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fez_machine posted:I would like much less shitposting, memes and jokes posted in the D&D Ukraine thread in general. It's the distinguishing feature of it in comparison to the CSPAM and GBS threads that it's largely serious and decorum focused. Guilty as charged, kind of. I don’t believe there’s regular shitposting in my thread that goes unpunished (examples to the contrary would be appreciated), but I’m fairly hands off with people cracking jokes. The main reason for that is a large population of fellow Eastern Europeans in my thread, including, e.g., someone who had family members sheltering in a basement in Mariupol for weeks, with one of them dying shortly after being finally evacuated recently. Many of us are immediately affected by this war, and I do believe that cracking a joke, or having a laugh at one, does help both posters individually and to take an edge off the thread on the whole. That said, I do recognise that there are several “noisy” posters - to name a few, WAR CRIME GIGOLO and Despera. Here what I have to say is that their jokes frequently do appeal to what little sense of humour I do have, moderation on that specific rule being a subjective thing in our comedy forum, and that they do also regularly make normal contributions to the thread, in my opinion. My suggestion, trite as it will sound, is to report jokes you find excessive. As an IK, I have no access to reports, and so it will be moderators handling those posts. None of them is “local” to all of this, and most of them don’t regularly engage with the posters in the thread.
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Apr 24, 2022 00:59
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speng31b posted:I don't have any great ideas about this, but particularly for super long running threads with massive page counts, the gigantic piles of thread specific rules that accrue against rehashing "uninteresting" topics kind of suck. I sympathise with your concerns, but I would like to remind that the topic of my thread is current events in Russian war with Ukraine - it is meant to be a newsfeed with some nuance. The list of topics that are more likely to see the posts scrutinised from “boring posts” rule of D&D perspective is populated on the basis of having regular derails about them, and consists of the following topics: 1) History of NATO (literal hundreds of pages of derails, with the focus most frequently being on people just wishing to post about the United States) 2) Legal analysis of the Geneva Converions (dozens of pages of derails, when the thread has like 2 posters who understand what they’re talking about there) 3) No-fly zones (dozens of pages of derails, overlaps with general rule against Tom Clancy posts) 4) DSA and tankies (maybe a dozen pages of derails, but this both gets heated in a US CE kind of way and is frequently used as a dogwhistle for posting about C-SPAM regulars) Here, I’d like to note that people can still post about these topics if they are a part of the news cycle for the day. Furthermore, they can also simply make fresh and interesting posts about them, though additional rules around (3) and (4) may make that difficult. Lastly, posting about neither of these is required to have a comprehensive conversation about the day-to-day developments in the war. In general, I also dislike having rules of this kind. However, I disliked the thread without them much more, and so I have just filed these rules under the “this is why we cannot have nice things” label. cinci zoo sniper fucked around with this message at 01:42 on Apr 24, 2022 |
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Apr 24, 2022 01:39
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speng31b posted:I understand your perspective. From the standpoint of someone coming into a thread without understanding the full history of why some of these topics have been historically difficult to moderate it just seems like a pretty lovely tradeoff to be honest. But I also don't have to moderate that thread, so I get it. I speculate that the long term, sustainable solution to this requires a posting culture change, and moving away from the megathread model. It should be a normal practice for complex topics to have multiple threads, where each thread clearly defines what it should be about - say, in D&D we have the current events thread for war in Ukraine, and a “WW3” escalation thread spun out of it. I’m sure this model has its own problems, but to me it seems like the most user friendly way to defuse heated threads about major topics. That said, the model could only work if posters would respect it, and would leave the attention they may or may not receive out of their calculus for posting decisions.
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Apr 24, 2022 02:04
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speng31b posted:Yeah, maybe? I suspect that sub dividing hot topics into multiple threads would hit a wall pretty fast. A few threads is fine, but if you have half a dozen off limit topics on popular threads, I don't know that spinning up new threads in each case is realistic or would really result in better discussion. It feels destructive, but let’s review the problem on the example of my thread. Early days thread was going 40-60 pages per day. Between reading, posting, and moderating - and I made a point in absorbing every single post made in the thread, it took me 6-10 hours per day. 3-5 hours of that was pure reading time - that’s the cost a poster would’ve been asked to pay for staying abreast of the conversation. Now, English is my 4th language, and I definitely do not pretend to be the fastest reader. For the sake of example, let’s assume that an average goon can consistently absorb 20 pages per hour. That’s still 2-3 hours. The next argument is then the viral nature of the topic, and the time it took for other threads on the war to become established. To keep numbers pretty, let’s say that “normal” post flow would’ve been half of what was seen, so 1-1.5 hours of daily reading for our spherical goon in vacuum. Under the assumption that a good discussion requires familiarity with the discussion so far, I think my case is reasonably clear by now. For most threads this would absolutely be overkill approach, but for a fast thread having multiple verbose topics compete for real estate does only degrade the quality of all ongoing discussions simultaneously. It also sucks to read something too fast for active posters to follow proper, because you’ll be seeing the same arguments playing out on repeat. Not sure about other big threads, but my thread would’ve managed with just 2 spin-offs for the most of it. I tried to make both of them happen naturally, and at least one of them did, but I think it would’ve generated less bad blood between various posters if there was an established practice to make them proactively. For something with tons of competing narratives, like an American election or something, this may very well not work. You’d have to probably go after raising the individual post quality really high, and I’m not sure that is compatible with the spirit of not moderating positions.
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Apr 24, 2022 04:11
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Varinn posted:The reason those rules suck is that you're the only person who's semi-obligated to read the entire thread. So of COURSE poo poo seems boring to you, because you're probably the person reading the thread the most (as IK). 99% of other posters can't keep up, and so they dip in when they can, and have the conversations relevant to their interests. Being told that people who aren't you had this conversation 100 pages ago, and that the IK is tired of reading it, is extremely lame. I agree that that these rules are fundamentally lame, don’t get me wrong. I just also believe that they benefit posters, since they arguably halve the volume of reading one would otherwise do to keep up with the thread, at an expense of only somewhat restricting a few topics that add nothing to the function the thread ought serve. On the posters dipping in, it’s a delicate issue if its own. To be fully clear, I think it is entirely unreasonable to expect anyone to have read the entire thread thoroughly. At the same time, the rules stipulate that posts should be “funny, informative, or interesting” and that they shouldn’t “repeat a very common talking point”. I think it would do good for posters to earnestly ask themselves if they’re in the clear of this, and perhaps use search before they have a serious argument about something that isn’t part of the news cycle of the last couple of days. I say “serious” since I seldom make any topic-based enforcement decisions in response to brief exchanges. As for Despera, I’m certain Fritz will be happy to help. Moderation ultimately is a subjective thing, and I’m unable to adopt someone else’s sense of humour. I could go full rationality golem and start plowing through Calibanibals of this world as well, sure, but that would harm the thread much more than me tolerating a poster some may find annoying. Edit: SpiritOfLenin posted:As a sidenote, the Ukraine-thread differs quite a lot from most threads on the forum in that it appears a significant amount of regulars posting in it are from Europe (maybe even a majority right now?), The majority for sure. We also easily have 2-3 dozens of goons with themselves, their family members, or friends being bombed by Russians - and that doesn’t include lurkers. This demographic is the sole reason why I have elaborate shock content tagging rules that I go at non-trivial lengths for to enforce. When people post all those 40 minute YouTube videos or 50 paragraph articles, I actually try to go and check them for violent footage or gore even when I don’t personally care at all about their content, for example. Edit 2: SpiritOfLenin posted:This also applies to some Americans posting stupidly loving bloodthirsty posts by the way, and I wish those kind of posts got tagged a bit more consistently. This is a fairly broad category of posts, so I’d appreciate if you can bring a few more specific examples forward to discuss if something could and should be done about them. Moderating bloodlusting is something I try doing, but I think that it’s difficult to do so without moderating positions, and that it’s entirely reasonable for posters, especially those from Europe, to wish for sound defeat of Russian soldiers in Ukraine. Consequently, current unwritten rules around that focus on calls for violence against individuals or civilians, ethnic slurs, suicide “recommendations”, and elaborate descriptions of violence or war crimes that someone should do. cinci zoo sniper fucked around with this message at 11:32 on Apr 24, 2022 |
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Apr 24, 2022 10:47
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Sarcastr0 posted:But I do think a project of working towards a D&D values statement to go alongside the more procedural rules is something to strongly consider. I think this could be a good idea, but I'm uncertain if you can do that without kicking conservatives out of D&D, on example of the sports thread.
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Apr 24, 2022 15:50
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PT6A posted:Bigotry is not, by its nature, conservative. There are conservative bigots, there are liberal bigots, there are socialist bigots. Sure, though I’m not certain why you take me for an American. What I’m saying is that, e.g., ostracising trans people in sports in Latvia has virtually unanimous support of all parties representing classical conservatives, national conservatives, liberal conservatives, social conservatives, and right-wing populists - which is the sum of political forces we have that could be ostensibly described as “conservative”. This group of people would be excluded from the conversation effectively on the basis of identity, since our conservatives love having whips and purity tests, whereas the remaining 2 parties are “big tent for Latvian speakers” and “big tent for Russian speakers”, where members can (mostly) do whatever the gently caress they want. Hypothetical “no LGBT bigotry” rule would have an order of magnitude difference in relative casualties between the conservatives and everyone else. That was the gist of what I wanted to say - not that there are no card-carrying political progressives with individual beliefs on some topic that are reasonably classified as bigotry, but that such a rule change would disproportionately affect conservatives, especially on the topics pertinent to current day culture wars, if it had any teeth. On the other hand, as Gumball Gumption says, D&D posters already self-moderate the forum into specific political positions anyway, and so formalising such a rule would hardly affect many - not that I would loose any sleep over them. Besides, we already have C-SPAM, where people appear to be welcome to complain about Holodomor believers all day long already. In the short term, this would likely cause more inter-forum drama, but in the long term I fail to identify how the status quo benefits the majority of active D&D participants. That could of course just be me being ungrateful for being presented with regular attempts to rationalise Russian Lebensraum. Or maybe I’m missing those people who were genuinely put off by D&D before and now sincerely contribute in it, instead of intentionally leaving incendiary messaging to farm quotes, like what the trans athletics thread appears to have been meant to be.
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Apr 24, 2022 16:37
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Main Paineframe posted:One thing I haven't seen brought up yet, even by the mods, was the "working the refs" problem previous iterations of D&D had. How do people feel that's going right now? As far my thread is concerned, that still happens. There are posters whom to the best of my intuition will angle their posts so that I ought to find myself in a position to clap someone else, just on the “decorum” grounds. Different means, but the same outcome.
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Apr 24, 2022 17:34
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Sarcastr0 posted:'Denying that trans individuals have a right to exist' is a value 'no bigotry' is an invitation to work the refs against your posting enemies. This has been an interesting discussion, and I’m curious to hear what kind of outcomes would people prefer for the hypothetical move away from the observed outcomes of the current moderation stance: 1) Values, e.g., “D&D mods believe that trans women are women, and do not wish to have this debated” 2) Principles, e.g., “conversations in D&D shall follow the spirit of the UHDR and the Istanbul Convention” 3) Behaviours, e.g. Rob Filter posted:"To help encourage debate and discussion we do not generally moderate on the content of your argument, just how do you present it. There are a few exceptions to this rule, though, where we see there is no meaningful debate or discussion to had around issues, or where the debate is been weaponized politically by the far right to organize violence against marginalized members of the community. Those topics include: the validity of trans rights, Holocaust denial, scientific arguments for racism, and gender equality. If you are concerned that your post may violate these rules, contact a moderator first." 4) Something else 5) Combination of multiple or the above I understand that my 3 options do overlap - this is just the best eloquence I can muster on the spot, apologies.
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Apr 24, 2022 18:30
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SourKraut posted:This is a few pages back, but I didn't want it to get lost, because I think it's a valid argument. I agree, I think it's a fundamentally unhealthy dynamic for the SA on the whole. My feeling is that the majority of goons farming various subforums for quote have a jaded, deeply cynical view of it all, and so the USDA Grade A quotes are then to be sourced from someone genuinely passionate. Once you define the target like that, the name of the game is to elicit an emotional response, which de facto means that the existence of a quote farming practice in a subforum does explicitly incentivize threadshitting elsewhere. D&D as a subforum, much like every other, should be allowed to exist without being a punching bag for posts like this one. Sure, this specific post was punished, and much harsher than what its ilk gets away with normally, but I believe that SA would be better for it if the practice was banned in general. Not sure this is D&D feedback material though, and if it would make sense from a moderation perspective to, e.g., decided that we just start slamming 1-day probations as the minimum duration for someone caught SYQ'ing. That’s basically D&D mods moderating posts outside of it, which they shouldn’t do. cinci zoo sniper fucked around with this message at 19:03 on Apr 24, 2022 |
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Apr 24, 2022 18:49
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speng31b posted:Basically what it boils down to is that D&D "serious posting" ethos combined with constant suspicion of bad faith posting makes for an especially toxic environment. And while I totally understand the history and valid reasons for suspicion of bad faith posting in specific cases, it's pretty demoralizing to come into a thread and see a viewpoint be shouted down as bad faith, against thread rules, boring, when it's sincerely not any of those things. I think this is a salient argument, but this coin, in my opinion, does have the other side. There’s a lot of malicious posts (which I would define from D&D perspective as posting in any way that isn’t meant to constructively move the conversation forwards in the lowest number of posts possible), and plenty of high-visibility posters making malicious posts exclusively. Just look at US CE, it appears to have 2 dozen regulars while having maybe half a dozen contributors. It does suck to be suspected merely because you are genuinely clueless about someone’s favourite posting cudgel, no disagreement here. However, I do disagree that D&D posters on the whole are being unreasonable or excessively paranoid in their suspicions, especially when it comes to topics like the trans athletics thread - in this extremely online discussion board it simply is implausible that in 2022 someone could still have a naive, pure heart “so how are these trans people women anyway” question, to paraphrase.
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Apr 24, 2022 19:14
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speng31b posted:Yeah I totally agree that the behavior under suspicion actually does happen, but depending on the specific case maybe or maybe not to the degree suspected by posters. Agreed on the number nuance, I fully believe that people inside the problem threads overestimate it, myself including, and just speculate that people out of them are likely to underestimate it. It’s definitely a thread-level problem as well, rather than some grand conspiracy. That said, while thread bans do effectively solve that problem, my understanding is that the general direction for SA moderation is to drop thread and forum bans in future, due to cumbersome enforcement logistics.
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Apr 24, 2022 19:43
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Koos Group posted:Good points, and I haven't talked about one of my motivations for this, which has to do with my age. I've seen the whole transition from racism and other bigotries being acceptable to completely unacceptable. I've seen the passionate, righteous and intelligent arguments people made against these things when it was still necessary to do so, and that led to us winning culturally. But now that we have won, and equal rights is becoming an axiom, I fear some people might be forgetting the actual justifications for it. I don't believe moral and social progress is durable in the same way as technological progress, where we'll simply stay at the most sophisticated level we've reached because we have all the necessary knowledge; but rather it's something that we'll need to always be vigilant to maintain, because it involves human beings rather than physical laws. I think this is a noble philosophy, but I'm not sure if we (and I'm not even sure if I mean D&D or the people talking politics online in general) are capable to have such conversations in principle in the post-truth world. I know that this is not useful, but I cannot help but wonder if this is a medium where such principled conversations can become a baseline at all. At a risk of sounding as a broken clock, I suspect that the answers depends on whether if people genuinely hold their beliefs, or just post in a pattern that earns them the kind of attention they revel in.
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Apr 24, 2022 20:21
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Arrhythmia posted:@cinci zoo sniper They're not, and have never been. You're welcome to quote any such posts I, son of a Russian mother, have somehow missed for a retroactive special. cinci zoo sniper fucked around with this message at 00:14 on Apr 25, 2022 |
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Apr 25, 2022 00:11
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cinci zoo sniper posted:They're not, and have never been. You're welcome to quote any such posts I, son of a Russian mother, have somehow missed for a retroactive special. At a risk of coming off as obnoxious, I’ll bump this into the fresh page for Arrhythmia.
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Apr 25, 2022 00:15
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Cicero posted:I've read quite a bit of that thread and it's hard for me to recall instances of wishing violence on Russian civilians. Both of those kinds of posts are not entirely prohibited, correct. I try to moderate the more egregious instances of such posts, however - slurs, bizarre graphic descriptions, and so on.
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Apr 25, 2022 00:59
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speng31b posted:I think the danger cited of moderating positions has been framed in terms of the tendency to steer opposing viewpoints in the direction of a forbidden position. But I'm having a hard time thinking of a clear cut example of how someone could abuse this in the transphobia / trans athletes test case. Very easy. Let’s say that the global conversation about trans athletes moves to some new accepted position. You take that, go find your posting enemy in an appropriate thread, and start some “what do you think about X” spiel. The objective here is to get them to cast doubt on this new position as a plausible premise, preferably disagree with it in stronger terms. Once that happens you just dump supporting material for it into the thread, declare them a transphobe, and chances are some bystander without the full context of your conversation will take the bait as well. At that point either your target concedes and has thus been mauled to your satisfaction, or they double down for posting culture reasons and you can murder by cop them.
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Apr 25, 2022 01:21
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speng31b posted:I understand this as a general framework for attack, what I mean is in the specific case of transphobia I'm having a hard time understanding how that vector would not be incredibly hard to practically utilize without it being extremely obvious. Baiting someone into an opposing political view or something like that is one thing. Baiting someone into outing themselves as transphobic is a bit harder presumably. I mean, you wouldn't be trying to get them to say “I am a transphobe”, you just want them to say something that could a transphobe could also be reasonably expected to say, which obviously works better with something new. You get to that point, and ideally have them double down by virtue of yourself being annoying or having someone jump into dogpile. If mods are intervening only at that point, they will need to 1) waste their time on retracing your antics to figure out what happened, and 2) deal the poster who not only has affirmed their punishment-worthy position, but also likely has someone baying for their blood. Sure, it takes a certain kind of goon to get owned like that, but I don't think I need to convince you that there's an abundance of temper on SA. Goons ddox other goons for just posting about US politics, what is there to say about trying your luck with owning a posting enemy of yours sous vide. I'm not saying that everyone did post like this back when it was possible, to be clear. I'm just saying that it is really annoying to post around goons trying to fish for poo poo. Cease to Hope posted:can you point to an example of this happening in the past? because i genuinely do not understand what risk you are pointing to No, I don't have a good recollection of individual posts stretching years back, except for that guy who claimed to have stuffed drugs inside his dick before rollerblading. cinci zoo sniper fucked around with this message at 02:25 on Apr 25, 2022 |
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Apr 25, 2022 02:15
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Cease to Hope posted:I don't necessarily mean a quote, just an example of the phenomenon in practice. Even just a hypothetical one would work. I'm still unclear on the hazard you're trying to avoid. I don't believe that I can provide you with anything more illustrative than what I've already posted. The hazard is a manufactured pretext for a punishable ideological position.
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Apr 25, 2022 03:07
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Spoke Lee posted:When it comes to bad faith posting a good chunk of it is being over thought imo. If someone is contemporaneously posting in a different thread espousing much more extreme views for example, shouldn't that be clear evidence of intent? That only holds if all threads are serious, and to an identical degree.
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Apr 25, 2022 05:01
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