[Mod announcement] New posting rules enacted today

[u/rhiever]

Hi DataIsBeautiful!

After much deliberation, the mod team has decided to enact new posting rules for the subreddit. You can read all of the details of the posting rules in our posting guide. The gist of and reasons for the new posting rules are below.

Why did we decide to enact new posting rules?

Ever since it was created, DataIsBeautiful has operated on two fundamental principles:

1. Posts must include a data visualization.

2. Posts must give credit to the original author(s) of the visualization.

DataIsBeautiful has grown considerably in the past 6 months and the mod team has come to realize that some rules that worked in the past no longer work in a default subreddit. One of those rules is how we assign credit to the original author(s) of the visualization.

In the past, we allowed posters to rehost visualizations on image sharing sites such as imgur and share it on DataIsBeautiful as long as the poster included a comment on the thread linking to the original source. This method used to work when threads only received a handful of comments, but nowadays any post that reaches the front page easily receives hundreds of comments and the source statement is easily buried underneath the mountain of comments. Essentially, by the end of the day, many posts on DataIsBeautiful end up without an easy-to-find credit to the original author.

The issue goes deeper than assigning credit, however.

Many data visualizations require context to understand and evaluate. It's important to know why the visualization was created, how it was created, and what information the visualization is meant to convey. Much of this information is lost when the visualization is rehosted and shared without the context of the original article it was introduced in. This leads to confusion for the reader, misrepresentation of information, inability to evaluate and critique the visualization, and ultimately a bad DataIsBeautiful post.

With these issues in mind, the mod team has decided to enact the following new posting rules.

New posting rules

Non-OC posts must now directly link to the web page of the visualization author where the visualization was originally introduced (not an image on the site, but the actual web page). This means that non-OC posts may no longer rehost content (e.g., on imgur) and post it on DataIsBeautiful.

OC posts are essentially unaffected by these rules because OC authors are required to describe the visualization in the comments. OC authors may host their own content anywhere they like, including image sharing sites (e.g., imgur), but it would be wise to ensure that the host can handle potentially large volumes of traffic.

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We hope that you find these new posting rules agreeable. If you have any questions or comments, please leave them in the comments below and the mod team will get back to you.

[u/[deleted]]

As an outsider looking in, I hope these rules improve the overall quality of posts that hit the front page. Almost every time I see a post from this subreddit on the front page, the top comment is pointing out how shitty/lacking context the post actually is.

[u/rhiever → u/[deleted]]

That's more likely to be the result of the critical nature of the subreddit rather than the fact that bad posts are making it to the top all the time. Plus, there's so many ways data visualization can go wrong, either by using statistics improperly, using the wrong data source, or even using a color scheme that somebody dislikes. A good data visualization takes a combination of art and math, and it's very difficult to get it just right.

[u/2noame]

So how does this work where there is one particular visualization we want to bring focus to on a page full of data visualizations?

[u/SheCutOffHerToe]

Should require all posts to include source data for visualization.

[u/rhiever → u/SheCutOffHerToe]

That's a tough one because sometimes visualizations are made from proprietary data that can't be shared. We don't want to exclude posts like that even if the underlying data can't be shared.

[u/Aschl]

I can't stress enough how much I approve of this rule change! Thank you thank you dear mods!

The last straw was the visualization of the reddit front page meritocracy. Such a bad post without the extremely detailed and clear context of the author original post...

[u/[deleted] → u/Aschl]

What if the figure is buried inside a 200 page pdf report? Then there's no way anyone's going to see it.

I think linking to a rehosted image and mentioning the source in the comments should be enough.

[u/iagox86]

I predict a lot of overloaded servers as a result of this rule.

[u/Dykam → u/iagox86]

I don't think there's anything against posting a rehost in the comments.

[u/[deleted]]

This is probably for the best, since there's been a lot of contextless graphs without labeled axes lately, but on the other hand I really hate most "visualization sites".

They end up trying to animate every single little thing, they either use full screen flash or they do strange things with complex svg files and javascript to manipulate them. They take a long time to load, they spin up the fan on my laptop, and they often have strange unintuitive interfaces where they do something stupid that ends up hijacking the back button etc.

It's because these sites are so terrible that I'm conflicted here. Often when people link directly to these sites I really wish they'd posted a screenshot instead.