Yesterday, a discussion about race results in thread titles became quite heated, so I decided to lock the thread.
Personally, spoilers don’t bother me. If I can’t watch a race live, I stay off my phone entirely until I’ve caught up. Since results are everywhere: TV, radio, and all over social media, avoiding them is usually up to the individual.
The current spoiler rule was originally implemented by three moderators (myself included) as the community grew. However, I am now the only active mod left, and I don’t want to be the sole person deciding whether to change this policy. Even if we change the rule, there’s always a chance someone will post a result in their excitement, and I won’t always be available to remove it immediately.
I’ve created a poll to let the community decide. It will remain open until this Thursday:
https://strawpoll.com/bVg8BLRQ3yY
PS: I understand that disagreements can get intense, but please keep the conversation respectful. There’s enough negativity in the world already, let’s keep this community a positive place.
Edit: the results are in!
Rule number 3 will not be adjusted. Thanks for voting everyone!
My stance is along the lines of this: who are these posts for? We should always do things for a reason.
On the one side of the field we have a large number of people who want to watch races but can’t always watch them live. This is a confirmed and not insignificant group of people. Many of these people are active contributors and members of this (our) very community.
On the other side we have a nebulous and hypothetical group of strangers. This group does not want to watch races, but does sort of want to know who wins the races. But they also don’t want to put in any effort whatsoever to find out themselves. They don’t read the sports news. In fact, all they want is to be able to skim titles as they’re scrolling social media and find out without even having to open the post in question. That way they can be informed about who won the F1 race so they can participate in F1-related small talk in the office while simultaneously putting in the absolute minimum effort required to engage with the sport.
It’s all a matter of which of these groups we want to cater to.
I disagree with this reasoning. I don’t think we should be creating rules on the premise of “who are these posts for?”. First of all, we don’t know if there are people who want these posts or not. Most of the time you don’t know until it’s posted and even it’s not entirely clear. For example should we also ban posts about liveries or helmets? Very often they’re the lowest upvoted posts and very rarely does it spark a discussion. Using your argument there’s no reason for those posts to exists because it’s only catering to somekind of hypothetical group of strangers whose existence we can’t even verify. I don’t think livery or helmet posts should be banned. I might not upvote them nor comment on them but I do enjoy looking at the on occasions. In case of liveries and helmets I’m that hypothetical group of strangers. It’s not a question of “who is it for?” it’s a question of “do we as a community want these posts?” and when it comes to spoiling race winners I think the community overall will agree that we don’t want those posts.
That said, I voted Yes for an entirely different reason. I don’t like the wording of the question. I think it’s too ambiguous. What constitutes as a race result? If I post about Hadjar driving it into the wall, should that be banned? After all it very much spoils how Hadjars race went. We all have our favorite drivers and some of us definitely care more about how they did rather than who won. My wife doesn’t care about Antonelli winning, she only cares about where Verstappen ended up. So if the rule is about spoiling race results any post about a crash that DNFs the car should get banned. But I don’t think crash posts should also get banned because those can spark entire discussions. Bearmans crash is Suzuka was such a significant crash it changed the rules, but because it would break the rule we shouldn’t dedicate a discussion to it? I think the rule should be unambiguous and as such the question about implementing the rule should also be unambiguous. I don’t think all race results posts should be banned, I think race winner posts should be banned.
The question being too ambiguous is kind of with a reason. If the rule is implemented that you cannot spoil the race winner someone will work a way around it and post all results except the winner. That’s why the rule we have at the moment (browse at your own risk) is just less complicated.
I agree on the poll being ambiguous and maybe a rule could be enforced on marking with a spoiler tag posts including any info on the current/recent race.
I don’t understand your counter arguments, really. I never once brought up upvote counts or engagement. I don’t see the logic you’re purporting to draw from the helmets either. This is a community for F1. Helmets and liveries are a large part of that. Someone interested in F1 has a good chance to be at least curious about helm or livery design. I don’t understand how you got from there to thinking I would purport we ban helmet posts?
All I’m saying is: we know there is a significant part of our community that can’t watch races live, and would like to remain unspoiled so they can watch later. We can choose to do what we can to help these fans out and protect them, by electing to not include spoilers in post titles to the extent we are able without completely compromising the function of the sub at a whole. I’m not suggesting a news blackout, I’m not suggesting banning race clips or accidents or stuff like Hadjars crash. Yes, they are also spoilers but we can’t bend over backwards. This is only about whether or not we should include spoiler information about race winners in the title of a post.
We can also elect to just say “fuck em” to the people who can’t watch live. But I don’t think we should, and I don’t understand why we would go that route. What do we lose by having titles be spoiler free (eg: “Winner of the Miami Grand Prix!” with a blurred image)? To me it seems like we lose nothing, we don’t impose any particularly strenuous burdens on ourselves, but at the same time we might make a huge difference for some of our community members.
And that leads me back to the beginning of “who is this for?”. Who are we hurting by doing spoiler free titles? Who stands to benefit from the current status quo that would suffer by introducing spoiler free titles?
You said we should do things for a reason but you haven’t given a reason why we should do thing one way or another. You’ve only given your opinion disguised as a reason, which is also why it makes no sense to you when I replace your opinion with a different opinion and keep the disguise intact, it stops being your opinion so it stops making sense. Maybe this will make it clearer?
I can also flip it around and defend race win posts.
Any argument you give on why we should ban race win posts can most likely be used to argue for banning anything else and any argument you give why we shouldn’t ban something can most likely be used to argue why we shouldn’t ban race win posts. That’s because you’re presenting your opinion as the argument.