The !salt Rules Discussion Thread
Hello Boobies, Webmaster here (yes, my "can post as myself" kingdom is expanding).
As you might have heard, now that we can have sidebars (and now that our user base is growing), it's time to start discussing both which "official categories" every board should have, and also get more specific about rules and stuff.
I wanted to begin with !salt because... well, it's The Most Dangerous board we have. From great salt comes great responsibility, and so (without calling anyone out, because this is not what we're here for and also, no one knows who you are anyway), I wanted to start proposing and discussing guidelines.
More inside!
published: about 4 years ago
Ah yes, this is how I remember I haven't actually fixed the bullet points bug. I know what to do today after i'm done here.
One thing with Twitter screenshots: It's VERY easy to search the words in the screenshot and find the tweet, and thus the person who said it. Which is also the issue with cringe accounts on twitter, even with the names blocked out people WILL search out the original poster to do whatever.
I don't know how I feel about screenshots. It's def the easiest way to illustrate a salty point, but seems to foster a catty, gossipy atmosphere.
maybe summarizing the tweet in different words?
Actually yeah I search the text of screenshots all the time because people love to take stuff out of context to get outraged over
So it isn’t as foolproof as it looks
I acknowledge and agree with all your concerns, but at the same time I'm worried about making a too restrictive rule. Maybe we can find some in-between guideline? Something like "if it's a very specific thing about a very specific person, reword it, if it's a generic trend use your judgement"?
Maybe you're both right and rewording is always the best thing to do. Making rules is hard. So, as usual, feedback is welcome.
I want to chime in to say Sometimes rewording style complaints aren’t done poorly on purpose for making a tweet seem worse than it actually was too. the ship of theseus, kind of deal? It should come less into play without ppl naming names while doing it but, sometimes ppl reword to suit an agenda
Are done*
https://youtu.be/Ui-ArJRqEvU
I don’t like rewording because part of why I complain about things is a tacit “am I reading this right, is it as bad as it looks—?” check that’s largely erased if I just complain about the thing I read in my head.
I’m the anon upthread who mentioned searching out original posters to either block or check for misinterpretations; I don’t feel great about relying on someone else in a way that removes that either, but I recognize that “vent about the thing I read” without my “…they did say that, right” subtext—
—is something people can want/need, and having the non-mandatory option to summarize “the message I received” versus display “the stimulus I’m upset about” helps allow both those needs to be conceivable without 100% overlap, I think.
in regards to seeking people out to block them, while I understand that, I think there's merit to a space that is just "I need to get this off my chest, you will likely never encounter this person, seeking them out is unnecessary."
I can’t and wouldn’t want to stop other people from paraphrasing over screenshotting/highlighting specific examples/anything like that, but/and I have strong feelings on both options existing because they do different kinds of work. (I don’t think we’re actually disagreed? Unless I missed a thing?)
Like, existing as in being conceivable without either one having to be a failure mode of the other as opposed to neutral-in-a-vacuum options; if someone says “no exact phrasing here, specifically, do the other thing here in particular” I will go “ok!” and be glad they spelled it out for me.
But as far as I know that’s still up in the air so the difference/articulating “one is not just a failure of the other” (going either way, like, it’s important that I remember paraphrasing is best for other people sometimes too!) matters to me. And also apparently is a weird needle to try to thread
As someone who has probably contributed a good number of threads to salt i def feel that, screenshots with usernames blacked out is a better compromise than just summarizing if only to be succint. As far as people searching for the post - IME the people most likely to start shit for thr sake of
stirring drama probably wouldn't take the time to look it up. On thr other hand, people who use the site still would be more likely to look up the poster of bad takes so that thry can block and try to filter out bs.
I think one thing we must acknowledge is that we can't prevent All Cases of Things Being Misused, but that putting more barriers to have one thing being misused is still important. Eventually I see (though I might be wrong) people passing links to each other on Discord a higher source of potential
harassment than someone posting a screenshot on Boba that a couple of bystanders might end up digging up (and ofc there's no way from preventing that from being a thing). Boba's impact might change if it ends up wildly popular, and maybe that's when the rules might change too.
(That is to say: the internet needs to get their shit together to make people harder to harass on other websites, and while we should definitely not make it easy for people to contribute to it, there's a limited amount of action we can reasonably take to prevent the possibility).
I mean one alternative is to have salt be one of those boards that is only ever viewable when logged in and anything tagged as such automatically gets filtered into it even if posted on another public board?
I like this alternative because it neatly avoids the “bystander harassment” problem. Of course people might still sidestep it by other means especially when the site leaves invite-only, but it does prevent the kinda “I found this big callout thread, heres a link!” thing people do on Twitter
I think this is reasonable, but OTOH it might encourage people to be less careful about how they !salt. Do consider that if at some point signups are public we'll have less and less control on who is here.
Though OFC the idea of different "realms" hopefully works out well enough to make different pockets of culture feasible without any single one growing to dominate the culture of the website.
I think that paired with p explicit... maybe not straight up rules but regulations? terms of engagement? would nip the worse of it (i.e. the above req that if you're gonna vague on boba you wait a suitable time, no name dropping average users, etc) would keep the worse at bay?
About links on Discord: Although Discord is a more closed and vetted environment than Bobaboard will be in the future, I think it’s that very same sense of being closed that can lead people to feel more open and free to dump receipt links there that stay in the history forever.
Maybe having the salt board not be text-searchable, or making posts here be impermanent would help. The archivist in me is screaming but it would help to keep stuff off the permanent record
On one hand you have a good point, the idea of salt disappearing after a time would probably help and the lack of permanent means people can't pull up 6mo old bs, but on the other, the idea of disappearing threads makes my skin crawl too
I think disappearing threads could be good. I also internally scream thinking about things disappearing, but I gotta think, is there a reason to archive salt? One of the things that makes KF or ED so awful is that people can drudge through old threads/articles (along with the site culture.)
ED?
Encyclopedia Dramatica
Ooooh. Wow. I haven't thought of that place in YEARS
I see your point, but I also worry about what being unable to actually check what people have said in the past may do to future discussions...
Also, seeing people complain about something you didn’t realize it was ~allowed to be unhappy with can be very powerful and that happens to me with vent/salt fora a surprising amount.
As in, like, I was mutuals with [Requires Hate] because of social pressure for years, finally cut contact, and still felt like I was doing something wrong (in a way I wouldn’t gripe about because the “problem” was me) until I ran into people being salty about her randomly unprompted.
Or similar with behavior patterns as opposed to specific people, but those examples (“wait that’s something you can get mad about? does that mean that when, elsewhere, A did X, I wasn’t wrong to feel bad…?”) are much less striking, tbh.
On the one hand, I know I had an in-retrospect-unhealthy relationship with fandom_wank/FFA and Fanlore when I was younger—I thought if I just read enough of the failure cases I could figure out the rules and then make friends and no one would be mad, and the pattern-matching fucked with my head.
But I don’t necessarily think having that information exist for people in a community but not be accessible to someone making potentially-poor choices is going to prevent the worst-case sense of “everyone knows the rules from context and precedent” that dogged me as opposed to bury it.
"I thought if I just read enough of the failure cases I could figure out the rules and then make friends and no one would be mad, and the pattern-matching fucked with my head."
man, i did the exact same thing, without any filter for "is this thing actually harmful or just weird?" feels bad man