What is questionable or illegal?<p>You may argue it is full-body nudity, depictions of erections, exposed female genitals or breasts... but then someone will produce some art that everyone accepts really is art and shouldn't be censored, or a photo of breast-feeding. And so you make an exception as you do not wish to censor.<p>Then what differentiates the porn from the art? Is it simply the context of where it appears... a porn site or a gallery? What is the context of your site?<p>I'm arguing here that everything is subjective when it's not obviously illegal (against the letter of a law).<p>Law itself struggles with these definitions and tends to rely on the concept of what a jury or judge "reasonably" determines to be against some wording of a law.<p>The underlying key question in determining a moderation policy is whether you, the site owner, wishes to take on the decision making for those subjective cases. And, in doing so, whether you wish to accept the liability that comes with it.<p>Simply: Are you willing to be liable for the content posted by third parties?<p>If yes, then you need to have the equivalent of editorial processes, clear definitions you can communicate to users, declared processes for handling breaches of those definitions (and repeated breaches).<p>If no, then you can have the equivalent of "mere conduit" or "safe harbor". Anything you're unaware of you can't be liable for, and once you're made aware you need to handle it with whatever declared process you have.<p>Reddit and others were the latter.<p>And the latter works fine until you start moving towards advertising and those paying for advertising start to say "You cannot show our brand next to this (or that) type of content". Suddenly you need to know what content is where and your ability to deny knowledge of what is on the site is reduced and you have been pushed down the path, and probably taken the first steps, towards a more editorial process.<p>Trying to encapsulate processes in a set of rules, as you've done in the Ask HN, will fail if the rules themselves are against the nature of the site. The nature of a site that survives on advertising is that the processes and user terms and conditions need to create content acceptable and favourable to advertisers.<p>For most of what you've outlined above, I've had lawyers create terms and conditions for sites I run that does encapsulate a distributed and hands-off moderation policy that complies with European law. You can see those docs over here: <a href="https://github.com/microcosm-cc/legal" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/microcosm-cc/legal</a>