Daily Bard Digest 2024-07-11

At 07/11/24 10:06:09 in ModSupport with a score of 1 point:

You should only be making rules that are in your capability to spot violations of, and enforce.

Since you can't see who is blocking whom, you can't spot those violations, and so can't enforce that rule.

Blocking is a form of maintaining personal boundaries.

Telling people that — if they want to participate in your community, they're not allowed to have personal boundaries — that is you using your stewardship of that community to manipulate the community members. It's deindividuation, which some cultures don't accept, and is behaviour that is likely to make some people leave the conversation.

Also, blocking is a sitewide / systemic feedback mechanism for sitewide moderation, providing a number of systems with a hard signal that specific behaviours are a hard rules violation, and so helping with enforcement of sitewide rules.

And, finally, it's used by some people to protect themselves from stalkers and harassers, and you cannot tell people that they must put up with stalkers and harassers to use a Reddit community.

So, as per the User Agreement:

You may create and enforce rules for the subreddits you moderate, provided that such rules do not conflict with these Terms, the Content Policy, or the Moderator Code of Conduct.

Your proposed subreddit rule seems to conflict with the user agreement / moderator code of conduct, so you should not set it as a rule.

You should think about what you are trying to accomplish with the rule, what problems it is supposed to solve, and what other ways those problems and goals can be addressed.