Overview

Headbook is a place to be nice to each other. You don't have to be nice all the time - just when you're here! With the deep divisions in our society, many if not most of us have people or groups that we hate. That isn't what we are going to talk about here.

Headbook has been created to provide a place for enjoyable interaction with family and friends that is separate from discussions about the sometimes contentious issues of our times. When you make a friend post, only your friends or people following you will see it. When you make a post to a discussion, anybody who views the discussion will see it. So, there are two separate areas of Headbook - friend interaction and discussion topics. We aren't going to try to provide a commprehensive list of things you can and cannot do but rather set the tone and provide a way for people to quietly tell you if they think you've crossed a line. We don't expect to be able to hire thousands of people to police your posts, so we are going to have you do it yourselves and we will be pretty intolerant of those who break the rules. Headbook is a place to behave yourself!

Interaction with Headbook Friends

Your interaction with Headbook friends will probably look a lot like your interaction with them on other social media sites. You share news about what it going on in your life. It might be happy or sad but it is personal. You might do a little self promotion. You might organize a kid's sports activity. You might organize a family reunion. Actually, you are going to talk about whatever you want to talk about! Just keep it civil as described below. If you want, you can allow people to "follow" you. Your followers will get all your "friends" posts and you will get none of theirs except thier comments to your posts. Businesses and organizations will obviously want this turned on.

What we don't want you to do is share hostile political memes, promote conspiracy theories, get in arguments with your friends or attack people. Please do that somewhere else. The whole point is to provide an enjoyable place for you to interact with the people you know. You won't be fed a constant stream of "Suggested for you" posts that an algorithm predicts will "engage" you. You might still want this and if so, you know where to get it! We are trying actively to NOT addict you to the platform. So you will almost certainly get a lower volume of posts to read on Headbook than on other social media sites. On the other hand, if you and your friends get in the habit of sharing more of your life's experiences instead of relying on the algorithm to give you things to share, the volume might increase.

If one of your friends posts something that you think violates the friendly atmosphere we are trying to provide, you can issue a "caution" about the post or comment. They will be notified of the number of people who have cautioned the post and maybe they will get the idea. The people who have cautioned the post will not be identified to the person making the objectionable post. If you want to personally tell them, please do it offline.

Headbook Discussions

Each Headbook discussion is on a single topic and for each topic there is only one discussion. Discussions will be organized with general topics having sub-topics that address a specific issue within the general topic. Some topics have been pre-defined but you can request the creation of new topics. This differs from Facebook groups where there appears to be an endless list of public and private groups talking about the same thing, such as climate change, with no organization among them.

Posts to discussions are expected to be based on verifiable information. You can ask quesions and make suggestions but you can't state "facts" with no supporting evidence. Posts should be focused on the topic under discussion and not on people. You can make a primary post in a discussion and then other people can make comments to your post. Try not to be repetitive by posting things that have already been posted. You can vote to agree or disagree with a post or comment. Optionally, you can post a comment if you have something substantive to add. Remember to bring your evidence!

Speaking of evidence, you should give a reference to the source of the information you refer to in your post or comment for any information that isn't commonly known. Try to find the most reliable source you can. Something you found on some person's blog that you can't find anywhere else is probably not evidence. The point here is to have constructive discussions based on real facts without the heat of politics and ideology being involved. Let's solve some problems!

We constantly review how the discussions are working and will make changes to these rules if we think it will help. The main point is to keep us all from having to "drink from the firehose". You should give thought to your post and find references to the facts you include before posting it to the site. You should attempt to be as brief as possible in getting the point of your post across to us. Please don't use profanity in discussion posts. That won't add anything constructive to the discussion.

This is a PG-13 site

Consider your words, images and videos to be under the rules of a PG-13 movie. We will consider allowing users younger than 18 in the future, so we would like to make the site appropriate for them from the beginning. We know this is vague but most people have a sense of what this allows and doesn't allow.

If you consistently break the rules

If you break the rules often or post something especially bad, we will suspend your account and refund your last month's payment. The First Amendment to the US Constitution does not apply here at all. If you behave in a way that is going to be detrimental to the purpose of the site, we will remove you from our community.

Membership reqirements

Sorry, but we are initially limiting the site to English only posts. We will be moving toward making it multilingual in the future if there is a demand for that. We are also currently limiting membership to people 18 and older.

A few things to do and not do

Do be friendly.

Don't attack people.

Do explain what you mean.

Don't do "name calling".

Do use the discussion section for seeking solutions.

Don't use the discussion section for hostile arguments.

Do provide real facts that can be verified.

Don't provide misinformation.