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.