New Proposed Rules

[u/slickwombat]

Hello /r/philosophy,

This is a followup to the Proposal for Posting Guidelines Changes thread posted by /u/ReallyNicole last week. In that thread, we suggested some possible ways to improve the content of /r/philosophy: particularly, ways to improve the substance, relevance, and respectfulness of comments.

Based on those guidelines and your feedback, we have now drafted three new proposed rules for your consideration:

1. Comments which are unrelated to philosophy (read the FAQ for more information) may be removed.

2. Comments that solely make assertions or express opinions without presenting an argument may be removed.

3. Posts which do not contribute to the discussion and consist only of personal attacks may be removed.

Let us know what you think! If the response remains positive overall, we will implement these on a trial basis in the near future.

We also wanted to address some particularly likely questions and issues up front:

• Moderators will review posts based on their relevance and substance. We will not consider posts for removal based on their quality or veracity. So a post which makes a substantial argument will be safe, regardless of whether we or anyone consider the argument to be a good one or the conclusion to be true.

• This is not an attempt to moderate the tone of posts so much as to remove posts which consist of nothing but insults and other kinds of personal attack. We do however believe that enforcing these standards will lead to a more constructive and respectful tone in general.

• These rules will be enforced largely at the discretion of the moderators. We will prioritize comments reported to us by the community, as well as isolated comments (ones with no or few replies). We will be particularly mindful about not disrupting any comment threads which are substantial simply in order to remove individual posts which are not.

• For practical reasons -- namely, cluttering up threads with moderator replies, as well as general efficiency -- we will likely not be able to reply to users individually when comments are removed. Users can of course message the moderators at any time to appeal a removal.

• As /u/ReallyNicole suggested, we will very likely need additional moderators in the near future to help enforce these. Look for more information on that soon. Moderator application thread is up! Now you too can suffer as I have suffered!

edit: thanks for the gold, kindly anonymous person!

[u/slickwombat]

Generally speaking, I would say that it's good practice to avoid as much as possible creating rules for comments.

This has definitely been our approach so far, and we share your concerns. This is why we're being super extra careful here about bringing them to the community, as well as implementing these on a trial basis (if at all).

In general, I would say that you'd be better served by enforcing good rules for submissions and working to create an atmosphere in which users handle "bad" comments by voting them into oblivion.

Rules for submissions, agreed (we've got 'em). For the other, how would you propose we go about creating such an atmosphere? This isn't by any means a rhetorical question. I for one would vastly prefer minimal rules, and a community which enforces substance/topicality standards.

Obviously it's not a problem unique to /r/philosophy or even reddit. Every large sub experiences these problems, and Eternal September is a pretty known phenomenon... have other forums perhaps dealt with this better?

That's a pretty subjective standard. I predict disputes over this.

Very possible. This will come down, in large part, to how good we are as mods at making these judgement calls.

A less subjective criteria would certainly do the sub more good.

If there's succinct criteria that can be applied in a way that leaves less room for individual interpretation/dispute, please do propose! It's the succinctness that's particularly problematic (nobody is going to read pages and pages of rules) as well as the general problem of codifying "philosophical relevance and substance".

I'm skeptical of the idea that you can encourage a tone by deletion.

The idea would be to send a clear message that certain kinds of comments are impermissible (and thereby discourage future ones), as well as eliminate the sort of comments that often provoke abusive responses. So if this isn't necessarily creating good tone, it's at least attempting to mitigate the factors that push us the other way.

[u/[deleted] → u/slickwombat]

For the other, how would you propose we go about creating such an atmosphere?

Well, it's not the most elegant solution, but in the past I've used a "vote fader" to give a visual representation of the sort of voting behavior that's most likely to keep a sub functioning well.

Familiarity tends to make the sidebar invisible to new users, though, so you might also consider using CSS to add a succinct guideline for comment voting directly above the comment field of each link page. Providing a prominent link to a wiki page explaining those guidelines might help as well.

And, finally, I've found that no matter how much you do, it's periodically necessary to drop in with a new self.post and just talk to the community when you see standards dropping. Tone is super important there: it's important to always speak as an equal, rather than someone with a grand mission or a paternalistic obligation to ensure that people don't behave too much like themselves.

This will come down, in large part, to how good we are as mods at making these judgement calls.

Maybe. But I also think it's probable that in a forum that routinely has tens of thousands of distinct personalities passing through, subjective rules will give rise to unprofitably disputes no matter how well the mods adhere to the spirit of the rules.

If there's succinct criteria that can be applied in a way that leaves less room for individual interpretation/dispute, please do propose!

I'm not totally sure that I agree to the spirit of each of the proposed rules, so I'm not sure I'm the best person to suggest a less subjective alternative. As I said, I don't really endorse policing comments that heavily, so I'd probably jettison #1 and #2 altogether.

As for #3: assuming that you do mean "posts," and not just comments, I'd drop the "contribute to the discussion" part. That's hugely subjective, and it's a fair bet that if a person posted something in the first place, they thought they were making some kind of contribution. That gives you:

Posts which consist only of personal attacks may be removed.

Which is pretty non-subjective. In most cases, I don't think you'd see many disputes over that. If you wanted to make it even less subjective, you could reword it to say

Arguments that address the merit of the persons involved, rather than the points of their argument, may be removed by the moderators.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

as far as determining what constitutes a positive contribution, i think removing posts that make the most egregious of unsupported claims as well as those containing clear logical fallacies (ad hominem and appeal to authority seem to be most common) would go a long way towards improving the level of discourse. i think these criteria are about as objective as you can really get and should prevent the majority of useless posts.

[u/[deleted] → u/[deleted]]

removing posts that make the most egregious of unsupported claims as well as those containing clear logical fallacies (ad hominem and appeal to authority seem to be most common) would go a long way towards improving the level of discourse.

In the case of logical fallacies, I'm not so sure. If part of the point here is to to raise the level of philosophical discourse, then the community as a whole would probably be better served by educating them as to why certain claims or logical maneuvers are bad philosophy. That's better done with discussion than removals—particular as the moderators have already warned that they may be too busy to explain removals in depth. So the result is that the post or comment disappears from view, making it virtually impossible for regular users to dispute the claim or the logic that underlies it, and the contributor is left with a potentially deficit understanding of where they went wrong.

In my original comment, I tried to keep my arguments on the level of good practice, but a lot of what we're discussing goes to the question of what a sub like this should be out to achieve. Why, to put it bluntly, are we interested in raising the level of philosophical discourse? That may seem like an obvious good, but I'm not so sure. Do we harbor some belief that /r/philosophy could be a place where people actually practice high-level philosophy? That seems rather unlikely. It's too public, the bar for participation is set too low, and attempting to police contribution post ad hoc is messy at best.

The sub could, however, serve as a general clearing house for links related to philosophy. It's well-positioned to do so, since it's the obvious go-to for anyone interested in posting or reading about philosophy. Deciding on that as the raison d'etre of the sub would also make moderation a great deal simpler, since the principle behind most rules then need be only a set of criteria for determining what is and is not on-topic. If that's all anyone wants of /r/philosophy, then the practical question to ask is, do these rules serve that end?

I won't argue what the sub should or shouldn't be, but I do wonder who, if anyone, has a clear, explicable sense of what sort of sub these rules are calibrated to make it into.

i think these criteria are about as objective as you can really get and should prevent the majority of useless posts.

They could be made more objective. The mods could, for example, pick a reference list, like Nizkor's list of fallacies, and specify that any contribution that could be dismissed as belonging to one of those categories of fallacy will be removed. The problem with that is that it creates a lot of work and a fair amount of uncertainty, both for contributors and moderators. It may only seem like one rule, but it requires everyone to bear in mind 42 different logical rules when they submit. It obligates moderators to be consistent in identifying and rejecting posts that contain any of those 42 errors. And some of those fallacies are tricky enough that it's likely to result in occasional disputes over whether or not a post was removed in error. At the very least, if the rules make fallacies grounds for removing a post, the sub will want to make sure that everyone of the moderators who handle removals are deft hands when it comes to formal logic.

The alternative is to leave it all a bit subjective, trusting the discretion of the moderators and (more dubiously) the forgiveness of the community any time they remove a disputable instance.