Agreed. I'm learning that the use of the word "positive" on our homepage may not be conveying quite what we had envisioned, and maybe we'll need to change it. (Hey, everyone learns.)

We absolutely don't think Imzy should be a place where people can only say nice things and anything negative gets removed. That defeats the point of talking at all.

Our vision is that communities enrich people's lives in a positive way. That doesn't mean every comment, post, or discussion is positive. It means that I come away a better, more informed person from the discussions I have, or maybe I just enjoy my time there.

What that means is that harassment that makes people unhappy, fear for their lives, or feel like they can't participate isn't okay. But disagreement and even voicing opinions that are very unfavorable can still exist. We all become better people when we can share our own perspectives and hear the perspectives of others. Otherwise you end up with an echo chamber.

Hope that helps explain our thinking. I'm happy to elaborate further if you have any questions.

Thank you! Cautiously excited. Hopefully the moderation tools will be excellent:

- Private groups, for anonymity.

- Maybe limit upvoting privilege (to certain users?), if it's used in a strange attack.

That's something we're making a huge priority--to give our community leaders a really awesome experience to be able to do everything they need or want to. We've built the whole platform to be as flexible as possible so that communities can exist and have the function the way they need to (or build it using our developer platform if it's not there), and a big part of having healthy communities is allowing the leaders to manage their communities well.

There are definitely private communities! We also allow you to have different usernames in the different communities you participate in to partition your identity if you need to be anonymous, or post anonymously when you need to, all from one account, so you don't have to have throwaways and create different accounts just to be able to manage your privacy and online identity.

So will you allow neo-Nazis, white nationalists, misogynists, and other bigots to spread their bigoted views on your site? Because if you do, it's gonna turn into Voat.

When you say misogyny, do you mean sexism or are you saying that sexism toward men is ok?

If you mean sexism, are you using this term to imply that sexism is only directed at women?

Heavy moderation also creates a meritocracy where reputable users who post a lot will have their content passed through the filter seamlessly and new contributors will be walled off completely in order to support the status quo. Let's not forget reddit has a deep history of moderator abuse.

I think that's one of the biggest problems on reddit: There's no way to remove moderators, and so subs can easily be subverted by having a small group of bad actors enter the mod team, or just having the mods get burnt out.

Also Minor thing: I think you guys are taking about r/Askhistorians, not r/Askhistory

>There's no way to remove moderators

Of course there is. Any moderator can be removed by another moderator higher on the list. There's just no way for non-moderators to hold a coup d'état and remove moderators they don't like.

Imo AskHistory can be boring as hell because of the heavy-handed moderation. I get the effect that they're going for, and it works, but it's frustrating to go into an interesting topic to see every comment deleted and a mod warning at the top.

And they take their rules to the point of absurdity. I've seen many occasions where a commenter had direct personal experience with the event being asked about, and provided proof they were whom they said they were, but their comment was still deleted because "no personal anecdotes."

It's AskHistory, not AskForPersonalAnecdotes. History has the advantage of multiple personal anecdotes being cross-checked and compiled into a more or less reliable account. A personal anecdote may be interesting but not representative of anything.

> The quality of the subreddit is directly proportional to the moderation. The Ask subreddits (/r/AskHistory, /r/AskScience) are consistently cited for having high quality due to actual, transparent enforcement of the rules.

/r/AskHistorians is an Ask subreddit with strong and active moderation and has high quality.