Alright everyone, it looks like we had pretty broad support in this thread when it comes to cracking down on the hyper partisanship that's been spilling out of the political subreddits to all corners of reddit. In this thread I'm going to lay out some formal guidelines for comments on political topics. Since this is so widespread I want to be clear here: this post is everyone's formal warning. That means temporary or in some cases permanent bans are being handed out for people who violate said guidelines immediately. This is really the only way to deal wit this issue. I'm going to try to get automod to sticky applicable threads with this post as well.
First lets address politics
I want to note something first: we are absolutely enforcing higher posting standards for political threads. I think it's entirely uncontroversial to point out that calling Warren Buffett an asshole doesn't nearly stir up the anger that calling any given political figure an asshole will. Comments like that being upvoted quickly derail threads and drive the discussion away from investing.
So here's the simple guideline which I'll expand on: you're free to express your opinion so long as it's tied to investing, you put effort in to it, and it's civil. We're not here to stop the free flow of discussion or ideas but we are here to keep discussion surrounding investing and civil.
Tied to investing: this should be pretty straightforward but I'm laying it out here anyway. Investing encompasses markets, economic impacts, corporate profits, shifts in the yield curve, the federal reserve, taxes, potential government spending that may impact your portfolio.
Investing does not encompass immigration, personal lives of politicians, social issues, climate change(unless specifically within the context of impact to energy or similar), how you feel about a particular news organization's potential biases, etc. If it's not in the first list it's probably not investing related. Making comments pertaining to non investment related politics only serves to drive the conversation off course and create a thread that is indistinguishable from one in a political subreddit. Driving conversation off topic in high level comments by bringing up politics in unrelated threads also falls in this category.
Effort: no shitposts. If you're not conveying a thought or analysis of a particular subject then it's probably best to not post. Furthermore top level comments like "fuck my portfolio" don't help keeping conversation on track. Lastly and most importantly anything that falls in to the political meme universe isn't going to fly here. That means if you're repeating something like TDS, MAGA, trade wars are good and easy to win, Pocahontas, orange man bad, any of the millions of nicknames for the president, very stable genius, any given childish spin on Democrat/republican(ex DemocRAT or Republitard), etc isn't tolerated. These sorts of things only serve to agitate those on the opposite end of the political spectrum and create partisan arguments.
Your post should be something like "I disagree/agree with Trump here because [policy] will do XYZ which is good/bad for ABC and blah blah blah blah". If you are unable to express an investment related position on a topic without insults and memes then you probably should just go to a political subreddit and comment there.
Special note here: conspiracy theories about politics and markets are not allowed. If you are going to imply criminal market manipulation or insider trading proof in the form of reporting or other documentation is necessary. This is not a place for baseless accusations derived from political leaning.
Civility: so we already don't allow personal attacks here. Generally speaking many people identify so closely with political parties and politicians that they react to political attacks the same way they will to personal attacks. I get it, people get worked up over politics. Translating that emotion to a post here only serves to have people with opposing views get similarly worked up. This isn't an appropriate subreddit for that. We're here to discuss investing. So any comment that would violate our personal attacks rule if you made it towards another user is prohibited against political parties or figures. /r/investing is not a platform for people to express their outrage towards politicians or political parties. There are tons of subreddits for that sort of thing.
So now that the guidelines are made clear, here's the consequences. In our observation the vast majority of people engaging in political attacks and low effort posts are not regular contributors. They tend to frequent political subreddits and engage in political attacks elsewhere. So we're automatically handing out 30 day bans for violation of the above rules. If you feel like your ban was in error or unfair you can appeal in modmail but we're not really inclined to reverse decisions if you aren't already a regular contributor. For egregious offenses the ban may be 60 days or permanent. For overt racism, death threats against any public figure, or similar there is an automatic permanent ban.
Now Corporate vs Investment News
/u/crasymike did an awesome job laying out the general guidelines here: https://www.reddit.com/r/investing/comments/b3ss3q/topics_being_removed_corporate_news_vs_investor/
I'm going to just copy some of the hard guidelines here so they're in the same place but take a look at that thread to see a full explanation.
tl;dr Not all corporate news is investment news. If you post a topic the onus is on you to guide the discussion towards investing. If the moderators feel that a topic lacks relevance (which is more clearly defined below) then it might be removed. Off-topic top-level comments have similar standards applied to them.
This means that the onus is on you as the person posting the topic to guide the discussion. As moderators all we can do is remove offending comments, but we can't incite relevant discussion in every topic.
Tell us, why is this political news impactful? Seek out an article that discusses market impacts rather than a generic article. If you want to post corporate news then find an article that includes the impact on the investment. Copy that information into the body of your post. Include price history. Add other pertinent links or details for the corporate.
If you include no relevant investing information then don't be surprised if the topic is completely derailed from discussing investing. If you are posting a topic you need to invite people to talk about investing by using an article, or including information, that is pertinent to investors.
As moderators, we have a few policies that we use to guide ourselves. This is a broad rule that requires some interpretation, but here we go:
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If we can't figure out how your topic relates to investing, and the article doesn't include any (or extremely little) market news, and the body of your post doesn't link the topic to investing we will probably remove it as off-topic.
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If your topic has an indirect relation to investing (such as being about a public company, or is major market shifting news) but you included no market information and the article(s) you linked have no investing information we may remove it if we feel that there is no clear reason to expect on-topic comments.
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If someone posts a top-level comment on a thread that completely derails away from investing we will probably remove it.
If the policies above would result in the modteam seemingly needing to remove nearly every top level comment in a thread, and we felt like your thread is "borderline" not investing news, then we will take this as confirmation that the topic wasn't investing news. If the entire conversation in a thread is already driven off topic by political attacks or off topic discussion we will lock and remove a thread no matter how topical it is. Please do your part and downvote/report political attacks even if you agree with them. This will prevent us from just nuking a thread
Submitted September 01, 2019 at 03:31PM by MasterCookSwag https://ift.tt/2NFP6QB
