I typed up a whole comment last night (way past when I should have been asleep) and I swear I hit the submit button, but apparently I was delerious, because the post isn’t here now. Heh. So I guess I’ll say what I said there again.

I’m thrilled to have this kind of engagement with the mod team here, and I’m very much open to changing the rules.

To explain the rationale behind Rule 5 in the sidebar, we had some posts where people just kindof posted “look at this slop; it’s slop”. I think the posters in the situations I’m referring to were trying to make some point in opposition to AI (not just trolls trying to get a reaction), but it really wasn’t clear what the OP’s point was, if they even had a point. Rule 5 was designed to try to stop that problem while also letting folks post instances of AI doing obviously dumb stuff that we could all point and laugh at. Stuff like this.

That said, the rules are meant to change and I’m definitely open to the idea of changing that to forbid even point-and-laugh-at-AI-shitting-the-bed kind of posts. I do like those sorts of posts, but there are other communities for that, like !ArtificialIgnorance@lemmy.ca .

I’m talking with the rest of the mod team about making that change. (I just want to make sure there aren’t any strong objections or anything.) It seems like everyone in this thread so far is on board with the idea, but while that discussion with the other mods is happening, I’ll sticky this post so we can get more input from the community.

Two other rule changes that I’m also discussing with the other mods at the same time are the addition of rules something like “No misinformation” and “No NSFW/NSFL content without being marked NSFW or being in an appropriately-labeled spoiler tag”. So if you have thoughts on those, feel free to weigh in on that as well.

There are also some comments in this thread about adding more mods, but isn’t /c/fuck_ai already a pretty big outlier in terms of how many mods we have? I like to think (and hope) we’re doing a fairly decent job of it. I think I can speak for the whole mod team when I say we don’t want to be /c/yepowertrippinbastards, and we want this community to be the best it can be. But the more mods a community has, generally the greater the risk one mod will use the community as some kind of political platform, banning people for suggesting that “a vegan diet in fact isn’t better for your cat than a carnist one” or whatever. (I’m making up the example here, but Lemmy has had issues with people advocating for feeding your cat a vegan diet and a fair amount of drama resulted. Heh.) IIRC, I think Lemmy has a hard limit on how many mods a community can have and we hit that limit at one point. I think maybe some folks have demodded themselves and we’re not at that limit right now, so theoretically we could add more mods, but still.

I will say that if you want to help the mod team, the first things that occur to me are 1) report things (a report that we ended up ruling against is still a good and appreciated thing; it gives us more insight into what the community wants the rules to be, for one thing), 2) be detailed and specific in your reports, 3) message a mod (I’m perfectly happy to engage in such conversations) if you don’t like how something was resolved and would like the mods to change how they do things, 4) if you think something should be against the rules that isn’t, or vice versa, I honestly think this kind of meta post is a decent way to go with that. I mention the “detailed and specific” thing just because it takes more time and effort for a mod to gather context and figure out what the reporter even meant when the report is just “breaks rules” or even “uncivility”. It’s a lot more helpful to be like “The third image in this comment is a well-known anti-semitic trope” or “Claiming that ‘agentic AI’ can outperform humans at all jobs is misinformation”. I’ve definitely had to go down a rabbit hole of reading a whole comment chain 10 layers deep to figure out what assertion the reported comment was making specifically and what the rationale of the reporter was so as to have the information I needed to make a decision whether to take action and what action to take.

Lessee. I think that’s everything I said in the lost comment, and I think it mostly covers what I wanted to communicate here. Definitely weigh in, folks. And we’ll keep you in the loop on things.