Hello everyone!
As some astute readers have noticed, we are now having people self-select how well versed you personally feel you are in the topics discussed on this site.
You can change your selected experience level at any time by visiting https://discuss.privacyguides.net/my/preferences/profile, and this setting will slightly change your experience on this forum:
What’s new: The “Please ELI5” tag
In the Questions category, we have a new please-eli5 tag you can select when posting a new question. The intent of this tag is to indicate to readers that you may not have full background knowledge in the topic you’re asking about.
When you see this tag on a question, you are encouraged to:
- Not make assumptions about a person’s knowledge
- Not use acronyms or jargon that outsiders wouldn’t recognize
- Provide background context and explain the why behind your answer
- Explain core concepts in simple terms (for example, you could use analogies)
You are not expected to withhold information you think would be “too difficult” for someone to do, if it is the correct answer to their question.
You should avoid turning these questions into debates about things which are commonly debated by “privacy community insiders,” or veering off topic. People who consistently are unable to be respectful and courteous to our beginner members will be asked by the team to refrain from answering these please-eli5 questions in the future, at our discretion.
In the near future, we will make changes to make this tag more visually prominent on questions, and will give people replying to these questions an automatic reminder of these guidelines.
Questions posted by people who self-select as “beginners” will have this tag added automatically to all questions, because I would not expect a beginner to be the most well versed in our forum’s tagging system. At this time, this is the only automated action taken based on your personal experience level selection.
If you selected intermediate or advanced you can still choose to add this tag to questions you post, optionally, because we are not all experts in every field.
What else: Self-selected experience levels
If you click a profile picture on this forum and the user has self-selected an experience level, this will be displayed on the pop-up card.
Note we did not let people self-select a term like “expert” and left it to a more neutral “advanced” instead, because these claims are a reflection of how you would like to be treated by others on the forum, not an indication of your skill level. You can use these terms on other people’s profiles to judge how you want to address them.
Noteworthy people in the privacy space will continue to be marked as @verified, @developers, @media, @brands, etc. through a separate verification process by the team.
One additional benefit is that those who select “beginner” can optionally choose a Beginner title to be displayed next to their usernames on posts. You can select an option from your available titles in your settings at https://discuss.privacyguides.net/my/preferences/account
A new title is not available for those who choose intermediate or advanced, because our existing forum titles like Regular, Helper, etc. are more informative for non-beginner users.
What is not planned
At this time, choosing intermediate or advanced has no bearing on your forum experience whatsoever, and I do not expect we will create private forum sections “for only advanced users” or anything like this. The value of this community is derived from having all of these discussions publicly in the open, so closing off discussions to an inside/elite group of “advanced” users is not in the cards at this time.
We reserve the right to do something with these two other levels in the future, but for now they are again essentially an indication of how you would like to be spoken to on this forum.
Additionally, I do not have plans to add a please-eli5 to any other section besides Questions for now, and I hope that our other discussions can generally be guided a bit by “beginner” terminology and notes on user profile cards without needing an explicit please-eli5 tag on other topics, but if we see areas where we can further improve the experience for beginners in the future we may consider expanding this a bit.
