Comment on Rule 2 Clarifications and New Rule proposal I’ve gotten through (I believe) a
IsoKiero@sopuli.xyz 3 days ago
I worry a bit that its getting unwieldy, so feel free to suggest options to clean up the language a bit.
I would just keep it simple: “Self promotion for your product is allowed, but this is not an advertising platform. Be sensible and participate to community. Abuse will result in post removal.”
I don’t think it really helps to place any arbitary limit as it might just result on spamming low-effort comments so that your “quota” stays under the 10% rule and also posting about your fantastic FOSS project daily could be equally annoying. That 10% rule could be useful when deciding if something should be removed and obviously free projects should have more relaxed “limits”, but in general what counts as abuse can be decided by community feedback.
curbstickle@anarchist.nexus 3 days ago
That would be effectively the same as no rule at all, so I’m going to have to say that is not an option given the recent meta thread.
The issue is not repeat posts from specific posters, or even repeats - they just aren’t happening. What is happening, and caused the thread, were posts that were basically looking for beta/qa testers for their closed source app.
So “Please don’t be spammy” is not enough. What the majority asked for was strong limits or an outright ban.
I disagree that it would be the same than no rule at all, in my opinion that gives a pretty clear position on what’s allowed and what’s not without setting any strict limits so there’s some room for interpretation for community/mods to act.
Maybe rephrasing a bit helps: “This community is not an advertising platform. Self promotion is allowed only from active members of this community. Excessive promotion will result on post removals and/or ban from the community.”
What I’m afraid is that if there’s a strict rule then someone will argue that “only 9,87% of my posts are promotion, I don’t deserve a ban” even the rest of their content has little to no value for the conversation. And, since it’ll be a rule for the community, I personally think it should apply as it’s written, so it should have some kind of option to weed out smartasses trying to game the system in place.
But I’m not likely to promote anything around here, so for me it doesn’t really matter, just trowing out my thoughts about the matter.
JustEnoughDucks@slrpnk.net 3 days ago
Would spamming low effort comments to fill a quota then fall under the spam bit, not necessarily self promotion bit? It would be quite obvious and from what was written in the post, moderators have more hand-wavy freedom to decide what is spam.
I have no dog in this fight either since all of my projects are open hardware so nobody cares anyway because it would cost money to build it and test it out 😂
curbstickle@anarchist.nexus 3 days ago
Yup! Especially if they get reported for suddenly blasting out low effort comments which would put them on “mod radar” as it were.
I dunno, plenty of us do stupid things with our money to try out something we want….
Possibly, but there’s equally gray area that what counts as low effort spamming and what actually contributes to the conversation. For example I’ve replied to comments “I’m using X to do Y” with “I’m using X too and I’m happy with it” to give an opinion to possible solutions. That kind of comments are easy enough to throw out and, if the “10% rule” is interpreted strictly, it isn’t really obvious if they should be considered as “improving your ratio” or as a part of actual conversation.
curbstickle@anarchist.nexus 3 days ago
None of the posts that people have been complaining about were repeat posts.
It absolutely would be no different than no rule at all.
Now define active - how I did it was set a participation goal. How are you defining it here to make it a fair rule to be applied?
If someone is commenting and posting regularly enough to get a percentage like that, no one would even need to do the math to see participation for it to be an approvable post. And there is no ban here, just post removal.
Its about the people (or maybe bots) posting about a product in 9 posts, and 9 out of 10 comments, not the person who has a promo post in 11 out of 100 posts.
Spammy comments get yoinked or (if made elsewhere) noted as not actually participating with the self promo post removal.