Hello /r/AskHistorians users! Recently the moderation team has agreed to a small change in our content policy.
It is already the case on AskHistorians that we remove comments with offensive, hateful or bigoted content, and in many cases we dispense summary bans to users who post bigoted comments on the subreddit. Going forward, we will also be banning user accounts with hateful, bigoted, or offensive usernames. We decided that it didn't make sense to remove comments that contained racial or misogynistic slurs, while letting comments stay when the username of the poster contained a hateful or misogynistic slur. We've been monitoring user names like that in the subreddit for some time, and we've found that they are fairly rare.
Keep in mind that this policy is about the content of the subreddit, not the users themselves. If you made the decision to name your user account after a racial or misogynistic slur, you're welcome to post on the subreddit with a different account - as long as you continue to abide by the subreddit rules.
Feel free to post questions about this policy in the comments to this post, if you have any.
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Good show! It's not like anyone who gets banned under this policy can't just make a new account with an un-offensive name. This harms no one while raising the tone of the conversation considerably.
This is a good idea, I think. People can philosophise all they like about what constitutes an offensive username, but I think it's clear that excluding bigoted or derogatory terminology of any type in a sub dedicated to sensible and amicable discourse is pretty obviously a good thing.
That sort of language (misogynistic, racist, or just stupidly profane, etc.) doesn't have a place here - if people with poorly-chosen usernames still want to contribute, reddit makes it very easy to set up separate accounts.
I'm curious as to where the line of hateful and misogynistic is drawn. What about usernames that suggest something graphically violent or sexual? It seems like a slippery slope to be honest. Where I might draw the line could be very different to where you would draw it.
Edit: It also seems very open to interpretation. People are offended by different things.
Just a lurker, never a poster (since I'm not a historian); just wanted to say you guys are awesome moderators.
Is my user name alright? I feel like there is going to be a lot of ambiguous cases.
Are the moderators going to rest easy with a simple purge of blatantly offensive user names ? Will they form a panel of experts to ferret out the usernames of those who think they are "to cool for the room" by using a long dead historical language like Etruscan or Hurrian to form a username that would shake the sensibilities of polite society ?