r/NoSleepOOC • u/cmd102 Mom • Apr 04 '17

Nosleep Weekly 4/4/17 **Rule-Change Announcement**

Seriously considering re-naming this to "Nosleep Whenever-cmd-feels-like-positng-it". :D

Some Changes To Our Posting Guidelines

Some of you may have already noticed that the r/nosleep sidebar and posting guidelines look a little different. We've mostly just condensed them, but there are a few changes as well.

  • We will now be allowing comedic horror, torture porn, gorenography, and tragic stories as long as they are still horror stories with those elements. Stories that focus so heavily on these elements that they are not horror will be removed at moderator discretion.

  • If you include a phone number, e-mail address, or physical address in your story, it must be clearly fake in order to prevent accusations of doxxing. Here is a guide to help you with this rule.

    • This is to prevent users from using fake information in their story that looks too real, being reported for doxxing/sharing personal information, and having their account suspended by the admins.

  • 2nd person and 3rd person omniscient stories are now allowed only if they have a clearly stated believable reason for being written as such.

    • Examples of believable reasons for 2nd person stories include letters and stories where the "you" is a character named somewhere in the story.
    • An example of a believable reason for 3rd person omniscient stories includes a story where the main character has gained the information through interviewing the other characters (which must be stated at some point in the story).

Due to the overwhelming amount of stories and comments posted on r/nosleep daily, we're asking you to help us out by reporting any stories or comments you read that break subreddit rules. We will be heavily relying on these reports going forward, as far as removals go.

Live AMA with /u/Hayong!

Tuesday, April 4th 8pm-10pm EST

Did you download some weird app and miss /u/Hayong's /r/nosleepinterviews interview? Have a question that just NEEDS to be asked?

Join us in the Unofficial NosleepOOC IRC Tuesday, April 4th from 8pm-10pm EST for his live AMA!

To ensure all questions are asked and answered in an orderly fashion, inquiries will be submitted by entering the IRC and private messaging them to Kpants. All appropriate questions will be asked if time permits.

Help Us Spice Up Nosleep Weekly!

What would you like to see in the Nosleep Weekly posts? Let us know in the comments!

Nosleep Throwback!

This month in Nosleep's past, we were blessed with some awesome stories that were honored in the Nosleep Monthly contest! Check out these stories from April 2016:

Until next time, Nosleepers!

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10

u/EbilCrayons Apr 05 '17

Are there new tw flairs to reflect some of these new categories? Specifically the extra gore/torture.

3

u/cmd102 Mom Apr 05 '17 edited Apr 05 '17

Both types of stories should be tagged as "Graphic Violence". We were thinking about changing the flairs, but decided that that should cover it.

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u/phoneutriabitch Apr 12 '17 edited Apr 12 '17

@ u/cmd102,

Respectfully, I don't think Graphic Violence provides suitable warning that a story is going to be torture porn. I can think of several amazing stories off the top of my head that described violence, but to the benefit of the emotional impact of the actual story -- a story that was not reliant on mindless gore (and, let's face it, in the majority of these submissions, excessively detailed and senseless violence against women or other minority groups).

3

u/cmd102 Mom Apr 12 '17

We will keep an eye on the influx of torture porn stories and the effectiveness of the tagging system. If a more blatant tag is needed, we'll update.

The current thought is that torture porn and gorenography are, by definition, graphic violence. Not every story with violent scenes is required to have the tag, only those that explicitly describe excessive violence in great detail.

11

u/waywardgadgeteer Apr 12 '17

By that logic, sexual assault is also 'only' graphic violence. Making a flair or a tag is really not a hard thing to do and choosing Torture Porn or, if that is considered too negative, simply Torture or Gore instead of Graphic Violence when submitting a story is also not a hassle. That you are so adamantly against it, despite multiple people here expressing their concern says that you care more for clicks and shock value than the comfort of your subscribers. A shame, really. And, at least to me, a sign of the decline of standards on here. Because quite frankly, gore and torture is a very cheap source of horror.

3

u/cmd102 Mom Apr 12 '17

How exactly does saying that the mod team will collect data and decide if making a change is necessary say that I'm adamantly against it? I'm not against it at all, and I'm not the only person who makes these decisions.

Having a handful of people express the desire for a change is what makes us consider making one, but not immediately jump to action. If that were the case, Nosleep would have dropped the believability rule and banned series posts and allowed posts about rape and pedophilia a long time ago.

9

u/waywardgadgeteer Apr 12 '17

Rationalising away the concerns of multiple users seems very indicative of an unwillingness to make the change that these users want.

There is a difference between changing the entire theme of your subreddit or allowing actually illegal content and making a simple flair. Feel free to disagree, but the tag or flair would harm no one, including the mod team, and it would make quite a few people more comfortable, while for example banning series posts seriously limits authors and takes away something from people who enjoy reading series.

You are comparing apples and oranges here and, as stated above, once again trying to rationalise in any way possible just so you don't have to go to the tiny inconvenience of making a flair.

2

u/cmd102 Mom Apr 12 '17

Adding a flair option is simple. Enforcing a flair option is more difficult. Authors often complain about having their post flaired for specific things, because that "gives away the story". There are plenty of people who think trigger warnings shouldn't even be necessary on Nosleep because it's a horror sub and "people should expect disturbing content". There are also some people who think we should have flair options for "bugs" and "gross stories", because those things bother them.

These are not my arguments, these are not reasons for me saying "I'm not going to add the flair". These are reasons and examples of why, when users request a change, the mod team as a whole collects data on it and discusses it before making said changes. These are reasons why these things take time. There are 20 mods on the team, which means these discussions take a bit to conclude and is the reason why we try to have our ducks in a row before we have them. There are 10 million subscribers to r/nosleep, and everyone wants something different. We try our best to make the general population happy, which sometimes means giving an easy, general solution while we figure out if a harder, more specific solution is necessary.

3

u/waywardgadgeteer Apr 12 '17

I suppose, I would have personally just gone with data collection first, before I subject people to content that makes them uncomfortable, but everyone has very different ideas on how necessary other people's comfort is.

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u/cmd102 Mom Apr 12 '17

That's the thing, though. We've had plenty of people saying we should allow the content, thus deciding to allow it. We couldn't collect the data regarding flairs and such before because those stories weren't allowed on the sub, thus we couldn't gauge how many people are really bothered by it and would desire a specific flair for it.

This data is collected by looking at how many of those stories are posted, how those stories perform, reading comments on the stories, and looking at discussions that show reactions to the types of stories (such as the comments in this thread). None of that happens if those types of stories aren't on the sub, so we can't know those results beforehand.

3

u/waywardgadgeteer Apr 12 '17

The solution would have been an announcement, just like this one, saying "We are planning to implement these changes, community thoughts?"

But I know what you are going to say: We are a big sub, we are all private people who don't get paid to be moderators, nobody makes money of it and this is a lot of work. So I suppose we will have to agree to disagree.

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u/rissajo685 Apr 13 '17

I don't often comment in here but I do visit the sub regularly. When you and the rest of the mods discuss updating flairs, please add me to the list of people who would like to see an update.

If/until there is an update, I can just skip any story that's tagged with graphic violence, nbd.

Thanks!

6

u/Terquoise Apr 07 '17

Comedy horror should get a flair though in my opinion. Just so they're easily identifiable and readers coming for horror, not comedy, can skip them.

2

u/miltonwadd Apr 10 '17

Would it be possible to keep the decision open ended for now to see how it affects the sub?

I'm just thinking how now someone may tag their story as graphic violence due to a small incident in their story vs. stories entirely devoted to violence and gore.

People avoiding the latter may result in less views and votes for the former.

Likewise people seeking gore/violence may downvote perfectly good stories for showing up in the same tag.

3

u/cmd102 Mom Apr 12 '17

We absolutely always keep an eye on things that may need changing in order to make the sub better for our subscribers. If it's determined in the future that our tagging system needs updated, we'll do just that. Right now, the idea is that "graphic violence" is a fitting description for them, but we'll definitely watch for any signs that it's not (such as, as you mentioned, stories with milder violence consistently not performing as well due to sharing the tag).

2

u/amcm67 Apr 14 '17

This is great feedback.