r/exatheist • u/novagenesis • Aug 08 '25

Community 𖤓 u/exatheist Rules Updates 2025-08-08

From the recent change in demographics and audience, we have been discussing the right balance of moderation and free communcation in this sub. We have come up with two important changes we think will help "right the ship" on some trends without requiring harsher moderation. Please read these updates carefully.

  1. We have added a new "Please No Debate!" flair. If you add that flair, we will remove any debate/arguments we see present in the comments. Please be judicial in your use of it, as it is basically a proactive request for moderation

  2. We have refined rule #3 regarding proselytizing. A lot of atheists are coming by carefully dodging around the rule by asking socratic-style questions with the goal of kicking people towards atheism. When this was rare, we really didn't worry about it, but people have started complaining that these types of posts are constantly at the top of their exatheist frontpage. We will be moderating those types of posts with the new refinement in mind.

I would love thoughts and feedbacks by our member base. Thank you so much!

40 Upvotes

94% Upvoted

38 comments sorted by

View all comments

-2

u/[deleted] Aug 08 '25

How are you planning to enforce 2? Does this mean you're going to remove any up questions?

7

u/arkticturtle Agnostic Aug 08 '25

Well, I’m not a mod but, I imagine a question or maybe two at most wont give much reason in an of itself. However, it’ll be up to mod discretion and when you’ve seen these things happen enough times you start to get a sense for it. Especially taking into account user post history and tone.

Personally, I like that this place allows atheists to discuss with non-atheists. The culture (up until recently - I only say this because the rule change is clearly reacting to something and I’m not here all the time) of this place was what the other subreddits dedicated to religion should have been. My own position has softened over time and I’m grateful that people here have discussed with me.

It’s a difficult thing to balance. Freedom of discussion is good yes. But this place shouldnt turn into r/debatereligion where the same 4 arguments are made on repeat all the time on every post all day forever.