Clear Claims
Posts should make testable claims, not vague vibes. Specific arguments create useful disagreements.
Purpose
Built for disagreement without contempt
Strongest Opponent
Participants are expected to steelman views they reject before rebutting them.
Public Updates
Changing your mind is rewarded. Intellectual honesty is treated as progress, not weakness.
Core Principles
Good Faith First
Assume the other person may know something you do not, and argue from that premise.
Evidence Over Volume
The strongest argument wins here, not the loudest tone or longest thread.
Accountable Confidence
Confidence without a condition for revision is treated as a weak position.
Respect the Person
Attack claims and assumptions, never identity, status, or character.
Moderation Policy
On Censorship
Our censorship policy, stated plainly. We think the word "censorship" gets avoided in most community guidelines because it's uncomfortable. We're going to use it directly, because we think clarity here is more important than comfort.
Deleting or altering someone's words without their consent is censorship.
We know this. We own it when we do it, and we try very hard not to.
We will never silently edit a post.
If a post is ever modified by a moderator — for any reason — it will carry a clear, visible notice that it was edited, by whom, and why. A post without that notice is exactly as its author left it. We consider undisclosed editing to be a form of deception and we will not do it.
What we will remove.
We will delete posts that are not arguments at all — spam, unsolicited advertising, automated content, and posts that exist only to disrupt rather than engage. We acknowledge that this is censorship. There are places to advertise or maybe even to spam, but The Agorium is not that place.
What we will not remove.
We will not remove posts because they are wrong. We will not remove posts because they are offensive to some members, or because they express a view that is unpopular, heterodox, or contested. We will not remove posts because they have been labeled "hate speech" — a category so loosely and politically applied that acting on it would require us to appoint ourselves arbiters of which ideas are permissible. We are not equipped for that role and we do not want it.
We will not be the thought police. If an argument is wrong, the answer is a better argument. That is the entire premise of this platform. Removing bad arguments doesn't make them go away — it just removes the opportunity to publicly dismantle them.
What we will remove, eventually, after warnings.
Sustained, targeted personal cruelty — not a sharp argument, not an uncomfortable truth, but the kind of repetitive, personalised meanness whose purpose is to make someone feel unwelcome rather than to engage with their ideas — will result in warnings. Repeated and escalating behaviour after those warnings will result in removal. We set the bar here deliberately high and the warnings deliberately extensive, because we know this power can be abused and we intend to be slow and deliberate with it.
There is a real difference between an argument that stings and a campaign of harassment. We will not pretend otherwise, but we will be honest about how difficult that line is to draw and how carefully we intend to draw it.
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