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I'll kramer some war thread business in here, to have it all contained. Unfortunately, the timing of this feedback thread catches me at a busier period IRL, so I'll be brief and unlikely debating the feedback raised particularly thoroughly, if at all. I will, however, read it all before implementing the rules update for the war thread – which is not going to happen at least until April, to keep expectations clear. So, the historical context, give or take a few posts. Not crucial to read, just if anyone is really curious. https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=4014579&userid=197848&perpage=40&pagenumber=19#post530328037 https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=4014579&userid=197848&perpage=40&pagenumber=19#post530329667 https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=4014579&userid=197848&perpage=40&pagenumber=19#post530332932 https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=4014579&userid=197848&perpage=40&pagenumber=19#post530334156 https://forums.somethingawful.com/showthread.php?threadid=4014579&userid=197848&perpage=40&pagenumber=19#post530334375 Also, some posts in the late ChatGPT thread, where we broached the subject of using videos to make your arguments. So, in order: 1. Walls of text These are a chore to engage, since when you just drop a long quote bare, it can unclear what exactly you're trying to say. Additionally, under the D&D rules, you're expected fully to consume the posts you're replying to, and there is a limit on where replying to a post becomes onerous. For wholly original thought, I don't think that most people are really at a risk of breaching it, but for content not originating on SA it realistically should be a few minutes per post at most. 2. Long videos Same as the above basically, but then there's an extra wrinkle of people doing “look at what my YouTuber did” and “debate my YouTuber” posts, which aren't really adding anything to any conversation framed specifically like that. 3. One off links/tweets offloaded in the thread I think this is nuanced, in that for breaking news this is the pragmatic posting style. Overall, however, I've found over the course of the first year of the thread that quite often people will not ever click into the sources and check the finer details of whatever they're posting about. The blame on this one is mine to take, as I supported and contributed to that manner of posting for quite a while. It therefore is on me to see the problem mitigated. The proposed rules change for the U/R thread, attacking all 3 of these, would come as a blanket rule against dropping links, videos, and walls of text without at least some commentary. For breaking news, it will be fine to just “holy poo poo this is massive” – I just want to discourage the CTRL+C, CTRL+V posting style. Furthermore, not as a rule, but more of as a style guide for the thread, I will also ask of posters to focus on making their own arguments. What this means for bolding vs quotes of walls of text conversation is that I am firmly against posting the wall as is, and bolding the more requisite parts, and that I would like quotes usage to become more articulated, e.g., when you're relaying some precise language or figures, or something else not really practical for being summarized. For everything else, I would like posters' own words to become the load-bearing form factor for delivering one's arguments to the thread. Lastly, I would also like to receive some public feedback on the thread rules that are seen as obsolete, reductive, or otherwise unnecessary. I will respect your time and say that if your feedback about potential removals from rules is not more specific than “remove them all”, I won't dwell on it any much. Edit: “a few minutes per post” for in-line stuff, that is. This is not in any way a limit on using longer works as your reference material. cinci zoo sniper fucked around with this message at 15:40 on Mar 25, 2023 |
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Mar 25, 2023 15:31
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KillHour posted:To be honest, there are threads in D&D that I see as more "debatey" where the point is to sit and consume the arguments, and ones where I see as more "discussy" where there's things changing and happening at a fast pace and I come here to get news. I think in the latter, I don't really care if poster x gives their opinion on some CNN piece because I came here for the CNN piece, not the poster. Goons manage to be a much better news aggregator than the actual news aggregators, it turns out. This reminds me of another thing I wanted to propose. While moderation is context-dependent, e.g., the war thread and the US CE thread are two fairly different vibes, under D&D ruleset we distinguish regional threads as having specific privileges. Meaning that you can lightly flame your “neighbours” and otherwise behave more akin to tailgating, rather than making sure that your cuffs and collar are properly starched before posting. This is an occasional source of confusion for posters, usually in two flavours, in my experience. The first would be where people mistake a regional thread as “chat with posters from the region” instead of “chat about the region”. The latter does necessitate the former, to be practical, but the former in itself can occasionally veer towards ruminating over interforum drama, which is not appreciated. The second would be where people expect probations to drop over someone telling them to gently caress off in, e.g., the Canada thread, and as a team we, the D&D mods, don't offer any guarantees of justice for that. These are bants-on posting zones by design, much like the D&D chat thread. Consequently, my proposal would be to clarify the rules with “such as regional threads where some amount of non-serious posting is accepted.” replaced by “such as regional threads where some amount of non-serious posting is accepted, apart from cross-forum drama.”. Also, to rename the regional threads consistently, e.g., Germany regional - title text, California regional - title text, and so on.
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Mar 25, 2023 18:26
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Another question to discuss (but this should really be all from my side) is whether if we would like to pin the D&D chat thread.
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Mar 25, 2023 18:28
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Hannibal Rex posted:I understand where you're coming from, and it would be nice if every post was made with the intent of sharpening one's own debating skills, but on a very basic level, I view the thread as a hub for noteworthy news articles and expert analysis. If that's being commented on by posters with relevant experience, it's a bonus, but I don't want to see that as a pre-condition for posting. Commentary would not necessarily the accurate framing of expectation, and perhaps at an unclear timeline as well. As I see myself as a major culprit of why we're having this situation, I envision the roll-out as a gradual, multi-month thing. The end goal of which is that every link/article/video posted in the thread is presented so that it is reasonably obvious 1) what is it about, 2) why did you find interesting/worth sharing, 3) who is it for, and 4) what does it have to do with the current affairs of the war. This sounds a bit, but really what I'm asking for is a basic sentence or two, instead of mechanistic copy-pasting. As non-final example, consider this: a future poster posted:Here's a piece summarizing Ukraine's strategic planning for the upcoming counter-offensive. Interesting to see numbers given to their reserves, up to 60k being kitted out with predominantly western gear. https://www.economist.com/europe/2023/03/06/ukraine-is-building-up-its-forces-for-an-offensive edit: Quixzlizx posted:I'm hoping Cinci isn't expecting a think-tank essay, but just a synopsis so people know what the topic of the article is going to be. A bit overdoing it even, this is like twice-thrice longer than what I'd have the gall to ask of people under the threat of sanctions. Up to an SMS message worth of text to briefly clarify the purpose of sharing this or that is what I'm aiming at. cinci zoo sniper fucked around with this message at 18:48 on Mar 25, 2023 |
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Mar 25, 2023 18:40
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Thank you for feedback on the war thread, Kestral. I'm not sure where to place it, since I don't pose myself as a military expert of any sort. The closest that I can think of moderating “as an expert” is when I stop people from writing fanfic about battles hundreds of miles behind the current frontlines. That should ideally be self-explanatory based on the thread being about current affairs, or TVIV-style as Fuschia tude put it, but if it's not that, then I hope you can clarify. And no, copping a probation in the feedback thread is well into goatse territory.Kestral posted:The ChatGPT thread was a mess as every thread about these technologies tends to be, but also a good example of the tone. Apparently Cinci works in that field and has Strong Opinions About It - opinions I agree with, mind you. But expressing his irritation at the thread being badly informed about how the technology works, then declining invitations to share his expertise in about the most condescending way possible, then hanging the Sword of Damocles over the thread because it's "a failure of an educational thread" is behavior that would get another poster probed. You can't tell me this post could be made by a non-mod without drawing a probation. Cinci's impending crackdown on videos and walls of texts when his own major contribution to educating the thread was a link to a Wolfram article that a non-specialist would take hours to read and possibly hours more of adjunct research to actually comprehend is just hypocritical, but that's another topic altogether. The problem with the thread was not that I have Strong Opinions about it, as evidenced by me never attempting similar moderation when the Tech Nightmares thread discusses the topic to a varying level of competence. The issue was that this is a highly prominent subject presently, while the debate in the thread at large showed poor, if not outright disregarding or simply non-existent, command over the facts. As in, my view of it was through the prism that other goons may end up searching for this thread, hoping to find something informative for the talk of town, instead stumbling into that. When I first read through the thread, I spent a non-trivial amount of time talking to posters both publicly and privately, to set crystal clear expectations for its moderation, instead of closing it right away. Which is to say that the mod guidelines would expect me to close it, especially should the quality of the conversation fail to improve measurably. What subsequently happened was that my ruling on the thread's conditional existence got effectively dismissed by one of its main characters, who showed little to no interest in improving the quality of their posting. Not even a full day later after I made an internal decision to shut the thread down by the end of that week (more likely renaming it, less likely by closing it), the thread did have a serious meltdown (starting from the whereabouts of this post). This put me into a pinch of “Do I spend my time and energy saving this when they have ignored the terms of their lease and the thread remains not useful beyond satisfying individual pet peeves?”. The logical answer to that is “no”. That said, I think you're expecting a bit too much from an SA mod working as a consultant to do unpaid consulting in their subject of expertise. I didn't sign up to be a mod because I wanted some unpaid professional after-hours, or because I have a glut of spare time, and the best you're getting out of me on your terms is some literature pointers. The “on your terms” bit is the important here, as I post plenty of work-related stuff seriously in SAL, YOSPOS, and elsewhere, where I see people with mature interest in the subject. Here, however, I found it most plausible that the leading poster of the thread was unlikely to develop what I would consider mature interest. As of the thread's conclusion, I consider myself to be well vindicated in my suspicion. Consequently, my topic-focused participation in the thread was largely limited to offering a maximalist benchmark for what I consider to be a useful and non-controversial understanding of its subject, ChatGPT and similar models – the Stephen Wolfram blog post. No one was expected to read it in full to be allowed to keep posting – it would've simply been sloppy work from my side to clamour “you should grok the subject” and provide no “trusted” references at all. Whether if you derive your knowledge from it or somewhere else was irrelevant to me, and I assume that plenty of perfectly normally participating episodic posters in the thread had never read the article in full because, as you note yourself, it is a handful. Lastly, you would do well to read the post you linked about a future walls-of-text ruling from me. It concerns itself with in-line content exclusively, rather than linked references. What you suggest would be an incredibly silly thing to do. Edit: Kestral posted:You can't tell me this post could be made by a non-mod without drawing a probation. There's nothing probatable about declining an arbitrary call-out to write a post, since you do not owe anyone in D&D, or elsewhere on SA, your time. A similar-sounding post could draw a probation if it happens to be a parting shot, or if it blows off a button pusher investigating if they should put their button pushing hat on, but those are distinct situations. cinci zoo sniper fucked around with this message at 13:35 on Mar 26, 2023 |
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Mar 26, 2023 11:53
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Fister Roboto posted:Yeah this is the problem with these threads being so infrequent (the last one was over half a year ago iirc) and short. Sure there are a ton of individual instances that you could point to, but who in their right mind is going to keep a list of these things until whenever the next feedback thread is? The last one was in November, meaning that this is a month behind their cadence for the last year. And this one will probably stay open just for the weekend indeed, as they usually would.
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Mar 26, 2023 14:58
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Turgid Flagella posted:Joe Biden raped Tara Reade Post on your main, LALD.
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Mar 26, 2023 15:03
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KillHour posted:Cinci, that was a lot of words to say I don't know what I'm talking about when I gave my credentials multiple times and spent quite a lot of energy referencing both commentary by experts and academic literature, and yet you dismissed me out of hand instead of engaging with the substance of my arguments. That gave other posters carte blanche to frankly dogpile me and drag the conversation kicking and screaming to where people are hurling insults at me when the thread was closed. As I have suggested multiple times both to you, to other people in the gassed thread, and here - all you need to get me to ignore your thread is to name it more appropriately, e.g., “I want to talk about AI”. Do not name it after a specific, real-world thing, such as OpenAI ChatGPT or Google Bard, and the only reason I’ll have to read it then is if someone reports a post there, and I’m the mod clearing the queue at that moment. Also, that paper may or may not be in direct contradiction with OpenAI’s official statements on the matter, or getting laughed despite being littered with caveats such as: quote:Given the breadth and depth of GPT-4’s capabilities, we believe that it could reasonably be viewed as an early (yet still incomplete) version of an artificial general intelligence (AGI) system. quote:Our claim that GPT-4 represents progress towards AGI does not mean that it is perfect at what it does, or that it comes close to being able to do anything that a human can do (which is one of the usual definition [sic] of AGI; see the conclusion section for more on this), or that it has inner motivation and goals (another key aspect in some definitions of AGI).
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Mar 26, 2023 17:39
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KillHour posted:That is not what you said. This is what you said: cinci zoo sniper posted:If you name the thread like “let's chat about AI”, or any other way that doesn't imply that could be practically useful to people who want to learn more LLMs and their applications presently in the vogue, you can be well on your way. cinci zoo sniper posted:The fact that a crazy person could have a crazy take on statistics isn't really adding legitimacy to the angle of refusing to understand how the thing works. While I cannot stop such a crazy person from having such a crazy take, I can and will stop them from platforming it in D&D as an idea with an implicit educational value. cinci zoo sniper fucked around with this message at 19:11 on Mar 26, 2023 |
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Mar 26, 2023 19:09
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Bar Ran Dun posted:Yes, (as one) Neoplatonists are crazy but it’s a part of the conversation. There is a segment of the AI / tech folks that are very definitely Neoplatonists. It’s part of the public discourse on the subject. Even if I agree with you that in this ChatGPT context it is definitely crazy. And that's a perfectly fine point to make, even if hashing it out is ultimately not my preferred direction for that thread. I'm alluding to this merely as to the missing context for the claim that I've called KillHour “a crazy person”.
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Mar 26, 2023 20:19
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Quixzlizx posted:Although I do think there was a period of time earlier in the war where there were waves of blatantly bad-faith posts that only existed to troll/mine SYQs that weren't exactly clamped down upon on the D&D side, and it only eventually stopped because the moderation/admin policies changed elsewhere on the site to ban SYQ-baiting between sub-forums. The issue itself was blatant from the start, as it involved maybe a dozen goons sharing the same 3 openers. As such, I did what I could as fast as I could – there simply are limits to what an IK can do. Doing the same as a mod does take a specific due process, since by and large I should and try to give most posts a benefit of doubt, but is otherwise much more practical. To put it plainly, as a mod, I am empowered to (eventually) institute thread bans and make thread participation be a $10 letter to the editor if all else fails. As a matter of fact, however, it hardly does go as far (cf. the relatively short thread ban list for the war thread), as shrugging off longer probations eventually becomes counterproductive to just posting. It did, however, also help, and quite so, that the C-SPAM thread stopped being effectively unmoderated around the same time as I became a mod, and that the crew there had a better sense of humour than cosplaying an RSS feed.
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Mar 26, 2023 21:56
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MikeC posted:and if I respond I am the one eating the probe. MikeC posted:Just FYI, the twitter dude you are quoting is a Cato institute researcher. They are borderline isolationist in their FP thinking. They heavily argue against intervention and adventurism and it is through this lens they view the Russo-Ukrainian war. I'll assume this was a good-faith question. Most IR analysts of the realist school also do not view this war in isolation, especially US-based analysts who view this conflict as just one of many issues that need to be managed in order for the United States to maintain its hegemonic grip in the world that is growing evermore multipolar. Within this framework, Ukrainian territorial integrity is of minimal consequence to the United States. Unlike the bipolar world of the post-war era, proxy wars against *the* rival center of power are no longer zero-sum games. Since the emergence of China as a player with Great Power ambitions, any decrease in stability or power projection of the Russian state to protect its traditional spheres of influence necessarily results in the ability of Beijing to incorporate these regions into its own. This expansion is no longer theoretical with China emerging as Central Asia's security guarantor in the most recent SCO meeting held in Samarkand which saw Putin politically isolated and playing second fiddle with many CTSO countries that nominally rely on Russia as the guarantor and arbiter of security issues in the region. MikeC posted:Without access to classified materials, no one (including Twitter OSINT) can make a useful assessment of who is winning or who is more likely to retain an edge in the coming months. All outsiders can do is observe what has happened before and come up with a plausible scenario that fits the facts and behavior we have seen so far. Over the past 10 months with what we have witnessed the most likely assessment that can be made is that both the Ukrainians and the Russians are no longer capable of major offensive activities on the level that would either see the sudden liberation of Ukrainian territory or their sudden collapse.
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Mar 27, 2023 09:18
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VitalSigns posted:Is picking out the fairly inoffensive It is posting at people, and it's what the “sarcasm” probations that you gripe about are for, and so on and so forth. As far as the war thread is concerned, however, I have a zero-tolerance approach to inter-poster and inter-forum drama, and it is great modding on the back end. The last time our war thread has been on the agenda of anyone in the mod forum was when I got modded, nearly a year ago, which you can't really say as summarily about other threads.
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Mar 27, 2023 09:30
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VitalSigns posted:Why even have a feedback thread if you're going to characterize people as "griping" for providing feedback you asked for. Don't have the thread then if some mild criticism and questioning is "griping" to you. Am I not allowed to say that you complain when you've written a complaint? Also, no comment on “people” meaning “the 200 probations goon”.
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Mar 27, 2023 09:47
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VitalSigns posted:Anyways if you think those probes make for good discussion okay, seems penny ante stuff to me but I don't read that thread so maybe it's necessary or something. Catching your edit now, I don’t think that they actively promote a good discussion per se, if we dial into probations for posting at the thread or at the individual goons in it. They do tend to discourage holy crusade style of posts, however, which in my view of the war thread is a benefit that outweighs potentially bruising an informative poster or two with a sixer, both for the internal vibe of it and for its external perception.
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Mar 27, 2023 11:13
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Nelson Mandingo posted:Edit: https://forums.somethingawful.com/banlist.php?userid=230261#frompost530754006 Though this seems like an example of....not? I'd have to be explained to how it's a bad faith post. fez_machine posted:Yeah bad shoot on that one Cinci That is Catpetter, a goon wider known for posting so much SYQ from the D&D war thread in the C-SPAM war thread that Jeffrey began to personally ban them every time they did so. To try to stem this creative crisis, I assume, they’ve since invested quite a bit of effort into what appears to be a “look at me doing lib poo poo and all these dumb libs tolerating it and interacting with it credulously” routine. Which is to say that I measure their specific posts against the totality of their post history as I’ve experienced it. There could be alternative arrangements here, but the most interesting alternative to me would be to issue a thread ban, since they’ve been a bit too plugged into thread-related drama to ever come off as a candid thread participant to me. cinci zoo sniper fucked around with this message at 14:35 on Mar 27, 2023 |
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Mar 27, 2023 14:33
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Discussing IR theory is not only not verboten, but also not covered under any thread rules. MikeC just needs to manage to refrain from sniping at “the thread” as a political party, when they post about - which, to their credit, they usually manage just fine. Otherwise though, “an RSS of the war” is the point of the thread, as in my conception of it goons should find practical to read the thread with the purpose of understanding what is happening on the ground in Ukraine and Russia. There was a subset of posters who were not interested in that, and instead would prefer to litigate their own pet peeves day in an out. The repertoire there was highly repetitive, and most often presented in a low-quality way with a huge “debate me cowards” energy, which set a rather standard bar for any ensuing conversation too. That wasn’t really sustainable for the thread, and so I chose to impose a requirement asking of people to make novel, high-effort posts on the subject if they do. That led to a disappearance of multiple daily pages of useless posts without any much probations issued, and based on no “let’s talk about NATO history” threads springing since then I can only conclude that the point of the posts was to revel in the attention at least as much as to “contribute” to the thread (quotes due to missing the point of it).
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Mar 27, 2023 16:33
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Also, please keep politics out of the feedback thread for the politics forum. The point of it is to yell at us, not at Ukraine or Medvedev.
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Mar 27, 2023 16:36
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Judgy Fucker posted:How are these not tacit admissions of assuming bad faith in others' posts? I'd like to hear from a mod who isn't CZS on this matter. Oh, one can post poorly in good faith, which was the case here, the same one post dozens of times per day. People who would use, e.g., the topic of NATO history to mine SYQs would fall under the standing rules for posting in bad faith, and no thread-specific rules were needed to sanction them in a due process. The second highlighted sentence is a retrospective speculation on why the posting patterns the repetitive posting rules sought to curb did wither shortly thereafter. Procedurally, however, mods are not required to assume good faith of every single post, to address that question as well, as in no mod is under an obligation to be naive.
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Mar 27, 2023 16:44
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XboxPants posted:There's room for debate of conceptual topics, here. My objection was to having that debate in a topic that someone may mistake to be specific to the talk of the town that it was named after, especially when the main participants exhibited not even basic command of the debate and the facts of the subject. The new thread is named less dubiously and with a clearer OP, and therefore has my blessing.
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Mar 27, 2023 16:53
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gurragadon posted:What does the bolded mean? Is there a specific directive from Koos Group to avoid "embarrassing" thread? What does it mean to be an embarrassment? Are there specific criteria or is it completely subjective? Does there have to be a SYQ thread in CSPAM before it's embarrassing enough? Who determines what is embarrassing about a thread? Should there be a poll at the top of every thread so it's democratized? Heck Yes! Loam! posted:No. No it is not. quote:Consider rebooting or gassing a thread if it is a persistent embarrassment to the threads around it. If it is a large popular thread, be sure to talk this over with your fellow mods and the posters in the thread. A lot of threads become mini-communities all to themselves, and it does a disservice to those users if you nuke an entire thread before trying every other option.
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Mar 27, 2023 17:27
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Harold Fjord posted:I would have just renamed the chat GPT thread I was preparing to rename at the end of the week when it decided to combust, you're correct. The load-bearing problem I had with it was the distance between its title, its OP, and the conversation that de facto made home there, with this being a highly searched term considerably corroborating the situation in my view of it. gurragadon posted:D&D could very easily just not listen to whatever that nonsensical order was from Jeffrey. Not really the top 10 strategy for having a constructive working relationship with the site owner, if I may. cinci zoo sniper fucked around with this message at 17:33 on Mar 27, 2023 |
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Mar 27, 2023 17:30
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gurragadon posted:If I may, your not being paid and it's a completely voluntary working relationship. If you take a lighter approach to what he wants it will make for better conversations in more open ended threads like the Chat-GPT/AI thread Your current thread is literally under no restrictions, as I've mentioned earlier, and there's nothing I can do to make it even “freer”.
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Mar 27, 2023 17:38
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gurragadon posted:It would be freer without an ever-present threat of mod "embarrassment" ending it. Maybe there is nothing you can do, but you can choose to say threads aren't an embarrassment to you if there is some kind of mod vote. Not because it doesn't embarrass you, but because you agree it's a dumb reason to shut down discussion. Since “AI” is a fairly vague concept, thusly making the thread “let's chat about this vaguely defined thing”, it is not under a plausible risk to suffer an “anti-embarrassment” intervention. The goal of my moderation of the ChatGPT thread was to disassociate a specific topic from posts that don't suit it adequately, and a similar determination cannot be made for an intrinsically open-ended, conceptual conversation.
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Mar 27, 2023 17:52
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Turgid Flagella posted:Additionally, are you doubting the accuracy with which issues of NATO history, US postwar colonialism and anti-Communist (which has become synonymous with anti-Russian) activity, or do you just not care to see it at all? This is probably an important distinction to make - if I'm going to go digging through hundreds of pages of The Jakarta Method for a relevant passage, it'd be nice to know the effort won't go towards being accused of "mining for SYQs" before I put in the actual effort to show that all of this is just an extension of the US's desire to be the monopolar superpower while nominally communist-aligned governments that were left economically teetering on the edge because unlike the US they'd been entrenched in the actual war for years rather than showing up at the end to drop nukes on civilian cities and take some concentration camps selfies at camps already liberated by Soviet forces The bolded, I simply don't care. What I want to see in the war thread is not a macroscopic view of post-WW2 international politics. Instead, I'm seeking to support a flowing conversation about the current state of the war and its tangible trajectory and effects in the short and medium-term future. As a spin-off thread from the EEPol, it has quite a few posters and readers for whom a clear view of what's going on is of consequence, myself including, which is what defines my motivations for volunteering to moderate it. gurragadon posted:Do you understand my larger issue that I'm using the ChatGPT thread to frame? The point is embarrassment isn't a good metric to shut down conversation in any case. I didn't think of it in a more general sense, in the context of your words, so I appreciate the follow-up. We'll have to respectfully agree to disagree here, I guess, as D&D should have some standards that are maintained, in my opinion.
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Mar 27, 2023 18:04
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Alright, gotta go, but someone from American timezone should hop on sooner rather than later.Thorn Wishes Talon posted:It sounds like the issue is that CZS appears to be moderating discussions in which they themselves are active participants in, and it comes in the form of probating/silencing their debate opponents. And yes, that has been frowned upon and discouraged for a long time now. I've not participated in the ChatGPT thread as a poster, cf. my explicit refusal to do so cited earlier in the thread. Just the default vibe check to help establish the preferred course of action. gurragadon posted:I guess the standards need to be clearly defined within ideological boundaries if we want to limit it by "embarrassment." I agree there should be standards in formatting, effort and sourcing when possible. But standards on ideas? That doesn't sit right with me in a debate and discussion forum unless were talking about clearly illegal things. There are no standards on ideas, but there are standards on facts, which is why your current thread lives, but the last one received attention (don't forget temporal relevance though). There was no active poster consistently making faithful representation of the facts of the situation. In other words, under the assumption that titles accurately reflect the underlying threads, “the Earth is flat” would be an embarrassment, whereas “I think the Earth is flat” and “Flat-Earthism” wouldn't. cinci zoo sniper fucked around with this message at 18:39 on Mar 27, 2023 |
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Mar 27, 2023 18:31
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gurragadon posted:There are inherently standards on ideas if you are using embarrassment as a criterion, how else would you feel embarrassed about it? My opinions on AI are embarrassing to you, I don't care that they are embarrassing, and they are no less valid than your opinions on AI. The thread was embarrassing because it was talking about ChatGPT and AI technology in a way that a certain technical expertise didn't agree with. KillHour posted their credentials, they know what you know, they just came to a different conclusion. Again, this has nothing to do with what ideas you or anyone else has, and differences in ideas don't make a bad post. Not knowing what you (as a figure of speech) are talking about is a robust way to write a bad post, however, when you're trying to talk not about an idea (e.g., AI), but about something that is exists in the real world and is epistemologically falsifiable (e.g., ChatGPT). The thread was not deemed an embarrassment for talking about the concept of AI. It was found increasingly embarrassing for misrepresenting ChatGPT in the wrong place at the wrong time. Part of this misrepresentation was rooted in poor use of facts, and part in a poor command of the debate of it, e.g., anthropomorphization, in my subjective determination of the expertise and the credentials of the most active posters of the thread as dismissible. Most crucially, the thread was not shut down for being embarrassing. It would've been merely renamed. What got it shut down was the big meltdown KillHour chose to have, instead of reporting attacks on them and disengaging. Edit: gurragadon posted:Edit: If the thread title was really issue you would have just changed the title instead of the thread being gassed. It's a red herring and not relevant to the conversation. If the last page of the posts didn't happen, I would've renamed it a few days later. I guess what is coming poorly through is exactly how much weight (more than 50%) of the decisions I made came on the account of ChatGPT being this thing that an enormous amount of people is trying to find credible and practical information about, through the sewage of techno-futurism and crypto scammers doing a group job change. cinci zoo sniper fucked around with this message at 19:04 on Mar 27, 2023 |
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Mar 27, 2023 18:59
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A Buttery Pastry posted: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. It was cinci zoo sniper posted:The thread was not deemed an embarrassment for talking about the concept of AI. It was found increasingly embarrassing for misrepresenting ChatGPT in the wrong place at the wrong time. Part of this misrepresentation was rooted in poor use of facts, and part in a poor command of the debate of it, e.g., anthropomorphization, in my subjective determination of the expertise and the credentials of the most active posters of the thread as dismissible. 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.
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Mar 27, 2023 21:54
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XboxPants posted:Also, the subject of splitting the thread was suggested by posters in the thread and CZS said it was off the table, and we had to either stop discussing the conceptual issues or have the thread closed. This is not a factual representation of the conversation. To quote myself from that thread: cinci zoo sniper posted:Which is to say that it is a failure of an educational thread, regardless of your anecdotal experience of it, and it will not be tolerated in D&D for much longer in its current form. cinci zoo sniper posted:An easy solution would be to have multiple threads, but since this is a budding thread as yet, I would simply much prefer to see goons post in a manner more conscious of these considerations. cinci zoo sniper posted:I'm definitely not splitting it, so it'll live or die by the quality and clarity of conversations in it going forward. That said, I also do feel that expectations are considerably clearer now, e.g.: cinci zoo sniper posted:If you want to make such posts in D&D, you will need to create a thread that leaves no doubt that the thread is about some system of belief, or to debate you personally, rather than about the factual nature of ChatGPT. cinci zoo sniper posted:The fact that different domains have different language to won't make it acceptable to anthropomorphize language models in D&D anywhere outside a thread titled “I believe that ChatGPT is human”.
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Mar 27, 2023 22:28
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skeleton warrior posted:So my biggest pieces of feedback is, get more mods and get them soon. It's on the agenda, yes. The subforum is active as it has been since I've joined the website basically, as far as people familiar with the word “seasonality” are concerned. Coupled with ongoing changes in availability of the current team, that has us looking for 1-3 new full mods at the moment, before we even consider the election year. In addition to the ongoing maintenance of (ideally) making sure that there is an IK or a mod interested in actively posting therein for every seminal thread.
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Mar 28, 2023 13:17
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gurragadon posted:I think a good compromise would be that when a thread is gassed, the person who gassed it should be required to put their reasoning in the thread as the last post. That is done more or less consistently where the decision to gas a thread is not straightforward. No one is going to bother with that when it's like a goatse or some other obvious problem, like when the thread just devolves into a worthless brawl, which the ChatGPT thread got gassed for.
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Mar 28, 2023 13:39
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A Buttery Pastry posted: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. Yeah, I would have had nothing to say about an explicitly philosophical thread on the subject, or even one where the philosophical simply did have an easier to disentangle overlap with the practical for a different, less relevant and better understood real-world thing. As for the bolded, this is what I am trying to do in the war thread, which is my primary focus. Some of it is in rules, but a lot of it does also boil down to simply posting consistently in a supportive manner, for a long period of time. cinci zoo sniper fucked around with this message at 14:01 on Mar 28, 2023 |
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Mar 28, 2023 13:52
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VitalSigns posted:I did post an example though. For a while after we were told that the only reason the moderation seemed biased is that opinions which conflicted with the majority were reported more (which is its own problem. Mods have this big rulebook that they can't actually enforce so the resuIt is a heckler's veto. Posts with unpopular opinions get reported more, posts with popular opinions don't just by weight of numbers because people tend to be fine with minor rules violations if they agree with the poster. And this is only natural but in aggregate it creates the appearance of bias) I wonder how you reconcile the purported moderation by popular vote with your continued ability to post in D&D.
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Mar 28, 2023 14:20
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VitalSigns posted:Ha! Thanks. To also say something useful: VitalSigns posted:The easy way to clear the report queue is to remove the unpopular opinion right. 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.
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Mar 28, 2023 14:34
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VitalSigns posted:Pretty much yeah. There's a big rulebook plus a bunch of unwritten "vibes" rules (see above CZS bolding some anodyne little sentence in a big thoughtful post because it said something like "this theory you guys love to hate" which is apparently a pet peeve of theirs), so there's a lot of enforcement but simultaneously a lot of rulebreaking ignored, and that's a fertile ground for unintentional bias. People naturally look harder for fallacies in arguments they disagree with vor arguments that make them angry. The “unwritten vibe rule” here is rules “Ensure your posts don't impede discussion” and “Ensure your posts add to discussion”. When people start posting at “you people” or “the thread”, the underlying intent is usually to take things to a personal level, or at least to discredit someone, e.g., “this thread is liberal hivemind”. Consequently, the posts took probations explained by, e.g., II.C.1 and I.C (which are not rules, contrary to popular belief). Nothing is hidden about this, it's just consistent moderation of the rules as plainly presented. Also, genuinely  that you're seemingly accusing the war thread of being the one where a lot of rule breaking behaviour is ignored.
cinci zoo sniper fucked around with this message at 14:51 on Mar 28, 2023 |
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Mar 28, 2023 14:48
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VitalSigns posted:From what I understand it's probably more logging in on Sunday and here's a big report queue No, reports are checked and cleared a few times per day on every weekday. The only situation where there might be a small pile is Monday morning, as most of us post more actively during office hours.
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Mar 28, 2023 14:56
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VitalSigns posted:But idk at some point the whole team might want to step back and ask is an environment where "anytime there is a post that falls well outside the traditional liberal orthodoxy or is even just the least bit spicy, it will get reported" something that we should try to change? It's a tough question though because how do you go about it, but also I'm not sure if mods even agree it should change, maybe it's what they want? Also, respectfully to Rigel, that is a highly editorialized account of how reports work. USCE reports, which is >80% of net report volume, is a few people reporting each other by and large, unchanging for the year that I've been modded, with the occasional lurker chiming in. It does, however, not help that political “unusual” posts typically get made with a “well fuckers what are you going to say about this, huh, huh” demeanour, which no one but them is interested in. Now, such a poster could then try to say "but what about benefit of doubt", the honest answer to which, for all known posters that this describes, is “should've thought about that before spending years lashing out at people and having fun at their expense”.
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Mar 28, 2023 15:02
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VitalSigns posted: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. quote:Before you post: Before posting, please ask yourself the following question: "Am I making a post which is either funny, informative, or interesting on any level?" gurragadon posted:I really need to argue that it should be done with every thread that is gassed from this subforum then. Unfortunately, if given the option to not explain why the thread is gassed moderators default to that. You should have put a reasoning in the ChatGPT thread, it has been a major contention point in this feedback thread.
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Mar 28, 2023 15:20
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gurragadon posted:So you are just being dismissive in the feedback thread? This is why you are not a good mod I'm merely suggesting to make arguments not reliant on a misrepresentation of the situation, which you have largely avoided doing until now. For instance, when you say that the ChatGPT thread is “a major contention point”, the implication is that a large proportion of goons providing feedback in the thread do care about the thread, and find its story contentious. That is an evidently false statement, and the reason it feels “contentious” to you is because 1) you have multiple mods talking at lengths about it with you, and 2) you have a lot to say about it, especially in when it comes to prescriptivist treatment of moderation that is out of line with the present situation. If I had any interest in being dismissive about this subject in the feedback thread, I could've simply ignored you, other posters from the thread, and posters from outside the thread, when I have in fact taken a few hours reading through all of the messages, and replying virtually to all of them that don't ask for a specific response from someone else, e.g., Koos Group. As I said in the bolded part of the post you quote, your feedback is perfectly adequate for the thread.
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Mar 28, 2023 15:40
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Harold Fjord posted:Demanding obsessive keeping track of posts like this is weird to make a condition of presenting an argument. Very often it's not really possible to tell what the poster is complaining about, e.g., the whole genre of “mods censoring politics complaints” that at times feel like people see D&D as the liberal counterpart to C-SPAM, which it isn't. Bringing like 3-5 recent examples makes the intent basically impossible to misunderstand, and is by far the fastest way to get an answer about a real or suspected problem. gurragadon posted:I was trying to use the ChatGPT thread to frame the issue of modding on subjective things like "embarrassment" which YOU said was a criterion. Modding is ultimately subjective, in that context is going to matter, and it will invariably be a sum of the place, the time, the posters, and the button pushers interacting in one place. Also, to bring up general SA rules: quote:Crazy Catchall: Please do not try to cleverly circumvent some rule listed here. These rules are general guidelines and are very flexible.
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Mar 28, 2023 16:10
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