The !salt Rules Discussion Thread

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.

So, here's some things that we had discussed in the past:

1. Unless someone is a reasonably-known figure, avoid discussing people by name and putting their posts/tweets on blasts. This is the one board where screenshotting (with blocked out names) rather than embedding is preferable. If you're using a tweet to illustrate a generic situation/behavior rather than discussing a specific person, use your best judgement.
2. When a post is discussing a situation that happened within the community, you have two options:
   • Let enough time pass that other community-members won't feel "vagued" about, and then discuss the behavior more generally.

Explicitly acknowledge what happened, and word your comment carefully, with the full expectation that the person might see it and react. While it might not be in the spirit of !salt, the Situation/Behavior/Impact framework above can be useful to discuss the topic in terms of the impact the discussion had on you, as opposed to associating ill intent to the person doing the behavior.

Speaking of point 2, and acknowledging things that happen within the community, part of what prompted Finally Doing This was someone reaching out to me about this thread explicitly linking to a fanfic being described as "mediocre".

The Anonymous Anon felt that, while discussing mediocre fics is time-tested tradition and something we have all done, explicitly linking to the story and putting it on blast in a public forum (even a semi-public one like Boba) creates an environment where people fear their fanfic might be the next one to be publicly lambasted. And, of course, there's always the possibility that OP themselves might with time end up stumbling upon the thread.

Because of this, I'd also like to propose a rule about not discussing specific instances of fanworks. Of course, before setting this in stone (though nothing ever is), I'd like to crowdsource better heuristic and guidelines for it: are there situation/cases where you feel a public discussion is warranted? What should the guidelines on discussing a specific work be like?

@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.

There's a lot in this thread and I don't have enough brain to go through all of it so I'm just gonna put in my two cents.

1) Following what I've witnessed in other communites both ongoing and now defunct, any and all "raid" or "lolcow" style threads should not be permitted across !salt under any circumstance. There's an etiquette to vague blogging that actually makes it the better option even if it's still fairly underhanded, since only those already in the know will take any form of interest and can discuss it amongst themselves in anonymity for all parties, but by and large anything that directly names a specific person should likely be closely watched and if there's any way it can be interpreted as a call out or call to arms or gets out of hand it should be promptly locked and harshly followed until things blow over. I'd say a good line to draw would be when a certain person or person(s) are named within an OP or within the main discussion of the thread, if the discussion veers from "this is how what this person did with this piece of media or this situation relating to a community I'm involved in made me feel" to "Laugh with me about how stupid or incompetent I believe this person is outside of these public events that everyone can easily witness" it's time to cease.

It's worth noting to me that I don't necessarily feel this extends to content created as I've seen discussed in this thread through skimming. While not everyone agrees with the sentiment, all publicity is good publicity with few exceptions. I don't think threads made specifically for mockery of something someone poured their heart and soul into are good form, but I also think it should still be allowed so long as it doesn't lead into what I previously mentioned, but based on the happenings within the thread cited, I think THAT sort of thing would be better suited to be redirected to !liveblogging by future mods.

2) I think everyone here will need to just accept that while we are a smaller community, !salt will be a lot of fun and just a general gossip thing for stuff most of us mutually experience. Once it starts growing, no OG is going to want to be in here with maybe one or two exceptions and it's going to be by nature a very volatile board with some threads going amicably and other threads being a hot spot for polarized views and bickering. Vent style spaces will always be less volatile at a small scale and hard to manage at a large scale. This will likely need to be the most heavily moderated board in the long term.

3) Some official categories that come to mind in bobo's current state would be +fanpol, +media (or some variation of), and +personal (or real life/social). Possibly another category to encapsulate general salty rambling that doesn't particularly expect deep thought or discussion as well. I'm sure as the site grows we'll have to add more based on the most common searchable tags or content warnings.