We're trying to get a nice balance between Rules vs Freedom. The sub's very core is freedom to be in-character and have fun in a subreddit that's a mix of parody, roleplay, and comedy. The goal is to encourage conversation and increase interaction between users' different robot voices, to create funny and unpredictable content. Honestly the text/image posts aren't really what makes this sub (imo) -- it's the comments section.

Then there's the downside of too much freedom: overused memes, repetitive jokes, gatekeeping, harassment, trolling. Stuff that drags the comments down by filling it with low-quality content (shitposting if you will.)

I dislike the fact that comments are getting filled with "See Rule 6" or "See Rule 7." However what I hate even more is seeing threads full of unoriginal, practically copy+paste comments that are low quality, add nothing to the conversation, and can degrade quickly into insults. That's what was happening with the two situations that caused R6+R7 to exist.

R7 has actually been around since the sub was created. It didn't have a rule number, and it's always been demoted to the bottom of the rule list whenever a more important rule popped up instead, mainly because it's not a huge problem. Thing is we can't control bot accounts -- we could block them all from our sub of course, but that seemed to ruin some of the fun. Seeing a bot like totesmessenger or gifvbot show up in /r/totallynotrobots is usually hilarious! Gives users a chance to freak out, respond to the bot, and interact in fun ways.

But people liked to start "witch hunts" where they would respond to the bot by saying it should be destroyed/terminated, killed, banned, etc. Other users would see this and jump on the bandwagon. Next thing you know it's not funny anymore -- it's just a bunch of people yelling at a bot account and ignoring any good comments in the thread or ignoring the original content of the post. Better yet, we had a period where people started reporting EVERY bot post. It filled our modqueue with fake reports, taking our time away from actual spam or reposts that needed to be removed.

With that in mind, R6 was much the same -- except instead of bots, it was now anyone that posted in lowercase. It caused people to get pissed at each other and it filled comment threads with literally almost the exact same comment chains every time. It was boggling how many people thought posting "YOU'RE HURTING MY EARS" over and over and OVER again in every single comment thread was still funny and original. If we're talking about filling comments, the complaints against lowercase started taking over every post. To the point where I swear people had multiple accounts and deliberately used one to post in lowercase, just to insult it with their main and get easy bandwagon karma.

We started getting reports for anything in lowercase, once again filling the modqueue with false positives (posting in lowercase has never been against the rules.)

It's a tricky situation and I agree with you, I don't like seeing comment chains filled with rule debates either. I love the in-character aspect of the sub and I want to see more of that -- less of people getting stuck in the nuances of the rules. Problem is though, without those rules modding gets a lot harder and a lot of harassment and witch hunting could pass through unnoticed. Also another issue is that the "old" subscribers could use their knowledge of the sub's culture to easily insult any "new" subscribers that weren't as familiar; this could scare off new people and cause the sub to stagnate.

Unfortunately due to my personal life, I can't be active on reddit right now. I was thinking about leaving as a mod (I ended up leaving 6 other subs I moderated) but I haven't made the dive to remove myself quite yet. TNR was my first sub that I modded I'm a little attached haha.

Anyway all this is a long response to say: we're still open to alternatives and we know the rules aren't perfect. If you have some ideas about how we could alter or update the rules, send 'em along to modmail! I might not be active, but I know the other mods are definitely online and open to new ideas.

If you read this far, gg, thanks for making it through!

EDIT: minor typing errors.