Aotearoa / New Zealand

What about if !politics is used for government-related posts.

Teachers negotiating with government, policy changes for surgeons out of the control of the surgeons themselves, ETS, parliament protest, RNZ tankie issue (not related to our government but fully political in it's own right), these would go in !politics.

All Whites abuse, teacher being a dick, migrant workers being exploited, Mongrel Mob charges - these would go in !newzealand as their relationship to the government is not central to the article.

I also hear concern about the lock-and-crosspost idea. Perhaps when it's not black and white, this is an encouraged split rather than an enforced one?

Those are all politics.

But, 4 months out from an election, pretty much every single post in !newzealand is going to be politics. There's no way to fight that, for now.

I think it will be exceedingly difficult to separate out any news from politics in this country.

I think almost any news coverage can be politicised in the comments, especially with the level of polarisation and discontent in NZ, and the scale of social issues currently in the media spotlight.

I would consider all of the examples posted to be relevant to current affairs, and not necessarily politics focused (though I concede comments on them would likely stray into political debate almost immediately).

Politics to me should be more scoped to stuff like "David Seymour says ", "PM Hipkins talks to us about " etc.

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.

IMHO none of those are political.

Maybe #5 at a push.

Bear in mind, saying "I don't want to discuss politics" is a political position, it's an active endorsement of the status quo.

Honestly I'm just stoked that there's this much engagement and consideration going on in this community I love it! Personally I'm not worried if political posts end up in here but I do think encouraging them to be in !politics makes a lot of sense

Yes, totally agreed. I'm personally not interested in political posts so it's good to have them separate.

Apologies in advance: I've only just arrived so I don't know if my input is desired, but also I've seen some requests for more engagement and less lurking so I'm taking the risk.

Could someone explain what the up and down arrows on posts are for? I assumed it worked similar to Reddit or Quora: on the posts it's for things you want to see more or less of, and on the replies and discussion it's for saying this does or does not contribute to discussion.

If that's the case, posts that people don't want to see should be "downvoted" and we shouldn't take it as malice or being unwelcomed, but more that this doesn't fit the culture we are trying to build for this community specifically, maybe it would be more welcome in another community on the instance, or in another instance.

Again I could be wrong on how this all works, so please do tell me!

Purely from a scaling point of view, it would seem to be a bad idea to split up content and discussion further when there isn't a population to support that level of division.. but I understand the desire to ensure that the content appeals to the widest audience possible to try to grow that population. If it doesn't work like I assumed above, then maybe we could have a simple more/less poll on posts to say if we want to see more or less of this type of content?

As for these specific posts, many don't seem overtly political to me. Political in my mind is more about elections and the drama of all that, rather than the actual legislation and decisions that drive that.. we live in a society, so the rules that govern us and the way we pool our resources is something we certainly should encourage discussion around.

That's just my opinion, happy to lurk more if that's requested!

Honestly, I'm happy your doing a the work here and not me.

I am happy for you to take an approach that suits you.

In saying that, my preference would be to not split communities too early.

The NZ instance here is small and not very active (compared to reddit). Spreading the content across multiple communities makes it so that I have to check multiple communities that all have very low activity.

This makes it difficult to engage.

My thoughts, for what it's worth

• 1, 5, 8, 9 [email protected] but may have general interest
• 2, 6, [email protected]
• 3, 4, 7 not sure on, but probably general interest

I think the lock and x-post is probably the best solution at the moment, it does mean that I don't have to subscribe to [email protected] but will see the posts if I want to read more

For me I don't mind too much where politics content goes and it's often a blurry line, but I think part of that can sometimes be because people often come into things wanting to make the discussion political. That's often going to make it difficult to categorise.

Race relations and crime are both recent examples of this. They attract people who are sometimes tempted to use anything vaguely connected as an excuse to state their political views on those topics, and provoke political discussions, rather than necessarily talk about the content of the post.

One simple thing would be to disallow cross-posting. If !politics finds it interesting, people can go there to read it.

If something that seems apolitical turns into a political discussion, then perhaps it could be moved there? It’s important not to underestimate people’s desire not to read about politics, so erring on being too restrictive is fine in my mind. If it annoys people, tell them to post to !politics. I suspect a good number of people will just be subscribed to both.

Finally, I think you can find some fine lines by reviewing the articles that are posted. Anything about party politics or elections or politicians/parties criticising each other is politics. Luxon and Chippy commenting on flooding is different than them throwing even mild barbs at each other.

By reading only the headlines you posted it’s hard to judge. A moderator is going to need to review them.

I do have lots of thoughts on moderation as well as a lot of outdated experience. I’d be happy to share but when I’ve shared to em on /r/nz, people are generally pretty shitty to me about it. I think a lot of people like being able to shout at others and personally attack them so any threat to that is viewed poorly.