I've got a new feature almost ready to go. I'm pretty stoked about this one because I've been wanting it for quite literally years, but it was never possible on Reddit.
Hey, guess what? We're not on Reddit!
But before I continue, I want to temper expectations. This is a prototype of a first revision of an experimental feature. It is not going to look impressive; it is not going to be impressive. There's a lot of work left to do.
The feature is currently live on our perpetually-running dev site. Log in, click any thread, and go look below the Comment Preview. You'll see a quokka in a suit asking you for help. (His name is Quincy.) Click the cute li'l guy and you'll be asked to rate three comments. Do so, and click Submit. Thank you! Your reward is another picture of Quincy and a sense of satisfaction.
So, uh . . . . what?
Okay, lemme explain.
This is the first part of a feature that I'm calling Volunteering. Once in a while, the site is going to prompt you to help out, and if you volunteer, it'll give you a few minutes of work to do. Right now this is going to be "read some comments and say if they're good or not". Later this might include stuff like "compare two comments and tell me if one of them is better", or "read a comment, then try to come up with a catchy headline for it".
These are intentionally small, and they're entirely optional. You can ignore it altogether if you like.
I'm hoping these can end up being the backbone of a new improved moderation system.
Isn't this just voting, but fancy?
You'd think so! But there are critical differences.
First, you do not choose the things to judge. The system chooses the things it wants you to judge. You are not presented with thousands of comments and asked to vote on the ones you think are important, no, you are given (at the moment) three specific comments and information is requested of you.
This means that I don't need to worry about disproportionate votecount on popular comments. Nor do I need to worry about any kind of vote-brigading, or people deciding to downvote everything that a user has posted. The system gets only the feedback it asks for. This is a pull system; the system pulls information from the userbase in exactly the quantities it wants instead of the userbase shoving possibly-unwanted information at the scoring systems.
Second, you can be only as influential as the system lets you. On the dev site you can volunteer as often as you want for testing purposes, but on the live site, you're going to - for now - be limited to once every 20 hours. I'll probably change this a lot, but nevertheless, if the system decides you've contributed enough, it'll thank you kindly and then cut you off. Do you want to spend all day volunteering in order to influence the community deeply? Too bad! Not allowed.
But this goes deeper than it sounds. Part of having the system prompt you is that not all prompts will be the system attempting to get actionable info from you. Some of the prompts will be the system trying to compare your choices against a reference, and the system will then use this comparison to figure out how much to trust your decisions.
That reference, of course, is the mods.
I've previously referred to this as the Megaphone system or the Amplifier system. One of our devs called it a "force multiplier". I think this gets across the core of what I'm aiming for. The goal here is not majority-rules, it's not fully decentralized moderation. It's finding people who generally agree with the mods and then quietly harnessing them to handle the easy moderation cases.
(We have a lot of easy moderation cases.)
There's another important point here. The mods are only human and we make mistakes. My hope is that we can get enough volunteer help to provide significantly more individual decisions than the mods can, and my hope is that the combined efforts of several people who don't quite agree with the mods in all cases is still going to be more reliable than any single mod. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if there's people out there who are better at judging posts than our mods are! It's just hard to find you; some of you may not even comment, and you're pretty undiscoverable right now, but you will certainly get a chance to volunteer!
Also, this will hopefully improve turnaround time a lot. I'm tired of filtered comments taking hours to get approved! I'm tired of really bad comments sticking around for half a day! There are many people constantly commenting and voting, and if I can get a few minutes of help from people now and then, we can handle those rapidly instead of having to wait for a mod to be around.
Wow! You get all of this, with absolutely no downsides or concerns!
Well, hold on.
The big concern here is that virtually nobody has ever done this before. The closest model I have is Slashdot's metamoderation system. Besides that, I'm flying blind.
I also have to make sure this isn't exploitable. The worst-case scenario is people being able to use this to let specific bad comments through. I really want to avoid that, and I've got ideas on how to avoid it, but it's going to take work on my part to sort out the details.
And there's probably issues that I'm not even thinking of. Again: flying blind. If you think of issues, bring 'em up; if you see issues, definitely bring 'em up.
Oh man! So, all this stuff is going to be running real soon, right?
Nope.
First I need some data to work off. Full disclosure: all the current system does is collect data, then ignore it.
But it is collecting data, and as soon as I've got some data, I'll be working on the next segment.
This is the first step towards having a platform that's actually better-moderated than the current brand of highly-centralized sites. I don't know if it'll work, but I think it will.
Please go test it out on the dev site, report issues, and when it shows up here (probably in a few days) click the button roughly daily and spend a few minutes on it. Your time will not be wasted.
Blocking
Right now this site's block feature works much the same as Reddit's. But I want to change that, because it sucks.
My current proposal is:
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If you block someone, you will no longer see their comments, receive PMs from them, or be notified if they reply to your comments.
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This does not stop them from seeing your comments, nor does it stop them from replying to your comments.
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If they attempt to reply to your comment, it will include the note "This user has blocked you. You are still welcome to reply, but your replies will be held to a stricter standard of civility."
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This note is accurate and we will do so.
That's the entire proposed feature. Feedback welcome!
User Flair and Usernames
We're going to start cracking down a bit on hyperpartisan or antagonistic user flair. Basically, if we'd hit you with a warning for putting it in a comment, we'll hit you with a warning for putting it in your flair. If anyone has a really good reason for us to not do this, now's the time to mention it!
Same goes for usernames. On this site, you can actually change your display username, and we're just leaving that in place. So we'll tell you to change your name if we have to. Extra for usernames: don't use a misleading or easily-confused username, okay? If it looks like you're masquerading as an existing well-known user, just stop it.
I'm currently assuming that both of these fall under our existing ruleset and don't need new rules applied. If you disagree strongly, let me know.
The Usual Stuff
Give feedback! Tell me how you're doing? Do you have questions? Do you have comments? This is the place for them!
Are you a coder and want to help out? We have a lot of work to do - come join the dev discord.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
I don't understand how in particular it sucks, although I'm sure there are reasons. But I can't see how allowing someone you've blocked to check your comments really is a better solution, and it seems worse. When I block someone because I feel that they are trollish, arguing in bad faith or for reprehensible views I don't want them building their own conversations on what I post; I blocked them for a reason! To give a concrete example, I've blocked the pedofascist, but if they will be able to read and respond to my posts there are certain topics I just won't post about then.
I think that's a carry-over from the old site. Some people were using blocking as a means of censorship. Let's say BobertaTheBuilderina and PadDBare were in a spat. Boberta blocks Pad. What happens when Boberta posts something or is in the middle of a comment thread that Pad wants to reply to, but not necessarily to Boberta? Now Pad is blocked from responding to anyone in that thread, even if they want to reply to something BillyGoatzGuffy said about "I have no idea how many tarantulas can do the tarantella in a teapot, anyone got a bluesky estimate?"
We had at least a few instances of people asking "Hey, I can't comment here, but I got nothing from the mods about being banned, what's up?" for things like this. So "Just to let you know, you're blocked, but you can still reply to people who didn't block you in this thread" is an improvement, at least in my view.
EDIT: And some people were using blocking not because "BillyGoatz called me a bad name and broke site rules" but "BillyGoatz holds a different political opinion to me" or "BillyGoatz dared to contradict me that nine million witches were genocided". Hence, censorship.
For the first part, that seems like it just needs an exception to the rule: if someone has a reply to a comment, they can always comment even if they are blocked. No need to give permanent commenting power when blocked just to overcome this edge case that is inherently temporary.
For the second part, someone breaking the rules is the lowest on my list of reasons to block someone; the mods are generally good about warning or banning when this occurs, so the person either fixes their behavior or get removed. If that's the reason for the block feature, better just remove it entirely. But:
If someone, as an example, brought up how one of their relatives was killed in the Holocaust and another user (civilly!) denied that it happened and tried to argue that their relative must have starved to death or died from some other cause, the first poster might block them. That, to me, feels fair, if they don't want to argue with them about it, or have them denying it if they bring it up again in the future, even in comments they can't see. And they may not want to deal with it at all, or have someone denying it in the comments. But I, personally, don't want to be in the business of judging whether someone's blocking is valid or not, and I don't think that it will be possible to enforce any validating for blocking. And I wouldn't see this as "censorship" as that person can still post anything they want on their own.
That wasn't the way it worked on Reddit, especially after they changed how blocking worked, and people didn't know this until it happened to them. Let me try and make it clearer:
A blocks B. B does not know they have been blocked by A. Later on, C posts something in reply to comments in a thread started by A. B tries to reply to C, has no interaction with A, and can't talk to C because they've been blocked by A. They don't realise this, they then have to start a new post about "hey mods, what happened here?"
I mean, it happened to me, it happened to a few other people. If A says "my great-uncle died in the Holocaust" and B replies "There was no Holocaust" and A blocks B, fine, everyone sees that and understands why that happens. If A is raging wokie progressive of the most caricatured kind and B is a conservative, A blocks B by stealth, nobody including B knows that happened. And A then gets to block B from participating in conversations with others, even if B is not directly interacting with A.
That's not how blocking is meant to work. If A blocks B, A can't say that B should also not be able to reply to C and D. But that's how it was weaponised.
I will submit to you my proposal that a reply overrides blocking for that thread, which neatly solves this issue.
The straightforward solution here seems to be giving improved notification for blocking.
B can interact with any other conversation that wasn't originating with A. They can post about any topic, they can reply to anyone else's posts. And I have seen that, where someone gets blocked and posts about something they want to talk about. That's a rather weak weapon.
This is the non-negotiable as far as I'm concerned. The fact that you have blocked B should not mean that from now on, any thread you start on TheMotte is one that B cannot participate in.
(Back on reddit, we did have a very prolific poster who had also blocked a lot of people over the course of his career. In fairness, before the new rules were implemented. But when he returned after a long hiatus, it caused considerable disruption because suddenly he was starting a bunch of new threads and a lot of people were asking "Why can't I post in these threads?")
The situation I see is that e.g. TracingWoodgrains brings up Mormonism and someone comes by to, within the bounds of the rules, semi-harass them about it; they brought up their own personal experiences there a lot, so someone would have many opportunities to bring out the soap box. Someone could get tired of rehashing arguments or always dealing with one abrasive person, and blocking them neatly cuts them out. But allowing someone acting badly to get a permanent last-word feature, no chance of a rebuttal, is not an appealing solution. It's like a troll's dream option.
I think there are better options to overcome some of the worst features of the Reddit blocking system. Options like making it clear when someone is blocking you, letting an existing reply override a block to avoid any last-word gambits, allowing a blocked person to see a blocker's posts, and allowing them to make replies some level removed from a blocker's post would solve the great majority of the issues people have brought up. It still wouldn't be perfect, but I don't know of any perfect solution.
Blocking should act as an "Ignore" feature. If I block you, I will no longer see your posts, and you cannot DM me. But you can still see my posts and respond to them. As Zorba said, if blocking inconveniences anyone, it should be the blocker, not the blockee. That's the cost of deciding you want to block someone.
The above model works fine for the case where "You are such an aggravating individual that reading your posts elevates my blood pressure." Blocking so I no longer have to read your posts solves that - anything else would be allowing me to "punish" you. A non-mod should have zero power to affect how another poster interacts with the forum. If you think they should have their posting privileges restricted, you need to report them and let the mods decide if action is warranted.
The proposal already concedes that this isn't the case, it's in the text:
And it may be even stricter, from Zorba:
How will you police all this? But:
Nobody has a monopoly on posts here, nobody is "punished" by not responding to something directly.
I don't think that people I block should have their posting restricted site-wide, I know where the report button is for that, I just want a way to figuratively walk away from them. Giving them a permanent platform to breath down my neck and directly reply to everything scot-free is the opposite. Are you going to step up your modding to compensate?
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