The Prisoner’s Dilemma. Two criminals in cahoots, caught by the cops, divided by one deal. Confess, condemn your comrade, and escape scott-free; or stay silent and serve a seven-year sentence. One catch – if they both confess and condemn the other, they both get twenty years.   In comment sections, you can build a cooperative community for discussing ideas. But there’s a lot of short-term incentives to break community norms to express frustration, mock someone, or push back at an idea. If it happens too often, it cascades, and we lose the community. We lose to Prisoner’s Dilemma. But the set-up can be beat by the mob boss: let snitches get stitches and then there are no benefits to betrayal. Create stable communities with predictable consequences.

So here are the Mob Rules:

• Violence, harassment, doxxing or threats of/incitement to any of the above are absolutely forbidden
  Everyone has a right to their physical safety and privacy here. If you wish to comment, you’re participating in a conversation, not attempting to shut it down. Any of the above will warrant an instant ban and potential reporting to the nation-specific relevant authorities if we feel it is warranted.

• Civil blood makes civil hands unclean
  Slurs and major pejoratives are out. You may disagree with an argument, but you’re still dealing with a fellow human being. If you think someone is being a deliberately unpleasant person, contact the mods. Even if you hate everything a commentator stands for, linguistically spilling their blood still makes your hands unclean.
  (Consequences: banning for slurs; warnings or short bans for other personal attacks.)

• Swearing
  Don’t swear at people, and don’t swear at their personal ideas – always try to be charitable about people’s motivations. More detail is always helpful. When tempted to swear, it may be better to say exactly why and how you disagree.
  (Consequence: warning if it gets excessive)

• Be ready to cite a source, and please indicate your level of uncertainty or mention areas of major disagreement – e.g. with regards to facts, arguments, and hypotheses.
  If we find that you’re recklessly spreading misinformation we will give you a warning. Comment removals will be used on anything we feel is dangerous (e.g. incitement to violence).

• Try to add to the discourse instead of shutting people out of it.
  If we judge that you’re making a conversation uncomfortable (major criterion: has someone asked you to tone it down?) we will give you a warning.

Addendum by Ethan (2023):

Anti-Spam Policy (Comments and Registrations)

Hi everyone! For some reason, the website keeps dealing with a lot of spam. Or maybe this is simply a normal amount of spam for a website, and I’m not used to it?

A lot of the spam comments seem to be an attempt to manipulate search engine/website verification results by adding a link to their nonsense on their username, making it appear as if we’ve linked to their rubbish. Let me extend Rebekah’s cop metaphor above to explain my policy for dealing with such attempts:

If you live in a Western country with a functioning judiciary/legal system, one very common feature is that any evidence obtained illegally cannot be used in a court of law. Which can seem strange, right? I mean, if you’ve already got the evidence, why not use it and deal with the issue of its illegal acquisition separately?

The reason – incentives. If you allow evidence acquired through such methods to be used, it can be very easy for sufficiently-motivated (or mistaken) law enforcement officials to decide that catching this one “criminal” is worth the penalties, even becoming willing to ‘martyr’ their career to do so. The only way to clearly disincentivize such practices is to ban the use of any evidence collected through illegal methods altogether, even if it means letting a few guilty people go.

To bring this back to websites and spam – our analogous policy is very simple:

Any website domains which has attempts made to promote it by spamming this website will be PERMANENTLY BANNED. No ifs, ands, or buts.

I don’t care if you think such tactics are a necessary evil to get started/compete and you promise to drop them after you get bigger.

I don’t care if you claim to not know about it or that it was done by someone else.

I don’t care if the website later becomes the new Facebook or YouTube; I will continue to ban all links to and (where possible) from it.

Even if it hurts this (relatively small) website’s traffic/reach etc. Sometimes, it’s important to enforce lose-lose outcomes in order to obtain better outcomes overall.

All such websites will also be reported to spam databases such as Spamhaus, Stop Forum Spam etc.

I may choose to make very limited exceptions to this policy for websites whose purpose is to store text, or cases where spammers link to profiles/pages on larger forums/platforms. However, if I keep getting spam from one or more particular websites in this category, they will probably end up banned as well.