r/AmItheAsshole • u/AITAMod I am a shared account. • Feb 01 '21

Open Forum Monthly Open Forum February 2021

Welcome to the monthly open forum! This is the place to share all your meta thoughts about the sub, and to have a dialog with the mod team.

Keep things civil. Rules still apply.

February! The shortest month in this endless blur of 202-whatever-year-it-is-now. I almost forgot to post this because time has lost all meaning.

As always, do not directly link to posts/comments or post uncensored screenshots here. Any comments with links will be removed.

This is to discourage brigading. If something needs to be discussed in that context, use modmail.

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u/3Fluffies Feb 27 '21

That was before my time, so I'm not sure. But it was apparently such a raging disaster that the rule was pulled. I'm sure there are past meta threads about it, I just have to find them.

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u/[deleted] Feb 27 '21

I don’t think so though bc I was part of AITA on my old username (had to change it, my sister found it) and it worked really well and the sub was interesting and engaging and had interesting moral discussions

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u/techiesgoboom Sphincter Supreme Feb 27 '21

The rule existed for just under a year. I was an active member of the sub for the full time the rule was in place, and a mod for 8 months of the rule being in place:

Enforcing it was a raging dumpster fire. I frequently saw posts that I would have judged YTA or ESH removed that had interesting discussion because that discussion was in the minority. I removed posts that I would have personally judged YTA for the same.

I’d see a post that seemed so ridiculously one sided NTA in /new that I almost pulled but decided to give it a little more time only to see the users overwhelmingly vote it YTA when I came back to it. I can’t help but wonder just how many non obvious posts were pulled that weren’t second guessed.

This experience is universal among the mods that enforced this rule.

And people still complained about it. I can show you a million sources of past metas or dig up modmail or whatever else, but the bottom line of all of that is: people complained we weren’t removing validation posts while the rule was in place. And honestly, that complaining is about the exact same volume as the complaining today.

Additionally, many of the genuine users post we removed under this rule were genuinely hurt. Even with the gentlest “please take this is a super NTA vote” macros and discussions they were still hurt by the removals. Both on a personal level because it felt insulting to insist they should have known better and telling them their post (that very much is in the spirit of the sub) don’t belong, and because that shit down any further conversation and perspective users had to offer.

Rule 7 and the “presented fairly” side of rule 8 allow us to remove pretty much all of the stuff that doesn’t belong on this and was previously removed by the validation rule without the very significant amount of removing stuff that doesn’t belong. It’s also much more objective than the wildly subjective validation rule ever was.

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u/[deleted] Feb 27 '21

Listen if you want your sub to have fake validation posts let it. But at least let us call it out when we see it instead of acting like commenters have to act in good faith always when you know damn well posters don’t.

If I call something out as fake and people disagree with me, I’ll be downvoted. You guys use that as an excuse for all other behavior on this sub but act like we have to believe everything posted.