MOD POST: Progress on creating community guidelines; next steps for mods and users

Good day to everyone! Heads up: this post is going to be very long.

First off, I want to thank everyone who engaged in some hearty discussion in my mod post soliciting input for community guidelines, vision for the magazine, and submission rules. There were some different viewpoints discussed, but we all had space to express those viewpoints and some minds were even changed (namely, mine) about a few topics. I have to say that it gave me a ton of hope that we are going to make this an absolutely wonderful space to belong to on the Fediverse.

Based on that discussion, we as the mod team decided to add at least a few items to the side bar to establish community guidelines that had a lot of consensus. More community guidelines will be added later, but these topics were repeated by multiple community members enough times that it seemed important to make very clear statements as early as we could that civility is the goal of our magazine's engagement and that we will not tolerate hate speech/ trolling/disinformation/fascism parading as "politics."

If you're visiting our magazine from a mobile device, you may not see the side bar as prominently displayed as compared to using a tablet or computer/laptop. So I'm copy and pasting the guidelines here:

Preliminary @politics community guidelines until further notice

• Be civil. Don't know the difference between the various levels of debate until it descends into incivility? Refer to this graphic for details. Safe zone is everything above tone policing. Engage in too many occurrences of the lower three tiers, and you're likely to be banned.

• Post links to respected or reputable outlets of information. Need a definition of respected or reputable sources of news? Refer to this Media Bias Chart for details. Links to sources that rank in the 32.0-64.0 range on this graph will be permitted. Links to sources that rank lower will be removed.

• No neo-Nazi, fascist, or white supremacy sympathizers or content. We want to encourage community engagement from a variety of positions on the political spectrum. Nazism, fascism, and white supremacy are not political positions; they are postures of authoritarianism, which is inherently anti-democratic, and are methods of exerting control through bigotry and hate. No hate speech will be tolerated.

• Posts must be links to informative or educational content. Memes or links to screen shots/image captures will be removed. Submissions must link to either a news article, opinion/analysis writing, video, or other informative content that relates to politics, policy making, and politicians at all levels of governance both domestic and international. To reiterate: the source of this content must be from respected/reputable outlets.

Submission rules will be established within a week or two.

Thank you for being part of our magazine and helping to create a great community! Please start actively using the report button, but please allow your mod team a few hours to respond to reports.

-The @politics Mod Team

Additionally, all the mod team is up to snuff on how to use kbin's current moderator tools and we have caught up on the reports that have been made in the past 3-4 weeks. We have banned the worst contributors to this magazine already. Please make use of the report button whenever you feel the need for submission and comments! Just be aware that none of the mod team are making this work our full-time jobs, and we also are very involved contributors to other magazines. Please give us a few hours to address any reports that are filed.

What's next for @politics?

Next steps for us as the moderators:

• Sort through all the comments left in that first mod post and start unpacking some of the requests for community guidelines that didn't have clear consensus or were complex and need more qualifications/context. We need time to figure out if everything asked for can even be achieved through moderation in the first place, and then start ascribing consequences and actions that we are capable of following through with.

• Establish submission rules to the content shared here based on that first mod post. It is not our goal to get bogged down as moderators in the bureaucracy of a too-finely set of created submission rules, so please be aware that these rules will be meant to prevent @politics from becoming a cesspool; it's unlikely that these rules will be so stringent that we will start removing submissions for not using a colon in the right place in the title.

• Roll out badges (similar to submission flair from reddit) so that posters can indicate the characteristics of their post and add transparency to the content being shared. As of right now, the functionality of badges is limited, but I trust that this will become more useful in future kbin core updates. On Lemmy, it is possible to filter out posts based on badges, so our goal is to have this established as a culture here in kbin so we're ready for the day that a filter-by-badge feature is ready for use. Early stages on this, but here are the badges so far. Content: Election coverage, SCOTUS, International, Federal Government, State Government, Local Government. Media: Article, Video, YouTube. Slant: News, Opinion/Editorial, Discussion. When you create a thread, there is a text field for you to indicate one (or more? I'm unsure) of these badges.

• Roll out Discussion threads. The crowd was mixed on whether there should be special threads for users to discuss politics without sharing content alongside. I'm picturing a couple of options for this type of thread: 1. Posting philosophical or meta questions about politics to inspire lively and civil debate. 2. Sharing content that isn't breaking news but still educational/informative about politics. I'm thinking here posting an episode of a podcast that focuses on the history of political movements, or a video essayist on YouTube that traces the philosophical underpinnings of modern day politics.

What's next for the users of @politics?

We still need your help shaping the community here. Please add in your two cents about anything you've read above. What's currently on the screen and in the side bar is not set in stone. Keep in mind we're still compiling from the last big discussion, so just because you don't see your specific suggestion highlighted yet doesn't mean it's been ignored.

We now have to count on you heavily to use the report button. Again, the moderation is not likely to be instantaneous, but we won't let abusive commenters and awful content go unabated forever.

Also, we need to ask you to please start testing the badges feature. For now, you have to type in the badges (so I guess stay consistent with how they're labeled above), but I imagine that this would be a drop down menu in the future. Who knows! But give it a shot and let's see if it's working yet.

Next, we still need clarity from you about some questions.

• Do you want this magazine to only be U.S. politics, or is it okay for politics from other countries to be posted here? On that note, should it go without saying that all content must be in English?

• Do you want a Discussion-style thread in this magazine based on the description above? Would you want this style of thread if the description was tweaked?

• What should the consequences be for violating community guidelines? What should the consequences be for violating the submission rules?

• Would anyone like to volunteer to help with QoL issues in this magazine such as rebooting our magazine image? With CSS or JS design?

Thanks for reading this far, and I look forward to another terrific conversation here.