Up/Downvotes: The HackerNews community has excellent moderation practices. One of the features is that after a certain amount of karma users unlock the ability to flag/vouch for posts, and at a higher level they unlock the ability to downvote posts. They also encourage the idea that downvoting should indicate that a post does not add value to the conversation, not that you disagree with it or just don't like it.

CSS: I think it would be wise to aim for a clean theme that prioritizes readable text and doesn't lean too heavily into traditional "conspiracy theorist" imagery (all seeing eye, ufos, etc) since they can be a shibboleth that tells the average person "oh it's those crazy people, I'll should ignore and mock this". We can use traditional symbols, but we should prioritize a look and feel that emphasizes that this is a thinking and research ground, not a tabloid.

Rules: Could we have the ability to tag a thread as "Serious" or "Investigation" and within those threads have a higher bar for conversation? Threads where we discourage memes, shitposting, culture wars, or personal attacks... and instead expect users to seek information through investigation and exchanging hypotheses. There's a time and place for memes and humor in any community but there's also a time for work.

On a different note, I don't know if this should be a rule but I would love if we could find a way to encourage conspiracy theory posts to be more akin to research, and less about emotional and non-investigateable claims. The difference between "X is a hoax! Why can't sheeple understand!!?" versus "X is untrue, here is information you can inspect that contradicts the popular narrative.". There are already a number of threads here along the lines of "I believe X and if you don't you're dumb" with no more substance in the post body to provide a basis or path of investigation, we can do better.

There were some discouraging trends on the reddit sub that I would be thrilled if we could avoid on this win. Specifically:

• Posts linking to a tweet where a person made a claim but did not provide any evidence that users could investigate on their own.
• Posters claiming that "It" was happening in 2 days, 2 weeks, 2 months, etc... but not being held accountable by the community when their claims were non-events. It's okay to make mistakes, but we should aim to not make predictions just to rile other people up for internet points.
• Posts that wage culture wars without having anything to do with a "conspiracy"

I would love it if we could have a flair for posts that provided a lot of primary source material for other users to investigate themselves. A "Highly Documented" or "Well Sourced" sort of tag. In a similar idea, if a post is making a prediction or a claim it might be helpful to tag those accordingly. Perhaps as a community we could periodically look at all of the "Prediction" threads from the previous month, or few months, in a roundtable megathread and discuss what was correctly predicted and what was incorrect. It would be fantastic if users who made a significant detailed predictions could be identified, and if we could reflect on claims that were all bark and no bite.