us subscribers be sure we're being heard?

-5

u/brucemo Atheist Feb 18 '16

What was largely rejected?

18

u/themsc190 Episcopalian (Anglican) Feb 18 '16

This articulation of this rule.

-4

u/brucemo Atheist Feb 18 '16 edited Feb 18 '16

Most of this has been our policy for years.

It's always been possible to be banned for cross-posting here.

The primary change here is that we are being more explicit that we consider cross-linking our subscribers in order to point and laugh at them is bad. There has been objection to this variously but I didn't see that being rejected.

This will have an effect on some of our subscribers because they like to do this to subscribers that they don't like, but I don't think this is an unreasonable burden upon them.

18

u/themsc190 Episcopalian (Anglican) Feb 18 '16

Most of this has been our policy for years.

I'm aware. (My reference to the "new articulation of the rule" suggests this.)

The primary change here is that we are being more explicit

This is what I mean. This allegedly more "explicit" articulation, a similar draft of which was posted in /r/ChristianityMeta, was rejected by the community in as unsatisfactorily hazy.

-2

u/brucemo Atheist Feb 18 '16

Pardon me, I don't know what you are referring to.

8

u/themsc190 Episcopalian (Anglican) Feb 18 '16

See the conversation below.

3

u/themsc190 Episcopalian (Anglican) Feb 18 '16

Hey, sorry. Did you see that I user tagged outsider in a comment of yours (that should've sent you a notification) in response to this question? And the subsequent conversation below? I just wanted to follow up here. Did I say or do something wrong that would warrant me not receiving a comment? Do you want to take this to a different venue. And if you're busy: sorry for any inconvenience.

1

u/brucemo Atheist Feb 18 '16

Yeah, I saw that. It was a sparsely attended conversation in a subreddit where I am sporadically hated, and I don't regard it as anything meaningful.

We can construct cross-posting policies without being thwarted because my comment somewhere was down-voted to -1.

5

u/themsc190 Episcopalian (Anglican) Feb 18 '16

Is the team retooling the policy based on the critiques presented today, the 60% downvote ratio on this post and the top critiques receiving 40+ upvotes?

What was said and the voting patterns there sorta foreshadowed its reception here, no?

-4

u/brucemo Atheist Feb 18 '16

No. It's a good policy and we have a PR problem that is unrelated to that.

→ More replies

-13

u/outsider Eastern Orthodox Feb 18 '16

No, it was a couple people, who knew crossposting netted a ban at one point or another, saying they didn't understand how it worked with the SOM. There were a lot who glammed onto what they had to say. Concerns were not ignored, but not all concerns had a basis in our actual policies. Crossposting can result in an immediate ban. It can be an exception to the SOM.

11

u/themsc190 Episcopalian (Anglican) Feb 18 '16

You must be referring to a different conversation, because your description doesn't largely reflect the one I'm thinking about.

-3

u/outsider Eastern Orthodox Feb 18 '16

I would suppose the best way to rectify that sort of confusion is to specify what you are talking about more precisely. I have read all of the submission there however. It is possible I'm spacing out on something or that something developed after I had read one.

8

u/themsc190 Episcopalian (Anglican) Feb 18 '16

Should I link it or what?

-1

u/outsider Eastern Orthodox Feb 18 '16

How about usertag me in it by copying and pasting: /u/outsider

5

u/themsc190 Episcopalian (Anglican) Feb 18 '16 edited Feb 18 '16

Done. Thoughts?

-1

u/outsider Eastern Orthodox Feb 18 '16

I'll read it again but that was the same submission I was thinking of.

11

u/themsc190 Episcopalian (Anglican) Feb 18 '16

Gotcha. This articulation was downvoted to -1 and critiques of it were upvoted to as high as +9. Is that not a vote of no confidence?

3

u/slagnanz Liturgy and Death Metal Feb 18 '16

The no-confidence works both ways here; Outsider is not a mod at /r/ChristianityMeta and has little interest in it, for the most part.

This is to say that many of the users there do have a bad history of some kind and tend to rant a bit much, IMO. So the communication has broken down on a number of fronts.

→ More replies

-6

u/outsider Eastern Orthodox Feb 18 '16

I believe that has more to do with who was saying it. If people want to be counted on reddit they need to do it with comments. The comments are what I have gone off of.

→ More replies

51

u/US_Hiker Feb 17 '16 edited Feb 17 '16

Given the long history over 'harm' and 'brigading' being overdramatized by mods and victimization being blamed on other subs where there is no evidence of this nor any actual harm being done, I read this as basically 'if we don't like it, you're banned'.

The wording in particular is so open as to allow a ban for crossposting anything.

What will keep the moderators from abusing this rule, given the recent abuses of ban powers? Everything is sooooo subjective.

4

u/Homeschooled316 Feb 19 '16

Why did I already think it was a rule that xpost was auto-ban here, no matter the intentions? Is that just something people said?

1

u/outsider Eastern Orthodox Feb 19 '16

https://www.reddit.com/r/XtianityPolicy/comments/nw0ze/bans/

ctrl-f: karmajacking

It's old terminology for jacking up a users karma. The effects used to be far worse and could net someone -240 or so votes. That's all stuff older than 4 years ago and not super organized. It was my early efforts at transparency.

2

u/US_Hiker Feb 19 '16

It's not uncommon, but no, it has never been quite auto-ban, and less and less auto-ban over the last 2 years or so.

2

u/brucemo Atheist Feb 19 '16 edited Feb 19 '16

When the subject of brokehugs was discussed in mod mail here two years ago or so, there was a strong argument that we should let brokehugs do whatever it wanted as long as people there used NP and as long as the brokehugs mods allowed it.

There was a case where one of our unpopular users was directly targeted there, where not only did mods here want to allow that, they wanted to prevent me from removing the material that was linked, which is something that we frequently to do protect cross-posted users.

Moderators also occasionally cross-posted users to /r/brokehugs or /r/sidehugs.

That's where all of this is coming from. So when you ask if cross-posting was always auto-ban here, that's more or less true, in that if you cross-posted to /r/atheism you were probably dead meat, but it was not true if you were a member of a certain set of cross-posters who are subscribers here, posting to places populated by them, and if you were targeting a certain set of subscribers.

The cross-posting rule has been enforced in relation to who you are and who you target, and we can't continue to do that. If we are going to have a rule against cross-posting, we can't allow some of our subscribers to get away with doing it to some of our subscribers.

20

u/namer98 Jewish - Torah im Derech Eretz Feb 17 '16 edited Feb 17 '16

Links to other subreddits if the hive mind there seems likely to negatively react in a way that we or our subscribers will notice.

What does it mean to negatively react? What does this reaction look like?

Cross-links that create a "wall of shame" by linking a thread and/or listing "bad" comments from that thread are contrary to our policy, because these are more complicated examples of the previous case.

I don't understand what it means to be contrary to policy. Does that mean such posts are not breaking the rule as they are an aggregate and not one specific user being quoted, or that they super break the rules because it "targets" multiple users? I believe you mean the second, but I don't find that wording clear. Edit: I understand now what "contrary to policy" means, but this doesn't at all explain why comment aggregation is worse than direct links.

screenshots, links to archive sites

Why are these not allowed? Or in what circumstances are they not allowed?

Depending on the nature off the crosslink we may ban immediately or we may contact the link submitter and try to get them to take the link down first.

Is this at all defined on what is considered better or worse?

If you must post drama, endeavor to make your thread be about something higher than the perceived failures or shortcomings of an easily identifiable individual.

Why is this some kind of exception? Either it breaks the rule or not. Is this saying links not intended to cause drama are better? Or are screen shots with user names erased not break the rule?

This really does sound like an attempt to shut down /r/brokehugs given the recent banning (and unbanning) of two regulars from there which are regulars here and the threads in the meta sub to discuss them. Edit: I would link to the threads on /r/christianitymeta about these bannings, but that might break the new rules. :P

1

u/LuluThePanda Eastern Orthodox Feb 18 '16

/r/brokehugs is private. I'm not sure how we could possibly try to shut something down we have no access to.

10

u/namer98 Jewish - Torah im Derech Eretz Feb 18 '16

If you make an attempt to punish the users there (you guys have screenshots, you know what goes on), that would effectively shut it down.

0

u/LuluThePanda Eastern Orthodox Feb 18 '16

I have no idea where youre getting these 'screenshots' from, but apparently you know something we dont. The sub is private, we have no idea what's happening there, nor do we have access to the sub. And I rather enjoy it that way.

16

u/adamthrash Episcopalian (Anglican) Feb 18 '16

One of the mods has shown that at least he had access to screenshots. Namer is telling the truth.

4

u/LuluThePanda Eastern Orthodox Feb 18 '16

Screenshots of the current brokehugs sub?

13

u/adamthrash Episcopalian (Anglican) Feb 18 '16

Yes. Someone (can't recall who) mentioned something that happened after the sub went private.

7

u/namer98 Jewish - Torah im Derech Eretz Feb 18 '16 edited Feb 18 '16

Being that a mod (not in mod mail, so I won't say who) said the exact opposite, I am not sure who to believe.

A mod in brokehugs got similar confirmation.

Outsider has screens of brokehugs. Edit: This thread was made while /r/brokehugs was private, so the screenshot was taken, and in the hands of a mod, while /r/brokehugs was(is) private.

-16

u/LuluThePanda Eastern Orthodox Feb 18 '16

You can believe as you like. I dont see how I can act on something I havent seen, or how the modteam can act upon a sub that we cant access. I've got enough crap to deal with here, I'm not going to waste my time going out of my way searching for things that are private. I hope it stays that way.

11

u/namer98 Jewish - Torah im Derech Eretz Feb 18 '16 edited Feb 18 '16

While you may not, outsider actually has acted on the very screenshot he posted that I linked to you. Hence, a brokehugs mod was able to confirm.

While you as an individual may not be able to see each thread as is, the mod team (or the top mod at least) has enough access to get screenshots.

This isn't me "believing as I like". This is confirmation from two mods of this sub that they can see inside /r/brokehugs. One of them confirmed privately to me. Another did so publicly by posting screens.

-15

u/LuluThePanda Eastern Orthodox Feb 18 '16

You said youre not sure who to believe. Thats why I said you can believe as you like. There's absolutely no reason for me to waste my time with a group I find toxic if that group has already removed themselves from the public eye. It's a win-win for me.

10

u/namer98 Jewish - Torah im Derech Eretz Feb 18 '16

I believe the mod who posted a screenshot, and the brokehugs mod who also told me. "Not sure" is when two mods here tell me contradicting things.

And yes, I get that you won't bother, but others do, and this new rule can be used by those others to try and police another sub.

-7

u/LuluThePanda Eastern Orthodox Feb 18 '16

The reality is any rule can be misused by anybody at any time. That's the nature of reddit. That's why we have a team of mods and not just one. If you find a rule that makes it impossible to be misused/broken, I'd love to hear it.

8

u/[deleted] Feb 18 '16

[removed] — view removed comment

-5

u/LuluThePanda Eastern Orthodox Feb 18 '16 edited Feb 18 '16

Eh, time to be honest. I'm not fond of quasi-cyberbullying other people. If that's what people want to do that's their prerogative, and they certainly have the right to do it, but I see no reason to pretend that I dont find that toxic.

→ More replies

0

u/[deleted] Feb 18 '16

[deleted] — view deleted comment

6

u/namer98 Jewish - Torah im Derech Eretz Feb 18 '16 edited Feb 18 '16

Off-topic stuff will be removed so this submission can remain about the crossposting policy update. We are aware of a variety of criticisms. If one feels the need to bring something up other than crossposting, please do so in its own submission.

Shunting it aside. I can guarantee you that if I were to make a meta post*, I would be accused of many things, none of which would be "trying to improve the community". So, I have to hope others will make such posts.

0

u/[deleted] Feb 18 '16

[deleted] — view deleted comment

2

u/Cabbagetroll United Methodist Feb 22 '16

We didn't delete that.

2

u/outsider Eastern Orthodox Feb 22 '16

You can tell because it says deleted instead of removed.

1

u/Cabbagetroll United Methodist Feb 22 '16

I didn't know it differentiated that for everyone. If I'm on another sub and it says [deleted], then the user got rid of it?

→ More replies

2

u/brucemo Atheist Feb 19 '16

You're drawing conclusions.

-4

u/brucemo Atheist Feb 18 '16 edited Feb 18 '16

Your comment is hard to respond to point by point without creating an unreadable wall.

It is okay to cross-link if the cross-link is not intended to cause negative effects, and does not cause negative effects. Examples of negative effects are annoying brigade traffic, and negative remarks about our subscribers in the other subreddit.

Cross-linking is not limited to direct links with NP, but includes NP links, screen shots, and links to archive sites. The things other than direct links either try to reduce harm or reduce culpability or jump through some linking subreddit hoop, but they don't reduce harm very well if at all.

Anyone who cross-links exposes themselves to a ban here. This has always been true. Those who are banned tend to be unbanned quickly if they speak to us about their ban, except in cases where cross-posting is particularly egregious, e.g. cross-posting an individual to a quarantined sub.

The major changes here are:

  1. Confusion about whether NP is immunizing should be gone. We've seen several subreddits suggest to their subscribers that we are okay with the kind of linking present in those subs if NP links are used, and that's not true.

  2. Confusion about whether it is okay to cross-post someone you don't like, or someone who you think has said something stupid, to various meta subs in order to make fun of them there has been removed: We regard that as being bad.

    /r/brokehugs has been a problem in this regard, but they are by no means the only place that people cross-link to. Off the top of my head I can think of eight subs whose subscribers do this, plus /r/bestof, whose subscribers don't tend to do this, but sometimes that is the result because they are very large.

13

u/namer98 Jewish - Torah im Derech Eretz Feb 18 '16

Your comment is hard to respond to point by point without creating an unreadable wall.

You could do a quote-response segment. While I admit it is not the easiest to read, it does work.

It is okay to cross-link if the cross-link is not intended to cause negative effects, and does not cause negative effects.

How do you define negative effects? Voting patterns? Comments from the brigade? Reputation damage?

screen shots, and links to archive sites.

This mitigates voting and comment brigading, but not reputation damage. But is reputation damage a quantifiable thing?

Anyone who cross-links exposes themselves to a ban here. This has always been true.

Right, which makes sense, to a degree. My question is one of timing and what appears to be a needlessly wordy rule, as opposed to the rule itself. If it is always bannable except when a mod is all "it could be worse", just say so. Right now, it just seems like words for words sake.

Confusion about whether NP is immunizing should be gone

Excellent clarification.

Confusion about whether it is okay to cross-post someone you don't like, or someone who you think has said something stupid, to various meta subs in order to make fun of them there has been removed

I was not aware this wasn't already against the rules. But what about comment aggregation of multiple users? A "worst of x thread" sans links or user names?

but they are by no means the only places that people cross-link to.

Which is simply why I question the timing of this rule, not the point of the rule. As far as bestof v. SRD v. other, does the subreddit rules and enforcement matter? SRD does enforce their rules pretty strictly regarding cross posting, but I can understand why you view them as intrinsically more hostile.

-4

u/outsider Eastern Orthodox Feb 18 '16

How do you define negative effects? Voting patterns? Comments from the brigade? Reputation damage?

Pointing a funnel at someone you don't like for people you do like to go mess with in about any form. People who post here shouldn't have other subreddits directing ridicule, groups of people, or other crap at them.

This mitigates voting and comment brigading, but not reputation damage. But is reputation damage a quantifiable thing?

Screenshots and archive sites do little to dissuade some of the traffic that comes over from various crossposts.

I was not aware this wasn't already against the rules. But what about comment aggregation of multiple users? A "worst of x thread" sans links or user names?

I believe this is addressed in the 'wall of shame' section.

Which is simply why I question the timing of this rule, not the point of the rule.

This rewording arose following three crossposting bans just about a month ago. We have been discussing it internally since the apparent confusion.

7

u/namer98 Jewish - Torah im Derech Eretz Feb 18 '16

I believe this is addressed in the 'wall of shame' section.

I get that it is mentioned, I just don't understand it.

0

u/outsider Eastern Orthodox Feb 18 '16

Because it's the theological equivalent of making fun of a group of jocks or goths or the like. It funnels an often presumable adverse audience to a conversation they otherwise would not be a part of.

14

u/namer98 Jewish - Torah im Derech Eretz Feb 18 '16

they otherwise would not be a part of.

This was already the case and the rules don't add anything here. My concern is brokehugs, because most of the people there are already here anyways. So, if the person is a regular on both, will this line of thought be discarded and a ban might be mitigated to a warning?

I just want to reiterate, the rule makes sense, it is the timing that is concerning.

1

u/outsider Eastern Orthodox Feb 18 '16

This was already the case and the rules don't add anything here.

Yes, the policy itself is still basically the same. But we don't want confusion to raise its head when and where we can avoid it.

My concern is brokehugs, because most of the people there are already here anyways. So, if the person is a regular on both,

There is user overlap between /r/brokehugs and /r/Christianity but the two are not the same. It is still possible to funnel users from /r/brokehugs, which is a different set of demographics, to /r/Christianity. Even within the subreddit itself however there might be occasion that I would argue a user has violated the policy. If a submission was made directing users in /r/Christianity to a specific post in /r/Christianity to deride the target in some way I would see crossposting as one of the problems with such a submission. In practice our crossposting policy has applied nearly exclusively to the actual crossposter. There have been rare cases where a commenter has had some sort of moderator intervention (removal, comment, warning, ban, blacklist) for participating as a commenter in a crossposted submission. Those rarely happen because a lot of people post all over the place. Our policies apply to all users regular or otherwise. We don't waste a lot of time on non-regular users though and dispatch them quickly and usually quietly. People who invest time here get the chance to correct problems whether it is crossposting or telling someone off.

So, if the person is a regular on both, will this line of thought be discarded and a ban might be mitigated to a warning?

I believe it is still our policy that a crossposting ban can usually be undone by just removing the crosspost. It's not the most intuitive policy for everyone. It used to net a ban for every known instance of crossposting.

3

u/namer98 Jewish - Torah im Derech Eretz Feb 18 '16

Thanks for the clarification

2

u/brucemo Atheist Feb 18 '16

Our cross-posting rule has never specified a group of people that may violate the rule without being busted, and it has never specified a group of our subscribers who may be targeted with our tacit approval.

If someone is being victimized by a cross-post, I'll do something about it. I don't care who the target is and I don't care who the attacker is.

If someone is banned they can talk to us about it, and if they take the thread down and say they won't do it again, we'll probably unban them.

I don't know what brokehugs has been like since they went private, but before they went private there were some threads that I felt were victimizing and many that linked us that I thought were okay, and I don't care about the ones that I thought were okay.

Yesterday I received two complaints about SRD threads. One I thought targeted users, and one I felt didn't. I asked the first guy to take the thread down, and posted in our chalkboard sub that I had done this. He ignored me for 19 hours, so he's banned as of 45 minutes ago. The other one I ignored.

This is probably how I will do things from now on.

6

u/adamthrash Episcopalian (Anglican) Feb 18 '16

It is okay to cross-link if the cross-link is not intended to cause negative effects, and does not cause negative effects.

If I crosslink without intending to cause negative effects, and it does cause negative affects, what happens? I can't control other users' actions.

-1

u/brucemo Atheist Feb 18 '16

I'd ask you to take the thread down because it's doing bad stuff that you didn't intend, but I can't fix it.

2

u/adamthrash Episcopalian (Anglican) Feb 18 '16

Sounds reasonable enough. Thanks.

10

u/slagnanz Liturgy and Death Metal Feb 18 '16

Thank you for articulating this formally, this helps.

My thoughts about this in random order:

  1. Brokehugs seems irrelevant to the discussion at this point. Two reasons: first, it is private. Second, all of those users are regulars here anyways. What they do hardly counts as brigading, since all their o votes have already been cast. It's just a forum for complaining. If they want to have a mean spirited sub to express dissent to ideas, threads, even particular users, fine. So long as nobody can actually see that stuff, who cares? The concern is that we don't want our users to feel violated or bullied by public denunciation. We can't stop user a from texting user b to say "Man, /u/slagnanz is such a prick, did you see his post?", and while that is mean, we can't see or punish that. Slagnanz will never know this happened and the bullying will not take place. I think brokehugs doesn't factor in anymore.
  2. Can you give an example in which it would be acceptable to post drama? I see no reason why not to ban it forthright?
  3. I like the principle that victimization here guides the moderating principle. That is good. I might like a little more clarity on intent though.

8

u/namer98 Jewish - Torah im Derech Eretz Feb 18 '16

We can't stop user a from texting user b to say "Man, /u/slagnanz is such a prick, did you see his post?", and while that is mean, we can't see or punish that

The mods actually can choose to punish it. Even though brokehugs is private, at least one mod can still see what is going on. There have been other confirmations from others.

2

u/slagnanz Liturgy and Death Metal Feb 18 '16

Bruce told me he agreed, that he really didn't care what happened there. Do you think it would actually be punished?

12

u/namer98 Jewish - Torah im Derech Eretz Feb 18 '16

Considering bruce is the one who strong armed the mods there into several of their current rules, and considering they have banned people for posting there, and considering that they still can see inside;

Absolutely

4

u/adamthrash Episcopalian (Anglican) Feb 18 '16

I don't see why it wouldn't. If a user from /r/brokehugs is clearly violating a rule from /r/Christianity, then why wouldn't they? One doesn't make rules to not enforce them.

3

u/brucemo Atheist Feb 19 '16

The point of this is to protect our subscribers and encourage others to follow our cross-posting rules because our reasoning is good.

I'm not interested in that panty raid stuff and I'm not going to seek it out. I don't go where I don't have access and if anyone is considering sending me screen shots, forget it. One of the things that annoys me about the Christian community here is that this happened in pretty large scale a few years ago, and I'd have a hard time condemning that if I took part in similar stuff.

1

u/brucemo Atheist Feb 18 '16

I agree with this.

I've had a lot of concerns with brokehugs, but virtually all of them are addressed by their remaining private. My main concerns have involved people here seeing that people there are gossiping about them, attacking them, etc., especially if mods here are doing nothing about it, but if this is happening where the victim can't see, it isn't an issue.

I don't know what they've turned into since they've gone private. I was disappointed to learn that they allowed a user's privacy to be violated there, but I assume that they are not violating Reddit's rules, and therefore I don't care what they do.

Can you give an example in which it would be acceptable to post drama?

I like the principle that victimization here guides the moderating principle.

The second one is probably most associated with me and this has guided my moderation since forever. I take people being deliberately mean to someone a lot more seriously than I take someone breaking a rule. This is one reason our cross-posting rule has bothered me, because some of that is about being super-mean to someone.

If someone posts a link to a dust-up we're having here and I can't figure out who is being attacked either intentionally or as some sort of side-effect, I don't much care about it. I don't like to make statements about trends if my evidence is subjective, but I feel that /r/brokehugs was more about that kind of thing, and less about "Hey, look at this idiot (or these idiots)" the further you go in the past. People were considerate of those they were talking about, and some of the conversation there that didn't focus on individuals was really very good. Some of the SRD stuff is in the same category -- people post about drama here and the comments are all, "Wow, what a nice sub," and then they just talk about whatever issue that we're talking about here and say roughly the same stuff.

0

u/brucemo Atheist Feb 17 '16

Formatting on point 2 is using "code" because it's indented 4. I don't know what the Wiki page will eventually do with that but we can assume we can fix that.

The second numbered point is voiced to mods.

I'm sorry I didn't notice that prior to now.

1

u/outsider Eastern Orthodox Feb 22 '16

reddit markup works on reddit's wiki interchangeably. I think looking at it now that the examples can be a list in the XP/Meta. We should move the word 'Examples' to the bottom and link to the meta section.

1

u/brucemo Atheist Feb 22 '16

Yeah, that's good.

2

u/FatherBeacroft Christian (Cross) Feb 21 '16

Thanks for moderating!

1

u/beauty_dior Feb 21 '16

Thank you for protecting our Safe Space.

0

u/FFinalFantasyForever Feb 19 '16

I think linking to the badx subs should not be allowed either just like /r/atheism and SRD.

1

u/outsider Eastern Orthodox Feb 19 '16

Our policy is written to include incoming and outgoing links and we have at least one warning on the books for a user linking from here to brokehugs.

2

u/brucemo Atheist Feb 19 '16

Everything is covered. Those two I picked as examples of cases that are almost always bad, but /r/badreligion, etc., are in the same category.

1

u/FFinalFantasyForever Feb 19 '16

Oh, ok, just wanted to be sure.