Since we're talking about alternatives, and one of these months I/we will get 2 Lemmy sites up - both self-regulated by their communities. TruthSeeker.Club for elevated discourse and TruthSeeker.Party for free speech folks and where we'll ban trolls to.

Rules will be clear, hard, and few.
Guides will be more grey, more arbitrary, and have many examples to try to be as clear as possible.

Besides democratically improving on magnora7's rules, openly and transparently with community feedback, perhaps it might be worth developing lists of things to avoid or embrace to improve quality content. Quality is more important than quantity, especially in these strange times, because whether you're in the rat race, busy with family, or a UBI NEET - we all only have 24 hours in a day.

Within this OP, a some things come to mind, proposed for your consideration and feedback (not close to being written in stone):

1) TruthSeeker.Party is free speech so these limitation guidelines don't apply there.

2) TruthSeeker.Club is the name, so truth-seeking should be the primary focus.

3) Avoid discussion of Reddit and/or pop culture (games, music, movies, TV, etc.), unless it directly relates to truth-seeking.

4) No humour or meme posts. (Share them on TruthSeeker.Party, and link to them only when relevant.)

Obviously some of these may put a "serious" damper on the .Club, as intended - but perhaps it might help people to manually separate the ephemeral fun stuff from the quality serious stuff.

Let me know if you like any of these guide ideas, if you think they're a recipe for disaster, or something in between.