ZorbaTHut
3mo ago
Civility is often helpful, perhaps even necessary, but as a filter on the truth, civility has a cost. Ideally, we should all be capable of hearing the hurtful antagonistic truth, and just keep cooperating, or here, discussing. Of course, in the real world, without the filter, people will fight or walk away. Civility is therefore just a compromise to our weakness and egotism, like you say “our very human tendency to bridle when we perceive we are insulted or demeaned“.
Yup. No argument.
Our club’s informal norms are cordial enough, its members stoic enough, that imo we don’t need a strongly enforced filter.
This is where I disagree.
You're right, in a sense. Our club is cordial enough. It's cordial enough almost by definition; it's cordial enough because the ones who weren't cordial enough already left.
Relaxing the filter pushes that boundary a bit further. It would cause more people to leave.
The club would still be cordial enough, defined in terms of the remaining members of the club, because it cannot be anything else; a group will always consist of the people who are members of the group. But merely consisting of the people who are the members of the group isn't enough. One must weigh the value of the people who are no longer in the group against the cost of keeping those members.
Here's the Foundation, which is, as always, the touchstone to use when discussing rule changes:
The purpose of this community is to be a working discussion ground for people who may hold dramatically different beliefs. It is to be a place for people to examine the beliefs of others as well as their own beliefs; it is to be a place where strange or abnormal opinions and ideas can be generated and discussed fairly, with consideration and insight instead of kneejerk responses.
All of the community's rules must be justified by this foundation.
Rules against anything is a sacrifice. I'm not going to argue otherwise. In an ideal world, we could somehow allow all forms of discussion to occur without driving anyone away. But in practice, that ideal isn't achievable. Any amount of permission we give will drive people away; any amount of restriction we impose will halt conversation. Rules against anything is a sacrifice, but at the same time, a lack of rules against something is also a sacrifice.
I personally think we've achieved a reasonable balance, but I also thought, for some time, that perhaps we'd gone a bit too far in the direction of lack-of-rules. Some of our new mods agree and are willing to put more time into shoving the general conversational climate in the direction that they think is appropriate.
This is a sacrifice. I am genuinely sad for the conversations this kills, that we will never see because the strata of the forum itself no longer supports them.
But I'm happy for the people and opinions we may bring back.
If you want to convince me otherwise, you need to make a good argument that less moderation better suits the needs of the Foundation. I think you'll have a hard time doing this, because you'll need to convince me, and convincing me is hard, ironically because I don't have any firm evidence, I just have gut feeling and instinct. This means you need to either provide a form of evidence that I'm not convinced can exist, or you'll need to overcome that instinct.
But that's your goal, and merely pointing to the conversations lost isn't going to do it.
I'm already aware of those, insofar as someone can be aware of something that never existed.
ZorbaTHut
3mo ago
Hence my wondering why that multiplication of entities was necessary.
So, here, lemme quickly explain.
We've (okay, "I") have a general policy of not demodding mods merely for inaction. I'm happy for them to come back, I'm also happy to have them giving feedback in the Mod chat channel. All of that is useful!
The downside is that this means we have a list of mods and a significant number of those mods don't really do anything. They're still valued people who I'm happy to respect, we just don't get a lot of work done, and the work needs to be done.
Before inviting new mods we were basically down to two mods who were commonly active and another two who were occasionally active, but one of the commonly-active mods was mostly active in doing the quality-contribution reports (which is valuable!) and so practically one mod was doing most of the moderation work. They were doing a good job but I'm always really leery of a bus-number-of-one situation:
- If they vanish, suddenly we have no working moderators
- If they start turning toxic, I have a big problem because I don't want to ban them because we would have no working moderators
- It's really conducive to value drift, which we might not even notice because it's just one person doing that work
In addition, it's a lot of stress on someone's back, which of course increases the chance that they decide they're done and they want to move on. Worse, they know they're a column, so maybe they end up feeling obliged to keep doing this when they don't want to, which pushes us right back into "start turning toxic" and "value drift" territory. It's a bad scene all around.
My main goal here was to take that bus-number-of-one and turn it up to two or three mods, entirely just to solve the problems with having a single mod.
When I've added mods before, my general experience is that for every two mods you invite, one accepts, and for every two mods who accepts, one contributes. If I want one active mod I gotta invite four mods.
So I invited four mods and they all accepted.
¯\_(ツ)_/¯
I'm honestly quite happy about this - maybe this means we'll have a healthy mod population until I can finally get some of the next set up updates to the Volunteer system done. But it still wasn't quite intended.
The tl;dr:
- We have fewer active mods than it looks like
- Having too few mods has a bunch of unfortunate consequences
- I went to add more mods and got more new mods than I expected
ZorbaTHut
3mo ago
Live!
I'm not sure it's a huge improvement because now it looks a bit cluttered, but it's better, at least.
ZorbaTHut
4mo ago
Not as well as I'd want. I need to wire up the quality contributions to Twitter in an attempt to attract more people.
It's not catastrophic or immediately existential, but if it's not solved, that'll probably be what kills this place in the end.
ZorbaTHut
4mo ago
The markdown parser honestly sort of sucks :/ We've had "improve it" on the list for a while, but it's a long list.
ZorbaTHut
5mo ago
This is now also fixed!
(No credit to me, all credit to the same person who fixed the previous bug, who I appreciate greatly.)
ZorbaTHut
5mo ago
This may now be fixed - someone submitted a review that plausibly fixes the issue. Thank you, contributor!
ZorbaTHut
5mo ago
This is part of what I'm slowly approaching with the volunteer system, although I have had no time to work on it lately :/
ZorbaTHut
5mo ago
Yeah, I could've sworn we fixed it, but it appears to have shown back up again. Unfortunately it seems very difficult to intentionally replicate, while very easy to accidentally stub your toe on, which makes it a pain to fix. If you can figure out reliable repro steps I would love to hear them :V
In general, you're welcome to PM me with reports, or post them in whatever thread seems most reasonable and ping me.
ZorbaTHut
5mo ago
Alright, I was gonna quietly let the ban evasion slide if you were willing to take correction, but instead you're right back to antagonizing mods who are telling you to shape up.
Re-applied permanent ban.
ZorbaTHut
5mo ago
Probably, yeah. Nobody reported you, don't worry about it too much, we'd appreciate picking one of the other options next time :V
ZorbaTHut
5mo ago
Unless I'm misunderstanding, "You must adhere to progressive orthodoxy on pronouns or avoid them altogether" does not sound to me like the middle compromise position you're making it out to be.
There's also "you can use 'they' regardless of whether the person in question is OK with it".
I'd say the strong trans-approving position would be "you are required to use the pronouns they want, and if you try to avoid those pronouns, you're a bad person for doing so". We're providing two different ways to avoid that, both of which the extremist left would disapprove of.
I hope, for my unblemished account's sake, that some story about a trans person doesn't become the culture war topic du jour any time soon. I also think that you'd see immense pushback from the community if those rules you propose were actually enforced. I suspect people just haven't read your comment above because it's buried in the previous week's culture war roundup thread.
For what it's worth, this has come up a few times now, and trans has occasionally been in the news between now and then, and it's just never been an issue. I do think you're overstating the issue here.
ZorbaTHut
5mo ago
The general antagonism clause applies as it always does, as do a bunch of adjacent rules. No individual word is banned, no individual word makes you exempt from the rest of the rules.
I could write both bannable and perfectly-fine comments with any of those above phrases. If you want to come up with a more specific example, I can tell you how I'd judge it.
ZorbaTHut
5mo ago
self-identification as the only criterion which determines which pronouns are OK in the opinion of mods is the the trans activist position, not a neutral one
This is not the only criterion which determines which pronouns are OK. I recommend going and reading it over again.
ZorbaTHut
5mo ago
As I said, "everyone finds them slightly uncomfortable". I'll take that over "one side is perfectly happy with it and the other side is not happy at all".
ZorbaTHut
5mo ago
Because people tend to use these things as a way to reinforce their beliefs and make it a hostile environment for others.
I think this falls generally under the "don't be antagonistic", "don't enforce ideological conformity", and "provide evidence in proportion to how partisan your claim is" clauses.
ZorbaTHut
5mo ago
There are literally people disagreeing with you in the replies. Read those, and don't make universal moral statements if people are going to disagree with you, because then it's not fact, it's opinion.
ZorbaTHut
5mo ago
We’re supposed to check the history of a person’s consent to pronoun before we refer to them in the simplest way possible, come on. Just let the pronouns go free.
Honestly, if it's a legit mistake, I'm not going to care much. I'm probably just going to say "hey don't use that for that person, thanks". It's more when someone is doing it intentionally and repeatedly that I start telling people to knock it off. I'm not sure we've ever given out a warning for this, let alone a ban.
And remember that gender-neutral pronouns are always acceptable, as is not using pronouns - if you don't want to keep track of what people's identity is, there's two easy global solutions.
ZorbaTHut
5mo ago
I'm honestly trying to figure out what to do with the sidebar; right now it's kinda just overly cluttered, and I'd like to slim it down. But I'm not sure how.
I've refrained from putting this up just because it doesn't come up often and doesn't seem worth the clutter right now.
Yup, exactly.
(You could also use "she" for the entire history if you wanted.)
ZorbaTHut
5mo ago
Man, you've been around here long enough to know that this doesn't fly. Three-day ban and frankly this is lenient because you've been here so long, but, like, that won't last forever, calm down with the accusations.
ZorbaTHut
5mo ago
This is both low-effort and building consensus. Put more effort into your arguments and avoid this kind of flat evidence-less claim, please.
I think my issue is that civility is an axis on its own, and worse, it's a contagious one. If two people are flaming each other then the spectators think "ah, flaming each other is okay", and we get more flaming, and it just kinda continues from there. There isn't really a way to limit it to just extremists; if we allow it for extremists we allow it for everyone.
But on top of that, I don't think it's an inevitable component of being an extremist. I think there's no reason debating extremists need to be any less civil than people who are ideologically aligned, regardless of how different they are.
With these two together, there's serious consequences to allowing it and not so much benefit to allowing it.
It is legitimately appreciated :)
I keep hoping someone else comes along and does what we do, only better, and, man, just nobody does that.
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