Community Guidelines

These Guidelines are the shared rules of Alpha. They apply to everyone on the platform — founders, builders, first-time makers, investors, students, lurkers learning the ropes — and to everything on it: every thread, reply, image, profile, username, community, cover image, invitation, and direct message. If you use Alpha, these rules govern you.

We have written them at length on purpose. Short rules get lawyered; detailed ones get understood. Each section states the rule in plain terms, then defines exactly what is not allowed, what remains perfectly fine, and why the rule exists.

Part I — About these Guidelines

1.1 What Alpha is

Alpha is a network for people who build. Founders shipping products, engineers deep in side projects, designers showing their craft, researchers sharing findings, students learning out loud, operators trading playbooks, and curious people who wander in just wanting to see how things are made — and stay because they start making things themselves.

The product exists so that knowledge moves between the people who have it and the people who need it. That mission fails if the platform becomes hostile, dishonest, or noisy. Every rule below serves that single goal.

1.2 The values behind the rules

• Psychological safety. People share unfinished work only where they won't be torn apart for it.
• Honesty. Advice, metrics, claims, and identities must be real. Builders make decisions based on what they read here; false information here has real costs.
• Focus. Attention is the scarcest resource a builder has. We remove the topics designed to consume it.
• Fairness. One rulebook, enforced identically, with published consequences and genuine appeal rights.

1.3 Scope and organization

These rules are organized thematically, in the style of modern platform policies: Safety and Civility (Part II), our two platform-specific Quiet Rooms (Part III), Integrity and Authenticity (Part IV), Privacy and Security (Part V), Regulated Goods and Commerce (Part VI), Work and Intellectual Property (Part VII), and Illegal Activity (Part VIII).

How violations map to strikes, restrictions, bans, and appeals is defined separately in the Community Policy and the Strikes & Appeals reference. This document defines conduct; those documents define process.

If you remember nothing else, remember this: be kind, be honest, build things. Almost every rule below is a footnote to those three sentences.

Part II — Safety and Civility

2.1 Violence and threats

You may not threaten, incite, glorify, or express desire for violence or harm against any person, group, place, or institution. Alpha is a working environment; credible fear has no place in one.

Not allowed

• Credible or conditional threats ("apologize or else", "watch your back") against anyone, including public figures.
• Soliciting, commissioning, or offering bounties for violence or harassment of a target.
• Glorifying, celebrating, or expressing wish for the death, serious injury, or suffering of specific people or groups — including reacting to news events with celebration of victims.
• Recruitment, promotion, or material support of terrorist organizations, violent extremist movements, or criminal organizations; accounts operated by their members.
• Detailed instructions for committing acts of violence or making weapons capable of mass harm.

Still fine

• Vigorous criticism of companies, products, strategies, institutions, and ideas — including harsh language about abstractions rather than people.
• Discussion of history, conflict journalism, security research, and self-defense as subjects, without promotion or threat.
• Fiction, games, and clearly-labeled creative work depicting violence without targeting real people.

2.2 Hateful conduct

You may not attack other people on the basis of who they are. Alpha judges ideas freely and attacks on identity never.

Not allowed

• Slurs, dehumanizing comparisons, or calls for exclusion directed at people based on race, ethnicity, national origin, caste, skin color, religion (as identity), gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, age, disability, disease status, veteran status, or immigration status.
• Content claiming the inherent inferiority or dangerousness of such groups.
• Segregation advocacy — "these people shouldn't be founders/here/at all".
• Targeted harassment of a person through the lens of a protected attribute ("women can't code, especially you").

Still fine

• Discussion of industry diversity problems, discrimination experiences, and structural critique — naming patterns is not hate; demeaning individuals or groups is.
• Reclaiming language by members of the group concerned, judged contextually.
• Robust, even brutal, disagreement about opinions, decisions, and outputs.

2.3 Harassment and bullying

You may not abuse, targeted-harass, or incite others to harass anyone on Alpha. Builders share drafts, failures, and early numbers here; a culture of pile-ons would kill that in a month.

Not allowed

• Targeted insults, name-calling campaigns, or sustained hostility toward a member.
• Dogpiling and brigading: coordinating groups (on or off Alpha) to swarm a person's posts, replies, or DMs.
• Demeaning commentary on someone's appearance, voice, accent, or body — including in reaction to their video or photo content.
• Sexual harassment: unwanted sexual remarks, advances, or imagery sent to anyone.
• Mob-forming: "everyone report this account", "find this person's employer", reward-framed harassment ("first to dunk gets...").
• Post-block evasion engineered to continue contact someone ended.
• Celebrating a member's misfortune, business failure, or personal tragedy.

Still fine

• Blunt technical critique of shipped work, pitches, designs, and decisions — even scathing, when aimed at the work.
• Public disagreement, sarcasm, and competitive banter that stops short of degradation.
• Blocking, muting, and reporting freely; using safety tools never requires justification and is never held against you.

2.4 Suicide, self-harm, and mental health

You may not promote or encourage suicide, self-harm, or disordered eating. Founder burnout is real; Alpha must never become a place where it worsens.

Not allowed

• Encouragement, instructions, methods, challenges, or glorification of suicide or self-harm.
• Promotion of risky weight-management, "founder stimulant" abuse normalization, or harmful body-image comparison content.
• Graphic depictions of self-injury shared for attention or shock.

Still fine

• Honest discussion of burnout, anxiety, depression, and recovery in builder life, handled supportively.
• Raising awareness of crisis resources. In any emergency, local emergency services come first — reporting to Alpha supplements, never replaces, that call.

2.5 Sexual content and adult material

Alpha carries no adult content. It is not an age-gated service.

Not allowed

• Nudity, pornography, sexually explicit writing, or sexual services advertising — text included.
• Sexually suggestive content functioning as titillation, regardless of artistic claim.
• Any sexual content involving minors, real or depicted. This triggers immediate permanent ban and referral to authorities and child-protection organizations. No strikes, no appeal window, no exceptions.
• Non-consensual intimate imagery or threats to publish it.
• Profanity used aggressively, at length, or at people. Occasional strong words in clean contexts are tolerated; tirades are not.

2.6 Shocking and graphic content

• No gore, torture, mutilation, or death imagery shared for shock value.
• No animal abuse, cruelty, or exploitation content.
• Newsworthy but graphic material should be described and linked with warnings, never embedded raw.

Part III — The Quiet Rooms

Two rules define Alpha more than everything else combined. They are unusual, deliberate, and non-negotiable.

3.1 Rule: no political content

Political discussion — however civil you believe yours to be — is off-topic everywhere on Alpha, full stop. We are not a neutral debating floor for politics; we opted out of the entire category.

Not allowed

• Elections, candidates, parties, legislation, court rulings as political events, government policy debates.
• Advocacy for political movements, ideologies-of-current-conflict, or politicians acting as politicians.
• Calls to vote, donate, register, boycott, or campaign for political causes.
• Group-based political contempt: "supporters of X are all idiots" — this is both politics and hateful conduct.
• Geopolitical war threads whose entire substance is taking sides.
• Political memes, slogans, flags, and dog-whistles deployed as identity markers.

Still fine

• Regulation as a practical subject: "how GDPR changes your analytics stack" is engineering, not politics.
• Policy-neutral civic basics: disaster safety, voter-ID expiration reminders, charity after natural disasters.
• History as history — academic discussion of past events that doesn't operate as proxy warfare over today's conflicts.
• Government as customer: procurement processes, public tenders, grant applications discussed operationally.

Why

We watched neutrality die in comment sections repeatedly before concluding it cannot survive contact with politics at all. Removing the topic entirely is the only moderation that works, and it is the single most-cited reason members give for staying.

3.2 Rule: no religious debate

Religion is personal, arguments about it are endless, and neither belongs on Alpha.

Not allowed

• Debate threads inviting agreement or dispute with any faith, scripture, atheism, or religious claim.
• Proselytizing, preaching, deconversion campaigns, or recruitment for any belief or anti-belief movement.
• Mockery, defamation, or dehumanization of believers, non-believers, clergy, or sacred figures.
• Sectarian attacks within faiths; using religious identity as slur or insult.

Still fine

• Life facts stated without advocacy: "back from my grandmother's funeral", "off Friday for Eid".
• Polite individual wishes exchanged outside debate contexts.
• Religion as subject matter — history, architecture, comparative anthropology, philosophy of belief — kept academic and detached.
• Faith-adjacent community operations ("Sunday run club") that exist around activity, not argument.

Part IV — Integrity and Authenticity

4.1 Authentic identity

A network for builders runs on reputation; fake identities poison it.

Not allowed

• Impersonating real people, companies, or organizations — including parodies that aren't clearly labeled.
• Fake investor, journalist, or staff identities used to extract information, access, or money.
• Bot accounts and automated personas presented as humans.
• Multiple accounts used to bypass enforcement, inflate consensus, or manipulate discussions. Operational secondary accounts (e.g., a product account) are fine when they don't evade anything.

4.2 Spam and platform manipulation

Not allowed

• Repetitive posting, link floods, copy-paste pitching, reply-spamming threads with your project.
• Purchased followers, engagement pods, automation scripts, mass-DM funnels, growth-hacking schemes that treat members as targets.
• Engagement chains ("repost or bad luck"), karma-farming, artificial trending attempts.
• Deliberate moderation evasion: character substitution, zero-width characters, leetspeak cloaking of banned content, or prompt-injection attempts against screening systems.

4.3 Scams and financial fraud

Builder networks attract a specific predator class: fake accelerators, phantom VC funds, paid-pitch scams, rug pulls, and "growth agencies" that bill and vanish. We hunt these aggressively.

Not allowed

• Investment solicitations, token sales, "guaranteed return" schemes, crypto doubling, forex bots, pyramid or recruitment-driven income models.
• Fake funding announcements, fabricated traction screenshots, forged press coverage, or cloned websites impersonating real startups.
• Phishing links, credential harvesting, invoice fraud, fake job offers collecting personal data.
• Unlicensed financial advice framed as guaranteed outcomes.

Still fine

• Real fundraising conversations: term sheets, SAFE mechanics, investor update templates, honest post-mortems of failed raises.
• Legitimate products, courses, and services promoted transparently (see 5.3).

4.4 Misinformation with harm potential

Politics being absent, most classic misinformation battles don't arise. What remains is builder-relevant falsehood with real-world cost:

• Fake security vulnerabilities announced to crash competitors' trust ("library X is compromised" when it isn't).
• Health misinformation presented as productivity or lifestyle advice.
• Fabricated data breaches, outage claims, or acquisition rumors about real companies.

Being merely wrong about something is human and permitted. Manufacturing falsehood designed to move markets, reputations, or user behavior is not.

4.5 Synthetic and manipulated media

• AI-generated images, voices, or videos of real identifiable people require clear labeling — especially founders' likenesses and demo footage.
• Deepfakes intended to deceive, defame, or fabricate endorsements are banned outright.
• "Demo-washing" — passing scripted or AI-fabricated results off as live product output — violates honesty norms and this policy.

Part V — Privacy and Security

5.1 Private information and doxxing

Not allowed

• Publishing anyone's home address, personal phone, private email, ID documents, financial details, family details, or precise location without consent.
• Sharing private correspondence, DMs, or screenshots of private conversations with third parties, even received ones, when the intent or effect is exposure.
• Threats to leak anything — "I have her files" — under any circumstances.
• Aggregating publicly available fragments specifically to expose, track, or intimidate a person.

Still fine

• Publicly listed business contacts of companies, press emails, support addresses.
• Your own story, your own data, shared voluntarily.

5.2 Platform security

• No hacking, scraping at scale, reverse-engineering, or load-testing Alpha's systems without written authorization.
• No exploiting bugs for advantage; responsible disclosures go to support@alpha-app.online and are genuinely welcomed.
• No distributing malware, stealers disguised as dev tools, or compromised packages through links and uploads.

Part VI — Regulated Goods and Commerce

6.1 Weapons and dangerous goods

Not allowed

• Sale, trade, gifting, brokerage, or marketing of firearms, ammunition, explosives, ghost-gun parts, or critical weapon components.
• Manufacturing instructions for weapons or explosives, including 3D-print files.
• Glorification imagery centering weapons aimed at people; threat displays.

Still fine

• Defense-industry careers, aerospace engineering, sporting-shooting businesses, and historical arms scholarship discussed professionally.

6.2 Other regulated goods and services

• No drug sales, prescription trades, gambling operations, tobacco/alcohol sales to-minor risk content, counterfeit goods, stolen-data markets, or fake-document services.
• Discussion of these industries as markets, regulation, or career paths stays permissible when strictly informational.

6.3 Honest commerce

Building things and selling them is the point; deceiving buyers is not. Paid promotions, sponsorships, affiliate relationships, and "I'm a customer too" reviews must be disclosed plainly in the post itself. Undisclosed shilling — of tools, funds, courses, coins, or your own alt-account product — violates integrity rules and earns strikes.

Part VII — Work, Craft, and Intellectual Property

7.1 Original work

• Showcase only what's yours or properly credited. Passing off others' code, designs, demos, metrics, or case studies as your own is fraud on this network.
• Copyright: no wholesale redistribution of others' protected works. Linking, quoting, fair-use-scale excerpts, and attributed inspiration remain fine.
• Trademark: don't present affiliation, endorsement, or partnership with companies you have no relationship with.
• Leaks: no publishing confidential materials you're under NDA for, however juicy.

7.2 Honest showcasing

• Traction screenshots must be yours or used with permission; fabricated dashboards fall under scam rules.
• Client work shown publicly requires client consent or anonymization.
• Case-study inflation ("we scaled X to 10M users" for a two-week contract) crosses into deception when material facts are hidden.

Part VIII — Illegal Activity

• No content facilitating crimes: fraud, theft, trafficking (human, drug, arms), hacking-for-hire, forgery, sanctions evasion.
• No CSAM, exploitation, or grooming of minors in any form — instant ban, deletion, and external reporting.
• No coordination of unlawful activity against platforms, companies, or persons.
• We comply with valid legal process as set out in the Privacy Notice, and preserve evidence for authorities where law requires or permits.

Part IX — Communities, Reporting, and What Happens Next

9.1 Communities inherit these rules

Community owners may add stricter rules for their spaces — stricter only, never looser. A community whose purpose violates platform rules is removed, along with repeat-violating communities whose owners permit abuse.

9.2 Reporting

Use the available in-app report controls for posts, replies, profiles, images, or messages, or contact safety@alpha-app.online when the relevant control is not available. Reports route by category for review. Serious categories — threats, child safety, credible fraud — jump ahead of everything else. Mass false-reporting is itself sanctionable under integrity rules.

9.3 Enforcement

Confirmed violations earn strikes: warning, restriction, then permanent ban with full account deletion. Severe categories skip straight to deletion. Process, edge cases, and appeal rights are specified in:

• Community Policy — how moderation operates day to day;
• Strikes & Appeals — exactly what happens after each violation.

Part X — Changes

These Guidelines evolve as the network does. Material changes are announced in-app before taking effect. Conduct is always judged against the version of the Guidelines in force when it occurred.

Questions: safety@alpha-app.online.