It's been over a year since our rule change, and users discuss more the direction of this sub.

Let's talk about it! Couple of points to give some perspective:

• Our userbase tripled since we had last years' rule change. Overall people enjoy the rules change a lot.

• We're not lacking in guidance for "what is a McMansion". The top post of the subreddit is a stickied guide - there's also Kate's excellent guide linked in plenty of places.

People just don't read! And since we're growing pretty fast, the continuous influx of new users won't know complex and subjective distinctions between types of ugliness.

This was a core problem with the old rules (where only McMansions were allowed). A lot of people don't agree or even understand what a McMansion is! So limiting the sub to McMansions meant people were arguing on every post about whether the post should be there at all.

• Other similar subreddits for ugly houses haven't gained critical mass to be popular; see: uglyhouses, killthearchitect, badarchitecture.

One similar sub which is gaining popularity is ZillowGoneWild. There's some overlap between us - look at this masterpiece for instance. But ZGW is a sub about "crazy" housing whereas we're a sub about ugly/terrible houses. Some crazy houses are ugly, and some ugly houses are crazy, but the focus is different and I see us as sister subs.

Overall people do like the ugly houses, what people seem to hate is mislabeled houses. And mods here often take 24h to re-label a post correctly, leading to a lot of annoyance.

• People LOVE nice house thursday. There are other good subs for nice houses (houseporn, etc.) but people love this feature.

• High effort posts like this, this or this are the gold standard of posts our community wants. We should somehow encourage them more.

• Redfin/Zillow listings in posts are enjoyed a lot, we should find a way to pin them on top of comment threads automagically. We should also encourage posting picture sequences from a listing rather than a single image.

• Our subreddit has a persistent troll making new accounts who thinks cardboard-built McMansions are the greatest thing in architecture and nice houses are actually bad. Keep downvoting him, we ban him as fast as we can spot him.

Possible tools:

Overall, I'd say:

• Ugly houses should stay allowed. We need to make clearer the norms between a McMansion and an ugly house, even to the least sophisticated users.

• There's a small, but passionate, core of the userbase which doesn't care about ugly houses at all and only wants McMansion. We could accommodate them by giving flair filters on the posts.

• Restricting what people can post on certain days is doomed to failure. Most people won't know or read and it'll just lead to bickering to self-enforce it. However, Allowing (eg. thursday) people to post outside stuff on certain days is good.

We'll likely revisit rules formally in the near future, but the most important things we can do at this point is steer people into making more quality posts, in my opinion.