MB, I’m not saying you are wrong or right. What I am saying is that you have the unenviable task of trying to play referee to squash these squabbles. I can tell you what I’ve personally experienced and feel depending on the contributions of any individual poster that they should be given more or less leeway. While I can’t tell you how you feel, I am pretty sure I understand Bored’s perspective because he has explained it to me in length offline. The cliffs notes version is that the people he hates in his perception attack people and generally shit up the forum because no one does anything about it. Its all tl;dr for me and I hope it all turns out for the best.
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A both sides argument. Here. Incredible.
The difference here between the two sides of course is that if you banned me the conflict would continue tomorrow totally unabated, but if you banned jalfrezi, watevs, and churchill I’d have nobody left on the site I even disliked and conflict with no one. (and incredibly almost all the drama on the site involves at least one of these posters… must be a coincidence)
This whole situation is happening deep in one of your idealistic blind spots. You can’t see what’s happening because if what is happening is happening your ideology doesn’t work. Some people suck dude. They will ruin other people’s experiences because it’s fun. It’s malice pure and simple. You don’t want to believe that of other people, but what you believe in this situation genuinely doesn’t matter. Jalfrezi sucks, watevs sucks, and churchill sucks. Nunnehi probably had a personality disorder. You have to make peace with the fact that for your community ideas to work you have to have some minimum level of willingness to pull in the same direction as the rest of the community from the other members of the community. We have a community pulling in opposite directions right now and it’s ripping apart. That’s because the system as you designed it allowed the problems to fester and then join forces to resist being forced to assimilate or be moderated.
And I’m not talking about ideological assimilation. I’m talking about making creating good posting the primary purpose of being on the site. Opinions might vary on what that means and I welcome the different takes on it different posters have… but if that’s not what anyone is here for I’d really like them to fuck off.
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This is not really a response to boredsocial’s impassioned posts, but I guess you can say my post is “in light of” his posts. Of course, not everybody is going to agree with everything I say below.
The level of sniping and toxicity has varied over time on UP but has definitely ratcheted up over the last year or so. My tolerance for sniping and toxicity is fairly low so in the last year I have placed around twenty accounts on ignore and eventually took a four-month break from the forum. I state these as facts and not as anything I am particularly proud of.
More recently things have come to a head and several different threads and polls have been started to try to “rectify” the situation (in one way or another). That is a good sign as the community, generally speaking, has acknowledged that things are bad and we want them to get better.
Listening to others’ grievances is a small first step, even if you don’t totally agree with those grievances. It is important to acknowledge them and make clear that you believe that the people expressing those grievances think they are real and valid. This many people have done and I am sure will continue to do so.
Since forum moderation seems to be associated with at least some of the grievances, several different threads and polls have been started (including this thread) to identify and address community views on its moderation. In addition to a more open dialog that these threads have exhibited, we have discussed getting new mods, term limits, super-mods, and a few other ideas. Of course, very soon via the RFC process developed in this thread , we can expect a series of proposals and votes on several of those issues.
None of this is to suggest that everything will be all rosy once we have some new mods (if that is one of the results of this effort). But I hope and expect that going through this entire process, possibly together with new mods or term limits or whatever, will lead to a lowering of the forum temperature and decreased sniping and lower toxicity levels.
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This site only exists for you?
You could make more use of the ignore function, or just scroll on. But maybe there’s more to it than this lol.
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We should be talking about his more and about mod terms less.
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You know what I’m tired of? Being told by people who refuse to consider any of the valid criticism of their ideology that I just don’t understand it. I do understand I just really seriously disagree. And since light anarchism isn’t even working for a ~200 person forum I think it’s pretty safe to say that the facts are on my side. I mean it’s literally failing for the exact reasons the critics would tell you it would fail. A total inability to understand human nature.
You guys remind me of the religious. Always trying to refer to your scriptures that I don’t believe in or agree with beyond ‘it would sure be nice if it worked that way’ in an argument as irrefutable evidence.
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He’s right though and it shows in how you’re so wrong about what I’ve done. It’s why you don’t see that it matters that I have done far more bans than any other mod for how long I’ve modded. I have said lots of times that I don’t oppose watevs perma. I’m not against rules because of any philosophy. If anything there are too many rules in anarchism for my tastes. What I’m against is rulers. I just want this all to be democratic. That’s what most people here want.
The fact that you can’t see this and you ignore all the other mods who haven’t banned people and lie about them being under my spell happens because you just want your friends to have a free pass and your enemies to be banned.
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If people wanted to argue that certain mods need to go, their best argument would be that the other mods have been deferring to you to do bans because they feel their authority is compromised and it would be best that such bans come from you, hence why you have banned more posters in a shorter period of time.
An argument can be made that users acting as an Occupy-style general assembly trying to do things via direct democracy is not a good fit for this forum, since there are some topics on which consensus will never be reached and the majority will need to enforce their will on the minority at some point in order to move forward on some issues. Also, not everyone wants to participate, so representative democracy might be better than direct democracy and moderators need to be more than just facilitators for this place to operate.
One concern I have is that having mod elections will lead to endless campaigning similar to US politics, where posters with a grudge against a certain moderator will use the entire period between mod elections to campaign against a moderator returning to the job, whether we allow consecutive terms or force someone to sit out before returning. Hopefully, we can come up with a rule that allows for mods to deal with this sort of abuse.
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I don’t think mod elections would generally be contentious if terms were short and no back to back terms.
If the process is not democratic, what then?
Who owns the site?
Rules are being worked out about what the thresholds are for votes right now by anarchists like economist.
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So kind of like what we have now only it eventually ends.
Tough argument since I’ve only been a mod for about 10 weeks. Were they deferring all those bans for the last year and a half in anticipation?
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I took my temp ban without complaint. You’re seriously just gas lighting at this point. Every single post you’ve made responding to me has been significantly misleading so far and as a result I’m done talking to you about it.
I have no enemies on this site except maybe you (and even this isn’t about personal enmity but about the fact that you’re very wrong about something important and won’t see reason). I’m not the person jalfrezi, watevs, and churchill are having drama with because I use the ignore feature liberally to keep myself out of it in lieu of having self control.
My entire motivation is to keep the posters here who add significant value to my life with their content here and happy about it. People who go out of their way to pick fights and AIDS up threads are what I have a problem with. When good posters are quitting or posting less because of how a small number of individuals are treating them I start to have a huge problem. When people are extremely toxic and produce almost no content of any real value I start agitating for bans… because I think the forum is always either getting better or getting worse. Right now it’s pretty clearly getting worse.
I think that’s likely to generate pushback that would discourage it. If it becomes an issue, we could look at restricting where and when people can campaign?
I’m less trusting in basic human nature than you are. I also think that short terms will amplify the whining because posters who have a grudge will have less time to get over bad mod decisions before that mod is eligible for another term.
I am in favor of a democratic process. I just don’t think everything has to be done via direct democracy. Maybe the new rule proposal needs to allow for users to vote to abstain and not just vote yes or no, so their vote is seen as endorsing whatever the outcome is while not counting towards the vote threshold.
Or it’ll ameliorate the whining because the mod is only a mod temporarily. If this works, it won’t be any kind of big deal to be a mod and ideally, there’d be a pool of 30-40 regulars cycling in and out of duties. It should be like it being your turn to do the dishes or something.
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No, I believe that posters have been doing more ban-worthy things in the past few months. Have you issued a disproportionate number of the bans handed out since you were modded?
I don’t think you’ll have anywhere close to a pool of 30-40 regulars cycling in and out of duties. I would rather not term-limit mods until you can establish that large of pool actually exists.
The man is a real legit no shit anarchist. Having a very naive view of human nature is absolutely required to be a genuine anarchist. It’s just a flavor of idealism. To be clear if I have an ideology (I very much do not) it’s anti-idealism. Every flavor of idealism is hot garbage in the real world.
Not only does it not hold the solutions to fixing the world it basically always makes things worse. It’s just fundamentally miscalibrated and can’t hit what it’s aiming at because the world doesn’t work the way it demands.
It’s a really serious first principles problem. To be effective you have to look at the world, understand how it is and why, and then taking that into account figure out how to get from where you are to where you want to go. Idealists instead start by looking at how they think the world should be and then try to force the world to be that way. It’s just not a loop that ends well.
It’s possible to agree with an idealist totally about the end state you want… but it’ll all fall apart in execution if you let them touch it.
Volunteers are comparatively thin on the ground, to be sure. I’m hoping that will change with time.
I never said you have taken your bans badly.
How do you do this? Because there’s a process that has been used. People can be voted off the island. It’s happened. You don’t do this. You have the opportunity to lead on this but all you do about it is negative.
Re the bolded…no kidding. Some of the posters you want banned add value to other people’s lives though.
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