Hello, very smart and cute VOGONS community members. This is a notice that the VOGONS terms of use and privacy policy have been revised. If you continue to post here, you agree to follow these revised rules.

What are the new rules?

#1: You won’t use VOGONS to promote social media channels.

VOGONS is a community, not a promotional marketing service for content creators. Over the past year or so, there’s been a noticeable uptick in accounts that are posting to promote their social media channels (usually YouTube). This is now prohibited.

As with the existing restriction on auction promotion, this rule is intended to discourage spammer-like activity from people who are not actually interested in being part of the community. As such, please use your best judgement when reporting this kind of post. For example: did an established community member do something cool and posted a link to their video about it here? Great, watch and discuss! On the other hand, is an account mostly only posting about their YouTube or TikTok or YouTok or TikTube videos and not really engaging with other community content? This is the sort of unwanted behaviour this rule aims to prevent.

#2: You won’t post topics or replies that are authored by AI.

VOGONS is a community for sentient beings, not LLMs. People don’t like talking to other people’s chatbots, and anyone can go ask Gemini themselves if they want a confidently wrong hallucination. AI-authored posts are uninteresting and they damage trust and connection within the community. They are now prohibited.

Note that this is not a blanket prohibition on all uses and discussions of AI. It does not apply to posts that are authored by non-English speakers and passed through an AI translator, so long as the translator isn’t adding its own ideas that weren’t in the input. It also does not prohibit posts about AI, or posts about projects that use AI (but please disclose if a project uses AI).

(Much like AI-authored posts themselves, arguing over the pros and cons of AI is pretty uninteresting at this point because the points are always the same, so please resist any urge to do that in the replies here. Thank you!)

What are the other changes?

• Rationales have been added to the rules on reaction images and auction promotion, so it is clearer why these things are not allowed, not just that they are not allowed.
• The directions for reporting a possible security problem have been tweaked.
• The privacy policy has been updated to add that cookies are now also used to manage bot traffic.