The difficulty here is: who is going to decide what’s political and what is not? Think of that argument that recently erupted between Neo and Vacrunch.
Rather than suppress and censor (moves that have cost the forum participants in the past, like Jabba), I would suggest moving any posts of marginal relevance to Safe to a meta thread. Clear definitions of marginal relevance can help prevent anger over recategorization.
I think the following types of posts should be moved to meta—posts that
Have no direct implications for Safe (e.g. wouldn’t change development or usage)
Introduce no knowledge relevant to the DLT/crypto ecosystem (e.g. provides an understanding of how project “x” handles issue “y”)
Speak only to the sociopolitical and/or economic policies of a particular nation past or present (e.g. personal opinions on country “x” or fiscal policy “y”, blanket statements about capitalism, socialism or communism, etc.)
In addition, I think all posts that threaten any form of bodily harm should be immediately deleted. I wouldn’t necessarily ban the poster unless they typically post threats (e.g. more than 50% of posts are threatening).
For other posts that are insulting/bigoted, community members can and should flag them for deletion. The poster is always welcome to repost their thoughts in a way that doesn’t demean anyone.
Finally, I think once the Safe Network is in more of a usable state (i.e. 3rd party devs are building dApps and users are testing/trying out those dApps), it will provide people with more Safe-relevant topics to discuss. This should help to naturally alleviate the current lack of focused discussion on the forum. Right now, I think many would find the discussion topics inaccessible (e.g. esoteric, highly technical, and theoretical). For many, it’s unclear what they can actually do with Safe right now. Integrating the UX work into the testnets and creating visual tutorials/walkthroughs could help to alleviate this.
Agreed. Perhaps if someone posts something in the wrong area, the post should be deleted (rather than recategorized). The poster can then repost in the appropriate area if they wish.
That would feel pretty cruel. It would also put pressure on the moderator making the “ultimate” decision. I still hope grown-up forum members will be able to sort their own post without needing much hand-holding. The rules and topic categories are pretty clear. People just need to follow them.
Despite what some may think, the moderators do not want More Power to Censor and Control. In reality we want to do as little as possible while just keeping the forum sensible and free from spam.
Just a question about the ‘Watch this video’ category. It is not labelled ‘off topic’, but there are a lot of posts there not directly related to Safe. I think there may be one or two other similar categories. Could the policies on these be clarified? Thank you.
Is it possible, that before moving a post, that the mod DM’s the poster and gives them x minutes to move it themselves … maybe that would save some labor and empower the user to do the right thing as opposed to the mods taking action and the user checking in and unable to find their post -and hence feeling the mods attacked them out of the blue.
I know that, but if you return and your post is gone from where you posted it and there is no message from a mod, you could easily jump to the conclusion that it was deleted.
General Politics is usually ignored by me. Some of it that affects me personally will get my attention, but usually its no better than an animal farm in my view. But when I say General Politics people sometimes say but everything can be classed as political. I mean politics related to politics (ie governmental issues)
More specific politics that affects the general area of privacy, censorship, etc may have relevance to Safe Network, but generally falls into the General Politics and Conspiracy theories (EG 5G is to control us and take away our privacy)
And the subjects that affects Safe Network. Specific laws, Bills, & actions by governing bodies which impact the Safe Network.
For me General Politics could be removed from the forum and I would be happy, people will then not feel displaced because their views on general politics would not be dog piled by others. If its not there then people would feel more included.
Politics about the general subject of privacy, free speech etc is very broad and mostly understood by people coming to the forum. Also the opinions held by different members vary by a huge amount from conspiracy to authoritarian to … Thankfully users are selective and mostly bring up things Safe related as news in the what happening topic.
And then specific articles affecting the Safe Network certainly have a place in this technical forum to be discuss when desired.
@Nigel I do not know of any forums that do not have people excluded and those who feel pushed out. As you say we need to keep both groups to a minimum without causing the forum to not be appealing to the rest.
Right and I’m sure that it’s near impossible but an improvement is an improvement. I myself have partook and visited other projects forums and the most productive simply don’t get into or have dedicated threads for politics and act more as the dev forum does for us. Sometimes I wonder if the dev forum is under utilized but making things here even one thread less far from Safe Network centric/technical subjects, should still be a step in the right direction. Fingers crossed
Just a wee observation on the thread as a whole. The goal, as per the title, is how do we include more people. But most of the ideas centre around excluding certain topics.
Perhaps we need to think first a bit more about who is not currently included, how we might talk to them, how we might listen, and help them stick around?
I think the reason is that while a goal is to be more inclusive, it is not to be something for everyone. Example would be to have gambling/casino news/views/discussions here, an extreme example but I think it shows why people are thinking that excluding divisive topics actual makes it more inclusive.
One step is to identify the purpose of the forum first and who it is targeted for.
