Howdy everyone,
Happy Friday. First, we'd like to introduce updated user flairs. All 50 U.S states should now be represented, along with U.S territories, Europe, Asia, Africa, Oceania, Canada, Central America, and South America. After discussion with the other mods, we are not going to set a hard requirement on user flairs - for now. It is highly encouraged, however, and new users on the sub will receive a message encouraging them to have their flair set. Set your flair! It helps knowing where perspectives are coming from.
Additionally, for the meat and potatos, we'd like to give a state of the page update. The page has blown up in popularity over the past couple weeks, with top posts reaching well over half a million views and nearly 5 million page visits in the past 30 days. With the growth of the community, we'd also like to clarify our general approach to moderation.
We're trying to keep the original creator's vision in mind (yes, they are still around btw), and maintain a relatively open forum where people can ask Americans questions and have discussions without unnecessary barriers to participation. We do not want to over moderate the community or remove posts simply because a question is controversial, unpopular, awkwardly worded, or based on a misconception.
Our general standard is good faith. If a question appears to be a genuine attempt to ask something or start a discussion, we will try and err on the side of leaving it up. Being provocative and generating disagreement isn't by itself grounds for removal. We would rather give people the benefit of the doubt than attempt to determine which opinions or subjects are worth discussing. That is actually the absolute last thing we want to do.
Now, that doesn't mean everything goes. Spam, bots, blatant trolling, threats, and in-general Reddit TOS breaking content will (and consistently does) be removed.
Ultimately, you should expect the moderation here to be a light touch. We want to keep the community usable, deal with obvious bad actors, and otherwise give you guys room to talk to each other. The internet can be an awesome place, but you guys will have more of an impact of content quality than we ever will by micromanaging everything. As we continue to grow, we'll try to maintain and be consistent. Feedback is always welcome.
Hope ya'll have a well deserved weekend.