And I thought you were being a jerk too. Yet I managed to refrain from any personal attacks. And then a mod came by, reviewed the posts, saw that you called me a cock - which you yourself said was over the line - but chose to just ask us both to knock it off.
Now I don’t want you temped for that. But I would like to feel comfortable responding in kind if that is the standard for the site.
The above is the basic root of the problem facing the site right now.
Did you report my post? I’m not asking to shame your or anything, I report posts I think are over the line all the time. If I’m remembering correctly, I got notified the post was flagged before the mod asked us to quit.
I think we should discourage personal attacks, even the ones that were as devastatingly funny as mine. I think we run into trouble when we try to quantify the “degree” of the attack, which essentially means we’re telling someone how to feel about something that was said to them. I think the discouragement should be fairly light to start with because everyone has bad days and types a little faster than they think. I think the mods should be given the tools to handle these situations as they see fit. In our case a “cut it out” was all that was needed, if I had come back and doubled down my acronym modification I think a temp ban would have been warranted.
tl;dr I agree with you, I think the system worked as intended during our interaction.
I hope not.
I think if I (or another esteemed Captain) fired back a similar personal attack I/we might have caught a ban while you walked. Now a mod will probably point out that I have received very few (if any) bans, but I mostly refrain from crossing the line since I’ve been bundled up into the UP deplorable box after having the audacity to point out obvious bias and hypocrisy (I know, very boring) back when this all blew up the first time.
But minus the cock comment, I agree that the modding worked as intended. But I still had to bite my tongue while you felt comfortable crossing the line. That’s the difference.
The point is that if any of 3 or 4 other posters had made the same comment you made they’d have been temp banned.
Wow, I didn’t read that post, but it’s great and very thought-provoking! I think the idea of bans as compensation is fascinating, but I don’t think that it really displaces the idea of ban as punishment. The concepts of transgression and restitution are pretty much inseparable. To be more precise (and maybe this is what you’re actually saying), I think the dichotomy is between restitution and deterrence. Frankly, I think deterrence is vastly overrated even in criminal law, so I would likely agree with you that bans don’t deter people from misbehaving, at least not directly.
However, I think there’s quite a lot of value in having a semi-official procedure for making restitution for wrongly inflicting a status injury on someone. This is what I was fumbling towards in the post I just made about honor culture. The reason societies developed weregild and courts and all the other mechanisms of conflict resolution was to (you guessed it) resolve conflicts before they spiralled into vendettas and feuds and warring factions. In the absence of a collective balancing of the scales, the wronged party is going to try to get back their status in some way or another (and will probably have an inflated sense of how much restitution they’re owed, due to human nature). The way to stop that is to have a conflict resolution process when someone feels injured that either: a) recognizes that a wrong was done and does something to fix it, or b) credibly concludes that the injury wasn’t wrongful (e.g., you feel bad that someone shredded your argument, but this community thinks that’s OK; or maybe you started the personal attacks and it got a little out of hand–this community recognizes a self-defense exception). If the process is just “we don’t deal with status injuries,” then people who feel disrespected will fall back on “self-help” measures. (Or just stop posting!)
The other consideration is that punishments aren’t just deterrents. They’re also communicative. As an example, imagine that with your current friend group, it’s pretty normal to tell someone to go fuck themselves in the middle of a light argument. But then one day you’re hanging out with a work friend and his friend group, and when you tell someone to GFH, everyone gets real quiet and looks at you with mild shock and the conversation dies down. That’s a form of mild social punishment that may or may not deter you specifically from speaking like that in the future, but it definitely communicates both to you and to everyone else listening that this group of people does not think that behavior is appropriate. There’s no objectively correct answer as to whether or not you can tell your friend to go fuck himself, and for that very reason, you need to actually build consensus around what is acceptable and what is not. The way that happens is by marking unacceptable behaviors as such publicly. (Note that it’s not a good solution to say that there’s no objectively correct approach, so let people talk however they want. If one person views GFY as a serious insult and someone else views it as harmless kidding, that creates social conflict. Either the first person needs to be told that it’s NBD in this context or the second person needs to be told that it is a big deal.)
So, I think I agree with you that bans probably aren’t great deterrents, but I think that having a mechanism to recognize and redress and resolve status injuries is really important, and I think it’s also critical to actually have (by which I mean affirmatively create) some agreement as to what kind of behavior is OK on this forum and what is not. That is what I meant when I said that bans are important to promote a healthy culture of respectful discussion. (Also, I don’t want to overstate this. Short-term bans I’m sure do prevent some bad behavior by letting people cool off.)
This is why I want to create user guidelines next. My preference is to have a guideline that states no name-calling or personal attacks. If this is a community guideline, then we as users shouldn’t be surprised if a moderator chooses to delete a post, issue a short temp ban, or in some other way moderate a post in violation of this guideline. However, if the community decides against that as a guideline, then we are accepting it is open season on these posts and they will not be moderated.
The greater issue that this will not solve is that name calling and personal attacks are apparently almost as subjective as shit posting. I mean, who can really say what an attack is?
And when a majority of the forum enjoys the privileges to shit post and attack a minority with impunity while simultaneously controlling the community vote, it’s a problem that no amount of rules or guidelines are going to solve. (And I used to be one of the folks running around with a tiki torch, which I guess makes me a hypocrite. Something I’m certainly not proud of.)
Oh, I forgot to sum up. I think the community is dead.
Good thing we have moderators that the community support dealing with this, so we can be free to participate in the forum as members without having to worry about it!
Way to be a cock.
That wasn’t very friendly :(
Why would you lash out when I indicate my preference that the moderators should be empowered to be the arbiters of what constitutes an attack, if indeed the community supports a guideline that posters should not attack one another?
He lashed out because you didn’t bother to read and understand his post.
If you can’t be bothered to report a post that you think crosses the line and should be discouraged is another indication that “community modding” isn’t going to work. For some reason there is honor in not reporting posts you don’t want to see in the community. This is stupid and leads to situation where mods are needed to step in when things inevitably escalate. If we’re going to claim community ownership that puts responsibility on the community to help make the site work they way they want it to, the absolute smallest way to do that is to report posts you don’t think should be on the site.
To a certain extent modding is going to be biased and should be biased. If you had spent the previous few days or weeks causing havoc in the forums, attacking people for no reason, derailing threads to bring up pointless tangents then your response in kind to my knee slapper should have been treated more harshly. You’ve shown a history of bad behavior and have used up whatever slack you had. This can seem biased to outside observers and requires an encyclopedic knowledge of every posters history on the board. Things which not everyone has. It is one of the downsides to rotating a bunch of mods through, the loss of that institutional knowledge, but I suppose it is a bonus as well, giving people clean slates gives them a chance to reinvent themselves.
I don’t really consider that lashing out when I deliberately thought about it first and decided that if it was good for Kerowo it was good for me. And I’m not too concerned with being friendly. I was willing to give that a shot for Johnny and some others, but I don’t mind mixing it up as long as I can give as good as I get. I just want consistency in modding. I’m perfectly able to adjust and abide by any standard the community adopts, except for the current two class structure.
I don’t know how to feel about this, I mean you just called me a name a few minutes ago for having the audacity to suggest that an internet forum adopts posting guidelines and empowers the moderators that are elected by the community to enforce them, so I’m not sure we’re on the same page vis a vis “giving as good as you get”. But whatever, good luck have fun. Dipped a toe into About Moderation and learned my lesson :)
You didn’t read and understand his post and gave a sarcastic reply. He could have been patient and explained that the answer to your post was plainly there to see in the post you were responding to. Or he could have let your post just slide by as a sort of drive-by comment not really responding to him. But, why your post was frustrating is obvious.
Not necessarily me, but some people on this site actually do (not bad faith) feel that not reading and thinking about other people’s points carefully before criticizing them is more disrespectful than name calling.
This is one of the areas that I believe rotating mods will help in. Both in expanding the moderator roster so that the same people don’t need to deal with every situation over and over again, and also in consistently providing fresh eyes to situations. I am hoping that this helps to eliminate some of the implicit bias that is natural to build up over time when the same small group of people stay in the position.
Nevermind, get me out of here.
I mean, Marty’s posts are still here, and anyone can see that they aren’t just telling goofy to fuck off. But sure, I am the biased one.
I would completely agree with you if I believed that this is what has actually happened here over the past 6-12 months. But I don’t agree. And maybe the majority of the community does agree with you, but a not insignificant (and growing) minority doesn’t.
I’m willing to move on myself, and I’m actively working on it. Doesn’t mean I won’t occasionally post here, just like I still occasionally post on 2+2. But I’m not sticking around as a punching bag or getting involved in initiatives like the sub-forum when it’s clear how much bad faith exists. I’m not going to play the role of Charlie Brown while the forum majority plays Lucy.
I am going to continue to encourage you all to try to let some of these grudges die. Try to post in here for awhile without attacking anyone. Likely foolish optimism on my part, but I can pretty much guarantee you’ll all enjoy your experience here more if you do.