1st quarter 2024 D&D Feedback: State of the Forum

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Giggs: Jan 4, 2013; mama huhu

Seven Deadly Sins posted:

Regarding cinci / the Ukraine thread, sometimes it can be beneficial to have a mod that is biased against the type of "positions" that tend to be bandied about in bad faith, good enough at recognizing that kind of bad faith arguing, *and* is active enough in the thread to act on it before it gets to suck the thread into a morass of bad faith bullshit that derails it for days on end. When there are common positions that are difficult to discuss and defend in good faith, having someone who is willing to at least have their bullshit-o-meter start at "probably bullshit" helps keep things on track.

This doesn't fit with the premise that D&D doesn't moderate positions (even though it does imo, for the same reasons why Cinci was such an awful mod, and why Cinci turned out to be such a ridiculous weirdo), not to mention the constant reliance on "bad faith" being a meaningless subjective cudgel that allows D&D posters the easiest workaround to "objectivity" Koos et al presumably intended to establish with the ruleset.

If the moderation team chooses members of a subgroup to police themselves and their biases align, they will protect their subgroup, it propagates a cycle where posters can push the boundaries ever so slightly on and on, and in extreme cases (like the war) it very quickly turns into the absolutely deranged Ukraine thread(s) where posters commonly posted insane things like:

Posters who disagree with me are genuinely agents of foreign influence who are trying to dismantle freedom, love, and democracy
SomethingAwful is a front of this war and posting helps the war effort
Remembering is helldumping

GBS had the exact same issue with KitConstantine which fostered bloodlusting and snuff film appreciation for months, before posters outside of GBS/D&D finally managed to convince the administration to curb it at least slightly.

In any case the conclusion to take from Cinci's tenure is that while yes, moderators are more inclined to be active members of the forums when they're exactly as deranged and biased as the posters they unfairly protect, it also totally ruins the presumed goal of D&D, so it's not a worthwhile trade-off. This has been pointed out by other posters many times over the years and in my opinion still holds. It should be obvious that the feedback being positive under Cinci was not just meaningless but indicative of severe issues, unless the purpose of D&D is to foster echo chambers instead of thoughtful, high-effort, vibrant discussions.

In terms of satisfying the two sides of the issue, (maintaining fairness and motivating moderator participation) the workload needs to be minimized and detachment underlined. To that end maybe punishments need a far harsher baseline and moderators need to be chosen who are not a part of in-groups in D&D. If the minimum probe in D&D is 24-hours, and/or posting is slowed dramatically across D&D then fewer moderators can cover more posts and things don't get out of hand as easily. D&D shouldn't be a chat/chill subforum where buds hang out, it just leads to the issues at hand.

Staluigi posted:

Everything's mostly business as usual but Isreal v Palestine remains an absolutely cursed subject and will go deranged for entire pages

Reinstate martial law and make lengthy threadbans a common feature

It would be useful if you explain what or who is deranged because I might agree with you but possibly for explicitly opposite reasons.

# ¿ Mar 12, 2024 17:20

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# ¿ May 12, 2024 22:43

Giggs: Jan 4, 2013; mama huhu

Victar posted:

[...]

We have different memories because we have different perspectives. For instance you state that "pro-russian" posters were dogpiled but I don't remember a single pro-russian poster in that thread. I remember plenty of posters claiming that posters and subforums were pro-russia through weak and typically fallacious rhetoric. I would argue this serves as an example of my contention that Cinci's one-sided moderation and bias explicitly led posters down a line where demonizing posters was not only allowed but encouraged, and that these actions obviously contributed to the ever-growing us-vs-them attitude that pervades D&D (and other spaces), which Muffins noted earlier in this thread. That Cinci was moderating a war thread where people were in a constantly heightened state provided the conditions for an outsized effect. I don't ascribe all the blame to Cinci, but that's who we're discussing at the moment. You might think my takeaways from what I read in that thread (and the SAD threads where regulars posted even more wild stuff) are false, but I do not, and for me it serves as a meaningful example of the issues I have with D&D and other parts of this website. But this is a D&D feedback thread where I saw Koos openly pondering takeaways from the Cinci "case study".

I still maintain that Cinci's biases fostered an environment antithetical to the stated purpose of D&D, and that the lesson to be learned from their "case study" is that 1) Cinci's bias stemmed from their experience in D&D as a member thereof, 2) their experience and bias directly led to unfair treatment and not enforcing rules, 3) this led to the posting I described and find revolting as well as the more general isolation/insulation, and finally 4) that the positive reactions to Cinci's moderation were an acknowledgement of similar bias which also served as Cinci's motivation for their consistent participation. My conclusion remains that attempting to recreate a similar situation requires a moderator to have a similarly strong bias to motivate them, and eventually will end up with another mod with weird spreadsheets.

Other things need to change in D&D to affect positive change and Cinci's tenure should not be used as a platform to continue from.

# ¿ Mar 13, 2024 04:50

Giggs: Jan 4, 2013; mama huhu

James Garfield posted:

Weak and fallacious rhetoric like suggesting that a poster who kept getting probed for trolling the thread with "Kyiv is encircled and about to fall" and "What about ~~Ham~~Azov" while posting "Flatten Mariupol" elsewhere on the site might support Russia?

My posts were intended to express my opinion that while Cinci's bias led to their fervent participation in the thread they were responsible for (which Koos likes to see as head mod) it also directly contributed to the ever increasing mania and poor discussion in D&D (which I think is bad and outweighs his persistent moderation), not to mention Cinci's turning out to be a weirdo. It's my belief that moderators will not have the motivation to spend all day reading threads to moderate unless they are similarly ideologically/politically/culturally biased into fervency and that there needs to be a different solution to the problem. I do not care how super duper russian some posters may or may not have been, it's not important to my concerns, and the reason I expressly replied to Victar is because I thought I could illustrate that perspectives are dependent on biases which are informed and constructed by experience/exposure, such as if someone were to be a participant of the Ukraine thread under Cinci's moderation, which also ties into Koos' recognition that feedback about his moderation was mostly positive which I previously argued was itself an extension of bias. The issues with any new moderator like Cinci can and will exist in any thread in D&D, they'll just contribute slower to the eroding reputation and experience of D&D.

To engage your distraction however, I'll say that I am Ukrainian, and if somebody brings up the extremely real and historically relevant concern about far-right ultra nationalists in Ukraine, I know, because I possess a lifelong perspective on Ukraine that almost zero D&D posters have, that it does not make one "pro-russia", and that posters who demand it be so are in fact using weak, fallacious rhetoric. It was frequently extremely distressing reading D&D posts (not to mention GBS, and there's decent crossover) about the war and recent history or politics and I had to just stop after what was far too long. If the moderation was staffed by perfect angels I don't think that would be completely different, (posters tend to get their information from media external to this site obviously) but it might have been better.

My concerns about D&D are only a part of my larger concerns about the site as a whole, wherein insular subgroups are just becoming more strange, extreme, and reactionary but this is yet again a thread for D&D feedback so I thought I'd take a shot at expressing myself. I felt that the result of the SAD discussion over the various war threads was barely adequate and that it did not appreciably address the issue I just mentioned, and that's why I'm bothering with these posts.

# ¿ Mar 13, 2024 18:59

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