Transparency - changes to the BBS

[LearnedCoward]

@orenwolf

That was never supposed to be a feature of the BBS. We don’t want that responsibility

Maybe not, but we shouldn’t be prevented from doing so if we want to.

@orenwolf

That responsibility does not serve the broader group of Boing Boing commenters.

I wholeheartedly disagree.

@orenwolf

A community free of these people is the goal of the BBS-at-large.

True, but that goal is now harder to attain.

[hecep]

@Melizmatic

It’s true a testament to your rational nature and maturity that you’re being so calm about all this.

It still sucks donkey dicks for quarters, though.

That comment reminded me of the witticisms of Noel Coward. ZERO SARCASM.

[nimelennar]

@orenwolf

No one ever intended for us to create our own 1%.

Really? It sure took long enough to notice. One of the first posts in the first Lounge Welcome thread was a listing of the number of members in each TL, and then: “Welcome to the 0.1%.”

@orenwolf

If I had given advance notice, every post in there would have been downloaded and archived. Because we have smart, capable members.

There was archiving that happened immediately anyway, because there were still a few Mutants who had access. And there was immediate outcry for it, and the archiving stopped, despite the fact that the member who was archiving had access to the Lounge past the point where they stopped. Because we have moral, ethical members.

It’s sad, but all I keep hearing is this went down the way that it did “because we don’t trust you.”

Why did we shut down the Lounge? Because we couldn’t trust you to determine which conversations belonged in the Lounge, and which ones belonged outside the Lounge.

Why didn’t we consult the members before making this change? Because we couldn’t trust you to come up with a better solution.

Why didn’t we implement a delay before closing the Lounge? Because we couldn’t trust you not to download the posts in the interim.

You’re not showing a lot of trust in us, in the Regulars. And we’re the pillars of the BBS.

And now you’re asking us to trust the Internet at large with the things we only felt comfortable saying in private; to trust the mods to keep us safe, to trust the Authors and the whole moderation and administrative team that, if we knew all of the facts, we would understand that this was the right decision to come to.

Trust only works when it goes both ways. I don’t feel a whole lot of trust coming my way right now.

[miasm]

[ficuswhisperer]

@Israel_B

Is there some special veterans charity for those wounded in this battle?

There’s no need to be daft. I was clearly being metaphorical.

[ChickieD]

I made it through about 150 of these posts and now I’m jumping down to add thoughts that hopefully are not overlapping other comments.

I have a different perspective on the problems that are cropping up because I moderated (technically still do but the place is a ghost town) a huge discussion board related to yoga. One of the things that happened with our board that - I don’t know how often this actually happens on boards or not - but we got to know each other IRL.

Because our board was centered around a single teacher who traveled widely to different workshops, we had these natural local hookup opportunities around his workshop schedule. At first there were just a few brave souls that dared to meet IRL, then as we talked about it on the board and had so much fun, it started happening more and more. Finally we had 4 “Gathering” events where it was an event specially for board members (plus, given our free spirited nature) anyone that got wind of the event and was brave enough to wander into a community of all regular members and claim their stake in the fun.

At this point that board is functionally dead - the teacher it centered on is now in retirement or at least, not actively participating in the board - but the people are still deeply connected and best of friends. I am moving soon and the first person I called was a discussion board member who lives in the area. This summer when I was sick I had calls from numerous “sisters.”

What I see is that this discussion board has developed to the point where people really are getting to know each other in more truly connected ways, which means leaving our anonymity behind. Unlike my yoga discussion board where we had this one person who was really admired that, just by his presence, kept a lid on the bad actors + yoga people, kind of self-selecting nice guys, here we DO get bad actors.

There is a real need to keep the regulars safe from the assholes who come here. We need a place where the people who want to get to know each other in a more personal way can do that but we keep our anonymity from the newbies. I love the idea of moderating the discussion board more, but you cannot change the fact that there are some nasty people who visit here and the best way to cope with those is to have committed members who lead the charge in teaching newbies to change their tone or leave our space. In order to do that, we need to feel safe interacting with people we have no history with.

I think there are some other answers to the problems that came up, and I do see them and agree that they needed to be addressed. My solution would involve more options for regulars to meet IRL and to unmask themselves to others that they have grown to trust over years of safe interaction together. I do think the “two tier” system created its own problems and I’m glad that @orenwolf and @codinghorror love this space so much that they are actively working to keep the tone one of community. I love BBS and hope that this change is maybe thought through again after the discussions here and perhaps some other solutions put in place.

Where I work we use AGILE principles which mean you collaborate with your users in creation. I feel like we users of the BBS might have shared some concerns that should have been put into the user stories when developing solutions.

[anon50609448]

@nemomen

While I agree that getting in a fight with the mods about other people being banned is generally not a good approach, @OtherMichael was legitimately worried about what he thought was the behavior that triggered the ban since it was a kind of behavior he engaged in. Could he have addressed the concerns better? Sure. Was a decade ban for trying to get that sorted out justifiable? Absolutely not.

I guess I just think of online communities as a little bit like murderous dictatorships, just with much lower stakes. If you even flirt with talking shit about the dictator, you have to understand the risk you are taking. It’s not just, but there is no justice (except the justice you make for yourself, and while dictatorships sometimes do provoke bloody revolutions, I seriously hope no online community moderator ever has).

I don’t know. I feel like I might be doing that smug, “You are surprised by this?!? I’m not surprised by this!” thing, so I’m going to shut up about it.

[Czanne]

With all due respect, I think you missed my analogy entirely. A house party is a temporary event. An intentional community is an ongoing, long-term relationship. When we have guests, we put away all of the extremely portable theftables or breakables, clean up the detritus to presentable levels, and while some might invite certain individuals into more private spaces for more private activities, we’re not inviting everyone who managed to wander through the front door in for a roll in the hay. When an intentional community adds members, they do so after some level of vetting – can this person make the rent, be trusted not to let the dog poop on the floor, be trusted to not use the Roomba to clean up after the dog poops…? At a house party, the hosts/owners can and should establish rules – who is keymaster, end-time, how to handle guest conflicts, and those rules are at the discretion of the host/owner, because the event is temporary. Not so in an intentional community. When conflicts arise, they’re discussed with a goal of consensus, and when a few members have an interpersonal conflict, that’s between those members, with mediation from others.

It’s patently clear that there’s more going on, and that we must agree to disagree, because you (sing or pl) have made a unilateral decision.

[jerwin]

I wonder if @codinghorror can comment on the more utopian visions of community self moderation that may have been incorporated in the earliest visions of discourse.

[LearnedCoward]

No it wouldn’t.

The Lounge threads benefited all of us as a whole, even if they weren’t necessarily our favorite part of the BBS.

They also weren’t nearly the high-school Mean Girls clique that some are making them out to be.

A reputation score wouldn’t do a whole lot except gamify a system that does not need further gamification.

[Nonentity]

@anon89609066

There was too much darkness here before. Maybe after this first round of bloodletting, it’ll clear up and we can get back to having group fun again in the proportion we used to have it.

Thanks, person who joined in November of '16, for letting us all know how much better it was in the old days. I’m sure all of us will be mighty ashamed of all the darkness that happened within the community.

[LearnedCoward]

@nimelennar

You’re not showing a lot of trust in us, in the Regulars. And we’re the pillars of the BBS.

Normally this would sound hyperbolic, but in this case I think it’s spot on.

[tinoesroho]

Egg-zackly.

I love this community. I do. But I also recognize that members of this community should not be exposed to bad actors, 4channers, trolls, doxxers, and other assholes. I’m an obstinate asshole, yeh, one of those weird hoarders who keeps high school yearbooks on their shelf. A few weeks ago, you’d probably have filed me into a troll doll drawer - and I’m not objecting to that.

What I am objecting to is the callous disregard for the safety of the members of this community. And I think it high time we take @jlw 's advice and build our own damn BBS.

[anon48584343]

@jerwin

utopian visions of community self moderation

Well, like it states on the BB footer: “Who will be eaten first?”

[Medievalist]

@Nonentity

Wow. I leave the place for the night, and suddenly there’s a ~300-post-long thread (and now that I’m done typing, more than 300…) that I absolutely must read through in its entirety.

Not much to add here that others haven’t already said.

Well, I’ve got something…

@Israel_B

Tiered communities are something I dont like. Goes against my nature. Real life is full of tiers and in-groups and so on. I don’t tend to make it in with the fancy people and honestly thats fine as well. Tiered online communities are no different; there’s the in-group and there’s the out-group.

@anon89609066

Excellent. The caste system must die.

…oh, wait, I was wrong. @Israel_B & @anon89609066 already said it.

I personally felt that at least a couple of the restricted threads served as backwaters where toxic people and attitudes curdled and metastasized outside of the mainstream, and appreciated it only for keeping that backbiting poison semi-isolated.

If you can’t say it in public, maybe you should go shout it down a well.

@ficuswhisperer

I take it the banquets you attended never had a “kids table”? (Which was always the more fun place to be, mind you but let’s not get too wrapped up in that aspect.)

I always sit at the kids table. Although sometimes it annoys the kids.

@SteampunkBanana

I never go to the front page. I bbs, and if I find the headline interesting then read the full post.

You’re sitting at the kids table, then! Pro tip: there are bbs category views.

Thank you @jlw, @xeni, @doctorow, @pesco, @frauenfelder, @beschizza, @orenwolf for doing this. I think getting rid of one of the elite tiers will make this place better, and hope you will continue to try to find ways to remove more.

[Donald_Petersen]

@gellfex

In. One. Thread.

Nope, in one Category, which contained a few threads. To which anyone could gain access if they put in the effort of a certain minimum level of mostly good-faith participation.

It was a better thing than you think. Even if illusory, the peace of mind conferred by that gentle gatekeeping turned out to be invaluable.

I’m one of a relatively few BBS posters who uses their real name here, and doesn’t even hide where they work or live, and even I found value in the Lounge’s softly restricted access.

[Mister44]

Well…

1. It’s your sandbox, do what you want.

2. This is going to be a hugely unpopular move with a lot of people.

3. MOST people are casual users and won’t notice or care. So you’re move is “safe” there.

4. If the point of all this was MODERATION issues, we could have simply made those threads open and visible to ALL. Not sure why that couldn’t co-exist with the higher trust level lounge.

5. I liked the lounge as a semi-private place to hang out and share TMI on the internet. I guess I will have to use Facebook now for that, but my friends already thing I am fucked up enough… there is some catharsis in sharing with “strangers”.

[enso]

Apparently mods are now deleting posts here on this thread that are critical of how this worked out. I’m done.

@orenwolf

That was never supposed to be a feature of the BBS. We don’t want that responsibility. That responsibility does not serve the broader group of Boing Boing commenters

No, our eyeballs and wallets are all that seems to do so. A point I made once already to have it silently eaten.

The authors of this site don’t want this community. Our utility is our ability to service the goals of finding the site and nothing else, it seems. They should just end this discourse.

[SteampunkBanana]

@Medievalist

Pro tip: there are bbs category views.

Superpro tip: Let people use the thing they want to and create a series of content users.

[SteampunkBanana]

When Mister44 and I agree this strongly then the universe should be looking over its shoulder and checking the thermal output of hell.