I’ve had a couple posts removed, including one yesterday, for violating “community standards” without specifying which standard I supposedly forked with. The most recent seems most improbable. Who did I abuse or offend by speculating that COVID is an extinction event?
I didn’t flag it, but a disease that usually does not cause death or sterility cannot make humanity extinct, and posting false information about the pandemic is frowned upon by responsible people
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All flags, regardless of who threw them, are reviewed by moderators if they are upheld. I do not look at (nor care) who threw the flags. While users can choose to provide details as to why they flagged a post (and this is often invaluable, as I’m not aware of the subtleties of every topic or the dog-whistles of every bigoted community that may try to trolley here), ultimately, posts are removed or kept based on how much value they add to the conversation taking place.
The idea that a cabal of secret users has special authority here is preposterous. There are some highly valued Leaders in the community, chosen because moderators usually agree with their flags, who may be able to hide a post more easily (with fewer flags) than others, but these flags are still reviewed by moderators. And they don’t show up as special “This is an important flag!” to the moderators, either. Lastly, we literally did away with the invite-only, high user lounges (which anyone could obtain access to if you were enough of a Regular here in good standing) because we wanted to avoid even the appearance of a second-class member here. We are all mutants.
What you seem to fail to realize, even after a month away, is that your posts derail topics. You try to take the discussion in a different direction. I often use a cocktail party as a metaphor for our discussions, and walking into a group discussing Star Wars and saying “But what about how much better Star Trek is?” Or “I know you’re all talking about the races of Star Wars, but I think we should be discussing the ships as well” doesn’t help those discussions along - it attempts to end one line of conversation, to substitute your own.
This is why forums have topics, and why discourse has the ability to split off new topics from any post, by any user - it allows you to take a subgroup of that cocktail party that wants to discuss your interests into a separate area, and have that discussion, without causing the original discussion to end.
It’s clear, though, from your belief that 1) you were banned not because of your actions, but because of the actions of others, and 2) your complete failure to understand how your actions involve others that the very idea that other people may be having a conversation and don’t believe you should come in and disrupt it is foreign to you.
Because of this, I strongly suggest you find another community. Do, or do not, but you can’t come back here.
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I did not claim to be informative. I speculated, and we don’t know the long-term effects of COVID, so I see that speculation as neither unreasonable nor fear-mongering. Many more fears are mongered here. Still, when a post is rejected, I’d like to know which guideline I’ve supposedly violated.
This places undue burden on the moderation team who do not have the time to respond personally to every flag thrown. That’s why there is a link to the guidelines in the automated message that is sent, and more importantly, why the item:
- Enforcement may be lax or draconian as befits the whims of the Entity. The rude will be eaten first.
…exists in the first place. While we make an effort to be transparent about moderation decisions by posting in the General Moderation Topic, there is an ocean of difference between our best-effort attempts to be transparent and a requirement that we do so. If you expect this level of personalized service for every flag, I can assure you that you are on the wrong forum.
Lastly, if you believe that Boing Boing, via it’s BBS, a heavily indexed and shared forum, wants to be associated with FUD like the possibility that COVID-19 will kill the majority of the planet, then not only have you been reading a different Boing Boing than I have, but you also clearly have no idea what us supporting that level of fantasy by allowing it to be hosted here would do to our credibility over time. We are not a disinformation source, and we’re not going to entertain FUD just because you find it to be a useful “thought experiment”. The Pandemic isn’t a game, stop treating it like one.
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The guidelines specifically forbid “hostile, whining hand-wringers” and also “rules lawyering”
Anything that’s even slightly reminiscent of trying to build a legal case of some kind ("DO YOU ADMIT YOU HAVE ACTED UNETHICALLY OR NOT?") seems unlikely to last long
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The key word here is respectfully.
because Discourse won’t let me reply without adding something.
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FYI: I removed a discussion here because it involved reposting a moderated post. This topic doesn’t exist so that people who are determined to have their moderated posts present on the site can do so in this topic and “skirt the rules”.
To the question of “Where do we gripe about Boing Boing?” You have the entire internet to do that. Boing Boing isn’t one person, it’s a collection of people. Their contact information is on the about page. There is contact information on the contact page. All of those are read by real people on the other side, and often acted upon as well (it’s a common source of corrections or removal of store posts with product issues, for example.)
That doesn’t mean the BBS is the place to gripe about Boing Boing. We provide this space to have conversations about topics on Boing Boing, not to discuss whether or not Boing Boing should exist at all. If you have decided that the hard work of the Authors trying to keep an independent Blog alive isn’t for you anymore, then thank you for your time with us, but please take it elsewhere (or take it up with the Author you take issue with.)
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In other words: If you want to gripe, don’t be an ass; do it with class.
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For the sake of others who may be confused about why their posts get seem to be inconsistently moderated, I’d like to share my experience. I’m not a mod, just someone who has experienced the frustration of moderation that appeared arbitrary and inconsistent with the stated rules.
This forum has flagged my center-left posts that take issue with the far-left posts from vocal forum members. This form of disagreement is presumably flagged as off-topic, hijacking, derailing, or being disagreeable.
My first inclination when trying to figure out why I’m getting flagged is to look at tone; am I coming across as insulting, disrespectful, or uncivil? So as my posts kept getting moderated, I tried to soften them as much as I could.
But as time went on, I was posting the softest most clinical formulation of my disagreement, and it was still getting moderated. And others were replying with rougher tone and not getting moderated.
I have benefitted from those exchanges by learning and refining opinions. But it isn’t all about me. After reading the moderation threads, my eyes were opened to the cycle of derailment and conflagration that my disagreeing posts seeded.
Reading some of the moderation threads, I learned that there is a bedrock principle that it’s considered better to flag a comment than to reply. It took me more than a decade of posting here before I encountered mention of this principle. The simplest and most effective way to stop conflagration is to cut it off at the head, remove the post that started it. And if that is going to happen anyway, better to do it before the responses heat up.
Moderation here is not about legalistic or textualist interpretation of the forum rules. The moderators are playing 3D chess, looking ahead at how things will affect discussions and weighing many factors.
My sense is that it is mostly the super-dedicated posters who know and engage this way, by flagging posts whose only sin is that they can be predicted to cause a backlash. If there is a groupthink here, it’s the groupthinkers who do the flagging. Power posters know their replies will end up in the bit bucket if the post they replied to gets moderated, giving further motivation to flag instead of reply. The moderators have said they usually delete flagged posts.
This leads to a systematic orientation towards making this a wonderful place to support particular views.
Of course, this looks a lot like posts get moderated for simply disagreeing with groupthink. I’m coming to accept it. I am reaping the benefits of having a well-controlled environment with intelligent posters. And I’m seeing my personal limitations in identifying what might be constructive vs selfish, perhaps even trollish.
I did notice that I got moderated here more when I started engaging on reddit. Reddit seems to be a troll factory. And even reddit has more and more frequently been moderating posts simply because they express a perspective different from what the forum wants to support. I guess this is the nature of modern forums.
Reading the moderation threads, I did see that someone who seemed to get away with more had in fact been moderated more strongly than I was. The main point of this post is that there is a consistency to the moderation even when it appeared that others were able to get away with things that I couldn’t.
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I feel you. One thing that is important to remember is that everyone gets moderated at some point. It’s not fun, to be sure, but usually it’s nothing personal (the system is set up in a way that quickly learns to ignore flags that are just because you don’t like someone).
One thing that I have learned is that people are not always in the mood for a weighty debate about something, and you just have to respect that, even if it means you don’t get the last word in.
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so… uhh … that gunbattle comment thread got moderated pretty hard …eh?
This happens every single time someone creates a whole account just to complain about a post. It will get flagged as off-topic because it is. 
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perhaps with the exception of my initial comment/reply - most of the comments seemed to be actually about the article and it’s status as boingboing article.
It was about whether or not it should be posted, not the topic itself. It was a meta discussion. And then it was all about how people were being censored… Bringing up how disappointed one is in Boing Boing never ends well. You may disagree that it’s off-topic, but this drama happens quite a bit… someone starts a new account to complain how the blog has gone down hill and how they are censoring readers, etc. It also gets moderated and removed, usually with links and reminders about WHY they are getting removed.
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true, though i think there were rather valid points, even if the thread should have been locked.
the news byte is especially controversial considering how quickly it followed this article: Innocent man killed in police chase was uncle of teen who filmed George Floyd's murder | Boing Boing
Maybe, but still off-topic and as such, it will either be removed or moved to a meta thread.
BB is not a newspaper and it’s made up of a number of different authors who write about different things.
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