Greetings

As the Comedy Open Mic community (COM) continues to grow we feel a clear relationship is required between us as admins, curators, moderators, and members of this COMmunity to ensure we don't have any problems going forward.

In this post, we will quickly cover a few points to avoid misconceptions.

GIFs and Pictures

Some of you may have read this post about how the use of GIFs may have crossed the line to the point of oversaturation. As curators and moderators, this is something we see every day. If you read the post then you know how we feel, if you didn't, then you don't need to as it will be clarified here.

First of all, we don't have any rule on the number of GIFs used in a post or the number of pictures used per post. We're not going to police posts that way, nor do we ever intend to do it that way as this remains a community that aims to be a place for comedy and laughter and recognizes itself to be lucky to have such a large number of members among other comedy-themed communities.

However, we do believe that exaggerated uses of GIFs coupled with the fact that we have spent years seeing this formula have come to affect the quality of posts shared here, comedy-wise. As curators we find them to be doing more harm than good. That being said, we don't have any rules when it comes to the use of GIFs whatsoever, nor do we ever intend to regulate it.

Our rules will always be the ones you see in our About section.

Where it may matter, however, is when it comes to curation.

As we established before, we view GIFs to diminish the quality of posts in their written form. We owe our supporters at OCD complete honesty when it comes to what we view as quality posts since that's OCD's main goal.

What that means is simply that you, as a member, are free to add as many GIFs and pictures that you want but you also should be aware that it affects your chances of getting curated. We could be more specific about the Do's and Don't's of GIFs if you ask us to.

Another aspect that affects curation is word count. Now, much like GIFs, you're only required to meet the 200 words per post to be eligible to post here. However, also like GIFs, there are minimum requirements.

Now, we can't be specific about the number of words per post required as we have submitted posts that are barely over 200 words long but there is something everyone should be aware of when it comes to posting comedy posts.

Comedy posts overall are required to be a quality posts in the general sense but also in comedy terms. That means if you wrote a quality post it would also be required to be very funny for it to be curated.

The issue with comedy posts is that they often take a long time to set up and we're required to also judge by how funny posts are. So often, posts that are 500 words long count as 100 words long because they only started to be funny in the final 100 words.

What this means is that if a post only has a few funny lines near the end, it won't justify it being 200-500 words long as far as curation is concerned. So, if you're going to write a short post (200-500 words), make sure the setup doesn't take a long time.

I.E if the post has 6 paragraphs, 3 of them can't be just the setup without having jokes in them.

Future Ideas

While the COMedy Rumble is more likely to become a seasonal thing due to its nature, we do aim to have fresh and different contests and content that are like no other on Hive. If you have any idea you'd like us to try, please let us know.

We will also write a post of different ideas we have and see what you'd like the most.

That's It This Week

We hope this wasn't a confusing newsletter, if it is we promise to clarify it more in the comments or take all your concerns and answer them all at once in another post. We realize that we're not the best, but we work to improve and your feedback will help us with that.