I will only vote for this if the cat starts bopping again. Make it happen.
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Re: the bolded. I think this absolutely is something we should internalize as an integral part of the process. We are not appointing dictators for life with power to run roughshod over us little people. We’re not 2p2, we can choose our own moderators as we wish.
I hate to say it but people don’t want moderation because they are afraid of being moderated. Then the mods are demonized by that group. We should all want this to be a better and more civil place. We should trust mods to be fair and if they aren’t have things in place to boot them. Reeking all of the mods and then bitching about the mods being Reek doesn’t make a lot of sense to me.
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Fair enough, that’s an approach that could plausibly work. I don’t 100% agree but appreciate your thoughtful input.
I think something to consider as a counterweight to those who say they are fine with the amount of negative behaviour here is that it discourages some people from going from a reader to a contributor, and will discourage some contributors from getting involved as much. There’s also a good chance you won’t hear most of their voices in this thread.
Just worth thinking about, just as we should try to be considerate of the more quiet people in real life situations.
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I don’t think that’s accurate. I’ve been one of the biggest voices for lack or or light moderating ever, everywhere I’ve been, and iirc I’ve never been temp banned except once as a joke in the last 15 years on these poker/politics forums. There are a couple reasons I don’t like moderation that have nothing to do with my fears of being moderated.
eta: And yes, I know I’m a mod. And the reason I am a mod is so I can resign from being a mod after a reasonable term.
There is a lot packed into there that I don’t really want to wade into.
But I can say for my part, that if the two of you went back and forth about it a couple more times, I’d be wishing for a mod to step in. Something of the form, “Hey guys, your little spat is getting annoying, could you please drop it?” And I’d hope that being the big boys that you are, that you could drop it and Bob’s your uncle.
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We’re coming after you sooner than that!
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I want to be modded. I’d rather have an occasional comment hidden than spend too much time thinking about the appropriate level of self-censoring.
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There are few assholes that seem to have personal grudges and\or are constantly posting negative snarky no true Scotsman stuff, but their shitiness makes me feel better about myself. They’re not always wrong either.
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I think it’s also the only approach that has a chance of going forward. Because if you want more detailed, specific rules, they’ll have to be written and then get approved by the community and that’s just going to crash and burn.
I think it shouldn’t just rely on mods to step in. If we’re a community hopefully people would feel comfortable to tell people to simmer down, if not publicly possibly by pm. I think this can be particularly effective when it’s posters that generally get along pretty well.
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I agree with you that ideally the first “line of defense” would be fellow posters giving feedback about problematic posting. And then the recipients of the feedback making adjustments.
There are a couple limitations to that though. One is that often the “recipients” for whatever reason just don’t respond to peer feedback. The other is that certain posters will turn their guns on you, and now you’re in a beef with someone. And some of these someones hold grudges. It’s easier, as seities says above, to stay quiet and hope it blows over.
On PMs, I think that’s a little dicey because from what I can tell, there is a wide spectrum of norms around PMs. E.g, to some people it seems creepy or too personal to PM them with feedback, and they’d rather it be “in public.”
Still, I’m not saying not to do it. If it’s a tool in the toolbox, use it as appropriate. But there will be times when we’ll need multiple tools to be successful.
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Oh right I had no ideas pms came across as creepy.
If you give the mods too much leeway in their decision making powers then all mod decisions have the appearance of personal decisions. This reinforces the idea that “mods have favorites” and “TLMHGTG” and you run the risk of someone who is modded taking it as a personal affront and leaving in a huff.
If the rules are too elaborate you have to deal with rules lawyers seeing just how close they can get to the line. These people get everyone pissed off at the mods for not doing anything to stop these horrible posters despite the rules being clear that there is nothing to be done.
Currently we aren’t really doing either and are stuck in a weird limbo; vague rules and a community that doesn’t want any modding to happen without a handful putting in their 2 cents on it.
I would say Keed was right if I hadn’t eaten recently and if he wasn’t saying what had been proposed way back on Unchained: Mods have authority to mod people but all mod decisions can be overturned by community feedback. This requires that mods document what they did and that there is a forum for discussion by the community. These don’t have to be the same thread, which as we’ve seen too often gets derailed into oblivion, but they both need to exist.
“Authority to mod people” in this case means taking actions more involved than requesting people to stop taking shots at each other, things like editing or deleting posts (a whole other conversation) to locking threads to temp bans.
To stop the tendency we have to talk something to death put a reasonable time limit on community feedback to an event and then take an up/down vote on it. If we gave an identifier to each mod action that could be used to name the discussion thread. This would be a place to excise any non-mod action posts in the mod-action thread and provide something that could be locked at the end of the discussion period.
This would be enough to get us started.
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Well, now that you mention it I’m not all that sure about that. I mean, I don’t mind PMs, but have on many occasions thought about PMing someone and held off because I thought they would think it was weird. Maybe it’s just me?
P.S. People should feel free to PM me about the subject of this thread, or any other subject really.
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That would require a coup.
So obviously I’m in favor.
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How else am I supposed to get supposedly confidential PMs that I can then broadcast in the thread as proof you suck?
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Agree, this here is the challenge I’ve tried to articulate a couple times in this thread.
(What is “TLMHGTG” though?)
Yes!
I’m not quite sure what you’re agreeing with or not agreeing with based on your first sentence. But it seems to me we do have a place for mods to document their actions and for the community to discuss them (the Log of Key Moderator Actions thread).
Right, and I’d add, if this is made progressive (i.e, consequences increase on an agreed-upon schedule), that should help rebut concerns about arbitrary, capricious, or biased modding.
This sounds a little over-complicated to me, but if that’s what it would take to get a community consensus on more active modding, I’d be for it.
Thanks for posting. I appreciate the thinking and input.
He’s just saying he hates me but I’m right