Following the last "What's the purpose of this sub?" post - thank you for your contributions - we've spent the past while rebuilding how moderation works on r/southafrica. The goal was simple: make the sub easier to understand, both for users posting here and for the moderators making calls. The old rules grew over time as reactions to specific problems, and the result was a framework that was hard to navigate, inconsistent in places, and harder to apply fairly than it should have been. Everything below is live now. The full detail lives in the wiki; this post is the short version of what's changed and why. The headline changes Six rules instead of many. The sidebar now has six top-level rules in plain language, along with a wiki page that explains what the rule covers, what it doesn't cover, and why it exists. The rules are: attack ideas not people post and comment honestly keep it South African flair your post don't spam or shorten or survey without asking, and Reddit's site-wide rules apply. The full rules wiki has the long form. The rules sit on top of community principles We wrote down what this sub is and what it believes: Eight principles covering things like frustration is welcome but dehumanisation isn't, the sub is as good as its people, and we're not obligated to host every conversation. The principles wiki is where this lives. Each rule names which principle it serves, so when a moderation call gets challenged, you can see what the rule is actually trying to protect. More permissive defaults A lot of the old framework was about prevention through removal - auto-removing content from new accounts, low-karma users, anything mentioning certain topics. Most of those gates have been softened or retired. The default for borderline content is now let it through and let the community sort it out, with downvotes and engagement doing more of the work. Removals are reserved for clear rule violations. One ask: The downvote button is not a disagree button. Downvote what you feel doesn't add to the conversation. Upvote what you feel does - even if you don't agree with the opinion in it. Fewer flairs Down from twenty-five to thirteen. The duplicates are gone, the niche ones got folded into broader categories, and a few were retired because they didn't earn their place. The full canonical set is in the flair wiki. Things you'll notice as a user Politics is back as a user-assignable flair Politics has been mod-only for some time because the flair attracted low-quality soapboxing more than substantive political conversation. We're reopening it because the new rules - particularly Rule 1's handling of coded language and dog-whistles - can now do the work the old framework couldn't. Politics submissions and comments will have higher community-standing requirements than the rest of the sub. Most established users won't notice; very new accounts or accounts with limited engagement history will see their Politics content held for moderator review. If you're caught by the filter and you shouldn't be, message the mods and we'll sort it. Reposts are no longer removable. If something has been posted before, the community handles it through downvotes and ignoring it. Mod removal of reposts was inconsistent and the new framework asks the community to carry that weight rather than us. The Maintaining Quality section of the rules wiki explains the broader thinking on what rules cover and what voting handles. Twitter/X links and other reservoirs of misinformation remain blocked. This isn't changing. X content is unmoderated and frequently misleading, and we're not hosting it as a primary source. If a story matters, it'll be reported somewhere with editorial accountability, and that's the link to share. New removal messages. If your content is removed, the message will tell you which specific rule applied, what the issue was, and what to do next - repost with corrections, message the mods, or use the appeals process. The old messages were essentially boilerplate; the new ones do real work. Apartheid denialism is still non-negotiable. This hasn't changed and won't. Rule 1.2 covers it explicitly. The principles wiki explains why we treat this as a non-grey-area. A new News - Paywall flair If the article you're sharing is behind a paywall, pick News - Paywall instead of News - it lets other users see at a glance whether they'll hit a paywall when they click. We don't enforce this. No penalty either way. Does anyone have an idea how to automate this? Please let us know. What's coming next This is Phase 1 of a longer project. The next phases are about building a moderation rubric that operationalises the rules consistently, then testing it against real content, then bringing in LLM assistance to help with assessment at scale. None of that replaces human moderation - the goal is to make moderation more consistent, not less human. We'll write more about each phase as it lands. In the meantime, the new framework is more permissive in places where the automated tooling isn't fully in place yet. We've made that trade deliberately. If something feels off about how the sub is being moderated, tell us through modmail, through the appeals process, or in the comments here. What we want from you Read the rules, principles, and flair wiki pages when you have a moment. They're the canonical version of how this sub works now, and they're written to be readable rather than legalese. If something in them seems wrong, broken, or out of step with what the sub should be, tell us. The principles and rules are community documents, and feedback that comes through is part of how they stay honest. Comments on this post are open. We'll engage with substantive feedback. If you spot a specific contradiction, an unclear case, or a moderation pattern you think the new framework gets wrong, that's exactly what we want to hear about. Thanks!   submitted by   /u/lovethebacon [link]   [comments]