Griping about moderation, bias, et cetera

[gracchus]

@anon27007144

Sometimes I wonder if people are flagging conservative viewpoints as a way of suppressing them, with the justification being that the conservative perspective in this country is inherently prejudiced.

I just don’t think that’s the case here. I see comments get hidden because they violate the site rules on stereotyping or victim-blaming or name-calling, not because they’re (usually also) expressing a politically conservative point of view but because right-wingers tend to do those things more often than left-wingers do. As often as they’re flagged here, they’re pushed back at and refuted in replies – either way, neither is suppression of conservative political viewpoints in general.

That said, there’s no doubt that the commentariat here tends to lean more to the left socially and economically. Not surprising, given that BB’s publisher and Authors lean in the same direction. And while liberals and progressives are certainly capable of violating the site rules as defined by the site owners and enforced/interpreted by the mods with the help of the Discourse system, they just don’t end up doing that as often as modern conservatives and capital-L Libertarians do.

What really frustrates certain people with “unpopular” or “contrarian” views that violate the rules is that this BBS platform, in contrast to most others, has both highly professional and highly involved moderators and a system designed specifically for and based on feedback from said moderators. Furthermore, the regulars here, who seem to have decades of experience on various forums, are well-versed at spotting all the shoddy tricks they pull and aren’t afraid to call them on it or flag them. Between all that they can’t get away with the behaviour they’ve been able to on other forums.

[orenwolf]

@anon27007144

Sometimes I wonder if people are flagging conservative viewpoints as a way of suppressing them, with the justification being that the conservative perspective in this country is inherently prejudiced. Thus any post in support of the conservative viewpoint is loaded with implied prejudice even if none of it is expressed.

This happens, and is probably the greatest cause of ”disagreed” flags. However, as I mentioned, the incidence is low. far more often, the flagged post is in violation of our community standards and is removed for that reason, and it just so happens that a large majority of those posts happen to contain conservative viewpoints for some reason.

As a moderator, this trend has been clear as day. I may do up a Boing Boing post on it sometime, because the approach being taken by either side of the divide, especially in terms of new users, is vastly different in terms of civility, and has to be a product of conditioning in other venues. It’s fascinating to me.

[chgoliz]

@orenwolf

As a moderator, this trend has been clear as day. I may do up a Boing Boing post on it sometime, because the approach being taken by either side of the divide, especially in terms of new users, is vastly different in terms of civility, and has to be a product of conditioning in other venues. It’s fascinating to me.

Please, do it!

[gracchus]

@orenwolf

it just so happens that a large majority of those posts happen to contain conservative viewpoints for some reason.

At least in the American context, those reasons aren’t obscure. Since 1968, the GOP has positioned itself as the duopoly party for bigots and sexists and victim-blamers (usually via dog-whistling. See Lee Atwater). And since the 1980s, their “free”-market fundie allies and affiliates have openly embraced the use of bad-faith and fallacious debate-club arguments (see Newt Gingrich, Ted Cruz, Ben Shapiro, or countless other bitter conservative nerds who never got over HS) and outright lies (see Leo Strauss and the neoCons) and now driving trollies (see the current White House regime) to forward their agenda. American left-wingers aren’t immune from these malaises (e.g. the sexist subset of BernieBros or tankies), but they express them far less often.

That these behaviours and attitudes would carry over into online forums, and that they’d come into direct conflict with this particular forum’s well-enforced community standards is entirely predictable. Whether you agree or not, add me to those who’d like to hear your take based on your experience in the trenches.

[ETA: added link for tankies]

[navarro]

i see that a lot myself. if someone wants to make a comment taking a conservative opinion on something, i don’t have a problem with that. if someone were to make a comment about the social safety net taking a position like “we need to find ways of dealing with poverty that don’t promote dependency or we have more pressing things that we need to be able to pay for” or any of a number of conservative arguments against welfare programs or types of welfare programs i take no offense at that. i’ll engage or not depending on other factors but i’ll take their position as sincere and discuss it with them on an intellectual or policy-driven basis. on the other hand if they take the position that “group x shouldn’t get welfare because that demographic is a bunch of lazy mongrels” or “group y should be driven out of society because they represent a moral infection that needs to be driven out” or any of a number of racist or fascistic arguments i’m likely to just flag it.

for me, it isn’t conservative viewpoints as such that makes me push back, it’s when those viewpoints have a subtext approaching genocide that gets my hackles up.

[gracchus]

@navarro

if someone wants to make a comment taking a conservative opinion on something, i don’t have a problem with that.

Right. If it’s presented in a straightforward and good-faith way that doesn’t break the site rules, I see it as an opportunity for engagement and genuine explorative debate. Unfortunately that tends to be the exception rather than the rule when it comes to on-line forums whether or not they have and enforce rules like they do here.

[Melizmatic]

@L0ki

Oddly, I think the ignore feature is more likely to turn the forum into an echo chamber - but not as a whole. Rather each user now has the theoretical power to tune the chamber for themselves alone.

If everyone can still post their opinions publicly* then that’s not what an “echo chamber” is; any more than your home is an echo chamber, because you’re selective about whom you allow into it and when.

Our phones are not ‘echo chambers’ when we choose to block calls from unwanted solicitors or people whom we just don’t want to talk to.

The site has plenty of contrary and nonconformist opinions to the point that the concern about the community becoming an echo chamber is an unfounded one.

This conversation is exhausting because no matter how you slice it, at the core it always comes back down to certain people thinking that they somehow ‘deserve’ special treatment, or others insinuating that they are somehow being ‘victimized’ because it seems they can’t figure out how to navigate the site without violating any of the terms or the code of conduct.

The rules apply to everyone; me, you, all of us.

Full stop.

And all the petty whining and endless rules-lawyering in the world won’t change that.

TL3 isn’t a ‘popularity context,’ there is no secret cabal of members dictating the actions of the staff, and there is no systemic plot in place to turn the site into a tree-hugging ‘liberal haven.’

BB and it’s moderation isn’t ‘perfect,’ by any means, (nothing created by humans is) but even with the flaws it does have, it’s still a far better, more consistently fair site than most public forums, including FB & Twitter. Hell, especially those two, as their policies and moderation totally suck balls.

@orenwolf

it just so happens that a large majority of those posts happen to contain conservative viewpoints for some reason.

It’s not that conservative opinions are not welcome here at all, it’s that all too often those aforementioned opinions are also laced with content that flagrantly violates the terms.

It really is as simple as Tamsin said up-thread; people can converse about pretty much any topic and can express almost any viewpoint, even unpopular ones, as long as they are not dicks about it.

But in a nutshell, maybe that’s the real issue; maybe some people just don’t know how to switch their mental dickhead button to the ‘off’ position.

* As long as those opinions don’t violate the terms and conditions, obviously.

[DukeTrout]

@AndreStmaur

I am not really sure that the flag system makes much difference on the work of the moderators when all deletions still must be agreed by a moderator, BTW.

Wow. I guess you’ve never moderated a comments section or BBS before, then. I have, but a much smaller one than BB. Moderators can’t read every post. Even if they managed that monumental task, there would be an inherent delay in moderation as they worked through threads. An offensive post could be up for hours or even days before being deleted. By having community flags, it reduces the response time for moderators to delete a bad post, while, if it’s REALLY bad, community flags can hide it immediately.

You seem to have the benefit and burden of communication backwards. I was taught from an early age that the burden of communicating clearly is on the communicator not on the audience. The audience judges whether the communication is worth reading, or is inappropriate. If a writer writes something that is offensive, the audience has no obligation to read it, regardless of whether it is misunderstood.

If you find yourself offending people often, then there are two possibilities: you are not expressing yourself clearly, or you are being offensive. Either way, the burden is on you to adjust, not your audience.

This is a moderated forum, as you know. We are encouraged to flag posts that are inappropriate rather than respond in kind. In an unmoderated forum, you can post something offensive and expect immediate reprisal. That’s why unmoderated forums inherently devolve into flame wars. It’s simple entropy.

The way I am reading your comments here, in the context of your posting history, is that you want it both ways: you want to post things that offend people, while being protected from reprisal

[L0ki]

@Melizmatic

If everyone can still post their opinions publicly* then that’s not what an “echo chamber” is; any more than your home is an echo chamber, because you’re selective about whom you allow into it and when.

I agree it’s stretching the definition which I was willing to do for the sake of a fair discussion.

It certainly doesn’t turn the site as whole into anything like an echo chamber in the sense of limiting anyone’s ability to say their piece but as in your example of one’s own home, it does theoretically involve the possibility of cutting oneself off from unwanted views.

That can be very welcome. It can also be limiting. For example, left to my own devices I would not listen to LBC any more (that’s a talk radio station in the UK which is now pretty firmly a pro-Brexit station with Nigel Farage and Jacob Rees-Mogg as prominent show hosts).

Any given show can be reliably guaranteed to have either the presenter or the majority of the callers or both spouting such utter bigoted rubbish that it wouldn’t last five seconds if posted here.

I would prefer not to have to listen to that kind of thing. My wife however has a more personal interest in Brexit and the public mood against immigrants and insists that we listen to at least a bit of it.

It does provide a good gauge of what the large number of people who support Brexit think.

@Melizmatic

This conversation is exhausting because no matter how you slice it, at the core it always comes back down to certain people thinking that they somehow ‘deserve’ special treatment, or others insinuating that they are somehow being ‘victimized’ because it seems they can’t figure out how to navigate the site without violating any of the terms or the code of conduct.

Well perhaps. I’m still at the stage of trying to presume that people raise these things in good faith. If someone asks a question about how the site works, I’ll bite and try and provide an answer.

@Melizmatic

BB and it’s moderation isn’t ‘perfect,’ by any means, (nothing created by humans is) but even with the flaws it does have, it’s still a far better, more consistently fair site than most public forums, including FB & Twitter. Hell, especially those two, as their policies and moderation totally suck balls.

Agreed. I don’t think it hurts to consider now and again whether it can be made even better - after all that’s how the ignore feature got implemented.

But I definitely agree that it gets wearing to go over the same stuff again and again. These points have come up before, they’ve been discussed ad nauseam on the BBS and over on the Discourse boards.

The only useful thing to come is, I suppose, that it might be helpful if the BBS had a quick summary of what the Trust levels are and what they do as part of the tutorial. It’s been so long since I went through that, I can’t remember whether it does or not.

[gracchus]

@DukeTrout

By having community flags, it reduces the response time for moderators to delete a bad post, while, if it’s REALLY bad, community flags can hide it immediately.

This also goes to the complaint above by @d_r about comments (I’d add any comments, not just specific ones) being hidden “too quickly” by community flags. By design that’s one of the main purposes of the flagging system: as a cooling mechanism it (in combination with the edit delay) prevents the topic from being derailed by a flood of responses and it brings the comment to the attention of the mod (and prioritises it) more quickly than if he had to read through every topic or rely on a flood of DMs.

[Gyrofrog]

@gracchus

tankies

(Had to look that one up… So that’s still a thing.)

[MalevolentPixy]

Here’s the thing about people bitching about echo chambers. BB uses Discourse. Unlike many comment systems out there, Discourse doesn’t rank your comments by reputation. It doesn’t say “You’re TL1, so all your comments must be approved until you move up a level when enough higher-level people like you” or stick your comment at the bottom of the list where hardly anyone gets to unless you get enough likes/upvotes/whatevers. Your post goes in plain view in the thread at the time you posted. If people flag it, it’s still quite obvious it’s there. It only goes away if the mods agree with flags placed upon it, or if it’s in response (or a response to a response) of a removed post.

People who never get a single like are just as visible as those who get 50 or more on every post (spoiler: even the most “darling” can’t pull that off unless they only post once and strike a chord).

When I have thrown my most flags? When we instituted the rule saying “hey, it’s not cool to slander people with mental illness, okay?” and people needed reminders that it wasn’t okay anymore. I also think that the bulk of my flags are “other” where I explain to the mods the exact word or phrase that is inappropriate. Sometimes it doesn’t need the post to be eaten, just edited with a better choice of words.

Ever hear the phrase “It’s not what you say, but how you say it”? Sometimes that really is the case.

[anon27007144]

@chgoliz

In other words, no, you are absolutely wrong when you state that “conservative” viewpoints are flagged here as a matter of course, just for expressing a conservative perspective. The question is, do you KNOW what you’re saying is wrong, or are you reacting out of ignorance and fear?

I was trying to guess why you had such a strong reaction to my post, and I think it’s the way I phrased it. I wrote, “Sometimes I wonder if…” but what I was thinking was, “I wonder if sometimes…” I didn’t mean to say that it happens as a matter of course. @Orenwolf confirms that it does happen, but with low incidence, and also that there’s a strong correlation between conservative posts and posts that violate community standards. Which I’m sure is one of the great mysteries of our times.

[gracchus]

It might have sounded to her a bit like JAQing off, which is one of the favourite shoddy debate-club tactics of conservatives. I didn’t take it as such, for what it’s worth, but I can see how it might have been.

[Melz2]

@L0ki

It certainly doesn’t turn the site as whole into anything like an echo chamber in the sense of limiting anyone’s ability to say their piece

And that’s the entire point.

Anyone can have their say, as long they are willing to do it within the parameters of the site, which we ALL agreed to upon becoming members.

That doesn’t mean that anyone else is required to listen to those opinions, nor agree with or even engage them.

@L0ki

That can be very welcome. It can also be limiting.

And that’s an individual choice which each of us is free to make for ourselves; it’s still not equivalent to an ‘echo chamber’ if one selectively chooses to limit their own exposure to unwanted input or content that has already been assessed as having no actual value (like flagrant propaganda, bigoted stereotypes, hate speech, etc)

That’s just not what that specific term means.

@MalevolentPixy

“It’s not what you say, but how you say it”? Sometimes that really is the case.

Quite often that’s the case, especially online where we lack the benefits of tone of voice and body language to help determine intent.

[LurksNoMore]

@L0ki

Oddly, I think the ignore feature is more likely to turn the forum into an echo chamber - but not as a whole. Rather each user now has the theoretical power to tune the chamber for themselves alone.

We could theoretically have swathes of marxist warriors discussing the overthrow of capitalism (Yay, Comrades!) and swathes of hardcore libertarians debating how to implement pure Randian capitalism (Yay, capitalism!) without either group being aware of each other because everyone has perfectly tuned their BBS experience to ‘ignore’ the others.

In my experience on forums with ignore function, this doesn’t happen. At least not on sites with an user base as large and broad as BB’s, or similar. Because, of course, it’s not enough to ignore your absolute opposites to create an echo chamber; both those Marxists and libertarians would still face a whole lot of posters whose politics put them in between those endpoints.

[KathyPartdeux]

@Melz2

“It’s not what you say, but how you say it”? Sometimes that really is the case.

Quite often that’s the case, especially online where we lack the benefits of tone of voice and body language to help determine intent.

True - but there are some things you can’t use this site to promote. Regardless of how lovely your prose may be.

• Be cool. Don’t post or encourage insulting, bullying, victim-blaming, racist, sexist, violent, or homophobic remarks.
• Do not make assumptions as to anyone’s mental state, race, gender, ethnicity, religious beliefs, group affiliation or sexual orientation without corroboration.
  -snip-

There’s a link to all of this prominently placed. And the mod has often posted notes on why specific comments violated standards. When someone is moderated - It’s often not about their language being outwardly polite - but their content. The very nature of which isn’t respectful to many people or dare I say - polite in fact.

And we all agreed to that when we signed up. We can all revoke our agreement whenever we wish.

[Melz2]

@KathyPartdeux

but there are some things you can’t use this site to promote.

Absolutely true; I’m only talking about within the stated parameters that you just so kindly reposted.

Like you said, the terms are both clearly stated, and easy enough to find.

Lastly:

@KathyPartdeux

we all agreed to that when we signed up. We can all revoke our agreement whenever we wish.

[orenwolf]

@L0ki

Oddly, I think the ignore feature is more likely to turn the forum into an echo chamber - but not as a whole. Rather each user now has the theoretical power to tune the chamber for themselves alone.

It really won’t. Ignored posters don’t get flagged. If someone wants to post a well-reasoned message about why they think keeping children in cages is sound national policy, have at it. Those that ignore them, will not see the post and not respond. Others will (very likely) vociferously debate them. While some may flag the post because they disagree with the idea, the mods will not allow the flags to stand if the post is otherwise within the guidelines.

That does not mean that the post deserves agreement, or any response at all, nor would we ever try to force individuals to read something they choose not to. It seems to me that a lot of the complaints around “echo chambers” fall into these categories, and they are doomed to fail. Just because someone wrote something doesn’t mean anyone will care, and especially doesn’t mean that anyone will agree.

When I see someone suggest that they choose not to post an unpopular viewpoint, my first response is: “well then you are creating the echo chamber”. Because to me, what they are really saying is “I should have an open forum to post opposing viewpoints without having to deal with contrary opinions”, which, frankly, is not an open forum.

If you are discouraged to post opposing views because you know they will be unpopular, that’s not an echo chamber. That’s an unpopular view. And you have every right to post them here (within the rules). But, everyone else has a right to respond, too.

[d_r]

@gracchus

This also goes to the complaint above by @d_r about comments (I’d add any comments, not just specific ones) being hidden “too quickly” by community flags. By design that’s one of the main purposes of the flagging system: as a cooling mechanism

Yes, this is what I meant when I wrote above that it was probably a good forum policy to err on the side of false positives. Also, my posts aren’t complaints.