I miss Cowicide

I liked Cowicide. But s/he did cross the line, and when s/he did, I noticed I wasn’t as interested in what Cow had to say. I think a little timeout isn’t going to kill anyone. I’m coming up on my tenth year as a semi-regular commenter, and I have to say that I don’t really notice BB going overboard with moderation. If anything, I think that keeping threads on track has helped people have more sophisticated discussions instead of having to start at square one every time an issue is discussed.

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The goal is to be a reasonably comfortable place for people to discuss sometimes difficult topics. It is more than possible to remain polite and moderately rational and still disagree strongly; it is desirable to do so, since otherwise you risk folks writing off anything you have to say on the topic.

In any system, there will be lines beyond which thou shalt not go. The bounds here really are pretty darned loose, but by definition they’re going to annoy someone. If you’re that someone, your choices are to try to work with the local conventions, or to go elsewhere, or to offer a coherent reason to change the rules.

So far, I haven’t heard much reason beyond “I don’t like rules” and “Cowicide was sometimes worth reading.” The latter is self-correcting when the time-out period is over, assuming he’s willing to work with rather than against the moderators. The former… well, there’s a whole big Internet out there.

(Yes, I’m assuming Cowicide is male, based on remembered text and subtext styles. I may be wrong; if so my apologies.)

I have nothing against rules. I have no opinion on the ban being discussed. I am complaining a bit about the free ice cream. I expect double my money back.

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Well, after sleeping on it I feel I wasted an opportunity going down the wrong road with my argument. I have more than a touch of the EGO and it leads me astray, often.

Rob, I hope you understood my flagging your GIFs was a “friendly” poke. I would say “kidding,” but that’s so cowardly. I thought the eye-rolling one was absolutely on point. (cringe-worthy)

Let me say, that as someone going through a late life socialization overhaul this has been useful to me for a glimpse of how others see me. Which is not that easy to get.

I listen, consider, and, if appropriate, I change my mind.

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Antinous is gone? Shit. What happened to him?

Well, I for one hope Cowicide chooses to come back after the timeout period. I thought he had a lot of interesting and useful things to contribute, though he did not always choose a kind, respectful way to say those things.

http://bbs.boingboing.net/faq

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No. As you can see, there are no ads on BBS! If we did put ads in, it wouldn’t make a difference. But in the absence of ads, it can’t even hypothetically make one.

Touché. I wasn’t intentionally implying a selling out thing, but that’s a fair read despite not being my intended point. I think of BBS as the comments section for BB.

What I was driving at is prior moderation regmes regarded lazy arguments, fallacious flame baiting comments, and outright trolling as being disruptive, and usually acted to intervene in a way that moved the conversation forward more quickly. It was prickly at times, but obtuse treatment of obtuse arguments has its place. This still happens here but less so. What I would like to see is moderation that’s more interested in the mechanics of earnest conversation.

And thank you for the free ice cream

Glad to hear it! We need the community’s help to make that happen, you can be a part of the solution by flagging posts which go over the line: FAQ - Boing Boing BBS

The only thing that scales with the community is the community.

Wait. WHAT?

I thought boingboing was immune to that sort of ‘you disagree with mod so therefor you are banned’ drama… epsecially given he’d been a boing boinger for years and had always been articulate and had well thought out arguments, counters, and at least would consider your position before calling you an idiot.

Just… what the hell?

Edit: OK read a little bit of the rest of the thread but I know precicely Nothing of what happened… but this is the sort of garbage I’ve seen nuke ohter communities. I don’t want it happening here. Please?

None o fthis ‘it’s not going to be talked about’ business either since that’s the best way to get drama going… I guess you could argue that it also stops it but you have to be iron fisted in enforcing the ‘no talking’ rule.

Either or. I don’t know what’s going on. I just saw ‘cowicide’ and ‘banned’ on the same line and associated with eachother. So… yea.

I enjoy his posts and value his contributions greatly, especially because he fights the progressive fight that I think many other BB regulars agree with but don’t get involved in arguing about (I certainly don’t contribute anything to political discussions here, I mostly just read them).

I have also noticed him getting nasty and overbearing of late, in a way he wasn’t (as much) pre-BBS - or, perhaps, it’s simply that Antinous kept him more in check then than the generally-more-lax moderation we see now. I still value his comments, but I sometimes also find myself rolling my eyes and skipping over them.

Despite that, I am writing to say that I think the choice to ban him (temporary as it may be) feels odd. In the case of a long-time contributor valued by many getting out of hand, the solution is not the same as with a fly-by-night troll who can be banned without a second thought.

I’m more than willing to provide the benefit of the doubt to whoever made the decision because I’m pretty sure there isn’t a better solution available to the mods in this system as of yet… other than a private stern-talking-to, which is not a venture I’d envy or consider likely to succeed.

So I’d like to see more fine-grained, and transparent, moderation options so that silently banning people isn’t the only option (though I like the idea that bans are always temporary), without requiring the intense hands-on removing of posts and so on like Antinous did.

Though it has inherent issues, down-voting like on Slashdot and Reddit seems effective. It’s different from flagging because it reflects how the community feels in a finer-grained way, instead of only the most out-of-line things being flagged. Someone with bad karma from a lot of down-votes has automatic restrictions put in place - post limits, severe if necessary, being particularly effective. They can still contribute, but must do so in a positive manner in order to redeem themselves - if they use all of their restrictive allotment of posts in a day to continue being nasty, it leads to worse restrictions or an outright ban. Make down-voting available only to consistent users, to avoid the sock-puppet-army problem. I think this idea is present in StackOverflow and StackExchange already, in a far more nuanced way than I can come up with, I’m sure.

There have been loads of harshly critical comments about BBS and BB policy lately. It’s because we care about the community here and incidents like this damage it, and our trust. It gets amazingly nasty at times in here, and I like and want moderation to include shaping the conversation into something positive. Let’s not throw out the cowicide with the cow patties, though.

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[quote=“daneel, post:39, topic:13446”]
It seems to me that the tone of comments here seems noticeably more adversarial than we used to get on BB - probably because it’s much easier to have back and forths here, and the moderation, post Antinous seems a bit more hands off.[/quote]

I agree with this observation. I personally have enjoyed the BBS more now than in the past.

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I am sorry you lost a friend. I can see your hurting. It’s life changing events like this that makes us sit back and reevaluate our circumstances and see things anew. We don’t always see what is there.

Once upon a time I was a forum moderator in a far off virtual land. From what I’ve read in this thread, Cowicide was banned for legitimate reasons. As your posts make clear, nothing is black and white. I wish we could ignore the black but we can’t. It’s not the white that got him banned, it was the black. If you want a fare system you have to ignore the white or else you end up with hypocrisy. One rule for the popular and another for the populace just isn’t good.

Question to ask one self: Do I want to be bound by these rules or do I want to go elsewhere and/or start my own forum? You can start your own forum, I’ve know people who have and I don’t think you want to be bound by these rules.

That’s all the energy I have to expend on this topic. Good luck.

That works for clearly outrageous behavior, but not so well for generally corrosive discourse and baiting, which might be more subjective

I could imagine a 0 to 5 rating scale. Let the community vote on how serious a comment is, how well constructed. A one could be straight trolling, and a 5 could be for insightful well cited analysis of a topic. Those members who choose to could help to filter such comments, with some minimum number of votes needed before the rating applies. In slow threads it might be irrelevant, but in a well read and active discussion it could be a way to help crowd source the sorting of wheat from chaff, as well as letting commenters know that their well liked comment didn’t add to the debate (many hearts, few earnests)’ or their unpopular but well stated opinion (few hearts, many earnests) has a place here.

Then maybe let us filter out the comments that others have deemed just plain disruptive, which the mods used to do.

I don’t see a heart it or flag it system as sufficiently robust to encourage quality discussion or to engender responsible community involvement.

BBS is 20% more like YouTube than it used to be. Volume =/= Quality.

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This.

I for one do not believe you’re sorry. I think this is the sort of false and condescendingly smug crap that former mods rightly treated like a piñata before it inflamed well intentioned people. You’re sorry he lost a friend? I’m not convinced.

If I had a quick way to say i didn’t find the opinions to be earnest or believable (say, via an earnestness scale), I could just click 2/5 earnests and not respond verbally or stick my neck out when I think someone is being disingenuous. Without that i might respond to my compulsion to call shenanigans, which also isn’t likely to move the conversation forward. If I think the person is being disingenuous and I say so to alert other members, an actual troll will love that opportunity to further derail conversation.

If I had a way to flag low quality contributions, It would really cut down on the troll feeding that well intentioned people often waste their passion on.

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Got to agree with those who feel that the generally rougher tone of the BBS since the cutover is not an improvement.

Flagging could work. But flagging in most systems is an explicit request to kill a post rather than to gently correct the trend of discussion, so I think your audience is pre-trained NOT to reach for that tool except in the most destructive cases. If that’s what you want us to use, you may need to publicise it as such, and/or have an explicit “Look at this and make a judgement call” choice on the list, and/or remove all the checkboxes and just have the text field for why we think attention is needed, or something else that makes it clear that this is solicited feedback rather than crisis interruption.

And, frankly, moderators should be moderating more proactively.

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It’s fascinating that it’s not the lingo that’s rougher - it was way rougher in the past - it’s the behaviours and activities, the set of underlying motivations.

Next time I get dusted up, I’m going to go hard, but in rhetoric.

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He was banned? But he was awesome, if a bit caustic at times… When did this happen? It seems like I saw him around not too long ago.

Edited to add once I read the rest of the thread here: Falcor seems to indicate that there is something else going on, and he was not permanently banned. I do know he’s been around a while, for as long as me, I think. I do agree with that lately there does seem to be a high level of trollish behavior around these parts. There seems to be lots of first time posters weighting in on politically charged topics…

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I think it might have more to do with nasty PMs which @Thecorrectline mentioned. I like Cow a lot, but that is kind of rude and unnecessary behavior. It’s an online message board that has a pretty strong sense of community. I think we can get heated, without sending nasty grams to one another. I would actually really love to hear Cow’s side on this, though. But, at the end of the day, @Felton and @Falcor are the moderators, and they get to make the decisions about stuff like this. I think this sort of thread is a good idea to try and figure out why they make the decisions they do about this kind of thing.