!salt
OP
Webmistress

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!

»I know I know we survived without rules for so long
»and I don't want to be overly prescriptive, ofc
»but I think !salt most of all has the potential to really hurt people and feelings and we should strive to set some boundaries to maintain the culture here one that doesn't make people feel alienated

Personally I’ve had a pretty good time with !salt, even when I’m reading stuff I don’t agree with.


There are a couple things I consider gauche or faux-pas that haven’t seemed to happen much here (in some cases, haven’t happened at all), and those are:

  • Directly naming people
  • Directing people to bother people’s accounts outside of Bobaboard
  • Intracommunity Boba drama (like that one thread someone made to directly complain about another user on Bobaboard)
  • Posting other people’s personal information


Personally I’m fine with having links/embeds/whatever to stuff we dislike as long as there’s the expectation for people to be decent and not brigade others over it. If it turns out people are misusing that then maybe that should be reëvaluated but I have hope for Bobaboard as a community to be better than that.

      OP
  1. @The Webmaster: “One thing to note, is that as BobaBoard becomes more public, you might have onlookers not part of the community reaching out to harass people on other socials, even if no one here would be the type of person to do that.”


    I’ve been thinking about this, and what troubles there might be in providing people a public space to complain vs. preventing bystanders from taking advantage of those complaints... It’s a very human impulse to complain about stuff you don’t like, and also a very human impulse to rubberneck at drama you’re not involved in. Complaining about people and trends is a strong force for bringing people together. (Case in point: all the gossip sites that exist on the internet, “discourse” channels on discord.) I’ve seen some really interesting and productive conversions come from shit someone brought to the table to complain about. But the problem comes when people start to bully others based on that gossip.


    One starting point I can think of is “What policies did KF use and what culture did they foster that led them to become such a horrible cesspool, and how can we try to act against that sort of culture?”


    Part of that is the immensely right wing pool that was recruited from which I think was attracted to the encouragement and culture of casual bigoted language, but many people from all over the political spectrum use that site so it’s not just the rw userbase.


    I think one thing we can do on here at least is not cultivating “receipts” or anything else that would commonly go in a callout post against someone in these threads. Preventing people from gathering mass amounts of “damning evidence” against a specific individual’s character can really reduce the potential harm of someone with an axe to grind coming across a thread about that person’s action.


    In general I think making threads about a specific person’s character should obviously be discouraged too.

    »Sorry this is so long and jumbled!
      OP