New Moderation Policy

[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.