Our moderation team had a heck of a primary season, doing their best to maintain some semblance of peace in bitterly contested times. It was clear, during the worst of it, that our existing community guideline documents were either severely out of date or outright obsolete. How could we ask people to follow community rules if we didn’t have a current set of rules to follow? That was more our failure, as an organization, than that of the people breaking the rules. (I still blame the rule breakers, though, so don’t worry.)
Well, the primary wars are over, the community is in general-election harmonious mode, so it gave the team a chance to update those community norms and guidelines. So without further ado, here they are for everyone’s current and future reference. Note the complete lack of gray areas and ambiguity! (Kidding … nothing can ever get rid of that...) Thanks to the moderation team for creating such a concise and to-the-point accounting of what is a complex and oftentimes confusing community culture!
RULES OF THE ROAD: POSTING, COMMENTING, AND RATING AT DAILY KOS
SITE PURPOSE
This is a site for Democrats.
That’s the fundamental premise underlying all expectations about posting, commenting, and interacting with other site users. We are here to connect, unite, work together toward a common purpose, whether it’s to elect more and better Democrats, to advocate for specific issues, or even to socialize among like-minded friends. But ultimately, we are fighting to make ours a stronger, more effective, more progressive Democratic Party. Given our clear goals, these are our only ideological prohibitions:
But of course, there’s more to encouraging a harmonious community than ideological guidelines. We must still be able to work together as human beings. This is the internet, where hostility and negativity comes all too easy. So we must necessarily have and enforce standards of behavior.
These are not the “Terms and Conditions” that you must accept to sign up for a user account. The expectations as outlined here are enforced by community moderation—that is, the community itself helps police bad behavior. How?
Community members may reply to your comments and diaries, rate them positively (recommend), ignore them, or flag them as unacceptable. If you are uncertain as to what is and isn't acceptable to the community, despite the guidelines listed below or the Knowledge Base at the Help Desk, feel free to simply ask! People will be more than happy to guide you in the right direction.
So without further ado:
COMMUNITY GUIDELINES
DO...
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Remember that there are real people on the other end of your communication, along with thousands of others who may read but never reply.
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Respect the opportunity provided here for interaction. If you publish a post, try to reply to comments. If you comment, make it relevant to the issue at hand, and be prepared to continue the discussion.
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Fight hard but fight fair: Write an argument, not an attack. Remember, other people are just as passionate, committed, and ornery as you are. That’s supposed to be an advantage for us, right? Democrats boast about having a big tent. Learn from those who oppose you; let their challenges help you formulate your positions more clearly and draw upon better evidence.
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Accept that reasonable people may in the end still disagree.
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Value the norms of a “reality-based community.” Support your arguments with links to supporting documents and original source materials. Such original sources should be credible news and information sites.
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Participate in Community posts or Open Threads to get to know some of your associates.
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Make use of the many and varied resources for navigating the site successfully. Images, embeds, resources--the more the merrier.
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Investigate Daily Kos Groups for activism, education, and camaraderie.
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Bring first-person accounts or reportage of progressive political organizing in your community to the site, via posts or comments. We need your help developing a 176,000-precinct strategy!
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Keep in mind the formal site mission: “Daily Kos fights for a progressive America by empowering its community and allies with information and tools to directly impact the political process.”
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Be generous in praise, encouragement, and positivity. Make new people feel welcome, remind old timers that you appreciate their work. Drop in a nice comment and recommend positive contributions.
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Read the whole comment or diary before recommending. And base your recommending decisions not on who wrote it, but on how positive a contribution to the discussion it is.
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Disclose paid campaign or organizational positions (or unpaid positions of authority) when it is relevant to the conversation. Such identification should appear in each diary posted by the paid individual and on the individual’s profile page. Persons in such positions who are caught posting on the site without identifying their role will be banned and, in an exception to the no-outing rule, we will expose their real names publicly.
DO NOT...
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Endorse or call for violence against anyone, public figure or private blogger, not even in jest. Claiming hyperbole, humor, or poetic license/justice is no excuse. Don’t pull a Donald Trump on us.
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Promote Conspiracy Theories (e.g., 9-11 was a false flag attack).See point #5 above.
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Insult the character, intelligence, or background of people with whom you are arguing. You want to win an argument? Then don’t engage in ad-hominem attacks.
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Use racist, sexist, classist, homophobic, ageist, able-ist language -- or hate speech, generally. It is not acceptable at this site. We respect everyone.
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Make personal attacks or threats. This includes, but is not limited to: name calling, harassment or bullying toward any other site user. Also don’t follow users you don't like from diary to diary to harass them (See: Stalking)
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Reveal the real-life identity (outing, doxxing) of someone who posts behind a pseudonym.
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Create multiple identities ("sockpuppets," or “zombies” if you have been banned). Only one account is allowed per person. There are exceptions, but they must be approved by moderators. Use help desk for any such requests.
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Publicly accuse other users of being paid campaign shills, sockpuppets, zombies, or imposters. Such accusations should be brought up in a private ticket at the Help Desk, with proper evidence.
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Plagiarize or violate copyright. Do not post long excerpts of material from other sources without explicit permission from those sites. You can generally post 2-3 paragraphs with a link for attribution. (The blockquote and link tools are your friends.) Do not steal photographs. Respect people’s intellectual property. And yes, it’s stealing from someone’s livelihood.
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Post private email or private direct messages ("kosmail") to the public site, in a story or a comment.
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Use profanity in the titles of posts, which makes the site run afoul of Internet filters. Adult language is otherwise acceptable, provided it does not abuse other users or break site rules against hate speech.
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Post spam. If the despaminate bots don’t get you, the community will.
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"Call out" other users by name in the headline of your post, unless you are writing about how wonderful that person is. (Site editorial staff are exempted from this prohibition.)
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Write dramatic blog posts proclaiming your aggrieved exit from the site. Just leave! No one cares! And you can’t possibly hope to meet, let alone top, this.
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Do not recommend posts or comments violating the rules above! When you do that, you own that rule violation as well, and can suffer the same sanctions as the original perp. Also, it’s dickish to pile on with bullies, jerks, know-nothings, and assholes.
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Mess with the Pootie and Woozle People! For those who don’t know, pootie = cat and woozle = dog. These terms are used often in posts by the PWB Peeps, who comprise one of the largest, fiercest, and kindest groups on the site. For these peeps, the personal is very political, and their presence on the site exemplifies community ideals.
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Flag comments for disagreement. Only flag for violations of site rules. More on that below.
Recommendations and Flags: What They Mean and When to Use Them
Brand-new users to the site may recommend posts and comments. To recommend a post, click the Star. To recommend a comment, click Recommend.
Users with some standing at the site can become Trusted Users. Trusted Users have additional ratings privileges: they can “flag” or “hide” a comment.
Users have an unlimited number of recommends, both for stories and for comments. Trusted Users have five flags per day, and those five flags cannot be applied to the same user more than once per day, or once per post.
When and when NOT to flag:
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Do not flag something because you think it's wrong, even if it IS wrong. Feel free instead to rebut the erroneous statement in a comment (preferably with supporting evidence). And sometimes, just accept that it’s the internet, and people will occasionally be wrong.
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Do not flag someone just because you disagree with them. Flags are intended for seriously offensive comments that other users (and site lurkers) should not read. Believe it or not, people disagree on stuff!
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Do not flag someone you are in an argument with. If the comment is truly objectionable, someone else will step in.
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Do not flag someone who posts a comment in a story that you wrote, no matter how bad it may be. Someone else will step in.
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Do not "uprate" hidden comments by recommending them--unless you sincerely believe they have been flagged inappropriately.
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Rate the post/comment, not the poster. Do not flag because you don’t like the person making the comment. Do not drag in arguments from post to post.
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Do flag for violations of the Community Guidelines above. Whether it’s personal attacks, or conspiracy theory mongering, or racism/sexism/homophobia, etc.
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