Whenever there’s a controversial thread, we see freshly created accounts (likely made by people coming from Xitter/Reddit) “contributing” with low-quality, often inflammatory posts (most recent example being this thread, of course).
These posts are quickly flagged by the community, but a) this is work we could spare ourselves b) before that happens, the posts have a chance to fan the flames.
My proposal here is to use Discourse’s “trust levels” for specific threads, so that new accounts have the time to familiarize themselves with the general culture of the forum, before they jump straight into one of the controversies.
The gate-keeping could be either on account age, or on number of contributions. Each has its benefits, although I’d probably prefer the former cause it allows long-time lurkers to chime in.
The TL;DR: is that I think we lose nothing of value by implementing this policy: we add a requirement for non-malicious new accounts to take their time before they dive into a controversy, while sparing ourselves the work of dealing with low-effort drive-by comments and malicious, social media fueled pile ons.
Sounds like a idea worth trying out. I just need to find the time to check it out what levers need to be moved. Not sure I will have time for that in the very near future. Feel free to remind me in the coming days or jump into a call with me to help me implement it
I did a quick search, and Discourse probably can’t do this out of the box (though if it can you’d have to look in the Category permissions for it), but I’ve found this plugin which looks like it does that Discourse Restricted Replies - Plugin - Discourse Meta
Maybe this could be used for any discussion with slow mode too? Since slow mode is already used on topics that might attract unwanted attention. It seems a bit too easy to be able to circumvent slow mode by just making new accounts.
I think putting an equivalent restriction on meta discussion is also a good idea. Maybe people don’t post in here that much compared to announcement though ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
What about restricting new users from heart-reacting and flagging in the same threads they can’t post in? I noticed people creating accounts just to heart-react (and therefore probably also attempt to flag others). Seems like that’s just another way of abusing the system, and showing fake support to certain posts.
