Appoint people as mods who you trust and give them autonomy to do whatever. Never think about modding again.
Don’t perma people - just give annoying posters incrementally longer bans so you don’t need community referendums on everything
Establish upfront that moderating is imperfect, people will make mistakes and sometimes things will even be unfair
Mitigate the consequences of this imperfection by lowering the stakes of moderation - frequent but shorter bans, liberally giving folks a timeout whenever it makes sense
Limit complexity of forum rules and procedure. All of this stuff is nonsense. This site supposed to be for fun!
Moderating should be oriented around limiting thread derails and broadly annoying/unpopular behavior - instead of sussing out who is right or wrong in random feuds, just ban both parties for participating in a derail. There is no need to even fully read the posts, just ban people if they’re forcing folks to talk about things unrelated to the thread topic.
I cannot stress enough that people need to 1) accept imperfection and 2) rely on the discretion / judgment of the mods
The biggest problem is whatever system of rules you use, angleshooters are always going to be taking their shots.
There has to be mechanisms to quickly disused this sort of bad faith participation.
I agree with what you outlined. Just realize the same people here will be fighting tooth and nail over any length of ban for their “friends”. It’s not like they are going to be 6 months is too much but 3 is okay.
The opposition and erosion is never really about length of punishment but instead about their being a punishment at all.
Perhaps enough of those users who are not really involved will actually demand the bad actors take punishment but if they don’t nothing literally changes as all the bad faith participants just slightly alter their opposition to pretty much anything and everything.
Instead of “should fidget be permabanned” we just get “should fidget be banned for a week”. The group of people causing all the problems have an agenda and it’s not “fairness” and it won’t be satiated by a modified set of rules and punishments.
Contain all of the should X be banned in a single thread and don’t take it so seriously. Mods have been appointed to use their discretion. People can whine and complain but at the end of the day this should all be VERY low stakes. Some posters were given a timeout from a website. They were not thrown in jail.
On a UX note, all of this modding discussion and forum drama SHOULD NOT bubble up to the front of the site. It should all be contained in a discussion thread.
I think people are being too accommodating to whiners. rotating mods is a dumb idea. that requires too much effort and planning. it sounds nice and fair and all that but it’s impractical.
I think it’s worth saying again that the stakes in all of this should be incredibly low. it’s a website where bans prevent someone from posting for an hour or two. If people are going to throw fits about unfair bans or perceived nefarious, malicious moderating then this isn’t a place for them
I don’t think we ever mirrored 2p2 here, not that i’m necessarily advocating for that. 2p2 did not have a persistent meta conversation about modding, rules, power structure, etc. There were mods and some people whines occasionally but nobody was really ever of the mind that if they cried enough they could create serious structural change to the entire site.
Power is diffused here and nobody takes ownership of anything so any time a complaint is made, it can easily snowball because nobody is really standing in the way. Mods need to step up and assert more authority imo
Can we please do this? There’s so much drama on this forum that 1) it’s impossible to follow if you’re not posting/reading regularly and 2) I’m sure a lot of people are like me and don’t want to deal with it. It’s annoying that it keeps cluttering up the top of my feed.
Thanks for this. Unfortunately I find that view much harder to navigate with and frankly think it looks bad, although I’ll try dealing with it for now.
Instead of rotating mods why not let anyone who asks be a mod? Have any actions be self recorded in the mod log and if those decisions are bad remove them as mod for a few months before the can try again. Are there any actions a mod can take that can’t be undone? Can those be locked away or require more than one mod to be enacted? Let mods undo the actions of other mods as long as they have a better reason “I disagreed” and treat those decisions like any other. Log them so users can see what is happening.