Welcome to another rules roundtable, a series of posts where the /r/economics mods explain how we enforce the rules and the underlying reasons motivating them. Today we will look at Rule III our rule which regulates submission quality standards.

Why Do We Need Rule III? How Does it Differ From Rule II?

Where Rule II mainly exists to keep submissions within the subs focus of economics. Rule III instead covers a variety of practices which in general lower the general quality of submissions. For instance we ban submissions which contain little more then a link to some article, instead requiring the original source be submitted as well. Memes, for obvious reasons are banned as well.

Ban on Self Promotion and the 90-10 Rule.

The fact that an article is submitted should reflect the interest of an independent user, not some website's social media strategy. As anyone who has spent time moderating any sizable subreddit knows, Reddit is subjected to a constant barrage of spam-bots and self promoters. Rule III is meant to stop quality content from being overwhelmed by this torrent, of often mediocre, submissions.

What qualifies as self promotion? The mods will follow the typical Reddit standard that only 10 percent of your submissions on /r/Economics should be your own material. Accounts which only exists to promote a particular site will be banned.

Original Headline Rule

Rule III also regulates submission titles. Sensationalized or editorialized headlines have the ability to derail threads at worse and at best are better left to the comments. At the same time, we recognize that there is no clear standard which we can use to decide if a particular headline is not editorialized. Thus for simplicity we require the original headline be posted. While these may be editorialized themselves it is a more consistent and easily enforceable standard.