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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   3859 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for November 20, 2022

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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Typically ban evasion is the reason for nuking posts and comments.

Not to be defeatist, but is ban evasion really solvable? Twitter's been in the news for months for its bot problem, and they had a ton more resources to solve it than this website, which doesn't even require email addresses. How do you stop someone from hopping onto a VPN while incognito and starting new accounts? I guess you can try to infer through whatever limited data you can gather from user agent?

I've never moderated a website so am just speculating. But my layman's perspective is that it seems far more practical just to delete posts because they intrinsically violate site rules as opposed to being suspected ban evaders.

We have some major advantages over Twitter:

  1. We have far less content to moderate. I'd also guess that our ratio of moderators:content is at least two orders of magnitude better than Twitter's, and possibly even three orders of magnitude better.

  2. Most banned users aren't trying too hard. Twitter is a big platform and lot of people want to be on it. This is a tiny tiny platform that only a few hundred people want to be on. We had rdrama users trying to come over for the first few weeks, but consistent banning and removal of troll content mostly solved the problem.

  3. Some of the banned users that are trying hard seem unable to avoid outting themselves. If we ban a user that can't stop talking about a particular topic, and then notice a new user account created the next day that also loves to talk about the same topic ... well things can be pretty obvious.

There might be a group of banned users that comes back under different aliases and successfully hide. And they don't break any of the same rules that got them a ban in the first place. Idk, I guess I feel like "mission accomplished" if that is what happens. We aren't trying to punish people with bans, we are trying to reform, and permabans take place for two reasons: we think you are beyond reform, or we are trying to protect the community from extremely bad behavior (for example we are generally going to nuke any accounts that post CP).

Yeah I'm moderately pissed that my comments disappear without forewarning or mod ping.

I silently lost one here, too. It was a request for update on the worker’s strike; I assume the level of effort was too low?

(@)johnfabian: Will you be making another report on the Ontario strikes? It sounds like they have seen an effect. I’d like to hear your impressions if you attended.

@cjet79 would you mind confirming?

That's my bad I removed that and had a message typed up, but never sent it. Basically what you wrote was too short for a top level post, I'd suggest just using the message feature instead of posting a top level comment in the culture war thread.

Thanks. Will do.

Which comments? I don't see any removed comments on your profile from the last month.

A branch here is purged and my comments are only visible through my profile. Same here. It's not technically a deletion, but responses to deleted/hidden posts are non-discoverable within the thread. We seemingly don't have the old reddit mechanic where [deleted] was a legitimate node.

Ugh, yeah, that kinda sucks. I don't think I've ever noticed it because mods can see deleted comments, so I just never got the opportunity to realize that was happening. Sorry 'bout that.

I've got a bug filed and I'm hoping I can get to this soonish, but it may be a bit, I'm afraid.

I'll bring it to zorba/the devs attention. I guess I don't really know the expected behavior there.

Not a fan of comments being removed. A bad post with a warning allows for discussion at least. OP would have limited opportunity to make bad posts anyways.

The forum should aim to maximise discussion given its position (much lower new user inflow than reddit).

In almost all cases, comments are either removed by virtue of the poster deleting them, or by virtue of us removing a ban evader. We have one annoyingly persistent evader right now (they're up to 15 separate accounts last I checked, most of which want to talk about the Jews, although there's been one lately which entertained me because he started complaining about how the community is obsessed with the Jews) and it would not surprise me if they alone are responsible for most of the removed comments in the last month or so.

I mostly want to inconvenience them and make it unfun to rejoin, but it's possible we're inconveniencing ourselves more than we should be in the process.

A moderation log does exist. In this particular case, though, it does not seem that the moderator (@Amadan) listed a reason for removal.

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