Yes, I’d agree that is a huge part of bringing value, though not necessarily the entirety of it.
Also, re-reading my own comment that you’re replying to, I hope no one thought I was implying that users at TL1 or TL2 don’t (or can’t) contribute to the community. Everyone who comments in a responsible way contributes. And everyone can notice spam or trollies or inappropriate behavior, and flag when it seems appropriate to do so.
There’s a fine line between going against the grain and bad faith arguments or JAQing. And there some topics where being “against the grain” whether well intentioned or not will get you slapped (victim blaming, racism, etc).
the discourse system gains value from the community in two ways. one way, which you note, is the value derived from the content of the posts and comments from the community members. the second way the community contributes is through their participation in the moderation process through the use of flags. community flags are a vital and inherent part of the discourse moderation system. they prevent the kind of obnoxious, shitposting behavior that can be seen in so many forums. you seem very dismissive of that kind of contribution but i’ve participated in forums in the past which did not have community flagging baked into the system and instead had overworked, irritable, and angry moderators instead. i know what kind of atmosphere i prefer.
can people abuse the flagging system? sure, but they aren’t going to be able to abuse it for long because the next line of defense for our community’s standards are the moderators who can see that kind of abuse in action and do what is needed to stop it.
I slipped off TL3 and saw that as an opportunity to spend less time on the board.
Even though some posts (like @AndreStmaur’s) disappear far faster than they ought to, suggesting that there are some flag-happy people, it wouldn’t be an issue if it was easier to unflag them. Once or twice in the past I have messaged the moderators to suggest that someone had posted in good faith and shouldn’t have been flagged, but it would be nice if there was some kind of unflag button, even if only available at higher trust levels. (Or, maybe some number of “likes” from higher TL could play that role.)
The site has decided that some types of discourse don’t add value; that they in fact decrease the value of the discussion and are not discussions that the site wants to support or subject its users to.
Some have made rather blatantly transphobic and misogynistic comments and wanted to argue that these had value here.
They don’t. And they should suck it up or move on.
That is assuming that a post adds to the discussion, inherently. Sometimes, a post takes away from the discussion. Subtraction through addition.
I could hand you a piece of art that I carved by hand - that would be a generous gift. I could hand you a transit card that still had value on it as I leave a city I was visiting, and that could be something you use or not - up to you. I could hand you some dog crap that I found in the park, and I don’t think you’d see that as valuable. It’s a net negative contribution: you’ve had a bad experience and probably need to waste time washing your hands.
Ideas can be the same way. Most of the posts I’ve seen flagged are actively harmful content that needlessly offends some or most users here. I’ve been flagged for writing something stupid or insensitive, or just letting my emotions get the better of me and going into “attack mode.” I’m glad those posts are gone. They weren’t contributing to the community or the discussion.
I’ve had posts deleted- I hope it caused me to reflect on my statement first - rather than what a rat bastard my colleagues here are for having flagged me.
Rules lawyering is just trying to subvert the rules and to continue to engage in poor behavior. Even if it’s politely stated poor behavior.
forgive me if i’m making an unwarranted assumption, but one thing i think you may have missed in the details of the flagging system is that, with one exception, it takes flags from multiple people to hide a comment. this means your hypothetical higher trust level user would be undoing the judgement of a number of people with their “unflag” button. the only people who get to have that kind of authority in discourse are the mods.
that exception, btw, is that if a tl 3 or higher flags a comment as “spam” it is immediately hidden. i’m going to go out on a limb here and say anyone who abused that on any kind of a regular basis is not going to stay welcome here.
in the end, the most the community can do on a cumulative basis is to hide a comment while simultaneously alerting the mods that many people think there’s a problem with it. the mods can then choose to unhide the comment, they can remove the comment, or they can leave it up but have it remain hidden. i also believe there is an automated message giving one a certain amount of time to edit the comment to make it compliant with the community guidelines. so there are many possibilities once a comment is hidden and only in the case where the moderator removes the comment because it completely and blatantly violates the guidelines is it impossible for community members to see the comment if they want to.
as i said, maybe i’m making a bad assumption and you were aware of these details and you still think one user’s judgement should be able to overrule the considered judgement of multiple other users. it just seems like there’s more to this system than you seemed to be giving it credit for.
No, I don’t think one user should be able to undo a flag, but I do think one user should be able to alert the mods to a possible reason to unflag, and that a severality of users should be able to weigh in with counterweight in either direction. If one is worried about creating ‘chatter’, eg with trolls trying to unhide racist comments, then tie this ability to unhide to higher trust levels.
I think I’ve been around here around as long as you have, and while the moderation is generally excellent, I don’t think it is possible to have been here that long and not seen plenty of examples where posts were quickly hidden that really didn’t call for it. In my business we call these “Type I” errors. I do think a good argument can be made that Type I errors are less harmful to a forum than Type II errors, so a policy that allows the former to minimize the latter is probably good policy. All I’m suggesting is that maybe there are reasonable ways to reduce Type I errors as well.
There are. The simplest one involves no more tech to implement, and is just Don’t be a Dick. Abilities with that option vary, obviously.
No, that won’t do anything for Type I errors.
We review flagged posts. Users who flag posts that shouldn’t have been lose flag weight. Users who do it consistently lose a lot of flag weight until their flags are essentially meaningless without others.
We also weigh single flags lower than we do multiple flags for a post, because in practice that has resulted in a better signal/noise ratio upon review.
The system tracks all of this, and users with whom we have consistently agreed with and have extremely high flag acceptance are offered TL4.
If someone wishes to message a moderator about a post, including making a case for why it shouldn’t be flagged, they are more than welcome to do so. But the incidence of “false flags” (ha!) here is pretty small, and the vast majority of posts that end up hidden by flag weight alone tend to stay that way upon review.
Hiding ≠ deleting. Decisions on whether or not something was properly flagged belong to the moderators and the moderators alone.
You can view hidden content with a single click, and it’s rather obvious it’s there. Outside of spam, no one gets one-click hiding abilities, not even TL4.
That’s what keeps this from being a popularity contest, and keeps things sane for the mods.
You will lose TL and privileges if you throw too many flags that the mods disagree with.
Again, the only thing flags do is alert the mods and maybe hide a post if a certain threshold of community members.
Also, the mods can see the actions any member of this board takes. Anyone caught abusing their privileges – whatever they might be – will be lucky if they only lose a TL.
Edit: whoops @orenwolf, owe you a coke. I was still composing while you posted.
Just to be clear, I never meant to imply that posts being flagged by single users were an issue, and I agree (and said) that one route to questioning a post (someone else’s post, again to be clear) being hidden is to contact you. I was only suggesting that there could be ways to make the latter easier/more mechanical. And, while I agree that the number of false positives is not high, and while I have just said that false positives are probably healthier for a forum than errors in the other direction, I don’t think the number of them is as insignificant as is being suggested, and I think it could get worse as we get closer to 2020.
Now, it isn’t my forum, I am here by the benevolence of the owners and operators. I’m just trying to share my impression of how things look to me as one long time participant here. My impressions might be different from yours and from those members whose impressions align with yours, but that’s kind of the point: I wouldn’t be posting anything if I didn’t see something where I thought I could provide a different perspective. And I hope this is taken in the spirit of just providing constructive feedback, rather than as a criticism.
(In one of my real-world jobs I am editor-in-chief of an academic journal. One thing I haven’t yet fully mastered is an effective way to communicate to authors that comments from referees are not necessarily things they need to address or refute, just things for them (and me) to think about as part of the total publication process.)
i don’t know, based on my observations the rate of false positives is pretty low. the vast majority of the time when i see a comment that has been hidden it’s usually something that is at least borderline racist or sexist or it is something blatantly insulting or completely off-topic or an attempt to hijack or derail the conversation or all of the above. if anything, i tend to think the type 2 error rate is somewhat higher than type 1.
@Tamsin_Bailey’s suggestion, while not improving the p-value, would have the virtue of greatly reducing flags globally if everyone were willing to follow it.
I think I flag about 3-4 comments a year - maybe.
The concern that there’s a posse of flag happy censors seems false. The mod has told you that he discounts overly flag happy people.
So - if you’re getting a lot of flags that actually effect your posts - you’re getting flagged by a lot of different people here.
on average i probably flag about 5-7 comments a month. sometimes, like when we have a jordan peterson topic and we get an infestation of fanbois, that rate will dramatically climb but i generally take a fairly relaxed attitude about other folks comments. generally, unless someone is being abusive or is promulgating an ethos that denies the rights of others to exist, i’m not going to flag their comments. i may argue strenuously and debate to the limits of my abilities but i’d much rather attempt to persuade than attempt to blockade.
Which every member can do once they’ve crossed the very low threshold to level 1.
Which is sort of the point. Until a mod decides that yes, that post is toxic, you have the choice whether to read it or not.
Yes, most of us will click to unhide most of the time but there are some users where I know once I see a hidden post what kind of stuff it will contain. I don’t need to subject myself to that.
In addition, if you know the post has been flagged to the point of being ‘hidden’, I suspect there is less temptation to reply to it immediately, thus reducing the tendency to turn the whole topic into a shitfest and having your perfectly reasoned, carefully tuned response eaten along with the original post.
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.
I must admit that pretty soon after the new feature was implemented someone popped up with a post that had me reaching for the ignore button like the Flash sprinting for the loo after a night out with the Wigan Warriors.
But as others have made clear, there are opinions and ideas which while do not violate the rules go against the common understanding or narrative and so “their house their rules” and that’s that.
I’ve found that its simply best to stay out of conversations here where I hold very different beliefs.
I am not dismissive of the contribution of moderation. I just wanted to remind that there is value in the contributions of the member and not just in the building of a “community”.
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.
I never denied that.
I think that we all agree on this thread that nobody wants blatantly transphobic or misogynistic comments. I would certainly flag them if I found some. However, I am not so sure that your post is not a veiled accusation. Do you feel that I have posted blatantly transphobic or misogynistic comments? That was never my intention.
