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.
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:
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.