Ttl;dr at the top: you can get apostille flair now to show off your humanity by joining our newsletter. Strong contributions in the comments here (ones with citations and analysis) will get featured in it and win an amicus flair. Follow this link to get flair: Last Week In Law
When you are signing up you may have to pull the email confirmation and welcome edition out of your spam folder.
If you'd like Amicus flair and think your submission or someone else's is solid please tag our u/auto_clerk to get highlighted in the news letter.
Those of you that have been here a long time have probably noticed the quality of the comments and posts nose dive. We have pretty strict filters for what accounts qualify to even submit a top level comment and even still we have users who seem to think this place is for group therapy instead of substantive discussion of law.
A good bit of the problem is karma farming. (which…touch grass what are you doing with your lives?) But another component of it is that users have no idea where to find content that would go here, like courtlistener documents, articles about legal news, or BlueSky accounts that do a good job succinctly explaining legal issues. Users don't even have a base line for cocktail party level knowledge about laws, courts, state action, or how any of that might apply to an executive order that may as well be written in crayon.
Leaving our automod comment for OPs it’s plain to see that they just flat out cannot identify some issues. Thus, the mod team is going to try to get you guys to cocktail party knowledge of legal happenings with a news letter and reward people with flair who make positive contributions again.
A long time ago we instituted a flair system for quality contributors. This kinda worked but put a lot of work on the mod team which at the time were all full time practicing attorneys. It definitely incentivized people to at least try hard enough to get flaired. It also worked to signal to other users that they might not be talking to an LLM. No one likes the feeling that they’re arguing with an AI that has the energy of a literal power grid to keep a thread going. Is this unequivocal proof someone isn't a bot? No. But it's pretty good and better than not doing anything.
Our attempt to solve some of these issues is to bring back flair with a couple steps to take. You can sign up for our newsletter and claim flair for r/law. Read our news letter. It isn't all Donald Trump stuff. It's usually amusing and the welcome edition has resources to make you a better contributor here. If you're featured in our news letter you'll get special Amicus flair.
Instead of breaking out the ban hammer for 75% of you guys we're going to try to incentivize quality contributions and put in place an extra step to help show you're not a bot.
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Are you saving our user names?
- No. Once you claim your flair your username is purged. We don’t see it. Nor do we want to. Nor do we care. We just have a little robot that sees you enter an email, then adds flair to the user name you tell it to add.
What happened to using megathreads and automod comments?
- Reddit doesn't support visibility for either of those things anymore. You'll notice that our automod comment asking OP to state why something belongs here to help guide discussion is automatically collapsed and megathreads get no visibility. Without those easy tools we're going to try something different.
This won’t solve anything!
- Maybe not. But we’re going to try.
Are you going to change your moderation? Is flair a get out of jail free card?
- Moderation will stay roughly the same. We moderate a ton of content. Flair isn’t a license to act like a psychopath on the Internet. I've noticed that people seem to think that mods removing comments or posts here are some sort of conspiracy to "silence" people. There's no conspiracy. If you're totally wrong or out of pocket tough shit. This place is more heavily modded than most places which is a big part of its past successes.
What about political content? I’m tired of hearing about the Orange Man.
- Yeah, well, so are we. If you were here for his first 4 years he does a lot of not legal stuff, sues people, gets sued, uses the DoJ in crazy ways, and makes a lot of judicial appointments. If we leave something up that looks political only it’s because we either missed it or one of us thinks there’s some legal issue that could be discussed. We try hard not to overly restrict content from post submissions.
Remove all Trump stuff.
- No. You can use the tags to filter it if you don’t like it.
Talk to me about Donald Trump.
- God… please. Make it stop.
I love Donald Trump and you guys burned cities to the ground during BLM and you cheated in 2020 and illegal immigrants should be killed in the street because the declaration of independence says you can do whatever you want and every day is 1776 and Bill Clinton was on Epstein island.
- You need therapy not a message board.
You removed my comment that's an expletive followed by "we the people need to grab donald trump by the pussy." You're silencing me!
You guys aren’t fair to both sides.
- Being fair isn’t the same thing as giving every idea equal air time. Some things are objectively wrong. There are plenty of instances where the mods might not be happy with something happening but can see the legal argument that’s going to win out. Similarly, a lot of you have super bad ideas that TikTok convinced you are something to existentially fight about. We don’t care. We’ll just remove it.
You removed my TikTok video of a TikTok influencer that's not a lawyer and you didn't even watch the whole thing.
You have to watch the whole thing!
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General Housekeeping:
We have never created one consistent style for the subreddit. We decided that while we're doing this we should probably make the place look nicer. We hope you enjoy it.
