As the sub has grown and the volume of submissions and comments to ShitAmericansSay (SAS) has increased, the subreddit has changed from a snug club of users to a burgeoning subreddit of 35k members. This is in itself of course not a bad thing, but it did often lead to a feeling that the "soul" of SAS - a light-hearted, humourous one - is becoming harder to find.

Therefore, the mod team has decided upon rule and moderating style changes that are more adapted to this larger community where the mods don't know everybody by name anymore, and where active curation is necessary to avoid the subreddit becoming another generic 'general purpose' meta-sub.

A. SAS is a place to have a laugh at silly Americanism, not a call-out sub for right-wing politics.

Submissions that lean more towards calling out political beliefs or racism rather than sharing funny shit will be removed. The "line" between these two will be at the discretion of the moderators. Yes, these decisions will be subjective and may appear arbitrary. Sorry, but there's nothing to be done about that. There's no objective list of guidelines you can write about that, and stuff that appears funny to, say, Europeans might appear a political call-out an American and vice-versa. We'll do our best though.

Overall, the line "Keep in mind that we are here to have a laugh, not to get angry." will remain a core tenet of SAS.

B. Rule changes

The main change is that we are mainly dropping the "you can only submit direct quotes of Reddit comments" rule, with these caveats:

\1\ Submission titles need to be neutral. They need to be written in such a way that they don't imply that the writer of the linked comment is in the wrong, and not be smug and circlejerky.

For example:

Ignorant Murican thinks the Irish are going to be amazed by Snicker bars is not OK.

Kind-hearted Burger wants to bless us Shakira-addled Yuropoors by bringing us Snicker bars is still not OK.

American planning a trip to Ireland wonders if he should bring Snicker bars to hand out to the locals is OK.

Frankly, this is a similar sort of rule as is being employed over at r/subredditdrama. Take a look over there if you want to see what we're aiming for.

The gist of it is this: when totesmessenger replies to the linked comment to inform the OP that his comment was linked to SAS, it should be impossible for the OP to be offended by the thread title.

\2\ Comments about controversial topics can only be submitted as an archive.is link, or a screenshot. We've noticed time and time again that when comments about controversial issues get linked to SAS, it leads to users breaking rule II and going over to the linked thread to vote and comment. That's the worst thing you can do: not only does it put the subreddit at risk of being quarantined, it also creates a lot of ill-will against SAS.

Hence, from now on you can only post direct links to harmless shit, like 'heritage' stuff or 'the USA is the whole world' kind of things.

Comments that have to do with the following things (even tangentially) can henceforth only be submitted as archive.is links or screenshots:

• Guns
• Racial issues
• US foreign politics and wars (past and present)

This list is subject to change, and in fact will most certainly be added upon. We're just starting with these three because pretty much each and every time comments from those subjects get linked there's brigades.

Note that even the archive.is and image submissions still have to adhere to the core rule that they should be amusing Americanisms - if they're not funny, not even in a cynical way, they will be removed. This is completely up to moderator discretion.

C. New Mod!

Everybody please welcome /u/sgt_colon as a new SAS mod! Not only is he an appreciated and fun member of the community, he's also an Austrian! Hence he'll cover a whole new time zone for us :)