A new file on civilized discussions. #392
Conversation
This still needs stuff sorting in config.json etc
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Overall I really like this as a baseline for all interactions within the Exercism community.
Right now the document is written with the lens of being about a forum and the topics/discussions posted there.
We might need to go through it to ensure that it's clear what these guidelines cover.
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| ## [This is a Civilized Place for Public Discussion](#civilized) | ||
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| Please treat this discussion forum with the same respect you would a public park. We, too, are a shared community resource — a place to share skills, knowledge and interests through ongoing conversation. |
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Please treat this discussion forum with the same respect you would a public park.
Given how much trash there is in public parks, I'm not sure this works the way you want it to work. Maybe a public library fits the sentiment better, especially in regards to what follows behind the dash?
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I agree with Sascha that people really don't seem to respect public parks, at all.
| Help us make this a great place for discussion by **always adding something positive to the discussion**. If you are not sure your post adds to the conversation, think over what you want to say and try again later. | ||
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| One way to improve the discussion is by discovering ones that are already happening. Spend time browsing the topics here before replying or starting your own, and you’ll have a better chance of meeting others who share your interests. | ||
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| The topics discussed here matter to us, and we want you to act as if they matter to you, too. Be respectful of the topics and the people discussing them, even if you disagree with some of what is being said. |
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"adding something positive to the discussion" doesn't match the rest of the paragraph imo. A post can be negative, e.g. because it points out an issue with an approach or whatever, but still be valuable and useful for the discussion.
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What about always adding something valuable to the discussion?
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| Instead, provide thoughtful insights that improve the conversation. | ||
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| Write your opinions **as opinions**. Rather than saying "everyone knows Python is the best language for beginners" or "Python is the best language for beginners", say "I feel that Python is the best language for beginners because ...". We take this seriously as it's an innocent looking habit that can be extremely disruptive to an online community. If you constantly write opinions as facts, we will ask you to stop and refer you to these guidelines. If you continue, we may choose to ban you. |
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| Write your opinions **as opinions**. Rather than saying "everyone knows Python is the best language for beginners" or "Python is the best language for beginners", say "I feel that Python is the best language for beginners because ...". We take this seriously as it's an innocent looking habit that can be extremely disruptive to an online community. If you constantly write opinions as facts, we will ask you to stop and refer you to these guidelines. If you continue, we may choose to ban you. | |
| Write your opinions **as I-messages**. Rather than saying "everyone knows Python is the best language for beginners" or "Python is the best language for beginners", say "I feel that Python is the best language for beginners because ...". We take this seriously as it's an innocent looking habit that can be extremely disruptive to an online community. If you constantly write opinions as facts, we will ask you to stop and refer you to these guidelines. If you continue, we may choose to ban you. |
I feel that explicitly refering to I-messages is clearer here because it's not uncommon to assume that everything one writes in a forum is an opinion. Alternatively maybe something like this could underline that such an assumption should not be made:
| Write your opinions **as opinions**. Rather than saying "everyone knows Python is the best language for beginners" or "Python is the best language for beginners", say "I feel that Python is the best language for beginners because ...". We take this seriously as it's an innocent looking habit that can be extremely disruptive to an online community. If you constantly write opinions as facts, we will ask you to stop and refer you to these guidelines. If you continue, we may choose to ban you. | |
| Be **explicit** about your opinions **being opinions**. Rather than saying "everyone knows Python is the best language for beginners" or "Python is the best language for beginners", say "I feel that Python is the best language for beginners because ...". We take this seriously as it's an innocent looking habit that can be extremely disruptive to an online community. If you constantly write opinions as facts, we will ask you to stop and refer you to these guidelines. If you continue, we may choose to ban you. |
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Thanks. I prefer this second suggestion to the first as I don't know what "I messages are" (I can guess, but others might not guess). @kytrinyx Any thoughts here?
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I've also never heard of an "I-message", so that might be something that people in general don't know about.
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I hadn't heard of it, either. I don't know if this is something that a lot of people haven't heard of, or it just happens to be me and Erik. I like the wikipedia article on it, though.
If it's likely that a lot of people haven't heard about it, I would lean towards not introducing the idea here, because it means we're potentially leading people away from this article, whereas I really, really want people to read the whole thing once they've started, because it seems less likely that they'll finish if they click away (and we want people to have read it before they start posting in the forum).
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Whatever we do, I do really like the extra explicitness here that Sascha is trying to add. The second suggestion would be much better than the current doc imo.
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I also never heard of I-messages before.
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| Nothing sabotages a healthy conversation like rudeness: | ||
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| * Be civil. Don’t post anything that a reasonable person would consider offensive, abusive, or hate speech. |
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I feel like "reasonable person" is quite judgey here. People will have different ideas of what's offensive, abusive, or hate speech, and implying that someone whose idea of that might be different from the moderators is an "unreasonable person" is quite harsh. This text violates the guidelines above about criticising ideas, not people.
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I agree with what the point is trying to make and I agree with what Sascha is saying. Point in case (without a comment about this case, or the outcome, or the subjects, but just take it at face value that "what is reasonable" means very different things to very different people)
| Nothing sabotages a healthy conversation like rudeness: | ||
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| * Be civil. Don’t post anything that a reasonable person would consider offensive, abusive, or hate speech. | ||
| * Keep it clean. Don’t post anything obscene or sexually explicit. |
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To me using "clean" here feels very judgemental. While sexually explicit content has no place in this forum, it's not "dirty", which this post implies. You can remove the "Keep it clean" and it works just as well without that judgement.
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It's also not rude to be sexually explicit, but it is rude to be out of place. Exercism is not a place to be sexually explicit or obscene.
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| These are not concrete terms with precise definitions — avoid even the _appearance_ of any of these things. If you’re unsure, ask yourself how you would feel if your post was featured on the front page of a major news site. | ||
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| This is a public forum, and search engines index these discussions. Keep the language, links, and images safe for family and friends. |
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The idea of what's friendly for family and friends varies dramatically between both cultures and even individuals within those cultures. Think back to the person who thought exercism was a christian minecraft server and considered "making out" obscene language for an example. Perhaps this could avoid that issue:
| This is a public forum, and search engines index these discussions. Keep the language, links, and images safe for family and friends. | |
| This is a public forum, and search engines index these discussions. Don't post anything that you wouldn't want to be publicly associated with your name. |
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I also have an issue with the wording Safe For Work or "family friendly" content, but I have no issue with strongly suggesting (and heavily enforcing) people don't make the forum inhospitable.
| * Don’t start a topic in the wrong category; please read the category definitions. | ||
| * Don’t cross-post the same thing in multiple topics. | ||
| * Don’t post no-content replies. | ||
| * Don’t divert a topic by changing it midstream. |
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Discourse has threads within a thread, kinda like a tree. Sometimes that can lead to interwoven conversations. This rule would effectively disallow using that feature. Is that intended?
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| ## [Post Only Your Own Stuff](#stealing) | ||
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| You may not post anything digital that belongs to someone else without permission. You may not post descriptions of, links to, or methods for stealing someone’s intellectual property (software, video, audio, images), or for breaking any other law. |
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Can we improve the phrasing here? In particular,
You may not post descriptions of, links to, or methods for [...] breaking any other law.
Any other law, in any country? There are laws that forbid things that we may consider ordinary, moral, and desirable. The set of all comments that does not "break any law" may be much smaller than the set of comments we want to allow.
Edit: I see that Reddit leans heavily on "applicable law" in https://www.redditinc.com/policies/user-agreement. But I'm not sure that's what we want either. And their content policy does have a similar "avoid posting illegal content", but maybe that's defined somewhere as "illegal in your country", or "illegal in the USA".
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I am not very keen on "you may not break the law" style language. I rather see consequences instead.
Me posting about Tom would be illegal in a lot of countries, so there's that.
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| ## [This is a Civilized Place for Public Discussion](#civilized) | ||
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| Please treat this discussion forum with the same respect you would a public park. We, too, are a shared community resource — a place to share skills, knowledge and interests through ongoing conversation. |
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I agree with Sascha that people really don't seem to respect public parks, at all.
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| <a name="encourage"></a> | ||
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| ## [Encourage each other](#improve) |
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| ## [Encourage each other](#improve) | |
| ## [Encourage each other](#encourage) |
| This is first and foremost an educational space - a space to learn and share ideas, to uplift each other. It is **not** a space to prove yourself, show off your knowledge, compete with others, create a sense of “us vs them”, or put others down. We take a strict approach to this, and so topics that would be considered ok in other forums are not considered ok here. | ||
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| Some examples: | ||
| - A discussion exploring what the tradeoffs would be between using C# vs F# could be a positive and educational experience. However, a comment saying “C# is rubbish because …” is not helpful, does not add to the educational experience and would be deleted. |
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| - A discussion exploring what the tradeoffs would be between using C# vs F# could be a positive and educational experience. However, a comment saying “C# is rubbish because …” is not helpful, does not add to the educational experience and would be deleted. | |
| - A discussion exploring what the trade-offs would be between using C# vs F# could be a positive and educational experience. However, a comment saying “C# is rubbish because …” is not helpful, does not add to the educational experience, and would be deleted. |
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| Some examples: | ||
| - A discussion exploring what the tradeoffs would be between using C# vs F# could be a positive and educational experience. However, a comment saying “C# is rubbish because …” is not helpful, does not add to the educational experience and would be deleted. | ||
| - Any conversations around topics such as politics or religion are not appropriate in this space. Neither are topics that are fought with a religious fervor (e.g. whether VIM or Emacs is better). |
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This would disallow me to advocate for accessibility, FYI. That may be intentional, or it may not be what you intended, but from the outside, it absolutely would be considered preaching by some. For example, read the incredible toxic and hostile responses here: prettier/prettier#7475.
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| ## [Improve the Discussion](#improve) | ||
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| Help us make this a great place for discussion by **always adding something positive to the discussion**. If you are not sure your post adds to the conversation, think over what you want to say and try again later. |
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| Help us make this a great place for discussion by **always adding something positive to the discussion**. If you are not sure your post adds to the conversation, think over what you want to say and try again later. | |
| Help us make this a great place for discussion by **always adding something positive or valuable to the discussion**. If you are not sure your post adds to the conversation, think over what you want to say and try again later. |
If you're forcing me to do a feedback sandwich, this probably would not be a place for me. Whilst I usually have something positive to say, it's not always positive, and forcing it undermines the value of the feedback itself (apart from it being incredibly rude in my culture to feedback sandwich).
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@SleeplessByte Your contributions to the JavaScript mutation discussion in the forum today were exemplary. Extremely valuable, and I also saw it as positive. I vehemently dislike feedback sandwiches (it's also seen as rude in the culture I'm from).
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| <a name="derailing"></a> | ||
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| ## [Stay on topic - don’t derail](#derail) |
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| ## [Stay on topic - don’t derail](#derail) | |
| ## [Stay on topic - don’t derail](#derailing) |
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| Nothing sabotages a healthy conversation like rudeness: | ||
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| * Be civil. Don’t post anything that a reasonable person would consider offensive, abusive, or hate speech. |
There was a problem hiding this comment.
I agree with what the point is trying to make and I agree with what Sascha is saying. Point in case (without a comment about this case, or the outcome, or the subjects, but just take it at face value that "what is reasonable" means very different things to very different people)
| Nothing sabotages a healthy conversation like rudeness: | ||
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| * Be civil. Don’t post anything that a reasonable person would consider offensive, abusive, or hate speech. | ||
| * Keep it clean. Don’t post anything obscene or sexually explicit. |
There was a problem hiding this comment.
It's also not rude to be sexually explicit, but it is rude to be out of place. Exercism is not a place to be sexually explicit or obscene.
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| These are not concrete terms with precise definitions — avoid even the _appearance_ of any of these things. If you’re unsure, ask yourself how you would feel if your post was featured on the front page of a major news site. | ||
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| This is a public forum, and search engines index these discussions. Keep the language, links, and images safe for family and friends. |
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I also have an issue with the wording Safe For Work or "family friendly" content, but I have no issue with strongly suggesting (and heavily enforcing) people don't make the forum inhospitable.
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| ## [Post Only Your Own Stuff](#stealing) | ||
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| You may not post anything digital that belongs to someone else without permission. You may not post descriptions of, links to, or methods for stealing someone’s intellectual property (software, video, audio, images), or for breaking any other law. |
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I am not very keen on "you may not break the law" style language. I rather see consequences instead.
Me posting about Tom would be illegal in a lot of countries, so there's that.
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Thanks for all the comments. I hadn't expected the main body of this to go down so badly 😁 So in case you weren't aware >90% of this document is Discourse's own guidelines rather than anything I've written (and nearly all the comments are on the original document's content). So it feels quite a lot of work for me to do in rewriting that whole thing which I hadn't expected. Having seen the comments, it's clear that a lot of it does need rewriting, and that that's important, but it's going to take me a while to find the time to do it. I just wanted to update y'all on that 🙂 |
These are the guidelines we're using for the forum. They're basically Discourse's baseline ones with some extra stuff Katrina and I add. I'm interested in comments on the content rather than proof-reading please. Thanks!
(At a later point, we'll generalise them to be a global set of Exercism guidelines on "civilised behaviour")
This still needs stuff sorting in config.json etc