Also, I think something that @codinghorror has danced around but I will not…
If you have the ability to alter someone’s post by removing vowels, you have the ability to alter what they are saying. With this version of discourse removing the edit history, we now are in a position where we have no traceability or transparency to make sure moderators are acting in the best interests of the community. Discourse , remember, has levels of trust. Theoretically at some point, people who are normal users will automatically rise to the level of moderators if they have earned the appropriate trust levels.
I’m for removing the offending post. Not altering it or giving people any power to change its meaning or appearance. For a site that prides itself and has commentators who write about personal liberty and personal expression, offering moderators the ability to distort someone’s communication because they don’t like it is a slap in the face. Remove it, fine. It doesn’t belong here. Alter it? That’s a completely different message. That’s saying “We have the power to control what you appear to say.”
I wasn’t afraid of Antinous. I was afraid of his abuses of power. I saw him ban people, and then offer no acknowledgement of why they were banned, to the point that the people wrote into BoingBoing staff who apologized profusely and had NO IDEA there were sanctions issued.
I liked him as a moderator. But I also know he overstepped many , many times… and Discourse is designed to take that ability to overstep away from a single person and instead put it in the hands of trusted users in the community. That type of moderating is simply not a good test of Discourse, and if that’s how Boing Boing wants it (and I’d be utterly gobsmacked if it were, because they knew what they were getting into with Discourse), then I’ll eat my shoe .
I discovered I was banned once, after I heatedly posted a bunch of replies [ooooh, much like this (non-) thread!], sucked up my humble-pie pride, and waited it out.
Then it didn’t go away…
So I finally contacted Antinous about the non-expiration… and he said I had been banned by mistake, all better now!
Well, yes and no. It could be set up that way but disemvoweling was only done by hand because a system wasn’t in place to do it some other way. It took me all of 2 minutes to make a RegEx that would disemvowel a post. (Took way longer than that to figure out I was barking up the wrong tree trying to find a way to disemvowel and remove the resulting double-spaces in one pass. Two passes, people. It’s worth it.)
Mods could easily be granted a “disemvowel this post” button without allowing them to make any other edits to the post.
Anyway, I haven’t decided how I feel about disemvoweling. When paired with a shadow copy staff could restore if necessary, I think it could be ok. Certainly would keep some context in the event of a heated conversation with deleted posts.
Not exactly. Disemvoweling (there is one L, surprisingly, at least per Wikipedia as I discovered in my earlier post in this topic) is more like
Let’s clean up this toxic waste, but leave a little toxic waste behind to teach people a lesson!
Which leads to
In general the preferred Discourse moderation pattern, as @anon85524460 noted and I said myself above, is not deletion (except in extreme cases). It is “flagged by community to threshold, hide post, send very nicely worded invitation to edit for improvements, user edits, post unhidden, everyone wins.”
That’s about civility and being kind to others in your communications with them, the importance of how you say something, not necessarily what you say. For more see
I have some concerns because I’m already seeing a lot more fallacious arguments being made around here since the change to Discourse. I’m not really interested in having a private conversation with a troll, as one of the new options is, so I’m not sure how to address these issues of misinformation, misdirection, and other barriers to earnest conversation under the current community based moderation methods. I’m not sure i want to be an enforcer of community norms. And there’s no rule against disingenuous arguments to base a report on, but there used to be some informal sanction for it.
Heck, just yesterday the opening comment of a thread about climate mentioned the holocaust. That paragraph craved disemvoweling. I’m sure it’s worked out fine, but it was quite a charged comment of the sort that disrupts debate (as that user continued to do) rather than engage in it in good spirit.
Having previously had active moderation by eyes really tuned into such communications styles, here, I think went a long way towards BB addressing such trouble, and was a big part of the draw to the comments for a lot of well meaning commenters. I imagine it turned some folks off too.
I hope at least as much thought is being put into how to dissuade the trolls as has been put into “reply to/from”. A very good newspaper comments section is still a newspaper comments section. They need curating or they go septic. It’s totally contagious.
I think the potential quality of community moderation could be an answer, but I don’t see how to encourage a sufficient quantity of it.
Speaking for myself, I often get two or three replies in with someone before i realize they’re not arguing from a position of good faith. How do I, in clear conscience, flag a comment i already responded to, as disruptive? I’m not sure how a community moderated from within by me and people like me would do well, nor do I want the artful trolls to have an equal voice within that structure.
I guess I’m hopeful, but the jury will be out for a while.
Indeed, and pitching in to flag things that are over the line is how we can all help achieve that goal. I flag posts that I think are rude, mean-spirited, or cruel. Posts that need to be edited (or possibly removed) because they are not in the spirit of civilized discourse. You should too.
It’s fine to have a couple back and forth exchanges before deciding the conversation isn’t going anywhere useful. The responsible thing to do is stop responding. If the other person keeps grinding an axe after one person has stopped responding to them (particularly when the axe-grinding follows them around from topic to topic), then I’d flag it.
Absolutely mocking the person. Its snotty and makes the mods come off as some sort of censors in charge of enforcing group think.
As someone who used to get my vowels taken and banned a few times for speaking truth to boing, I’ll admit it was kind of perversely satisfying. Kinda a reinforcement that the Boing was afraid of different thought.
Funny, I never complained when it happened to me, but I know the difference between the truth, and my truth.
In my experience dmv’ing was conducted mainly on tho with a chip on their shoulder, which, of course, sounds nothing at all like someone who is smugly gratified by causing a ruckus.
We don’t always frequent the same conversations, but I haven’t noted any big change that can unambiguously be attributed to Discourse. There’s clearly a lot less high-speed moderation going on, though (Antinous used to read everything, which would have caused my brains to melt and dribble out of my ears) so some stuff is remaining in play that used to get weeded out quickly.
Now, when Disqus was introduced there was a noticeable change in the community, because any drive-by could use their existing google/facebook/whatever login to make a post without enduring the tedium of creating a BB account, which created a useful speed bump in my opinion. But it’s entirely possible that this was an acceptable outcome to Mark et. al. - after all, it may well be driving up site revenue and thus enabling them to realize more of their own dreams or desires. I dunno… just theorizing.
I’m a fan of disemvoweling, but my POV has already been explained above.
Creating a special ‘boingboing’ account was a speed bump that only impaired discussion. Yes, it might have stopped one or two trollies from commenting, but how many GOOD people did it stop too?
It took me more than a year to successfully register an account; the system was pretty broken (I’ve been here since the first BBS which as Cory says “turned septic” and was shut down). I burned my first three favorite 'nyms trying - I’ve reverted to my primary one now in Discourse - and ended up Japanese.
When I was unable to register successfully, I commented as anonymous and signed my posts. Then I made bookmarks and manually polled for replies. This barrier to useability meant that conversations were an effort and I only spoke when I had something I felt was really worth saying. Not that anyone else shared my opinion on that!
I don’t mean to attribute anything to Discourse as a platform, but to the change in comments sections -and- moderation. I agree that it’s the owners site to run how ever they like, absolutely.
