[This ended up far longer than originally envisioned.]

It has come to my attention that our Sidebar rules and our Rules Page have drifted somewhat from each other, and I'd like to take this "opportunity" to gather a bit of feedback on specific language.

The majority of the content is thankfully the same, but not in order, at all. As different combinations, recombinations, and rewrites were done for readability. Or with the intent on trying a lighter/heavier touch for moderating content over the years.

Which has lead to enough confusion, blow ups, comment spats and grumpy PMs to warrant an apology from me personally for not correcting that sooner. As different members of the mod team (including myself) made different tweaks to one or the other during active periods, with varying levels of consensus.

Forgive me if I maintain a somewhat flippant and often overtly personal tone throughout this post, it's going to be far too long and maintaining PR-level writing quality is frankly exhausting. Plus we need some "real talk" sometimes you know?

If you just want to skip over and leave rules and community feedback, I wouldn't blame you.

The Apology

You idiot, how could this happen?

For those of you who have been on Reddit for some time, it may not surprise you that communities had no "functional" Rules pages until around late 2016. It was just another full length wiki page that was more often than not just a copy paste of the sidebar. So it just sort of, did.

How can you guys not always have consensus? You are a mod team after all!

It turns out that the same challenges of trying to determine the fit of incredibly subjective material has extended to the mod team to varying degrees over the years. With various departures of members, and debates over acceptable content, philosophical aspects of what might be considered a glitch, or just plain disagreements. Some of these also stemmed from my own disconnection from major life events or from feeling that we were stuck at some impasse at one point or another.

At various times different mods have stepped the fuck up, to take the reins and I've appreciated that, regardless of exact methodology or personal beliefs. I feel that they usually took, what they felt, were the best approaches available to them. And we are only human after all. (Probably...)

The Feedback

Is there best way to provide feedback?

Not really, but there are better ways!

For starters- indicating within your comment if it applies to the main rules [list] or the [side]bar, tagged respectively. But I'm not a cop so I won't force you to follow a format in order to tell us how you feel. But do try to make it clear which version you are addressing, if any.

What sort of things are you hoping to hear?

Ideally that one or the other versions is obviously perfect, everyone agrees, we copy one over and go to bed smiling.

As that is unlikely to happen I'd like to hear your thoughts, if you have them:

• Whether or not something should be a rule at all - Your inner Revolutionaries will be disappointed, as the majority of things that are discouraged/banned will be retained in order to separate us slightly from various "creepypasta" subs. But I'm open to the criticism/thoughts, and just maybe there's additional annoying things that simply don't fit here anymore and should be Ruled Out.

• Readability - Is it easier to understand, as a new user, to have items fully separated like the [list]? Or grouped like the [side]bar? Or something total different?

• A minimum standard for punctuation/formatting on posts - there was a time where we would actively remove posts that didn't meet some minimum standard. Run on sentences with no punctuation, capitalization, or basic spelling and grammar submitted as one wall of text were the biggest casualties.

Some praised the effort. As it was honestly a plague at that time, and I felt that if you wanted someone to read your Glitch Report, the least you could do was take a second to read it over (Others would just send me death threats over removals, different strokes.)

• Reporting procedures & options available to users?

• Is something hard to see, read or find due to app layouts?

• Better 'New Reddit' support would be pretty gre- No.

• Flair system - Both personal flairs and posts themselves.

• Any other thoughts really: Are you doing okay? How was your day?

Some paraphrased past questions & grumpy PMs from over the years that I'll pre-answer:

Why ban childhood stories?

Because they are unreliable as hell at the best of times, almost routine in how easily explained they are, cause the absolute dumbest comment spats, and consistently some of the least coherent submissions we receive. Which is really saying something when they often worse than drug stories in this regard.

Okay so Drugs...

There's plenty of other communities that delve into mind expansion via substances. with a greater knowledge depth, and inducing chemical hallucinations is sort of outside our wheelhouse.

But Dreams...

Almost literally anything can happen in your dreams, other than reading text apparently. So discussion doesn't so much go off the rails, as starts mid-air backwards falling off a cliff. There's dedicated communities that fit this better, indulge in them.

Isn't all this bullshit fiction anyway, why even bother having a rule about it?

Maybe, you can hash that out for yourself, and see what other people have to say.

But what we don't want to encourage is those that use our community for creative writing practice and their six part self-insert fan fiction. We don't exactly have an incredibly high burden of proof here given the nature of these things, but there's an ill-defined line somewhere I'd like to stay on one side of. Lets try to stay honest.

I've seen you say some *very mean things about The Secret/Law of Attraction and Manifestation! It's not a question, I just didn't like that and wanted you to know you are $#@%.

Short answer: Law of attraction submissions will be likely be added to the removal list in the near future. Because.

<rant warning>: I have. And my 'purpose' here is not to particularly convince you one way or another, more of an awareness of how we justify things here to ourselves and each other. This is of course a community whose themes, experiences, theories and discussion will frequently follow opportunistic threads towards enticing and comfortable ideas.

A lot of people have adhered to or attributed the events in their life to such over-arching themes. For a variety of reasons: self-satisfaction, sense of agency, order in an often uncaring and chaotic universe, or just as a focus for achieving goals. And in many of those cases, good for you! I'm happy things are working out. But the worrying number of people I see here using it as a religious-like validation for "why things are" is drifting well beyond the intent of the sub, as mercurial as it can be. With those who *Have getting to feel like they "deserved" it and the Having Not hoping that it will happen for them too. So to members of our community that dismiss empathy for those who suffer from the lottery of their birth on the basis of "the universe does not make mistakes", who feel satisfied by the idea that even poverty "has a reason" or that somehow the 1300 children that shit themselves to death every day, must not have chanted hard enough... You ought to take a real deep look inside yourself, and figure out where the fuck you get off.

</rant>

Which I assume will be /r/lawofattraction/ - feel free to stay there as long as you like, they are positively brimming with good vibes.

Are you expanding the mod team? Can I apply?

Maybe? Not yet though. Changes like that will involve a lot more planning as I'd like to set that up for greater success and stability than in the past. Enthusiastic people have burned out before, and lack of clarity/vision on a variety of issues had caused friction and made it worse. For that I'll own my part in it, or trying to at least.

The Future

We have an incredibly diverse and often divided community. People are here for very different, routinely even opposing motivations. I've learned from past change attempts that (in keeping with the stereotype) we can't make everyone happy. But we can try to at least maintain some thematic harmony for the community, you make this after all.

From those compelled to discover the root scientific explanation of a phenomena, to those who feel we just need to open our eyes and take in the connections.

From self proclaimed researchers of the human psyche, to those at work or school procrastinating on the throne.

From the excited seeking validation, to the terrified who just want solid ground.

And from those who want to help, to those who badly need it.

I open the floor, and invite you to speak your mind, I certainly did. ^{Too much.}

P.S.: I leave you our sidebar standard. The post that started it all. A window into a simpler time.

EDIT: I noticed automod might be doing some weird stuff lately (giving notices of actions taken due to "no content.") I think there's a bit of test code left in there and I'll fix it soon.