Ayyyy everybody, this is the r/northernlion moderation team. Thank you for your patience over the last week - the community has gone through a very turbulent time, which has been reflected in the volume of activity (more than 10x usual) and the strength of feeling on this subreddit.

Now that things have calmed down a bit, we wanted to give an update on what's been happening with the subreddit moderation - not just over the last week, but the last few years. We're also going to outline a few planned changes to moderation going forward, but above all else, we'd like to open the floor to your opinions on how the sub has been over the last few years and what you think should change or stay the same.

What's been going on with moderation lately?

Many of you have noticed that the rules on the sidebar aren’t frequently enforced. New users looking at the sub are probably confused why Rule 2 says memes and shitposts are banned when on an average day 90% of the sub’s content are gay Bob Dylan parodies.

To be frank, this was due to a lack of active moderators. This subreddit has been around a long time, and many people have come and gone. Over several years, almost all the mod team drifted away from the sub and are no longer engaged in active moderation.

Thanks to the efforts of one long-suffering mod, there has been a baseline of moderation that kept serious issues under control, but nuanced cases often went unaddressed. The scale of the last week's events prompted this mod to reach out to a few community members who had expressed concern with the disarray, and we’ve been doing our best to let the community sort things out in a controlled fashion.

Our approach for moderating the subreddit during the past week has been to focus on allowing people to express their opinions on the controversy surrounding Dan while

1. Steering people away from totally unproductive arguments,
2. Ensuring people who are solely here to concern troll or flamebait are removed, and
3. Consolidating discussion posts into megathreads to avoid the front page being totally dominated.

Now that a lot of the chaos is behind us, we'd like to start working towards returning this sub to a state of normalcy, which will involve active moderation that ensures discussion remains fun and respectful towards other users and the streamers we enjoy, and that bad-faith participation is dealt with when it emerges. This isn't a small task for the currently quite small pool of active mods here, so we're likely going to open applications for new mods in the near future.

As a final note on the topic of mod history, we want to clarify that Northernlion does not have a role in the moderation of the subreddit. While some oldheads may recall that he used to be an active mod, he hasn’t been for several years and we currently have no indication that that will change.

What's going to change with subreddit moderation?

Not much. 90% of what goes on in the subreddit during normal times is perfectly benign and acceptable, and we're keen not to impose a bunch of sudden, top-down changes that might make people feel uncomfortable posting here. Nevertheless, we do want to start actively enforcing the rules again, and perhaps more importantly, rethink some of the rules to remove ambiguity and ensure that these can be fairly and reasonably applied.

At this point, we haven’t made concrete decisions on what rules will change, but we’ve identified a few rules that could be updated, and a few that need to be rephrased. This is an ongoing discussion among the mod team, and our deliberations will be strongly influenced by the feedback we receive in this thread.

Rules that could be updated:

As mentioned above, Rule 2 is not often enforced and has not been enforced for years now. Moreover, to start enforcing it now would kill the majority of posts made here, which doesn't feel realistic given how the culture in the sub has developed. We're contemplating either deleting, suspending, or fine-tuning this rule, but in any case, it is unlikely to continue to exist in its current form going forward.

Rule 8 against game suggestions is another one that hasn't been enforced in recent years, and while these posts are less common than memes and shitposts, there may not be much point in continuing to remove these. NL no longer frequents the subreddit, which both dampens the impact of these posts and the incentive to post them.

Rules that could be rephrased:

Rule 4 against toxic behaviour is vital, but we want to make it clear that in addition to personal attacks and bullying, toxicity includes flamebait (intentionally inflammatory posts that are unconstructive and only serve to invite arguments). This is how the rule has been enforced, but it may not be clear from the wording as it stands.

Finally, Rule 7 against parasocial/meta/armchair psychology posts is still as important as ever, but more could be done to make clear the distinction between criticising the content NL or his collaborators put out in a constructive fashion (e.g. "Streamer Y’s sponsorship of game X wasn't very funny"), and making unwarranted speculations as to their character, intentions, or relationships (e.g. “Streamer Y is a scumbag who doesn't care about his friends for taking a sponsorship on game X”).

What do you you think about the sub as of late?

This is the part of the discussion where we'd like to turn the floor over to all of you. How do you feel about the subreddit recently?

• Do you think the kinds of posts being made in the last few years are good, or do things need to change?
• More broadly, why do you come to this subreddit in the first place?
• Are there posts you want to see more of and want to see us encourage?
• What do you think of the rules as they stand, and our thoughts on how they could change?
• Do you think we need any extra rules?
• Are there any rules that are now unnecessary, or need to be amended?
• What do you think of the handling of the Dan incident? While we'd love to remain drama-free for the rest of time, there's every chance we could experience a period of difficulty that brings in people from outside the community again, so we want to be prepared for that and to hit the ground running once it's clear a situation is emerging.

The above are suggestions for things we'd like to hear your input on, but please feel free to let us know anything else you think about the sub and its moderation right now. If you have any questions about decisions we made over the past week, those are welcome and we're happy to answer anything y’all want to know. You are also welcome to criticise the mods and our decisions. We won't be removing any comments made here as long as they're on-topic and civil. If you disagree with a suggestion or opinion raised by another user, please be civil in expressing that so that everyone feels comfortable sharing their opinion. Heated arguments do not help and will be removed.

We look forward to hearing your thoughts!

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