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Here's what I've got time to write up atm. Enforce the existing rules DnD has rules, and they are mostly pretty good rules. In USNews, for example, people are supposed to contextualize their sources and read what they link- and bad faith is supposed to be reported. However, the rules are virtually never enforced. This lack of moderation in a remotely serious space invites, and indeed encourages, abuse. The abusive users are able to control the scope of discussion because they have no reason to change their behavior. Users are invited to respond, in good faith, to the abuse of others, no matter how persistent or virulent. Effort is met with deliberate misrepresentation and personal attacks. People who put forward more effort or provide information, and mods who attempt to create standards for moderation, are immediately and continuously attacked. Moderation is made difficult, and individual moderators get targeted for abuse, as part of a deliberate strategy to make moderation as difficult and unpleasant as possible. Users will, with a straight face, claim that discussion from a shared reality, or rejecting sources of misinformation, or any other basis for moderating arguments, is impossible, and intractable insulting conflict is the only possible state of affairs- and they will follow it up with every line of attack they can think of. Recommendations: Take those rules you've written up, number them, enforce them, and include which rule is violated in the reason. It will be very unpleasant for a period as a group of assholes try to find a way to get you to stop, but eventually you get to actually remove them and you won't feel like coming up with excuses to not read the queue. Enforce rules consistently and do not guilt yourself out of moderating Where efforts at moderation do occur, they are reactive and do not reflect an underlying shared set of goals. What's even worse is that they are sometimes reversed, or even apologized for, not because there was some error in the decision, but just because...the mod felt bad? It's as if you believe that your goal is to be popular with everyone, which is...really not a way moderation can ever work. When moderation decisions are reversed, they create a standard of permissibility for abuse, and invite further abuse along the same line. It's basically a giant red flashing sign saying "hey trolls, do this!". It immediately affects every other user in the thread, and worse, it also guarantees that future moderation on the same subject will be even more difficult. It permanently cedes the discussion to whomever gets the validation. Recommendations: In the same way that agreement was previously needed to implement some punishments, mod consensus should be required to reverse a probation. If you've just probated someone and feel guilty and want to apologize or otherwise equivocate, go take a walk or wash your hands or something. You've developed a deeply perverse relationship to your role. Do not engage assholes One strategy abusive users deploy is to notice when a mod opens up by participating in discussion and specifically make them as miserable as possible. They know the mod is invested in the subject, and that can be used to trip them up and get them to react in a way that can be used against them. Recommendations: Do not engage with assholes. Specifically bring other mods in, immediately, when it appears that users are either following you from thread to thread to start arguments, or attempting to get you to react on a particular subject. For the love of god, ban abusive users I believe the greatest underlying issue here is a failure to understand what banning bad users represents. The decision to ban an abusive user is not just about whether or not you remove that user from the forums. This is fundamentally the wrong way to understand the effects of your decisions. The choice is about whether you remove the abusive user, or, through your inaction, you remove all of the users that the abusive user will drive to leave the space- and all the users who are no longer interested in joining, because of the reputation it's developed. Assholes are not going to stop being assholes because you verbally warn them or give them a probation. Tinkering with the number of threads, or creating spaces to "vent", or to contain or attract abusive users, does not work. Instead, as we've seen, they will socialize around and identify with their opposition to moderation. The long term effect of not banning users is that the forum has an active, semi-coordinated and absolutely rancid counterculture of abuse. If Jeffrey/admins/mods are unwilling to actually remove bad actors from the space, then any other moderation activity is doomed to failure. Recommendations: I think there have been some monthlong probes in this thread. That is an excellent start. How about you just keep using those, and more, from now on? This should be a core moderation policy. You are responsible for what the site is This is, whether you want to acknowledge it or not, a social media platform, and you're responsible for many of the same outcomes and issues that face the people who run 4chan or facebook. That's what the work entails. The difference is you have more personal control and the scale of the task can be far, far more manageable. It's true that the users in the community can define part of what SA is, but that is not an excuse to pretend that you are not the people with actual power over the forum. You are responsible for clearly delineating what it's for and what it does. You are not going to be able to escape responsibility for the results of your actions or inaction. Recommendations: The DnD mods should meet- like, maybe actually have a phone or discord voice call- and discuss issues and questions of how the forum should operate. This should happen whenever there's a significant issue, and any such call should actually lead to some kind of conclusion and plan of action. I know, this sounds like way too much work, but you're basically having to undo a deficit of moderation and planning that's now many, many years in the making. Once the basics are laid out, this sort of thing would be much less necessary.
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Oct 29, 2021 07:53
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fool of sound posted:Believe me I hate the "we agree on most things" argument too, but the solution in that case is to interrogate those differences instead of just declaring an insurmountable gulf exists. State your beliefs clearly, argue with other peoples' stated beliefs. Don't let labels do the talking. Not if the goal of the user is to ruin discussion or abuse others. In that case, being vague and saying discussion of specifics is pointless, or tossing out deliver inflammatory falsehoods, is highly effective… unless the people doing it are stopped by the people with the responsibility of doing so.
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Oct 30, 2021 22:27
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Mods, admins and owners are responsible for the community they create, whether by action or inaction. It would be absurd to say that Facebook or 4chan aren’t a product of their moderation decisions and policies. DnD, and SA generally, can’t sustain a productive community if the users that abuse it aren’t removed. The difficulty of moderation that now exists is entirely the result of not consistently moderating or applying bans.
Discendo Vox fucked around with this message at 00:38 on Oct 31, 2021 |
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Oct 31, 2021 00:32
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This also depends on the specificity of the prediction. I discuss the use of policy counterfactuals as a way to wreck discussion in hirschman’s reactionary rhetorics in a post in the media crit thread.
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Oct 31, 2021 01:19
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