Based on feedback from this post, we’re going to trial pushing for more politically controversial posts to go in !politics instead of !newzealand.
We’re interested in seeing where users think the line is. Which of these recent posts do you think belong in !politics?
- Frustration mounting as high school teacher strikes roll on - 1News
- All Whites game abandoned after alleged racial abuse - RNZ
- ‘Random’ group of Kiwis caught protesters who lit Parliament fires - 1News
- Teacher struck off after refusing to use student’s pronouns - 1News
- New additional ETS scheme floated in review of carbon market - RNZ
- Migrant workers being exploited, Queenstown Citizens Advice Bureau says - RNZ
- Operation Pakari: More arrests of people linked to Mongrel Mob, 85 charges laid - RNZ
- Auckland surgeons must now consider ethnicity in prioritising patients for operations - NZ Herald
- This RNZ story is probably more complicated than first thought - Stuff
- Teacher struck off after refusing to use student’s pronouns - 1News
We’re not able to move posts to another community at the moment, but we’re thinking of locking posts that should be in !politics and asking the OP to cross-post them there. Do you think this is the best approach?
Personally, I think while “politics” is something that should be defined broadly, and almost all of those posts are political in some sense, it doesn’t really make sense to split those out into a different community. I think there’s a reasonably clear line between “party/parliamentary politics” and everything else. But there’s not between “politics in general” and everything else.
I guess I would flip it’s on it’s head and ask “What would be allowed in the NZ sub?” You’re really left with meme posts, personal stories, maybe entertainment (in some cases!) and things that are really very “light”. And also, it wouldn’t be clear a lot of the time whether something qualifies as “politics”.
One of the problems I had with r/nz (and some other subs) is that their rules got so strict, I basically gave up posting because chances are anything I posted would be deleted (sometimes when it didn’t actually break the rules, but the mods didn’t have time to look carefully at the post to decide if it did). It makes some sense to have more rules in a larger community, because otherwise you end up flooded with low effort posts or whatever. But here, if posts get locked/deleted/whatever, people are probably just not going to bother. Personally, I don’t want to have to think through a bunch of rules to decide where I post something, so in the end I’ll probably either post on another instance, or not post it at all.
Edit: to make it a bit clearer, and reference what others have mentioned, people are saying #1 and #4 are political, but #2 is not. But surely racism is a political issue, not to mention the international relations component (the boundaries of countries are largely drawn politically). I know people will argue against that, but it seems to me there’s also a pretty good argument that it is political.
Yeah I agree with @SamC.
To me, all the examples listed should be allowed on c/NZ and we should only enforce party politics/party policy/party attack discussions move to c/politics.
I’m with you on this: things to do directly with political parties and politicians go under politics, everything else under the more generic NZ.