As I’m sure you’ve already memorized the community rules as if it was your moms birthday, I probably need not post it, but here is rule 6 anyway:

  1. No US Politics.

Please don’t post about current US Politics. If you need to do this, try [email protected] or [email protected]

I am writing this post in an effort to gather feedback on how the community feels about this rule. In short, keep it as it is, or revise it.

It is my personal belief that the main purpose it serves is to avoid the community from mainly revolving around whatever daft thing the orange lardsack last said or did. And while it serves that purpose well, I think it also inhibits some potentially interesting discussions.

For example, one possible revision could be to allow for questions regarding US politics, but with a requirement that the topic has to be regarding issues 25 years ago (that may or may not be relevant today).

Alternatively, would it be useful/entertaining to occasionally have a “Contemporary US politics question megathread” as a contained outlet?

Please let me hear your thunks. This post will stay stickied for “a while”.

UPDATE: There seems to be overwhelming majority in keeping r6 as is, at minimum. Thank you for your input, and stay classy.

  • hector@lemmy.today
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    8 hours ago

    Where do you draw the line between world news and politics? I mean the president launching airstrikes on Iran for Israel’s forever war, is that politics? The US annexing Greenland? The US bullying the EU into letting tech run roughshod over their users?

    What about the EU imposing age checks and chatcontrol as a trojan horse to get inside liberal democracy to id every account and every ip and connect it to id cards and likeness, and run everything a person does or says through AI threat detection, run by Palantir type organizations, to make secret social scores to be used in secret in myriad ways against people in ways they can never know and not challenge? Is that politics?

    It’s impossible to extract world news from politics completely is it not? I personally have been ignoring whatever dumbass shit the president has been saying, and political news myself, just trying to follow events, but you can’t separate them completely.

  • Tollana1234567@lemmy.today
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    11 hours ago

    it make sense on a niche community, but an ask anything community it will just devolve into politics eventually anyways.

  • uKale@lemmy.world
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    10 hours ago

    Keep the rule as it is, and take those kinds of discussions in communities meant for political discussion. There’s already enough of US politics everywhere else.

  • slazer2au@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    100% keen on keeping it. Expanding it to keep all political discussions out would be nice but I know that won’t happen.

    • pohart@programming.dev
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      1 day ago

      Expanding it to keep all political discussions out would be nice

      Not even possible. Every post would devolve into a discussion of what’s political.

      • slazer2au@lemmy.world
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        1 day ago

        The rule is currently US politics, where I would like to expand it to other countries because /r/Europe turns into US politics because “it effects Europe”

        • draco_aeneus@mander.xyz
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          11 hours ago

          It seems that the rule seems to work well enough here as is. In addition to the rule, how you enforce it is equally (if not more) important too.

  • dylanmorgan@sh.itjust.works
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    1 day ago

    As a US citizen, keep the rule. As laid out in the text of the rule, there are already communities where questions of that nature can be asked.

    • BeardededSquidward@lemmy.blahaj.zone
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      1 day ago

      Agreed here. People should wonder what normal life like can be in the USA than our politics. Not saying it’s great, but I think it gives better insight than who people voted for.

  • ClickAndPoint@lemmy.world
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    20 hours ago

    Humanity has already shown that we can’t have anonymous online discussion on politics. The worst possible people abuse it and benefit from it.

  • Sephtis@lemmy.world
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    1 day ago

    I think it should be expanded into a rule of no politics in general. While the us politcs have the most effect(are most know worldwide) EU poltics and so on should also not be discussed here imo

    • draco_aeneus@mander.xyz
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      11 hours ago

      I don’t see a problem with a bunch of European-specific questions being asked, so I question the need for an expanded rule.

      If you broaden the rule, you run at risk of banning or discouraging desirable questions. Stuff about economics or lifestyle. Those are “political” too, after all.

      • Sephtis@lemmy.world
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        10 hours ago

        I mean yo run the risk of banning some stuff regardless of if you only ban us politcs or eu politcs. What would be a reason why questions about european politcs would be any different than us politcs. best would be to just ban polutics in general, while keeping lifestyle/economical stuff etc, this would however require some nuance

        Edit: to specify i don’t mean to ban European specific questions, just eu-poltics.

        • draco_aeneus@mander.xyz
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          10 hours ago

          Fair, but nuanced rules are difficult to enforce, and somewhat open to interpretation. This leads to people trying to skirt the rules and also good faith posts which break the rules which leads to conflict also.

          I think it’s better to keep things as simple as possible, as long as the rule is good enough.

          • Sephtis@lemmy.world
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            9 hours ago

            Totally agree. But let’s for example say someone asks a question about something related to economics. I think it would be unfair if Europeans could answer a lot of stuff about politics, while Americans are pretty limited.

            Imo It already requires nuance at the moment, the only thing that would change is that all users would be treated the same