If you don’t know about submission statements, they were a rule introduced to r/conspiracy to cut down on the flood of bad faith, low effort forum sliding that became common place and the scourge of reddit after 2016. It was a requirement for only link and image posts, text posts were exempt. All that was required was 2 or more sentences. You could give background context, you could indicate potential avenues for discussion, basically anything you wanted.

So, I’m not suggesting the auto mod enforced 20 minute countdown to post removal, let me just start with that.

BUT I do think that submission statements achieved a handful of positive results at r/conspiracy that I think would help this place. I’ll list these things I think submission statements did well, and I invite any and all to discuss their (dis)agreements on the subject.

1. separates the near zero effort posts from the rest.

2. takes away one layer of plausible deniability from the shills. They can’t just post some absurdist u/magapede69 or u/theGreatOz trash at “face value”, they have to share some insights into what they think it adds to the discussion.

3. gives context to posts that may otherwise be overlooked. Sometimes a post title intrigues me, but it’s just a title, potentially not very descriptive, and I’ve never seen the site before. As mentally weak as it sounds, I will more often than not skip those posts. For some subconscious reason I’m more inclined to read psychotic ramblings when they’re posted directly as text than some sketchy (seeming, to me) blogspot link or whatever...TLDR : Moar context please