New Moderation Policy

[Julianek]

I will just quote my message in the childcare thread if people haven’t seen it.

@Julianek

I am a bit tired that every discussion starting on a valid personal finances topic often derails into endless drama about politics and people’s personal choice (unrelated to personal finance).

I used to think that I should let people discuss anything and everything on this forum, but the amount of drama makes it actually harder to find the relevant information in the discussion. Especially when we reach a point when people don’t participate to debate, but to put their opinion in the middle, not being prepared to change its mind, and somehow thinking that the other side will change theirs.

It’s hard enough to have accurate financial expertise on this forum, I don’t expect any of you to be an absolute expert on topics as varied as public healthcare, childcare, should-people-have-kids-or-not, taxation policies and what have you.

(If we have the extraordinary chance that one of you is actually an expert in one of those fields, great. If that’s the case, please link your arguments to scientific white-papers).

So from now on, a few guidelines, with examples of the few last heated discussions:

• I don’t care if you think people should have kids or not, or if mom or dad should automatically leave their job. What’s relevant is how much childcare costs and what the opportunity cost is.
• Taxation levels are what they are, I don’t expect any of you to have any power to change them in Switzerland, or in EU or in the world (the obvious exception would be a new votation on this exact topic in CH). Therefore I don’t want to hear how socialistic or capitalistic the world should be, or if Ayn Rand is the solution to all world’s problem. This topic always degenerate, here or on thousands of other forums on the Internet.
• On the other hand, what I’d encourage to discuss on the taxation topic is: given my current situation, and the current taxation levels in CH, what should I do to best meet my personal finance objectives?
• I don’t care about your opinion about public health policies, mask mandates, vaccination and so on. Over the last two years, public experts have changed their opinion on those topics two or three times, and once again it would be a miracle if we had a virology/immunology/publich health policy expert among us that happens to have studied this exact topic during his whole career. Seeing how much drama and irrelevant content this topic has generated on this forum over the last years, let’s not add more salt to the wound.

I am not sure yet how I will enforce those new rules. But if I see yet another thread where 5% is relevant personal finance information and the rest is endless drama where people spread their personal political agenda, I will start taking measures, including temporary and definitive bans.

EDIT, August 2022

The initiative with the [Coffee] tags mentioned below did not work out. Here are the new moderation policies:

New forum moderation policy:

1. Be civil. All conversation on this forum is expected to be civil. Rudeness, personal attacks, condescension, shaming, and provoking are just some of the multitude of examples of behaviors that are not acceptable. Any behavior, comment or post that does not meet the requirement of being civil will be removed. Repeated failure to follow this rule will result in a ban.
2. This forum is about personal finances, early retirement, financial independance and quality of life improvement (“life hacks”). Topics should drive discussion. All top level posts are expected to be about these topics, with discussion being the main goal of this forum. Posts that do not help drive discussion will be removed. If you are wondering what kind of discussion fits in the “quality of life” category, threads like this one are actively encouraged.
3. No gender or politics. This is not the place to discuss or debate anything regarding gender or politics. There is a distinction between politics and policy. Any discussion that is, turns, or becomes partisan or political will be removed. Discussion of serious legislation or proposals is allowed if the topic stays on policy, not politics. For example - “Ramifications of this new tax plan and new brackets on FIRE” is ok (mainly because it should result in actionnable advices). “Why my candidate and/or my political views are the best” is not. These topics are all off limits due to the forum as a whole not being able to discuss them in a civil way. Repeated violations will result in a ban.

[Bojack]

Sounds good to me! The only thing I would like to suggest: if someone creates a thread explicitly dedicated to one of these “banned topics”, then then discussion is contained within that thread and others can just mute/ignore it, while others can argue all night. What do you think?

[Dr.PI]

It would be indeed good to split discussions in other topics, if a discussion worth it. If not, just kill it.

[Bojack]

Politics / social policies is an igniting topic, so if one person (which often happens to be you ) speaks in this context, someone will surely reply and then it sidetracks the original discussion. It’s a PITA to select posts and figure out the name of the new thread (from the perspective of a mod). It’s better if users show self-discipline.

So in my opinion, if you want to discuss some hot topic regarding personal freedom or whatever, start a new thread, put someone’s post as a quote and discuss it there. Unless @Julianek thinks we should really restrict this forum to advice on “how to deal with how things are” instead of debating “what should the things be like”.

[ma0]

I agree on the idea, I disagree on the way you wrote it. Maybe it’s just the way you wrote it.

For example:

@Julianek

I don’t care about your opinion about public health policies

I don’t see an issue if someone want to talk endlessly about it, as long as it’s on its own thread.

Of course I don’t like how some people do that, but since it seems we are extremely liberal, I had to use the forum options to avoid that part:

(Which btw shows a bug on discourse: if the last reply is hidden, the thread will be shown as with 1 new comment in any case. But that’s not the topic here )

[Barto]

All for the new approach

Regards whether to allow political discussions under dedicated threads: don’t have a strong opinion just to point out the Coronavirus thread is by far the most viewed and replied: 62.3k and 4.3k respectively. Whether that is good traffic or not is another question

[San_Francisco]

Personally I think, if you do allow separate threads for such discussions, they shouldn‘t „pollute“ the sub-forums but be moved to a dedicated sub-forum (a „playground“ for such discussions, if you will).

[Patirou]

Don’t we have already the coffe subforum for that ?
With this should be fine

[Julianek]

@Bojack

The only thing I would like to suggest: if someone creates a thread explicitly dedicated to one of these “banned topics”, then then discussion is contained within that thread and others can just mute/ignore it, while others can argue all night. What do you think?

@San_Francisco

Personally I think, if you do allow separate threads for such discussions, they shouldn‘t „pollute“ the sub-forums but be moved to a dedicated sub-forum (a „playground“ for such discussions, if you will).

@Patirou

Don’t we have already the coffe subforum for that ?

With this should be fine

That’s a good idea, let’s try this. If you want to discuss a topic that is not directly linked to personal finance, create it in the coffee section. We should also add the tag [COFFEE] in the topic name to make it obvious that it is a general discussion topic.

@Barto

Just to point out the Coronavirus thread is by far the most viewed and replied: 62.3k and 4.3k respectively.

The Coronavirus thread is the poster-child of what I am talking about: Among the 4.3k posts, most of them are people battling about pro or con vaccines, lockdown policies and mask mandates variants. If there was ever any qualititative information in the thread, it is lost in a see of endless debates (and debate is a nice word for what I am describing).

@Patron

So, in order to apply this policy equally, then people would have to post and express things neutrally without their own bias and judgment. Some people do it quite well but not everyone does it equally well. My worry is a bit that some people can continue to express whatever they want / their biased point of view and ad hominem attacks (Schwurbler, conspiracy theorists, flat earther, Nazis, Troll etc.), but others will get banned for expression their opposing opinion. We will see.

If you encounter a message where you think the author is advancing his political agenda without any benefit for the topic being discussed (and without any link to personal finance), the correct action is to report this message to moderation. The wrong action is to advance your own political agenda by throwing fuel on the (already derailing) discussion. When someone posts bullshit, we should clean it, not put horseshit on top of it.

@Patron

Well, I regret to see that control over what can and cannot be said is increasing everywhere, and now is moving in here as well. I don’t think that’s a good development, but I take note of it.

I tried the “Let’s be very liberal and let everybody be responsible and post whatever they wish to talk about” moderation policy over the last five years. I am less and less satisfied with the results, because the signal to noise ratio on the forum is becoming weaker and weaker. Take a look at the recent childcare in Zürich topic. Out of 50 messages, maybe 5 or 6 are directly relevant to the original question. Everything else is endless debate about dad-or-mom-should-stay-at-home-wait-can-we-also-talk-about-taxes, and that does not go anywhere. If I were a newcomer in the forum I would find the amount of useful information very low, and that’s not what I want. The objective is to make relevant financial information more accessible on the forum.

@ma0

Of course I don’t like how some people do that, but since it seems we are extremely liberal, I had to use the forum options to avoid that part:

I thought that would be the solution for some time, but unfortunately very few people use it, and you don’t need many users to continue to throw fuel on the fire. The “ignore” feature is inefficient on this forum.

[nabalzbhf]

@Julianek

The “ignore” feature is inefficient on this forum.

Also doesn’t work for people who are not registered, so as you point out they might lose a lot of the benefit if things are buried in a sea of unrelated debates.

[anon21880037]

Hi everyone!

I welcome the new thinking.

The idea of the forum is to be able to find and discuss info. If this gets too chatty, it’s difficult to distill key messages and people may simply lose interest in reading long threads.

What they do on bogleheads is

1. policy about certain topics (politics, crypto and others) that will be deleted / banned
2. summary of key topic being discussed for long threads → helpful for long discussions about leverage investment / risk parity and etc
3. closing topics. After topic loses its value or diverge too much from the key topic this is closed so people can read it and others can no longer continue commenting about it

I don’t agree with 1) in terms of deleting posts but I would encourage to communicate to stop discussing politics with consequence of deleting / banning if an user keeps talking about politics

I like 2). For certain very useful topics we could ask the topic initiator or other if he/she is keen to generate an upfront summary

I like 3) when topic gets out of hand and no longer relevant

[yetanothername]

I like that. I am also tired. I think we should pursue factual information, not opinions.

I just stop reading topics once they are polluted with debates on opinions, not on facts and strategies that are pertinent.

[Giff]

@yetanothername

I think we should pursue factual information

Too bad people have (strong) opinions on what constitute “factual information”.

[rolandinho]

Thank you for this attempt at returning the forum discussions to a more focussed & calm content.

@Julianek

If you encounter a message where you think the author is advancing his political agenda without any benefit for the topic being discussed (and without any link to personal finance), the correct action is to report this message to moderation.

I will certainly make use of this.

[yetanothername]

Agree.

I think that the scope of the discussion should be about what answers the question in the title.

Example:
What are the childcare costs in the Canton of X?
Answers and discussion should be around:

• Actual examples of childcare cost with private vs public providers
• Tax implications
• In which cases it becomes cheaper to stay at home, taking into account pillar 2&3
• Cost of nanny or au pair…

Should not be around:

• Should there be public or subsidized childcare at all
• If it is good or bad parenting

Still plenty of room for debate…

[mikasa]

I like both the discussions and the financial info we can find in this forum. I like reading all your opinions but I don’t like when they are mixed up in the financial topics. There are many threads I read in the forum which had an interesting title but the discussions derailed into other things and no answer was really yield to the original question. “Other things” can be interesting too (they are for me) but they make it really hard to find the relevant posts for a specific topic.

In practice, how does splitting topics work? Taking the example of the child care thread, how can the discussions about raising children be moved? Does it require always a moderator to move all the posts? Or can participants just agree on that and move? Which messages should be moved? Should OP be consulted and agree with moving?

It would be great to not only agree on the guidelines but describe the required steps to adhere to it.

Thanks for proposing this change and looking after the forum @Julianek.

[Dr.PI]

@Dr.PI

It would be indeed good to split discussions in other topics, if a discussion worth it. If not, just kill it.

And if you don’t have enough time or don’t want to bother, why not assigning other moderators?

[Bojack]

My opinion is still that we should not restrict freedom of speech but to apply self-discipline and organize our discussions better. If you see that you digress, don’t hesitate about starting a new thread. I understand that this is a personal finance forum, but over the years, relationships between forum members were formed. So if I know there are some smart guys here who think differently than I do, why shouldn’t I ask their opinion on some controversial topic? Just put in “Coffee” and don’t derail investing threads.