First Quarter 2023 D&D Feedback.

The Something Awful Forums > Discussion > Debate & Discussion > First Quarter 2023 D&D Feedback.

A Buttery Pastry: Sep 4, 2011; Delicious and Informative!

cinci zoo sniper posted:

It is a specific directive from Jeffrey, which in the current rendition of the private mod guidelines reads as follows:

The criteria are entirely in the mods' discretion, and are therefore different for every mod-thread-subforum combination out there. In this specific case, I talked to my fellow mods first to see if there's a consensus that the thread is not doing great, and, with that secured to the practical extent, then I went to talk into the thread. The rest you know, including the hopefully uncontroversial thread meltdown that prompted me to finally toss it.

Having not seen a single thing from that thread, thus being a neutral observer, what was the embarrassing part of it? Because based on the likely origin of that rule, an "embarrassing thread" is one where the regulars develop huge in-group/out-group issues, radicalize each other into posting like crazy people, and then have huge meltdowns whenever someone comes in with a different opinion. Or if a dog-bricker gets permabanned for living up to their title.

socialsecurity posted:

This seems odd to me, everyone wants mods to be more part of the community but them to also not moderate threads they post in?

I think the moderator part of "active thread participant mod" should be in the style of "Hey, I think you guys are talking past each other. Poster A is talking about this, but Poster B is talking about that". As opposed to "Shut up, go away, don't talk about this anymore". This can actually work to bring a discussion back on track, and create a positive feedback loop where people have successful discussions about a topic and come to some sort of understanding, if not agreement, and then are better able to give the other side a chance in future discussions.

Gumball Gumption posted:

Yeah that's a good point, I'm not arguing that you should entertain that specific idiot but the same arguments are used for things that are a lot grayer. Really I should have used China as my example here, you can easily write fan fiction about how evil China is that is hard and loose with the facts and it really doesn't matter or get much mod pushback. USCE just had a fun quick jaunt into "ghost cities" an entirely made up xenophobic lie that's really just long term infrastructure projects. There is a divide between what D&D says it is and what it actually is and the ease with which you can lie if it backs up existing mod biases is a big part of it. DV being someone who wants to push for more accuracy is another reason I think they would make a good mod.

My feedback is that I do not believe DV would make a good mod. I'd expect precision, not accuracy, out of them.

I also suspect it would reignite a forum's war.

# ¿ Mar 27, 2023 21:17

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# ¿ May 21, 2024 05:23

A Buttery Pastry: Sep 4, 2011; Delicious and Informative!

Turgid Flagella posted:

I agree here too, because I think if nothing else, it would help DV understand the extent of the actual labor he's expecting to be done by volunteer janitors. His constant aggrieved tone about how the moderators "refuse" to enforce the rules seems to give way to the conclusion that he thinks moderating a forum of this size, of this activity, with such deeply held convictions is something one can do with a minimal amount of time and effort investment, so let's see how he'd do it. Make him Koos for a month (with the exception of a forum ban simulating a ban so as to make reversals after the 30 day period easier to implement) and see how it shakes out. Maybe he proves that all you need is 15 minutes with a laptop a day to make D&D a perfect intellectual saloon, maybe he cracks under the pressure of what he's asking others to do. Either way, it's a resolution to the arc.

This makes sense, until you take into account how well mods hang on to power on the forum. You need to be a straight up menace to get demodded, outside like FYAD mod breaking sacred mod oaths, so those 30 days would end up being a 30 month reign of terror.

# ¿ Mar 27, 2023 21:48

A Buttery Pastry: Sep 4, 2011; Delicious and Informative!

cinci zoo sniper posted:

It was

Or if I had to explain it to someone who doesn't know anything about the subject, like all 3 louder posters in the thread had a lacklustre grasp on the subject, and kept liberally mixing technical details with folklore. This in itself is not a problem, however that being the most �searchable� D&D thread about ChatGPT, a novel and highly sought after topic, was a concern, since the purpose of D&D is educational, and the thread had no warning signs, e.g., in the title, that it's just people chatting about whatever they think of AI in general, rather than treating ChatGPT and other modern LLM applications with some kind of consistent rigour. It did further not help, and, unfortunately, I have no delicate way of saying this, that the same posters weren't really the posters the D&D would send as its champions to a would-be RSF Grand Tournament. And so, I hatched a plan to see if I can get everyone to pull up (it failed as I had misjudged people's interests), and if not to then rename/move/close/gas the thread (in descending order of probability, settling on a rename as the least destructive option eventually). However, that plan also failed, since I was too slow to enact it before the thread just experienced a normally-thread-gassing meltdown with multiple people pulling the knives out and trying to shove the most active regular into a dumpster, as right or as wrong any of the involved goons was.

As to why gas and not just probate my way through a meltdown � I couldn't see that bearing any lasting effect, as the target regular in question didn't distance themselves from the conversation quickly enough to not get branded as the goon whose interest in large language models boils down to a new age academic plagiarism instrumentation.

Thank you for your response. Given the ostensible purpose of the forum and such a thread within the forum, and your perspective on the thread, I can understand your approach. I'm not sure I entirely agree that it really falls under the embarrassment clause, but it makes sense under a strict rigor clause.

That said, I would argue that some of the most interesting D&D threads I've read have been the pet project of weird eccentrics, whose positions were hardly compatible with reality - but which were fertile grounds to think about a subject conceptually/philosophically, rather than focus on "the facts". Though reading your later post, it seems like your suggested �prove to me that my slide rule is not sentient� thread would actually be that exact sort of thread.

Here's a suggestion based on the above: Enforce more rigor in thread subjects. Make it so you have to make the focus of a thread clear, from basic "Chatting about the news with proper punctuation" to "Philosophical arguments ahead, no facts required, only logic".

Thorn Wishes Talon posted:

These posts remind me of the poster who revealed that they had a PhD in economics, and within minutes they were compared to a cop and a drone bomber.

The poster quoted themselves brings up the cops and the military as sources of interesting perspectives. uninterrupted is completely justified in expanding their list of "professions that should not get undue respect in D&D simply for being supposed experts" to include those.

fez_machine posted:

why not just post in CSPAM about this stuff?

Why D&D?

I don't think it's right that D&D should pretend like a neutral judgment of the facts has a consistent liberal/status quo bias, which is what the blind credentialism people seem to be suggesting would result in. At least based on how it has previously been weaponized in D&D. I think that's something people need to recognize and reconcile with, that other posters have had quite terrible experiences arguing in D&D based on the exact logic they're seemingly promoting. While I can understand the desire to get to a more rigorous debate forum, the demand for rigor must only be scaled up as fast as the mods can be proven to not exhibit undue bias in their enforcement of it. Something which was a big problem not long ago, though the mods responsible for that are no longer in positions of authority within D&D.

e: Just to clarify, the opposite argument of "This people are just making GBS threads threads up for fun" is definitely also true. Just not as often as some people claim.

Timmy Age 6 posted:

I also don�t think probations are as ideologically driven as is sometimes claimed. Like, Discendo Vox gets hit semi-regularly, as did Evilweasel when they posted in D&D a few years back. I just don�t think that �don�t be a dick� is, or should be, an insurmountable ideological barrier to posting.

The severity of the hits and how often they come relative to others is the matrix to use, not whether someone gets hit occasionally. It is in fact possible that both DV and Evilweasel should've been hit 10 times as often for condescending and dismissive posting. Note also that the "ramping" system of moderation makes the number of probes you get escalate punishments, which can exacerbate bias immensely.

Fritz the Horse posted:

one thing that's often lost in discussions about what D&D is vs. what it should be is that it is a very international userbase

you don't hear much from the regional threads because they're mostly chill doing their own thing, it's US politics that both demands and results in the most moderation. but, for example, the UKMT gets a similar number of posts per day to US CE. by comparison, CSPAM is more US-centric.

I appreciate that the mods realize this. There's a reason why you sometimes get suggestions to prohibit US politics chat, because that's largely the actually contentious part of the D&D-CSPAM conflict. If you don't participate in that, the distinction between D&D and CSPAM is much reduced, though it does happen that this tribal conflict is recreated in threads that are ostensibly bigger picture. (See the Media Literacy thread)

A Buttery Pastry fucked around with this message at 06:10 on Mar 28, 2023

# ¿ Mar 28, 2023 06:05

A Buttery Pastry: Sep 4, 2011; Delicious and Informative!

socialsecurity posted:

No you didn't, you posted an example of a post you felt should of got probed but didn't which isn't even close to the same thing, not every single post is going to get reviewed so a single one not getting probed isn't proof of mod bias or anything else really. What people keep claiming is that people get probed solely for their opinions because they aren't liberal enough, which is something keeps getting claimed but never shown even a sliver of evidence for.

That's a subset of the "D&D mods are biased" complaints, with the larger pool including people who complain about precisely what VitalSigns is talking about. Not people getting probed, but people not getting probed for repeatedly breaking core D&D rules because they do it in a way that aligns with moderator biases. Like, I don't even disagree that a lot of the posts you're probably thinking of deserved a probation, given D&D rules and what it's supposed to be - but then that thinking should be applied universally.

That said, this might have gotten better with the new crop of moderators? I tried to give the serious discussion threads a shot a while back, but it was, respectfully, like trying to argue with a brick wall. No rebuttals were acknowledged, and the mods didn't care, so I just crawled back into the far better for discussion regional threads. If it has gotten better, then it'll probably take a while for people to really notice, given that (previous) bad moderation encourages people to not try again. That said squared, I would kind of expect there to have been some poo poo storm as a result of the mods cracking down like they needed to do, which makes me think it hasn't happened.

A Buttery Pastry fucked around with this message at 11:46 on Mar 28, 2023

# ¿ Mar 28, 2023 11:41

A Buttery Pastry: Sep 4, 2011; Delicious and Informative!

socialsecurity posted:

I asked for an example of someone getting probed for being not liberal enough, you know the accusation made many times in this thread. If it happens so often as people are pretending it shouldn't be hard to provide one, you don't need a "spreadsheet" or whatever.

Accusations of mod bias can be satisfied both by people NOT getting probated for poo poo because they align with mod biases, and people getting probated because they do not. VitalSigns is not responsible for arguing the latter, if they feel like the issue is the former, just because you've lumped them in with a larger group of malcontents.

# ¿ Mar 28, 2023 12:05

A Buttery Pastry: Sep 4, 2011; Delicious and Informative!

VitalSigns posted:

Yeah I agree.

I don't think it's unreasonable for mods to be aware of it (and I'm not sure they are), and to acknowledge it, and try to mitigate it, that's why people bring it up.

But they are only human, it will never be perfect, but maybe it could be better?

I think it's a problem though that exceptions are made when mods like it. I mean what is this supposed to be, a serious debate space of respectful tone and intellectual arguments, or shitposty laugh at nerds who get too riled up space. It can't be both.

I think it can, just not at the same time. Do what someone else suggested and define threads as either debate or discussion. Instead of the law getting laid down according to who the offending poster is, do it based on what type of thread it was defined as in the OP.

Discussion threads get to be a little looser, mostly by giving everyone the same leeway in posting style no matter the opinion presented. Basically, if you can post "lol Republicans" then you can also post "lol Democrats" or whatever, which seems to be the main point of contention. Apply reversals of fortune here if people reporting poo poo are posting in basically the same way, until everyone understands how this poo poo works.

Debate threads on the other hand is where you can't do poo poo like dismiss a position by proxy, by creating a daisy chain of connections until you eventually reach a person sort of related to the original position that can't be defended, or any other rhetorical tricks. Ideally this would be where the majority of reports were, which would be easier to handle if the volume had gone down. Would obviously help if the report system was better so people could more adequately describe why a role was broken.

# ¿ Mar 28, 2023 12:46

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# ¿ May 21, 2024 05:23

A Buttery Pastry: Sep 4, 2011; Delicious and Informative!

Main Paineframe posted:

It sounds like the problem might be that the posts Vitalsigns is complaining about aren't getting reported, then? Any given post can only be reported once, so the question isn't "How often does X get reported?" so much as "How likely is X to get reported?" and "How likely is the mod to take issue against X when they see the report?".

You're missing "How likely is the mod to take issue with the person doing the reporting?", which is definitely a concern I've seen raised for moderators across the forums. If you, based on your own experience reporting things, come to the conclusion that the mods will not act on your reports, then there's really only downsides to reporting anyone.

cinci zoo sniper posted:

Thanks. To also say something useful:

The median reports queue for the last several months is 0�10 USCE reports per day and 0�5 reports for the rest of D&D combined, including the war thread, Israel/Palestine, UKMT that's as active and as large as the USCE, whatever is the jousting thread of the day, and so on.

Using a data based approach, I've come to the conclusion that the most effective way to improve moderation in D&D is to ban American posters from the forum.

# ¿ Mar 28, 2023 15:00

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