Griping about moderation, bias, et cetera

meta
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I agree! That’s quite precisely what happens here every single day. Maybe because it doesn’t devolve into abuse and polarization you mistake it for an “echo chamber”. I’m fact that’s what you’re seeing this very moment. Someone engaging with you respectfully, point by point while also disagreeing.

And to the original point, it’s the community that flagged the offensive, abusive post, not the mods. If you went before a judge and started by saying “you’re just going to throw me in jail because this county is run by cuck leftist who don’t believe in liberty”, how do you think you’d be received?

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Stop, you’re being way too rational; and it’s ruining a perfectly good pity party.

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[apologies, wasn’t trying to respond to gracchus]

True, but they get hidden awfully easily, which guides the discussion. This post for example is the one I was referring to in the thread about bees:

I don’t know if you can see the revision history, but the fact that the initial post was even hidden says to me that the flagging system has some issues. I didn’t realize that editing it restores the post, that’s a brilliant feature, but still I think it’s all contributing to a, well, an echo chamber. Sorry to use that cliche, but it fits here more lately than ever, and I’ve been reading and loving BoingBoing comment threads since they were introduced years and years ago.

It’s certainly possible I’m wrong, but I don’t remember any insults. He or she was simply telling people to calm down and that they were overreacting. Respectfully dissenting.

For whatever it’s worth, seconded.

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“You’re overreacting” is something anybody can say, to anybody else, at any time.

The response is, “No I’m not!”

“Yes you are.”

“No I’m not!”

It’s pointless.

People react to things. Labeling them as overreacting is little different from telling them to shut up.

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You make us sound like dogs marking our territory. Or a clique of high-schoolers, shutting out all the uncool kids. Speaking for myself, that’s not the case, and I feel more than a little insulted.

I Flag if someone: (a) violates the Guidelines or (b) disrespects other board members without provocation (which actually falls under violating the Guidelines.) That’s it. Somebody wants to disagree with me? It’s the Internet. I expect it. And that’s fine. It would be boring if everyone agreed with me all the time. I appreciate the wide variety of knowledge and viewpoints here. I learn from it on a daily basis. It’s part of why I keep coming back, why I’ve stuck around here for years.

I admit, I do think of this place (and a couple of other sites) as my cyber-home, and consider my fellow Happy Mutants as my tribe. But if someone new comes along, and they behave… cool! The more, the merrier. And that’s how it should be.

That having been said, I don’t believe racism, sexism, or other bad-faith behaviors have a place here. And I reserve the right to Flag them if I see them.

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Especially in the context of a post responding to a woman by a user with a history of talking down to our female compatriots.

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It’s not a real complaint. It’s a meta-statement about who should be loud and who should be quiet.

If somebody’s wrong about the facts, correct the facts. If somebody posts the same stupid shit over and over, that’s actually against its own rule. Don’t Repeat Yourself is a great rule, and it could be enforced much more diligently than it is.

If multiple people are all upset about the same thing, and you’re tired of reading about it, click yourself a different link. It’s a big intertubes.

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Since I am the author of that beekeeping post:

In the original the first sentence was “This is ridiculous”. I edited it to “Please do not overreact.” It is the only edit. I did not intend to insult anybody.

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39

OK but isn’t that how the system is supposed to work? I mean, there was resolution and understanding, not just mindless flagging.

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It has an obvious asymmetry. That is an advantage to smooth functioning of the BBS in that wrongly hiding a reasonable post is not toxic the way not hiding an unreasonable one could be. In that sense I suppose it is working the way it is “supposed to”.

In the bee case I’m not sure how mindful the flagging was. Many participants on the BBS are rightly very upset about the state of bee populations, but few of us have much experience raising bees. As a result, when the poster soberly pointed out that the act in the thread was not cataclysmic, out of genuine concern but also out of lack of understanding people made assumptions and flagged him. We nearly lost what was probably the most level-headed analysis in the thread. If I understand what happened, the only reason it didn’t disappear altogether was that he edited it a bit, but honestly there was nothing wrong with the original post, and I would say that the accidental preservation of something valuable is not something to be satisfied with.

I don’t pretend to know a better alternative. Maybe with time the new “ignore” feature will help us be a little more judicious in our use of flags, a little more willing to give the benefit of the doubt for a little longer.

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This is excellent advice if your eventual goal is to be banned from the BBS. Routine violations of our policies without any sign of altering behaviour might be one of the most succinct definitions of ”trolley” that I’ve ever encountered.

20,000 active users, but please, do try and generalize. As for the mods? If your post is flagged and stays that way, then I’m afraid they do, indeed, disagree with the assertion that your post abides by the guidelines here.

  • Anyone could have opened a topic just like this one to discuss moderation.
  • There is a dedicated topic I started when I began moderating here for this purpose.
  • There is an invitation to PM me in on the guidelines page, and I routinely respond to comments, questions, or concerns about moderation.

IMHO, many of those who refuse these paths and instead argue about moderation or disrupt topics do so because they want to have their say, their way, in the topic where everyone else is posting. They learn pretty quickly that the BBS is not about them.

See above re: entitlement.

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This is why there are moderators, and only moderators can remove posts. The post was not lost. It was hidden from view, and while it can be restored by editing (and the system explicitly PMs you to tell you this!), it can also be restored by a review.

People flag for all sorts of reasons. In my experience, those willing to take a ”neutral” stance are few and far between. Because we are human, we have our own internal biases and beliefs, and overcoming that natural instinct in the face of comments you disagree with but are otherwise acceptable is universally difficult at times.

There are those who can do it consistently however, and that’s why we gave them Leader status, which increases the weight of those flags.

While everyone can flag, the system tracks how often those flags are agreed with, and that information helps the automated system to decide when it’s time to hide a post. They system is, IMHO, one of the most amazing parts of the software we use, and allows Discourse to have a moderation system that is possibly an entire generation ahead of every other discussion system out there.

It isn’t perfect, and sometimes highly rated users still flag otherwise valid posts and mods have to unhide it. But those incidences are far, far less common that posts that are legitimately flagged and removed, or situations where a ”bad faith” flag is ignored because it’s from a user who routinely flags in bad faith, their flags now carry little weight, and since no one else has flagged the post, the flag is ignored.

This all works exceedingly well, and Discourse even gives us the stats to prove it.

No system is infallible, especially this particular meat-based moderator. But there are a ton of tools here to help us try to get it right, and we really do endeavour to review flags and take action quickly.

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1
/s

Indeed. As in journalism, I wonder if a neutral stance is even possible (recognizing you put it in quotation marks for a good reason). It presumes at the very least there’s a measurable middle-ground that balances all salient points of view, but since POV and the weights of valuations are by definition subjective, neutrality seems like a mirage. Which is no excuse not to try to empathize with those with whom one disagrees, but that seems like something different.

Anyway, I look at it like I do every other private platform for discussion. Moderators represent the owners, and if I don’t like the policies (in theory or in practice), then I can accept that, or leave, or I can make a nuisance of myself until I get banned. Hopefully it’s apparent that I quite like the BBS guidelines, but even if I didn’t, making a nuisance of myself, in addition to being a dick move, would be juvenile and ultimately just waste everyone’s time.

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Short answer: no.

Neutrality is a human ideal. If people only wanted neutrality, we would have “both sides” debates about whether the human race should exist, or whether comments should be allowed to be a 10,000-long string of the letter N.

Neutrality is a wonderful thing to work for, but only within a rational context.

Not all biases are equal, and I prefer the rough grouping of biases that promote thoughtfulness and human progress, in moderation, journalism, and life.

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In journalism, a neutral stance is possible by bringing all the considered, mainstream viewpoints (there may be more than 2) on an issue and presenting them to the viewer in their best light. Extreme or uninformed views need not apply.

In moderating a forum, however, you’re there to enforce rules and guidelines, so it’s a different sort of impartiality. You’re not require to ensure all sides get a fair hearing, just that the situation doesn’t devolve into a food fight.

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Before you arrive at that “neutral” stance how do you evaluate which views are “considered”, “mainstream” and not “extreme”? Can you do that without having a viewpoint already, even if that viewpoint is just “status quo, yay!”?

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The point is that we all have bias and what constitutes “extreme” to one person, is not so much to another… so you have to figure out what is or isn’t extreme, and not everyone is going to agree with you.

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By extreme, I mean a viewpoint that doesn’t hold a lot of consensus, and consensus is essential in a democracy.

That definition has limits, too. If you’re writing about a dispute between two or three people, you’d be neutral for telling all sides of the story, instead. The consensus might come from people trying to settle the dispute, but there might not be anything resembling that.

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So

Consensus is driven by the viewpoints in currency at the time. That’s a recipe for a positively glacial, if not plate tectonical rate of change. If we did it your way, we might be getting close to votes for white women right around now.

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Not all consensus is good, though.

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