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@x0x7 I strongly advice against trying to mold the community aggressively by hellbanning users. First of all it does nothing to make the message clear. Users aren't warned beforehand and neither are they notified of the reason for their ban, instead they just discover that their posts are invisible to other users after the fact which is scummy, indirect behaviour. Hellbans were meant to trap spambots, not humans.
Secondly, the community is small. It doesn't matter how long or short the list of rules is, what matters is how aggressively it's applied. Bans happen in big communities out of necessity. In small ones they should really be a last resort. It's very off-putting to get censored and is guaranteed to turn users away, users you need now even if you want to take the website in another direction long-term.
Moreover, this is currently the only website that houses the Saidit community. By censoring and hellbanning users, you are splitting that community apart. I know you had other intentions with this website but I feel like there should be a sense of duty to house the existing community that currently isn't concentrated anywhere else. Not because that was planned but simply because of how things are panning out. We're fugitives in a web that's dominated by big tech. We should band together. Right now this is a friend group of sorts. Why is a private group on Whatsapp freer than this website? Also, there are parties now. Why can't Goatmatrix be the Saidit user party?
Thirdly, if it's about frontpage diversity there are other ways of achieving that. Such as combining "post now" with the queue and automatically queueing posts that were submitted in a short span of time. Or by fixing a certain percentage of each sub's representation on the frontpage, so that it can't be dominated by a single one.
Please stahp.
(I posted this in chat but note that the third paragraph is an expansion that wasn't posted there.)
If we're going to have a conversation about this, I feel that there's something I need to add.
I really like the minimal guardrails that have been placed on this community. The few rules (that I'm currently aware of) are both good and acceptable. But I must admit that I may not know all of the rules as of yet, since I have no idea what the rules for gvid are, or even where to find them.
But what I like far better than minimal governance
is transparency when that minimal governance has to be utilized.
There's definitely something to be said for administrative silence when handling issues. It makes sense when there are thousands of active users, since nobody would want to have long protracted debates over every single infraction or how it was handled.
But at this time we are merely dozens of active users, not thousands.
We're not a long string of anonymous names, yet. We know each and every regular contributor to the community. So when just one of us is silenced, it's very noticeable.
Without transparency on these actions, I've found that it creates a "users vs administration" mindset that isn't going to help us at all.
It's quite likely many or most of us would agree that the action was justified, if only we knew what the reasoning was.
I agree that transparency is key, one of the things I loved about Saidit is that modlogs were public and mods were reprimanded or even removed for abusing their authority.