We’ve just updated our Terms of Service and Player’s Handbook with new rules and guidelines as to what constitutes appropriate content at Dribbble.
Historically, Dribbble has been a relatively open publishing platform. It’s self-organizing in the sense that members can create their own community by following (and blocking) other members as they see fit. For the most part, we’ve tried to stay out of the business of deciding what content is and is not appropriate by crowdsourcing this responsibility. This model appears to works well for services like Twitter and Facebook; combined with our small population and invitation system, we believed it was working well for us.
That self-organizing nature is likely here to stay, but recent events shifted our thinking about community and our role in managing it. We better understand that:
- There is much stronger sentiment of Dribbble as a single community versus separate, sub-communities (a la Twitter, Facebook), and thus we have more responsibility to provide guidelines for Dribbble as a whole.
- Some people have expressed that they do not feel welcome or comfortable at Dribbble due to the nature of some of our content and comments. And we hate this.
Today, we’ve made changes to our Handbook to clarify what types of content are inappropriate to post on Dribbble, in order to make it a more welcoming and inclusive community for designers and fans of all ages. Specifically, we’re going to be more aggressive in removing content that doesn’t meet these new guidelines. We can’t guarantee we’ll catch every inappropriate shot or comment that’s posted, but we think expectations are now much clearer and more conducive to fostering community.
It’s important to point out that inappropriate content has been a small fraction of what’s posted. The vast majority of work shared is inspiring and the reason for Dribbble’s success.
Adding manual and automated mechanisms to better enforce our guidelines will be an ongoing process. It won’t happen overnight, so we ask for your patience as we continue our efforts to grow gracefully.
Thank you yet again, Dribbblers, for creating such a special place. We’re trying hard to keep it that way.
Find more Updates stories on our blog Courtside. Have a suggestion? Contact stories@dribbble.com.
