[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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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…
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.
Agreed on the witless posters. All guff huff and puff, ego and “me me me”, no manners, and no respect for their betters (me).
Thing about BB(S) is it’s such a treasure of artefacts, and previously I’d find myself scooting down rabbit warrens of interesting topics, but the noise now drowns that out, and I think everyone is being put off by that. Para upon para of ranting rants, no matter how accurate, or inaccurate, make it tough to keep nice feelings gently bubbling.
BB has always been an induction into a more intelligent, moderate approach, where you realise interesting people value your opinion, and actually interface.
How’s about we each have a reputation scorecard, where we can track what we think of people, and that influences the visibility in our feed?
Or at least a “heckle” button. To balance out the “love button”.
No-one need ever know.
Some form of BB social capital? Obviously, we must call it whuffie…
Edited to add: I think that is part of what our profiles are supposed to be, though–measuring our engagement and the like. But I guess it’s not a very detailed way of dealing with this stuff…
Yes. And in my model of walking onto the floor of a Greek antique congress to speak - which is how people should act really! - when they (we) log in, there could be a low background noise of applause, guffaws, spitting, cheers - whatever matches the general tone of the audience in terms of their accumulated scorecards.
1st posters would hear a “welcome, newcomer!” narrative.
And if your rep was in tatters - wouldn’t you want to know? I would. Maybe it is.
It would teach me to change the way I approach the BBS forum.
How about it, @codinghorror?
I agree. I think sometimes, we can get wrapped up in the argument and not pay attention to when we ourselves go off the rails. But I guess that’s the point of the moderators, to reign us in a bit? I don’t know how much of a democracy we can expect this to be, in that sense. I think that is something to think about too.
Indeed The whole point of moderators are to, uh, moderate the more batdrek elements of a discussion to keep it from going gonzo.
Right, but at the same time, the moderators are only human (well, human and luck dragon, but still…). I think that have public discussions like this when WE feel that there has been a wrong decision made is a good thing. Also having a way to guide and share our views about HOW we engage in public discussions here is a good ideas, too.
Also, the format (old horse I know) lends itself to other participants misconstruing statements. In a thread, you can plant your flag and it’s easy to see. In the current format, it rapidly disappears and casual readers can misunderstand everything. As a mis-conception builds, and gains ugliness and inherent fascination, more and more people are drawn in.
I had mud slung at me, it stuck, and stuck more, and more people piled in to sling more, and I was like wtf is going on?!
Well, let’s not forget the parable of the log and the stork, eh? If I had time to be a mod I’d be very proactive, and pretty soon people would be talking smack about me the same way they used to talk about Antinous. Luckily for everyone involved the boingers are too clever to give me mod powers.
tl;dr version - there are interesting problems with formal reputation systems too.
Long version! I was on slashdot pretty early. Rob Malda (the site’s proprietor and primary coder) introduced karma points. Later he had to introduce a “karma cap”. Due to the circumstances of the site and the times, it was easy for me to get karma, so after the karma cap was introduced I started six accounts and drove them all up to the karma cap, with the intention of selling them on eBay. But then I happened to actually meet Rob in NYC and he invited me to a party and there were cold beers and hot girls and nice music and he mentioned that he’d really rather people didn’t sell slashdot accounts, so I didn’t do that.
Mmm. How about donating Bitcoins? Love button or value transaction if you like someone. Compel them to keep posting.
I see what you mean.
Can I use that as a song title??
I don’t remember many complaints about Antinous. But there did seem to be a lot of hate for Antonius and Antoninus, whoever they were.
