I'm late to the party but here's my tl;dr two cents:
Enforce a strict checklist for submissions to make sure overall submission quality is high, and sub is free of noise.
Trust janitors to weigh benefit versus noise and practice common sense with regards to highly upvoated posts.
Choose janitors carefully.
In more detail:
Noise is a problem, and currently a lot of it is being generated by careless friendlies rather than shills, which is why a set of rules consistently enforced is imperative.
But every once in a while, a well-thought-out, powerful submission will surface that only indirectly contributes to the investigation. Allowing those and drawing the line there is the way to go in my opinion. For example, a "this is how you can help with X" or a "reminder: we're losing focus of Y" post should be allowed in moderation (say, 1 out of 20 hot posts) if it adds value, but a not immediately relevant "this elite-related horrific thing is also happening" post should not. I'm under the impression that making the distinction here requires a human rather than a checklist, and that we should trust mods (or at least groups of mods, so we might require more than a single mod's vote) to remove or leave up this kind of content.
@kevdude, I can dedicate on average an hour or two of my time every day to the cause. Aiding a community comes naturally to me anyway. Please take a look at my track record.
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wecanhelp ago
I'm late to the party but here's my tl;dr two cents:
In more detail:
Noise is a problem, and currently a lot of it is being generated by careless friendlies rather than shills, which is why a set of rules consistently enforced is imperative.
But every once in a while, a well-thought-out, powerful submission will surface that only indirectly contributes to the investigation. Allowing those and drawing the line there is the way to go in my opinion. For example, a "this is how you can help with X" or a "reminder: we're losing focus of Y" post should be allowed in moderation (say, 1 out of 20 hot posts) if it adds value, but a not immediately relevant "this elite-related horrific thing is also happening" post should not. I'm under the impression that making the distinction here requires a human rather than a checklist, and that we should trust mods (or at least groups of mods, so we might require more than a single mod's vote) to remove or leave up this kind of content.
@kevdude, I can dedicate on average an hour or two of my time every day to the cause. Aiding a community comes naturally to me anyway. Please take a look at my track record.