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!

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The !salt Rules Discussion Thread

Hello Boobies, Webmaster here (yes, my "can post as myself" kingdom is expanding).

More inside!

patiently awaiting the meta-salt about !salt

IMPORTANT: as you discuss in this thread try to maintain a constructive attitude. You can try using a Situation/Behavior/Impact framework ("when the specific behavior X happens, it makes me feel Y") to describe a situation and its impact on you without passing judgements.

Thank you all for your contributions. Please keep the thoughts coming. I'll give it some time and start compiling a draft of rules. If any of you wants to be in charge of this (I have way too much on my plate), please do reach out in person (or through feedback form).

Oh right! If you don't want to say anything publicly always feel free to use that feedback form up there. It's there so anyone can have a voice whenever they want in full safety :)

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.

how does the overlap between 'directly naming people' work with links/embeds? i ask because i'm of a similar mindset, but seeing both listed out like that got me unsure

I guess if you’re complaining about a general trend, I don’t mind seeing a tweet as an example for it. But if you’re complaining about a person, I don’t really feel as good seeing their name embedded in the thread OP.
Also thinking about it I guess for me it depends on scale of the person’s influence, like the difference between complaining about Die Antwoord vs complaining about the guy at your local bar’s open mic night
1. yeah i think this works! there's still a bit of leeway in interpretation, but like you said, i trust that we'll all figure out where the line is
The standard I try to hold myself to for “I want to use the exact phrasing because [it bothered me that much/I couldn’t make this up/I don’t want to change it in summary when I’m already upset]” is anonymized screenshots (do we have alt text yet? would straight blockquote be better half the time…?)
which still has some deanon risk (eg, exact wording is searchable for public accounts on Twitter), but indicates I don’t want to individualize the person(s) involved; and I tend to appreciate other people doing similarly (because I search phrasing to block so I don’t have to bother OP either)

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.

Ohh, I also agree with keeping !salt for logged in users only. That will push back the drama timeline.

I think having links and embeds work fine as long as it’s a general discussion and not targeted at one person.

Another possibility is to disable links and embeds and only allow edited screenshots. Someone brought up that people will take screen shots and look up the words to find the content, but those are rare and dedicated-to-the-hate kinda people. I don’t think there are many like that here.

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

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.
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.

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
OP
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.
1. 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
  1. Are done*
    1. https://youtu.be/Ui-ArJRqEvU
2. 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.
  1. 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."
    1. 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.
1. OP
  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).
  1. 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?
    1. 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
      1. OP
        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?
  2. 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
    1. 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
    2. 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.)
      1. ED?
        Encyclopedia Dramatica
        Ooooh. Wow. I haven't thought of that place in YEARS
      2. 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

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

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.
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.

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?

🤔 if the fanwork is part of larger issue (i.e. plagiarism, actually harassing a person via fanworks) i can see no problem with talking about it. I think in the op's case it was less about the fic and more about the authors actions.

But that kind of brings to question, would a list of "badfic i enjoyed" be okay on boba? Would that be treated differently than a thread of cult classics that were so bad that people enjoyed?

OP
I think that might be very dependent on what the original intent of the fic was (and what the reaction of the author at having people calling it a bad fic also was, in case it's already acknowledged as such). I mean, some fics are known for being bad, and written to be so.
Talking about My Immortal as badfic isn't out of line. Talking about The Room as a B-Movie (or any other mainstream work as such) isn't out of line.
1. So the idea is that, unless a fic is self labeled as bad/troll fic maybe err on not calling it that?
  1. OP
    I think this is definitely one of those cases where there's a difference between a "NEVER DO THIS rule" vs a "please think about what you're doing and try to be nice guideline". !salt will ruffle some feathers sometimes, and we as a community can signal when something went too far without having
    to point to a specific rule. "Not everything should be written in stone" is what I'm saying. There's stuff we can agree should not be done because it really sets the bad tone, and there's stuff we might be personally uncomfortable with we can grin and bear most of the time.
    I welcome people opinions on this, for real, because it's easy for me to overindex on what I like/don't like in public discussion. Generally, I want to try and model good behavior more than I want to forbid bad behavior, if that makes sense.
    1. Makes sense, be more celebrate what you like than berate the shit you dislike

The chilling effect of hater threads on posting fanwork for fear you might be heavily criticized next is definitely something that should be avoided. But at the same time I wonder... I’ve seen a lot of threads here and there about people feeling bad when they post stuff that gets ignored.

If there’s kind of an attitude of “People here feel free to actually give criticism when they feel like it” then maybe silence won’t be interpreted as hated as much... Probably the balance between those things isn’t worth it though

Background context: I loved sporking stuff back in the day and if someone sporked my fic or left hater comments about specifically the writing quality/structure/etc of the fic I’d take it well, but I recognize my experiences are not a monolith and people have very different attitudes to criticism.
As the environment of fandom changes to become more hostile overall, it makes sense that people feel more sensitive to criticism...
1. OP
  Thanks for the context! I think that the environment we're in makes a lot of difference. It's important, in my opinion, to acknowledge that we live in times where bad-faith criticism and harassment are the status quo, and that this space is also born as a direct escape from that.
  It's true that criticism is important, and there definitely has to be space for that. I think, however, if we want that criticism we should make explicit boundaries on how it should be given. There's a difference between tearing down and giving an opinion.
  1. Yeah for sure although it is highly subjective for the person receiving the criticism. I worry a lot about creating an unbalanced space, because in my experience of places that encourage “good vibes only!” it can lead to the absence being felt more keenly and the increase of backhandedness
    1. +1
2. I think sporking is a tradition best left in the past, but I think it would be a pity if we couldn't be salty over popular fics by name.
  1. Question! What would be considered "popular" like... "does it have a wiki article?" A la HPMoR (in which case a douche could make one for the fic which uh... 😬) kudos/bookmarks/comments isn't a good marker either
  2. OP
    One thing to consider: there's going to be a time when people will be able to make their own spaces on BobaBoard, and when the website will be bigger, and at that point the impact of someone making a board where that is ok will be much different, and our guidelines might need to be rediscussed.
    In general, as the website is small, I believe the impact of single threads and boards on the community's culture is much larger. Counter-intuitevely, maybe, this brings me to think it's better to be more cautious now and widen up our rules later.
    Eventually if one board among 1000s is a toxic cesspool (within limits) that has a much different impact than if one among 30 had that feeling, especially since right now they're all under a central (though very lax) administration.
OP
Can you elaborate a bit more?
1. So it seems a lot of the time that people are interpreting their posts getting ignored as [Everyone hated that] and IMO this is in part because of “If you don’t have anything nice to say, dont say anything” being reversed to “If you don’t say anything, you don’t have anything nice to say”
  But if it’s a culture where if people have something not-nice to say, they say it, by that logic the absence of a mean comment can also be implying that nobody has anything bad to say either.
  Although of course maybe its worse for nobody to have anything to say at all, good or bad...
  1. OP
    I think that is more true as a general consideration than as a !salt rule specifically. From what I've witnessed on BB it seems to me (who, I acknowledge, can have a skewed view) that people have usually felt free to disagree when needed.
  2. the overall attitude i've been approaching bobaboard with is: instead of a 'if you don't have anything nice to say...' philosophy, a 'if you can't say it nicely...' one, and i think that approach would probably work as one of the site's 'official guidelines'
    1. TBH I've seen a lot of my squicks on boba but its simple enough for me to mute / hide it so I don't have to engage in content that I'm not comfy with. Same if convos get too deep for me I can just nope and mute
      1. I’m looking forward to word/subthread/comment muting because often the stuff I can’t stand appears in the comments section only and it’s like stepping directly on a landmine
    2. OP
      This rings true with what I want the culture to be, and I agree it would be generally a good guideline to make explicit.
    3. "people have opinions; conflict is inevitable sooner or later; fight fair."
      
      I appreciate when I can find/make spaces where I don't have to bend over backwards to think about every possible interpretation of what I've said and where some healthy conflict is expected - I think it's harder the more open the space gets but I think that's also a norm that can be set early to a certain extent.

i do wonder whether live-blogging badfic without identifying features might still be okay? that thread was doing pretty well avoiding specifics (aside from the fact that there was a link)

part of me really likes that idea, but i wonder if vagueness would be enough to keep people from feeling singled out, plus the fact that if you can't link the fic or quote excerpts from it, after a while all badfic liveblogs would start sounding the same
1. paradoxically that might discourage them 😂
Call me a killjoy, but I feel like live-blogging badfic or bringing back sporking isn’t a good look? It just smells too much like old fandom’s elitist culture, and risks isolating folks who might worry their work could be next on the chopping block
1. Even without a link or name or even fandom of the fic, I know I personally would be aghast if someone live-blogged their reading of my fiction under the guise of it being bad. And I would certainly think twice about a) sharing fic here and b) sharing fic at all.
  1. I think there’s just a huge difference between making fun of mainstream media where lots of money went into it and different people worked on said thing, and poking fun at a labor of love one person worked on for free.
    1. Agreed with this. I think I have thick enough skin, especially in current social media times where every day I see some version of "people that like (description of thing I enjoy) should die" with thousands of likes. But if I saw my work posted here it'd hit different. Like... et tu, Boba?
      Lately even on the side of mainstream media I think twice about what I'm about to say, and how I say it. If there's nothing to gain from my comment I prefer to skip it. In social media you never know who your comment is going to reach 🤷
2. I completely agree. I already lived through old fandom elitist culture of blogs that curated "badfic" to make fun of in the guise of "critique", I don't care to live through it again. Its just cringe culture under a different name.

I did not know this was a thing and I have some feelings about it...

I don’t mind there being a post like this, however I do feel that linking the fic was a bit crass. Even more so when someone began liveblogging it. I feel like the liveblog could have been kept in !liveblogging told lessen the impact of “mediocrity” (is that the right word?)

I don’t mind hate reading fic, novels, and all types of stories but people do have to be aware of how they are projecting themselves when speaking about it.

I think that it’s fare to link to posts via discord. That way it puts more liability on the poster than just boba. Like, if you really want to talk trash and link something, you will also be exposed in doing so. It’s the users risk. But that’s just me.

Hm now I wonder what would happen if someone started liveblogging a fanfic in !liveblogging only to realize they absolutely hated it X number of chapters in. Would it have the same impact there as having a fic liveblogged here?
I think posting something in !salt definitely signals a certain intent coming in that !liveblogging does not, but if the end result is the same sort of posts... Well hopefully this hypothetical won't come to pass.
1. The wonder of literature is that something that won’t work for one person will work for another. If the live blog complains about dubcon, murder, odd pairings, or something ridiculous, it could be an advertisement for someone who likes that sort of thing.
  1. Liveblogs are also honest reviews on fiction. As long as it’s not completely bashing the author/creator, I think a little disappointment is fine.
2. i mean, if i’m coming into something with the expectation that it sucks and i’m trying to tell people how it sucks, i’m much more likely to highlight the worst bits/take a gleeful tone about its suckiness etc
  Whereas for if im liveblogging something that goes bad, i’m much more likely to take a...neutral framing? of my critiques if that makes any sense
  1. Similarly, I have absolutely gone ‘DNF bc i don’t like [thing]’ on liveblogs but I haven’t ever seen someone do that when like, hate reading badfic. You just keep going & keep trashing the thing, even well after the point where you’ve proven the fic isnt to your taste
  2. I think I’m the opposite, which is wild, anon—I get vindictive/uncharitable/etc. as part of the mood whiplash if I’m not expecting to hate something and then it goes south; once I’ve articulated it that way my “Intro: I hate this…” tone is the more neutral one because I know what I’m saying already

”I hate how this made me feel and I want to break down why, because [someone put so much effort into it/it’s well-liked/it came recommended] so I feel delusional for feeling bad” is the kind of mental state I actively like being able to find outside input on; ‘not the place, anon’ being the

ultimate verdict is fine. But I can see myself accidentally running afoul of a hard no-identifiable-information rule in future if the train of thought in my head is “all my friends have the same grudges I do, I want a kind of outsider reality check/perspective I can’t get—oh!” and so wanted to say.

Having this established for fics also makes me wonder about equivalent original fiction—is “I’m going to read this SCP plotline I don’t like because I want to articulate why” like ‘a random fic’ or like ‘a random book’?

And what about the line between ‘a random book’ and fic narrowing altogether in the first place (explicit cross-pollination, low-profile/indie authors, etc.)? Can I compare a novella I don’t like to the author’s fic or is one of these suddenly verboten to discourse on and if so where’s the line?

Is nonfiction just always on the table or is hate-reading a paper like sporking a fic? I think those are the big things that occur to me for just the question of whether “things I often want to share somewhere” cause further complication.

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

@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.

Thank you for your write up (and long and jumbled is great)! I think a rule against "making a thread about a person's specific character" or "collectively accruing receipts against someone" makes sense. I think people would likely want to have an exception for "public figures".

I don't know how much of a definition of "public figures" is warranted. Celebrities are fine (though we probably want to still be careful about what we're saying), but are fandom researchers that publish a lot of opinion pieces "public figures"?

Yeah one person’s ubiquitous is always going to be another person’s obscure. It’s going to be a grey area where the line remains hard to draw.