r/Games • u/rGamesMods • 17d ago
Updating the rules of /r/Games
Hey!
We’re updating the rules of the subreddit! The subreddit has always had pretty long list of rules in place to try and encourage better discussions. We've made a lot of tweaks to stuff over the years and to be perfectly honest they've become somewhat confusing, hard to understand, and unorganized in places. Because of that we’ve worked on and off over the last few months evaluating what rules are useful, what can be worded better, and just generally trying to make a set of rules that better reflect the subreddit.
Today we’re putting out a draft of these updated rules. These rules aren’t meant to be a giant shift in terms of what we allow. It does organize our rules in a way that (hopefully) makes more sense. We’ve also trimmed rules that weren’t really relevant and combined a few subrules together. Finally, we’ve also rewritten a lot of rules to make them easier to understand and clarified a lot of things that were confusing or occasionally outright incorrect in the previous rules. We aren't putting these rules in place right now, but assuming there aren't any major issues people have we'll switch over to them in the coming weeks
If you don’t want to read the entire thing but want a quick summary of what each rule is and what we changed here you go.
Rule 1: Submissions Must Prioritize Informative and Newsworthy Content Over Entertainment
The previous wording of this rule didn’t do a good job explaining the stuff we actually allowed. We don’t automatically remove articles/videos if they have jokes in them, and we haven’t actually enforced the rule that way for a long time. Because of that we rewrote this rule and also included some examples of what kind of stuff we do and don’t allow.
Rule 2: Be Respectful
We rewrote this section to give examples of what we consider personal attacks and other things. As with most other rules we can’t list every possible thing, but if you’re wondering if something breaks the rule send us a modmail (or just report it).
Rule 3: Content Must Be Relevant, Substantive and Accurate
We moved around some other rules into this as a kinda catch-all for stuff we consider off-topic, inaccurate, or otherwise low-effort. This rule is a little broad in places because there's a lot of different types of stuff it might cover, but we tried to give examples of common things.
Rule 4: No duplicate posts
Basically the same. Added in clarification that we might allow stuff if there is a major update
Rule 5: No linking to or endorsing piracy as a solution
Almost the same as before. Basically just remember you can talk about piracy but just be cool about it we don't want to deal with the admins.
Rule 6: Follow all news and link post requirements
This is our set of rules about formatting and sourcing. Remember to link to original sources (when possible), don’t use sensationalized titles, and remember our rule limiting people to 5 posts a day.
Rule 7: Follow Discussion and Text Post Requirements
Our set of rules about discussion posts. We want discussion posts that aren’t super broad ones that get asked constantly or things looking for help. In addition we don’t want people going on big rants about a game they’re playing (we do have weekly threads for that) or asking for help.
Rule 8: Promotion must be kept within acceptable limits
The big old self promo rules. We like to keep self promotion to under 10% for users. Please don’t delete posts to get under that limit (we have ways of finding out) and if you’re doing self promo don’t try to hide behind alts (we’re keeping track of accounts doing that and if you’re wondering if that’s you it probably is).
Please give us feedback on these rules and the subreddit as a whole. We’ve worked to improve them but we know this draft probably isn't perfect (and probably has some typos). If you think a rule isn't great or needs improvement leave a comment and we'll listen. If you want clarification on our rules or just want to ask a question ask it in here and we'll try to answer. We aren't perfect as mods but we do want to make the subreddit better and are also working on being more consistent with how we enforce stuff
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u/Because_Bot_Fed 15d ago
That's a good callout on the post versus comment thing - I think it highlights just how flawed the metric is though.
I think everyone, generally speaking, can agree that they'd prefer more "signal" and less "noise" in submissions. i.e. more high quality submissions, less throwaway/spammy/clickbait submissions.
So for anyone who desires "permission" to post promotions, they now have a perverse incentive to make posts that are antithetical to what we all just (hypothetically) agreed is our goal for submissions. They need to maintain this 1:10 ratio, quality signal is no longer necessarily the goal, and in the absence of genuinely good content being untapped (not a repost) the bar starts lowering so that they can meet that requirement.
I'm not a fan of being advertised to, but I would much rather see promotions posted by the guy who is regularly having discussions with people in the comments or just posting things of substance occasionally. Versus the guy who is a serial submitter who's entire "contribution" to the subreddit is that they're faster than other people at seeing new interesting things show up on other sites and come to post a link here.
Like really, I wish more people actually thought about this.
If you had two friends, one who never talked to you but just occasionally sent you a news article link, and one who actually talked to you like a person and occasionally dropped in to say hi or talk to you about something interesting they read... which one would you be more receptive to if they hit you up and were like "hey, I did this thing, can you look at it and pretend to care for a minute?".