DU Community Help

Last edited Sat Mar 30, 2024, 10:35 AM - Edit history (1)

Democratic Underground has ALWAYS had a policy that once the Democratic presidential primaries are over and we have a nominee, members must support that nominee.

When there are competitive primaries, it is not uncommon for people to get extremely attached to their choice, and sometimes people will go so far as to say things along the lines of, “If my candidate doesn’t become the nominee, I won’t vote.”

During the primaries, we would often let that slide. But if you’re still doing that AFTER the nominee has been decided, then you’re just trolling. This is spelled out in the “Support Democrats” rule.

Now for the part that people are probably misremembering. From 2001-2011, we had a rules-based system, where the rules were enforced by moderators. Those rules were not the same rules we have today. In 2011, we switched to the Jury system, and at the same time, we got rid of all the rules.

The Jury system from 2011-2016 was a much more radical version of the system. The only guidance we gave was to tell members to use their own best judgment when deciding whether a post was appropriate for DU or not.

This kinda-sorta worked for five years, but it was chaotic as hell. The fact that it lasted so long probably had something to do with the fact that there was no competitive primary in 2012, when Obama ran unopposed.

The flaws in the system were completely exposed, however, during the highly competitive Sanders vs. Clinton 2016. Those primaries, and the emergence of the “Bernie or bust” movement, saw a dramatic upswing in the number of people who claimed that they would refuse to vote for Hillary if she won, which got worse as it became obvious that she was going to win, but Bernie wasn’t dropping out.

We had observed that the free-for-all Jury system, which kinda-sorta worked in a chaotic way prior to the primaries, failed to work once members had drawn battle lines and divided themselves into two camps. Remember, at the time juries were not even anonymous! Everyone could see who was being alerted on, who was sending the alerts, and who was serving on the juries and how they voted. So it just became a partisan tool for members on both sides to smack each other.

We spent much of 2016 working on ways to reform the Jury system, and once the primaries were officially over we launched the new, reformed, rule-based system. The new system anonymized the process, and instead of asking members to simply decide whether a post was “appropriate or not” we asked them to decide whether a post violated one of the new rules. Those are the exact same rules we have today.

The rules-based system provided more guidance and incentive to good-faith actors and made it essentially impossible for disruptive people to wield the system as a weapon. However, since we were making a massive change to the Terms of Service, we needed to ask members to understand and accept that the rules had changed.

So when the big Jury overhaul happened following the primaries in 2016, everyone who signed in had to click a one-time button acknowledging that they had read and would abide by the new rules. We thought this was important not just because we wanted people to agree to the rules, but because the site hadn’t even *had* rules for five years, so we wanted everyone to read and understand the new ones before posting.

Since the new rules officially included our long-standing policy of support for the Democratic nominee after the primaries, along with new rules such as “Don’t keep fighting the last Democratic presidential primary,” quite a few die-hards refused to click the button and instead went elsewhere. Their choice.

So in that regard, you’re not wrong that people had to “sign something” — it was an agreement to the entire rules package which was a significant change to our Terms of Service. And that package included a rule which formalized our policy that people must support the Democratic nominee after the primaries.

But since 2016 the rules have remained the same, so there’s no need for us to make everyone sign some kind of pledge. We certainly didn’t do that in 2020, because nothing had changed — the “Support Democrats” rule had been in force since 2016, and remains in force to this day.

What we continue to do is allow additional leeway for members to more forcefully attack Democrats during “Primary Season” — which is normal and to be expected — provided that everyone reins it in and joins forces again during “General Election Season.” In fact I made an announcement on that very subject a few weeks ago:

https://www.democraticunderground.com/101314000

So I think there’s a fair bit of “half-remembering” exactly what happened in 2016 going on in this thread, but hopefully this additional context will settle the debate.