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Greetings. It's time for this quarter's feedback thread. Here you are encouraged to tell us your thoughts on how D&D is going. Whether you're a lurker or a poster, who reads one thread or many, we'd like to hear from you. As always, you can give feedback by posting in the thread, PMing me, or you may post in the thread anonymously by PMing me the post and I'll make it for you. D&D rules will be relaxed here somewhat, since we're talking about the forums rather than educational subjects, so citations will be less valuable than normal, and personal opinions will be more valuable. All I ask is that you continue to present your ideas with honesty as you would in normal D&D, be respectful to other users, and don't spam the thread, by which I mean posting the same thing repeatedly to increase its exposure at the expense of other posters. Unfortunately, you must refrain from posting here if you're forumbanned, and refrain from giving feedback about threads in which you're threadbanned. You can however PM me if you think it's been long enough and you'd like to appeal either one. Since I'm beginning this thread on Saturday, it will continue through Monday, as about three days seems to be the sweet spot.
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Mar 9, 2024 18:06
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POSSIBLE FEEDBACK TOPICS Election 2024 Thread I intend to make a thread for the 2024 election now that the primaries are effectively over. Some things I'd like your opinion on:
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Mar 9, 2024 18:06
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Zachack posted:Can you provide a brief summary of what, if any, feedback you received from the last thread that resulted in changes or adjustments to D&D? Doing so may help avoid rehashing of feedback that has low value in advancing change. I don't recall the specifics, as that was a few months ago, and I also don't think a list of issues or considerations that were already resolved would be informative on how to present new ones. Though there was a list like that posted toward the end of the previous thread, so one can go looking for that if they're curious. To address your concern of avoiding rehashes, the only issue I can think of where it's unlikely that feedback will be useful is the D&D policy of moderating argumentation and not positions. There've been many discussions of that, even from before I became a D&D mod, and everything that can be said has probably been said at this point. Otherwise, feedback on any topic should have the potential to be productive. Generally speaking, the best way to increase the chances of your feedback leading to change is to be specific. If applicable, link examples of when the problem has occurred, identify which D&D rules or policies should be changed and how, and even make comparisons to how something is handled in other SA forums, online communities, or real life organizations. It also helps to demonstrate how the proposal is in line with D&D's primary goal of being educational, producing interesting discussion and honest, rigorous and original debate. socialsecurity posted:I say we need the media literacy thread back, if we are for god knows what reason turning this place into high school debate club a huge part of that is being able to properly cite sources. I've been considering this for some time. I do think it's a worthy topic to have in D&D. The issue is that, because it has potential to inform moderation policy, it can become very high stakes or lead to perceptions of mod favoritism. There is also an enormous amount of baggage and grudges around it involving some users.
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Mar 10, 2024 02:28
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socialsecurity posted:Yeah might as well get to the point, DV having a group of people that hate and harass them doesn't mean we shouldn't have a media literacy thread. It means people trolling that thread because they view being asked to be critical of media as a crime against them should be actually moderated James Garfield posted:I'm not sure a media literacy thread needs to inform moderation, anyone who would get probed for that is already posting in bad faith. I think the value of a media literacy thread is that people make a lot of mistakes, like confusing factual and opinion journalism and posting articles with a misleading twitter summary or headline, that aren't always in bad faith, and it would be good to have a place to learn about that. Fair points. I'll try to get back to making the thread. If anyone has more advice about how to handle its moderation, please let me know. Papercut posted:Cynical despair fan fiction adds nothing to discussion and usually actively hurts it by causing stupid derails. Posts like these: I've had this complaint before, but I'm not sure how it's possible to get rid of posts that are excessively or uselessly cynical or despairing, because cynicism and despair must be a reasonable response to political developments in at least some cases. Though cases where someone is engaging in it without supporting their arguments, or when they receive counterarguments but persist without addressing them or further developing their own argument, are against the rules currently. Killer robot posted:I think an important part of tuning D&D rules over time is looking for and addressing "Debate Club" tactics where clever use of existing rules can substitute for having a stronger argument. To some extent that's inevitable in any rule-based debate space,but it should still be limited. One that stands out for me lately is the flexibility of "Show me proof that X." Sometimes it's totally reasonable and concrete and leads to showing who actually has some evidence on their side, but other times it's demanding "proof" of something either very loose and subjective, questionably relevant to the argument, or pervasive and obvious but still taking effort to actually chart out and document. Like it's cousin of "If you want a summary of my argument read this book," it's a way to require more work from an opponent than you are putting it. I believe I've seen this happening once or twice, but it's something where having as many examples as possible would be useful so I can understand exactly what's happening, how it differs from legitimate requests for evidence, and whether they're engaging in bad faith. If you'd like to avoid calling anyone out, please PM them to me. Rappaport posted:If there will be threads on the two conventions (the libertarian one could probably fit within the general libertarian megathread?), it might be better to relax the usual D&D rules a bit and let them be more "TVIV"-style threads. Mocking the weird choreography and people earnestly or accidentally giving "the Roman salute" for Dear Donald probably doesn't merit that much intellectual scrutiny. Bar Ran Dun posted:The TVIV style stuff for live events usually goes pretty well. I can’t think of a “live” event thread here that imploded, they usually move to fast too implode and everybody is watching the same thing. Agreed. Fister Roboto posted:I've pretty much stopped posting in D&D because it's just not enjoyable anymore. The forum trends towards a liberal centrist consensus, and any argument outside of that is met with hostility, compounded by years of weird cross-forum grudges. The mods might not explicitly moderate positions, but some positions seem to generate a lot more reports until something sticks. One of my goals for D&D is to have ideologically neutral moderation that encourages a diversity of viewpoints, so if I've failed in that I apologize. Fister Roboto posted:Many of the rules may seem fair on paper, but in practice are open to very wide interpretation. For example, the rule against making stale arguments. What counts as a stale argument? Is someone keeping a list of them somewhere? Does responding to a stale argument with a point that's already been made count as a stale argument? Does posting "but Trump would be worse" or "but what about Hamas?" for the 1000th time not count as a stale argument? Whether it's intentional or not, there seems to be an ideological bias when it comes to enforcing the rules. If you want them to be enforced fairly, then there ought to be more ideological diversity on the mod team. To answer your questions in order: a stale argument is one that everyone is likely to have heard already, and unlikely to produce interesting debate and discussion. No one is keeping a list of them, as that is not obviously not feasible. Responding to a stale argument with a point that's already been made probably does count as a stale argument, as it's producing more material that's not interesting, though posting an argument that's been made before as a direct response to a new argument might not be, as noted in the rules. "... but Trump would be worse" or "but what about Hamas?" posted by themselves would indeed count as stale arguments. It is true that this rule involves a degree of subjectivity. A bias could be expressed as punishing stale arguments that annoy you more because you're ideologically opposed to them, though I find the more common bias is simply what arguments you've heard more often influenced by what circles of discourse you follow (though this is at least mitigated when dealing with arguments that have become stale on SA and D&D themselves). For better or worse, I believe this is a rule we have to have, because there will always be people who make tiresome arguments, and these go against D&D's purpose. I certainly wouldn't mind having more ideological diversity amongst mods, though finding additional mods is already very difficult, so I'm not eager to add new criteria when looking. Fister Roboto posted:Finally some metafeedback, which is that these threads never seem to actually be for feedback but rather for releasing pressure. Nothing seems to have changed since the last thread. One weekend every 3-4 months is absolutely not enough. You always ask for specific examples, but what kind of weirdo is going to keep a spreadsheet or whatever of examples for months at a time? The haphazard nature of it also doesn't help. If it's only going to be open for one weekend every 3-4 months, it would be nice to know ahead of time when exactly that weekend will be. I didn't even notice this thread until just now. Lots of other forums have feedback threads that are always open, why not D&D? If the fear is that people will just use it to grudgepost, then just punish that kind of thing. The reason feedback threads aren't continuously open is that having them as events encourages more new feedback and prevents them from becoming hangouts. The reason they're only every 3-4 months is because they take a significant amount of my time and energy. The reason they aren't scheduled far in advance is because I like to have them on weekends where I'm mostly free, and I don't always know if that will be the case in advance. VitalSigns posted:I've made mental notes about instances I noticed that positions were obviously being moderated, but I didn't make a spreadsheet so I'd have to go back and search for them. I searched the last thread and didn't find any instances where a user was banned (though it's possible there was a panel ban by an admin not noted normally on a post). Regardless, I don't punish people for giving me feedback that's critical of me or D&D, as that would somewhat defeat the purpose. Generally the only things that are moderated in feedback threads are the ones specified in the OP. Fister Roboto posted:Oh yeah obviously it's a thing that does happen, but I don't think it's controversial to say that it's unhealthy behavior. But the problem is that the policy of "if you've got a problem with a post that did/didn't get punished, wait 3-4 months to address it" is kind of encouraging that behavior. If you reported a post and it didn't receive a punishment in a few days, you can appeal it to me and I'll take another look, overturning it or upholding it and explaining the decision. This actually happens fairly often.
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Mar 10, 2024 20:51
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Discendo Vox posted:Why. Well. There are surely political outcomes which are both undesirable and common to the point of being predictable, which would make cynicism a reasonable response. And there are surely ones which are undesirable and extraordinarily unlikely for you to be able to change, which would make despair a reasonable response. I'm not saying anything about how frequently these are the case, only that they occur more than 0% of the time.
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Mar 10, 2024 21:07
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Papercut posted:Enforce the "stale argument" rule against posts that are essentially just "nothing matters", even if they include the poster's own personal fantasy of how the nothing matters will play out The "essentially" is quite important here because it could break something down into a strawman or a position rather than the argument itself. If you were to simply say "stop thinking about this because it doesn't matter," that could be a stale argument. But if you say "this doesn't matter because X," and X is honest and hasn't been presented before, that's not a stale argument.
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Mar 10, 2024 21:19
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Papercut posted:I'm also curious why this post, which was reported, didn't get a probe. It seems to very clearly violate II.A and II.B and arguably I.A.2 We're still in the backlog and haven't gotten to that report yet. I probated the post since you brought it to my attention.
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Mar 10, 2024 21:44
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Discendo Vox posted:No, not "surely", and not for the purposes of factual good faith educational discussion in this factual good faith discussion forum. Show your work. What is the contribution of despair and cynicism to factual good faith educational discussion? Why are you not enforcing the rules? Cynicism around a certain topic can be educational and good faith if you explain the model or historical precedents that inform your cynicism, and your cynicism's validity can be tested by the predictions you make. Likewise, well-founded despair around a certain topic can be an argument that one's efforts are best spent on something else. socialsecurity posted:If you don't have the time or energy to do feedback threads and don't really post here in D&D all that often have you considered just finding someone else that's more active in the community that has the desire and free time to mod it? I have the desire and free time to mod D&D. I spend a significant amount of time clearing reports, taking private feedback, handling appeals, speaking to mods and devising policy. The reason I don't participate in discussion often is to help avoid bias, and I consider this an asset when modding a debate-focused board, rather than a more community-focused board.
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Mar 10, 2024 22:47
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tristeham posted:you should ramp probations for serial offenders. Agreed. We already ramp for the same offense, but I've been considering steeper ramps and more ramps for related but not exactly the same offenses, due to the amount of recidivism and an increase in reports and violations that's been happening. Marenghi posted:This. There seem to be some posters who abuse the rules to troll and get others probated. They do the calm Hitler routine until someone over-reacts and then they get probed. While the calm Hitler is free to continue playing their game to get more probed for opposing genocide. It does sound as though the posting of the article was a clear violation of I.A.3 (don't repeat rebutted arguments). I have considered, and even thought about putting it as a recommended topic in this feedback thread before deciding against it, the issue of whether punishment should be deferred when someone makes an accusation of bad faith and the user they accused is indeed punished for bad faith. It's already in the mod policies that you can, at your discretion, give such users lighter punishments including warnings, but that doesn't happen often. What are everyone's thoughts on that idea?
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Mar 10, 2024 23:08
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Jakabite posted:I agree, but to elaborate a little and hopefully avoid going to posting jail in solidarity… While the idea that you can say anything in D&D as long as you use the right language or tone is something of a meme, it is true that you are allowed to advocate for horrible positions. Verbosity in and of itself, however, is not taken into account. Rigor is important, because it not only makes a position falsifiable so it can be better engaged with, but shows the position is more likely to have merit and not be wasting everyone's time in the first place. It also has a correlation with number of words, though something can be laconic and rigorous. Precision of language, likewise, makes it clearer what you are saying and easier to respond to, and can take more words. In addition, good faith simply means you're being honest in every respect and doesn't have much relation to post length. As for your example, five paragraphs detailing Trump's words, without elaboration or explanation, would probably be probated for argument via insinuation unless it's undeniably clear what point they were trying to make. Jakabite posted:I truly believe that it’s loving insane to have someone who never interacts with the (or any) forum moderating it, because it means you’re not able to see the forest for the trees, and I think if you posted engagement numbers for D&D it would show a big drop and your myopic moderation style would explain it. I still read the forum despite not posting often myself, and I also keep abreast of the parts I don't read via private feedback and advice. We don't have any tracked data for engagement numbers, but overall engagement isn't the top priority anyway. It's quality. 1000 posts per day where all are good is considered better than 2000 posts per day where only half of them are good, and moderation is oriented with that in mind.
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Mar 10, 2024 23:42
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DeadlyMuffin posted:Part of the issue is that what once person considers debunked is not the same as another person. In the I/P thread there are people who see any indication that a journalist has interacted with the Israeli government as disqualifying, and pointing it out is enough to debunk a source. So if someone posts one of those sources there's a bunch of whining about how it's already debunked and shouldn't ever be discussed again. Marenghi and I probably have different options on what it takes to disqualify or debunk a source. Agreed. We've been thinking about getting more IKs for it. That's something I wouldn't mind hearing recommendations for, here.
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Mar 10, 2024 23:57
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Jakabite posted:A great first step is to recount what was asked of you last time and what steps, if any have been made to address those points, but you’ve already refused that simple, absolute minimum suggestion within hours of this thread being open. Going back through and making a list of every single one is a serious undertaking, and more than I'd like to do while I'm already fielding feedback in this current thread and going through the report backlog. However, if you or anyone else has a specific concern from the last thread where I agreed to work on something, I would be happy to explain what I've done, and redouble my efforts if necessary. Jakabite posted:I think you actually do believe this and want to it to be the case but, as you’ve been repeatedly told, it isn’t. The issue is that your response is once again going to be either ‘yes it is’ or ‘sorry I’ll work on it’, and we’ll be in the exact same position in three months. At this point I’m not sure if it’s wilful (I think it is, personally) or you’re just not brilliant at comprehension and analysis of the written word. I'm honestly not sure what concrete steps could be taken to reduce instances of, if I understand the problem correctly, rule violations being overlooked when the violating post is long. It's already not a policy to do that. I can make a note in the mod policy handbook that length is not equal to quality nor an exoneration, and bring the mods' attention to it, if you'd like.
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Mar 11, 2024 00:52
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Raenir Salazar posted:I have examples, but I am unclear to what extent the posting about posters rule is being enforced, should I pm it instead? I know at least two posters who just repeatedly post the same point over and over and never listen or seriously engage with the responses; the burden here of what what the "tired" argument is should be more on the person asserting it, not responding to it in the most straight forward and coherent way. There's no posting about posters rule ITT. Whether you post about them here or PM me is up to your judgement.
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Mar 11, 2024 02:30
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Seven Deadly Sins posted:I'm not enthused at advocating that people engage in drive-by threadshitting where they deploy opinions they're unwilling or unable to defend. Yes, I should clarify that doing what the Disreputable Dog is advocating is annoying to other posters and would likely lead to punishment.
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Mar 11, 2024 22:51
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Probably Magic posted:My sincere advice is that Discendo Vox be made D&D moderator. He has categorically refused to hold any position of power on SA. Main Paineframe posted:On the other hand, there are definitely people posting "nothing matters" stuff on a regular basis. Especially in the Trump Legal Matters thread, where every single thing that happens is routinely met with at least one person insisting that Trump is immune to legal consequences and will surely be bailed out by a billionaire or freed from consequences by a judge or simply declare that the consequences won't count because he's rich or will be president. It's very repetitive and annoying to have to respond to that stuff each and every time, especially since it's well-trod ground at this point and the counter-arguments are basically the same every time. skeleton warrior posted:I agree that this is an inherent issue for D&D that we don't have an answer to. There's no debate or discussion between "Trump has received no visible constraints on his lifestyle and ability to spout incendiary bullshit and therefore has not seen anything that could be considered consequences" and "Trump has been assigned penalties by our court system and therefore has received consequences, even if the financial details of them and how they affect him are completely hidden from public view" because those are opposite positions starting from opposite pretenses and have nothing new to say on either side. The same with "our system can be meaningfully reformed" vs. "reform will never be meaningful enough and only revolution is acceptable". Nobody has anything new or convincing to say on that, but a bunch of people think they do. Marenghi posted:A mod stepping in to tell people to knock it off when discussion gets pulled down into petty slap fights would probably go a long way to improving discussion. Rather than coming by a few days later and randomly probing the participants of said slap fight. WarpedLichen posted:I agree with this, probes after the fact just serves to piss people off - having a mod just telling people to knock it off when things get dumb (circular, heated, trolling, etc) would be best. I agree that the late responses to incidents are a problem. This is due in part to the current mod team as a whole not being active enough, and I'm looking into ways to fix this, such as getting more mods or making clearing reports easier or more rewarding. I'm also going to try to be more personally proactive myself, in the mean time. After reading and thinking about things in this thread, I'm considering the possibility that the root cause of multiple problems such as the mod inactivity and proliferation of arguments no one wants to read is my beloved rule delineation. It may cause mods to feel too constrained to probate poor posts that don't fall into one of the specific categories (or that do, but they don't realize it). Though having moderation that is objective as possible is good for a debate forum where we're trying to avoid bias, we may also need to be more confident when making subjective rulings, by keeping in mind that even the most objective moderation will still produce discontentment and accusations of bias. These are things we'll have to deal with no matter what, which we can't hide from, behind objective rules or otherwise. The point of this would still be to keep discussion interesting and debate fair, honest and satisfying. So it would still be a priority to remain ideologically neutral and foster a diversity of viewpoints. An informative case study to figure out how to do this would probably be Cinci's moderation of the Russo-Ukrainian War thread. He was a genuinely biased mod, who would use rules as ex post facto justifications for actions motivated by disagreement. However, I also received frequent feedback that the thread was high quality, and the leeway he was given seemed to be part of why he was willing to be so proactive in moderating it. So I'd like to figure out some way to have our cake and eat it too, having the best aspects of what Cinci did without the bias, if such a thing is possible.
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Mar 11, 2024 23:17
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RBA Starblade posted:It was stated once that the objective here was to create the Calmest Hitler. How far along to that goal are we and who are the current candidates? Everything I say in D&D is meant seriously, but things I say about D&D on other boards may be joking or trolling.
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Mar 11, 2024 23:19
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B B posted:Koos: Are these types of posts within the rules of D&D? No they are not, and I apologize.
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Mar 12, 2024 05:10
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Quotey posted:Free Wizard Master. https://wiki.teamfortress.com/w/images/b/ba/Heavy_no03.wav
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Mar 12, 2024 20:27
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DeadlyMuffin posted:There are other sub forums on this website that I don't post in, in large part because I expect if I did post there that a disagreement with the core thread cohort would result in me being called stupid or presented with two year old forum quotes to argue about by people with a grudge, as has happened in this very thread. To make it clear, posting about posters and their credibility is allowed in feedback threads but not D&D proper. This is because these threads require a much greater emphasis on the trustworthiness of a poster's opinions, whereas elsewhere explication and citation are more important. Probably Magic posted:"Everyone must assume I'm posting in good faith even as I contradict myself unless I post in the forbidden forum in which case my 'bad faith' can be assumed even without evidence." The reason dredging up someone's old forum quotes isn't an acceptable way to show they're operating in bad faith (and if it were, you would be expected to use it in a report or PM, not in a thread, regardless) is that posters' opinions can change, and there is nothing dishonest about this. The rule about posting about D&D while posting in D&D, in contrast, is about what's currently happening. As an additional minor point, the rule doesn't assume this means a poster must necessarily be operating in bad faith, only that it makes it more difficult for other posters to trust that they aren't.
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Mar 12, 2024 21:31
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Probably Magic posted:To be clear, I do not think being inconsistent is a probationary offense. Rather, the onus being on the person dealing with someone inconsistent to not point it out or indeed to argue as dispassionately as before I think ultimately rewards bad faith. I also see no problem in offering up opportunities to explain one's own evolution - I'll be the last person to claim I haven't personally evolved and I'd be happy to elucidate how I've in the past been Zionist or moderate and how I learned to revile those positions and change. Change is good! Would like it noted that no change happened here though, just bizarro logic. Well, the other factor is that I, and I suspect a large contingent of readers, don't have interest in learning about the personal political journeys SA posters have taken, and come to D&D for information and ideas about the real world.
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Mar 12, 2024 23:42
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Kchama posted:Yeah, this. Probing stuff from two weeks ago is way too late. Especially stuff that had to have been reported back then. It was, and I agree. The ideal solution is to handle reports more quickly, some ideas for which I outlined here, but when that fails, I'm not actually sure whether it's better to give amnesty to old reports or still punish them to make clear to users what they did that was against the rules (I'm currently doing the latter).
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Mar 12, 2024 23:49
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hooman posted:Can you be specific about what caused this to happen and what actions will be taken to prevent this happening again? Because this seems like a huge oversight in moderation efforts, especially in the context of people being dinged for strawmen that they weren't making. If all modding was overzealous that would be understandable, but there is a very clear disconnect here that I think it would be helpful to understand the cause of, and how it will be addressed. It looks like the Skex one hadn't been acted on yet because it was only reported two days ago, and the small butter one wasn't acted on because he was already on probation at the time.
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Mar 13, 2024 00:24
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hooman posted:It's also interesting that a post like that took 11 days to be reported. That seems to indicate that people posting in D&D are not being sufficiently proactive in reporting bad posts more generally. I have been trying to be more active in hitting report on posts that are rule breaking. ... normally we don't reveal who reports anything, but you were the one who reported that post after 11 days.
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Mar 14, 2024 04:12
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Valentin posted:e: like I can't emphasize enough how uninformative this is: It requires knowing a bit about the posters in question, but Baronash was correct to probe that. The reason no one responded is that the intent of the post was to antagonize rather than discuss, which is D&D's definition of trolling.
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Mar 14, 2024 04:31
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Discendo Vox posted:Moderators are in fact supposed to take a user's history of probations and practices into account. In practice this does not reliably happen, because the moderators do not read the forum, because some of them are resistant to applying punishments at all, because there may be some sort of higher obstacle to bans and forumbans, and because there is such heavy turnover among DnD moderators (a self-perpetuating problem). The only higher obstacle to bans would be admin denial, which is very rare, and the highest obstacle to forumbans would be me, and I am almost always in favor of them.
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Mar 14, 2024 04:33
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Main Paineframe posted:i'm pretty sure it's just because the thread got taken over by three terribly tiresome posters who spent an entire page just yelling back and forth at each other about petty, highly personal disagreements nobody else cares about I do find this conflict difficult to understand and without much relevancy to moderation issues (other than issues of what constitutes bad faith or how to recognize patterns in behavior). I do hope exchanges like that one are not common in D&D proper, and I urge you to report them and they will be dealt with.
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Mar 14, 2024 04:40
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Staluigi posted:sounds like the reporting system is comically braindead I disagree with GJB on the topic and have asked for something similar to this, but nothing's come of it. Staluigi posted:i mean i already probably know the answer (backend held together with twine and mummy dust) but still one would think you could hope Regarding reports, you are very correct. Raenir Salazar posted:Koos can you chime in if these sorts of posts are desirable for the feedback thread? Personal criticisms are allowed in feedback threads if relevant to moderation or the credibility of a user in the thread, but I would prefer Stringent be more respectful to you and let this particular conflict be, as we've seen enough about it.
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Mar 14, 2024 17:34
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Discendo Vox posted:If you want to reduce the number of reports, if you want to simplify the moderation burden, then one of the many ways you could do so productively is by recognizing that you will reduce the number of reports by removing the people who are the root cause, the ones you have already acknowledged are deliberately sabotaging discussion. This reduces the number of reports of the users in a) because they are no longer breaking the rules, and it reduces the number of reports in b) because there is no longer trolling for these users to correctly identify. I would be more than happy to remove anyone who has an intent or consistent pattern of sabotaging discussion. You just haven't been able to demonstrate to my satisfaction that this is occurring in all cases where you believe it is. Esran posted:I don't think Koos said that he "almost always applies forumbans" in the sense that he has forumbans on a hair trigger, which seems to be how you're understanding it. I think he said that if another moderator asks for a forumban, he'll generally approve it. That's correct.
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Mar 16, 2024 01:53
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Raenir Salazar posted:I think an important question here, insofar as it ties back to my earlier observations, is do the mods at all take any steps to determine if someone is sabotaging discussion, and aware of the ways someone can take steps to do so in a way where they have cover and plausible deniability doing so? It doesn't seem like especially with how delayed rules enforcement tends to be, that there's no way the mod team is really able to practically keep tabs on things? Hence why I've been suggesting we need more active mods participating in discussion so the people who may or may not be sabotaging discussion will be more likely to directly interact with the mods and more likely to get more scrutiny. More mods would certainly be a good idea, and may help with this. As for finding someone who is operating in bad faith following the letter of the rules, all we can really do is use our common sense (such as that one incident with BB and Discendo Vox). It also helps if reports explain how a user is attempting to skirt the spirit of the rules thoroughly and precisely in case it isn't intuitively or immediately apparent to whichever mod happens to be handling the report.
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Mar 16, 2024 02:05
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Raenir Salazar posted:My takeaway would be that there seems to be some dispute as to what topics should be allowed to be discussed with "rationality and nuance" and maybe the principle regarding moderating "arguments not positions" might need to be restated or clarified. All topics should be allowed to be discussed with nuance, and the principle regarding arguments not positions is essentially that someone is allowed to be wrong, provided they are arguing honestly and that their wrongness has not already been addressed. Victar posted:I'm not going to get into Xinjiang because that would be comparing cultural genocide (with some murder) to the mass murder and mass displacement genocide happening in Palestine right now. This is also not relevant to D&D moderation in any way that is obvious to me.
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Mar 16, 2024 19:28
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Victar posted:I guess the only relevance to D&D modding is that it's extremely frustrating to deal with shifting definitions, especially when the definition of "genocide" gets shifted around. Shifting definitions is against D&D rule I.A.4 (use precise language), and has been punished before. Victar posted:The I/P thread appears to have the consensus that Palestinian suffering prior to October 7th qualifies as genocide even though the Palestinian population was increasing. I agree with this consensus and I was under the impression that Esran agreed too, based on their I/P posts. (And yes, this is something that only someone who regularly reads the I/P thread would know.) Whether Israel is/was conducting a genocide (or some other crime such as ethnic cleansing or cultural genocide) remains in dispute among scholars, and the same is true regarding whether the Holodomor was a genocide. One may take the position that either one is or is not. This is not a violation of D&D's precise language rule. If someone posts their particular definition of genocide, and you raise the objection that this excludes acts that should be considered genocide, that is also legitimate argumentation. Raenir Salazar posted:My assumption as to what Koos wants us to do, please correct me if I'm wrong; is to generally not report that someone seems to have a contradictory position or hypocritical stance on a specific topic, but to only report a particular post, if and when they inevitable break the rules trying to defend that contradictory position in the course of reasoned discussion. Yes.
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Mar 16, 2024 20:34
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WarpedLichen posted:I think this would be a really good time for prompt moderation to jump in before this whole thing degenerates even more. Yes, I think it would be best to close here. Thank you everyone for your feedback. I'll see about getting another mod and looking into ways to increase proactive moderation and report clearing.
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Mar 17, 2024 21:19
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