I see posts on here all the time asking for help with legal, workplace, housing, or consumer rights issues, but the original poster leaves out where they live.
Since Lemmy is a global platform, an answer that is 100% accurate in the US might be totally wrong or useless in Canada, the UK, or the EU, or even between different US states. Something like tenant rights or consumer laws (like optometrist prescription rules) changes completely depending on jurisdiction. Without knowing where someone is, commenters either give bad advice based on their own country’s laws or waste time asking “Where are you located?” before they can even answer.
Obviously, privacy matters, and no one should feel forced to give away their exact city or dox themselves. Stating just a country, state, or province keeps you anonymous while giving people enough context to actually help.
Should communities encourage or require basic location tags for advice posts, or is there a better way to handle this?
If we’re going to make a rule about legal advice, it should simply be “Don’t ask for legal advice.” Then again, it’s really against rule 5 anyway. This is not a support community.
I find it weird how often I see meta posts here about people wanting to restrict content when there just aren’t that many posts here, anyway.
The last 24 hours were super busy, and there’s a whole 13 posts including this one… Most days have like 4 or 5 posts. What does any of this matter?
I would be opposed to requiring it. I think that even an example from another state or country might have useful bearing on how things work elsewhere.
I mean, end of the day, if you’re going to go out and ask anonymous people on a forum legal questions, I think that it’s safe to say that it might be a useful starting point for further investigation, possibly involving talking to a lawyer. But I wouldn’t go do something with major risk based just on what they say. I don’t think that it’s going to be really practical to change that.
Anyone getting legal advice from anonymous people is making a big mistake.
Anyone asking legal advice from anonymous people who are part of a virtual penal colony is insane.
To be fair, we’re overall a very friendly and helpful penal colony.
your protecting people from themselves. people should be taking answers in a forum like this with a grain of salt to begin with and its up to them to provide enough detail to get better answers.
Yes, but isn’t there an ask legal community that those posts should go to?
Hear, hear. Banish them to the legal post committee for judgement.
More regulation!
/s
I find it neat when a question has different answered depending on jurisdiction.
Different countries also have state/terrorist/province/local laws too…
Like, it’s up to the person asking how detailed they want to be, and the vast majority of posts don’t need a location tag…
If someoneneeded it and didn’t use it, someone’s gonna ask.
I don’t see why there needs to be a requirement
The discussion could be relevant to more than just the original poster if other people with similar cases find the same thread later. If the OP is forced to state their jurisdiction, the discussion might be more focused, but potentially less useful to others.
No, they should be banned.
Such questions need to handled by professionals, not internet ‘experts’.
but the original poster leaves out where they live.
In Usa, they even have an “ism” for it: Us-defaultism. So you can write that in the Modlog when deleting all these posts 😉
It could be a rule in the sidebar. OTOH, it could be against rule #5 which says “this is not a support community.”
