I think people are noticing some cognitive dissonance between:
Instead of “regular” being handed out according to public, algorithmic rulesets based on participation over time, it is now handed out based on private criteria determined at the whims of an individual?
Instead of communicating in a “lounge” category which is visible to anyone who attains “regular” by the public, algorithmic rules, there is now a group of @regulars who communicate only in hidden PMs?
At least in these two decisions, there seems to be a large scale switch from
Public rules and public communication
to
Private rules and private communication
Which is thematically the opposite of what you’ve been advocating. The title of this topic is “Transparency” and those two decisions seem to be the exact opposite of that.
To be fair, some of the other points, such as
Moderation discussions should be public
is indeed good (well, mostly, there’s a reason you actually want details of the moderation decisions to be behind the scenes) and consistent with the “transparency” title.
And to be clear, I think deciding “there shall be no TL3” is completely fine and something site owners are entitled to do for whatever reason they like. I’m just trying to explain the cognitive dissonance people are experiencing while reading through some of this.
I created the regulars group to allow for adding avatar flair, not specifically for communication (and in fact, closed that thread because it is a poor method of communication).
As for badges? Who decided on how regular badges would be given out in the future? That discussion is taking place right now in the Regular badges topic. Badges that do not alter a persons ability to communicate. Besides, since when do group mentions only work in PM’s?
The only cognitive dissonance I see here is the belief that our goal is to foster private communication when we are explicitly trying to provide community recognition that does not involve private communications.
I STRONGLY recommend that group not be mentionable by anyone outside the group (maybe not even inside the group), otherwise the potential for griefing is immense. Just one set of chars to generate ~140 notifications as much as you want.
A ~140 member PM is not really sustainable for a variety of reasons, similar to the “reply to all” issue in group emails, that’s why we use categories for that sort of thing.
I’m fine with the MacGuffin. The plot needs to advance though, and rapidly.
Final set of cognitive dissonance: there’s obviously a staff category where staff discuss moderation issues; this is standard on every Discourse. So the implied reason that lounge exists on every discourse is to enable the most active community members to engage in their own moderation discussions and provide that feedback to staff as well, so they can assist in running the community. This is normal, natural.
There’s nothing “secretive” about having moderation discussions a little bit behind the scenes. The old “praise in public, criticize in private” rule, etc. Plus some of the nitty gritty details of moderation can be painful to many parties. It’s often to everyone’s benefit to sanitize it a bit. You don’t tell a different story but you tell an abbreviated and generalized story.
If it helps, you could think of it as the difference between the Wikipedia page and the Wikipedia Talk page. One of them is meta-discussion that’s only interesting if you REALLY care about the nuts and bolts of what’s going on. And it helps to only let people who have skin in the game participate in that meta-discussion.
So viewing that as “look at all the secret conversation evilness” is really just… rubbing me fifty thousand ways of wrong. Sorry Ken.
I feel for you guys who lost your lounge. BoingBoing - when you have a site with 10k+ posters and many thousand active users, having little nooks an secret rooms helps foster community.
There are so many discussions and relationships that can be established in small groups that just don’t survive the noise:signal ratio of an extremely large forum (where inevitably trolls will drive out good posters).
Weep not, for this is not the end, but the beginning. Like Narnia, further up and further in - it only keeps getting bigger and better. Now the question is am I talking about BBS or Elsewhere?
As someone who used to have access yeah I didn’t get that… it was mostly a oooh so you spend too much time with the bbs as well? Here lets enable that behavior! Then the occasional more personal sharing as it wasn’t available to the public internet and well if you were crazy enough to make to the lounge then hey you are mostly okay to share this with.
Now we got god knows how many direct message parties going on. To be fair I have no clue how many were going on before but I do know there were some so the argument about secret goings on and cliques… well guess what everyone it was happening anyfuckingway. The only barrier to the lounge was reading the hell out of the site giving some likes and posting thoughtful or silly enough stuff to get some likes back.
The BBS made me move from RSS to here for reading the main posts and I still click out to the main site articles over 70% of the time. I actually started commenting more on the posts than before the BBS where I would just read and the comment content got way better. Then I discovered there were actually other worlds here and played in the games threads (if there is a another badass dragons I am in this time) and generally participating more with the Boing articles. I made it to regular when the standards were pretty damn high and the lounge was pretty empty but those there were good and wonderful contributors to the BBS. Heck if we had the choice of manual promoting @chgoliz, @Mindysan33 and more than a few others would have been in even earlier.
ETA so all this has done besides make some very good people pissed off enough to leave, is make the semi secret club that anyone could enter if they just participated enough into several totally secret clubs that are for sure invite only.
Well wow - I’ve been posting on BB for over four years now and I never knew about any of his Lounge thing! Regulars? Secret conversations? How? This is the first (and by the looks of it last) time I’ve heard about any of this!
Well, the Regulars were a group you were assigned to if you weren’t getting flagged a bunch, had a few looked posts, liked a few posts, and read a lot.
The conversations in the sekrit lounge spanned the gamut from gratiouitious gift spam to highly personal discussions.
I wish I could double or triple-like @critter’s comment. Because it is true, and because it shows in a nutshell that the Lounge, and the behavior of the Regulars, was neither all-good, nor all-bad.
As @TobinL and others have said, there was a lot of friendly goofing around in the Lounge, especially in the main Lounge thread, plus wonderful intimate sharing among members who became friends here. And at the same time, as @orenwolf and others have indicated, there was, in some other Lounge threads, stinky, mean-spirited, on-going disparaging talk about other members behind their backs, and organizing against some members who were disliked by some of the Regulars.
I’m very sad to lose the friendly aspects of the Regulars’ Lounge. And very glad that those stinkier threads are now retired.
Yes, some of us are losing a somewhat-private-feeling safe space on the internet that we enjoyed for a time. It meant a lot (A LOT!!!) to us for many reasons, and many of us are truly grieving it. At the same time I think it’s very radical for BoingBoing to commit to making the whole of BoingBoing’s BBS a safe space for civilized, well-moderated public discussion for all.
If I had an emoticon for :me-crying-about one-thing-while-happy-about another: I would put it here.
One of the main reasons I’ve stepped in here is how much I take issue with the idea that online civil discourse in the modern era is a “radical idea”. More than anything, I want the BBS to be proof positive that there can be a public place online today that can embody the traits you mention above.
