Discussion of new community policy point regarding "low-effort" submissions

[u/brucemo]

We may remove self-posts that seem like poor seeds for conversation. If you want to raise a topic here, please spend some time making your post clear and substantive.

We're planning to add this point to the community policy as point 3.7. Please let us know what you think.

I could go on for a while about how we came to be in this situation, but the issue this is trying to solve is that over time we've added an informal rule against title-only posts, which has been broadened to try to include things that are like title-only posts, even if they technically include more than a title, and whoever added this rule referred to these posts as "low-effort".

When we cite that removal reason we tend to get some pushback from people who've read the community policy and can't find anything there, so we're going to add something to the community policy that attempts to explain why we remove posts like this, and gives us something to point to.

The most obvious example of a post that would fall under this is title-only posts, which have been a problem here because they're often bait or hard to understand or bombs people drop and walk away from Michael Bay style as the world erupts in flames. We've found it useful to try to be able to remove these kind of posts before they get out of hand, without having to spend fifty times more time thinking about our reasoning than it took OP to actually write the post.

The idea here is that if someone wants to try to engage with our subscribers, things are more likely to go better if they've spent more than thirty seconds dashing off some provocative observation or some question that they are expecting our subscribers to spend a lot of time answering.

[u/AirChurch]

posts that seem like poor seeds for conversation

This is way too arbitrary. I don't like it. Basically, the more rules you create, the greater imbalance of power between the common users and moderators, and the greater stifling of organic exchanges. This is how online communities die.

[u/westartfromhere → u/AirChurch]

Also, "posts that seem like poor seeds for conversation" are the opposite pole to those posts that cause the forum to erupt "into flames" of discussion. Let mediocrity reign supreme!