As the community steadily grows, we are constantly refining our policies, and strategy for preserving both the health and usefulness of /r/TheRedPill .

Here's a few of our latest thoughts.

Moderating lightly vs. moderating heavily.

We walk a constantly-changing tightrope between stifling debate and letting in too many trolls. Overall, our goal has always been, and continues to be, preserving the signal to noise ratio above all, and ensuring the top of the front page remains as useful to the recovering beta as possible.

As such, we tend to remove posts very aggressively, while being somewhat more conservative in banning users. We've settled on a general practice of:

  • Remove any post that doesn't clearly add value.
  • Issue a short timeout (ban for about two weeks, or some such), for well-intentioned users who clearly didn't understand the rules, and need to lurk more before posting.
  • Permaban anyone who intends to sabotage the group or hinder recovering betas from achieving happy, self-determined lives.
  • Permaban anyone arguing against TRP with postmodern discourse. Debating against TRP principles is permissible because it helps participants test and explore their ideas, but ultimately the group is here for people who want help, not for people who want to argue. If you want to argue the premises, either keep it about facts and principles, not feelings or moral, or take it to PPD.

This strategy seems to be working out pretty well. We always get the occasional butthurt rant from a banned troll, or some newbie who doesn't understand that having a post removed is not a punishment, but overall the group seems to be growing and thriving.

One new policy we are considering.

In the future, we may start removing more red- or blue-pill examples if they come from daytime tv talk shows, or reality shows. While these are not exactly fiction (which already verboten as an example source), they are heavily staged, heavily edited, sometimes scripted, and generally tend to focus on unusually broken people. If are trying to discuss which principles of human behaviour are universal, not what the freakshow does, and I think if anything is truly a thing worth talking about, we can find better examples than some weirdo on Maury Povitch.

About concern trolling and tone policing.

Those rules are here to protect the subreddit as a whole from disruption and dilution by newbies and trolls, not to protect individual people from hearing things they don't like. If someone says "Don't tell young men to do this, it's bad for them.", that would not fall under the concern trolling rule. I'm not going to weigh in on that particular debate (not while wearing a mod hat), but productive discussions ensued, and we will not be shutting them down.

Reporting problem posts.

Users are doing an awesome job of spotting problem comments and posts and tagging them for our attention. This is really helpful. Many of you are doing this already, but if why something should be removed is not immediately clear, or if it's a bit of a subjective decision, then the more you explain in that comment box, the better. This your chance to make a case for why something doesn't belong here. Every time we look at a reported post, we are making one more decision : "Am I protecting the group, or stifling debate and discussion?"... so the more you have to say, the more helpful it is.

New Mod

/u/EpicLevelCheater has introduced himself and been quite active, so I'm sure many of you are already familiar with him. But I'd like to publicly welcome him aboard, and thank him for his tireless troll-slaying. The mod load gets heavy sometimes, and sharing it more ways gives all of us more time to spend with each decision we have to make.

Reposts

Please don't report things for being reposts. The priority here, unlike the rest of reddit, is not "who gets valueless internet points for what?", but "is good information available to readers, or not?". If something is over-repeated, perhaps it should be yanked, but the fact that something is a repost is not, in and of itself, enough.

Feedback

As usual, if you have comments on the moderation process, this is the post to comment in. (Just remember that /r/theredpill is not, and never will be, a democracy.)