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[META] Something Shiny and Two Things Boring

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:

  • If you block someone, you will no longer see their comments, receive PMs from them, or be notified if they reply to your comments.

  • This does not stop them from seeing your comments, nor does it stop them from replying to your comments.

  • 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."

  • 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.

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Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

Hey mods. My discussion with @Amadan seems to have ended without a resolution. Could I get some clarification on how our rules permit insulting public officials when it isn't explicitly necessary to make your point? It seems to contradict several of them:

Be Kind… To a lesser but non-zero extent, this also applies to third parties. You shouldn't just go and attack people that you think are bad, you should be kind to them, even if you think they're mean, even if you think they're bad.

Or

Be no more antagonistic than is absolutely necessary for your argument.

Or

To have a discussion on some point of disagreement it is necessary that both parties be willing to say what they believe and why, not merely that they disagree with the other party. Sarcasm and mockery make it very easy to express that you disagree with someone without explaining why, or what contrary claim you actually endorse, and you can't grow a discussion from those grounds.

Or

Write like everyone is reading and you want them to be included in the discussion.

"Trump is a venal, fascist clown" seem like really clear cases of prioritizing heat over light, vilifying your outgroup, arguing to win, and treating the thread as territory to be won. Just completely counterproductive and the anthesis to the goals of this place.

If you decide you're going to allow them, could you explain how my interpretation of these rules is wrong and/or rewrite the rules to be more clear?

I feel like Amadan answered most of your questions in that thread. But I'll re-answer with my own thoughts.

Something like "Trump is a venal, fascist clown" as an isolated comment is bad because it is low effort. If it is buried in an otherwise effortful comment, it seems fine to me to ignore.

Something like "Trump is a venal, fascist clown, and the people that support him are idiots" is bad because it is boo outgroup and antagonistic. Even if it is buried in an otherwise decent comment it might get some mod action.

In general, I interpret the rules against insults to apply to people that might be on this forum. The more likely it is that the person is using this forum, the worse it is from a rules standpoint. Insulting a specific user being a clearcut case of 'that is bad'. And insulting a public figure with zero chance of using the forum being something I don't care about at all.

Also as election season slowly starts to ramp up, I do not think the moderators should be in a position where we need to defend politicians from insults. People need to be able to have a civil discussion with the other people on this forum, that is the most important thing.

Something like this is generally ok, but not a great start to a discussion:

user_A: "Trump is a fascist clown"

user_B: "I think he is playing 4d chess and is a genius"

user_A: "He made mistakes X, Y, and Z, how is that 4d chess?"

user_B: "Well [longer discussion about those items]"

Something like this is not ok:

user_A: "Trump is a fascist clown"

user_B: "I think he is playing 4d chess and is a genius"

user_A: "You think that because you are an idiot and a racist"

user_B: "get out of here with your woke bullshit!"

feel like Amadan answered most of your questions in that thread

Frankly I disagree. There was no argument at all for why "Kamala Harris is an airhead" offers anything positive at all to the community, nor for how it doesn't break the rules. Just "we're not gonna do it", "it's not part of The Norms", etc.

The purpose of enforcing "don't call Kamala Harris an airhead" isn't to protect Kamala Harris' feelings, is to prevent people who do support her from seeing red and manning the battle-stations or, alternatively, from doing so until it's blatantly clear how lopsided this place is against her and they all decide to leave.

The argument of "but it can trigger good discussion" proves way too much (it justifies nearly anything), and is particularly unpersuasive when you can trigger the exact same discussion with far less heat by saying (e.g.) "I disagree with Trump's political goals, and his decisions have repeatedly backfired". "Trump is a facist clown" is clearly intended to fire a shot in Culture War (do you disagree?) and should be modded as such.

Somebody (not sure if ZorbaTHut, TracingWoordgrains, Scott, or someone else) once wrote a great post on how "free speech" is decidedly not the same thing as maximizing good discussion, and insulting Trump or Harris seems like a pretty clear case of prioritizing free speech for it's own sake. I'm really skeptical there are people that (1) we want hear from and (2) who couldn't maintain elementary civility standards if they actually cared to.

Are you responding to things I wrote, or to things Amadan wrote? I can't tell.

There are things that are bad but also not worth moderating. Insulting politicians falls into this category. I never said it was good for triggering discussion, I didn't say it was good at all. I specifically said it was bad.

There are two failure modes of moderation. One failure mode is not moderating enough and the place descends into a hell hole. The other failure mode is moderating too much, and the place goes silent (or turns into an echo-chamber of moderator-approved content).

Protecting politicians from insults feels like it would tend towards too much moderation.

As a practical matter, there are multiple problems with this proposal:

  1. I'm not even convinced we'd gain more Kamala Harris supporters in the discussion. After all, we'd be enforcing the rule accross the political spectrum. So there would be 'no insulting Trump' rules as well.

  2. Politicians insult each other all the time. There is a problem in the news where repeating someone else's slanderous remarks isn't slander. We would have the same problem here. Users that wanted to insult a politician, would just have to share some story of their favored politician insulting their unfavored politician. To stop that we'd have to get into content moderation, which has always been a line we have tried to avoid crossing.

  3. Insults vs opinions are a thin line. "I hate Trump" vs "I hate how Trump looks like a fascist clown and has ruined the image of the presidency" vs "Trump is a fascist clown". All these statements are sort of expressing a similar thing. And I imagine that anyone that is seeing red from one statement would probably be seeing red from all the statements, even if the 2nd statement should be allowable under our rules. So we'd have to go through a moderation crack down just to get people to be slightly more careful with their language ... and in the end we'd gain zero additional users. Because if someone can't stand another person not liking the same politicians as them, then they probably won't fit in here in the first place, and a slightly more careful phrasing of that dislike isn't going to appease them.

The first paragraph is an explanation of why I disagree with your claim that Amadan answered my questions. Everything else is a response to the rest of what you wrote.

There are things that are bad but also not worth moderating. Insulting politicians falls into this category. I never said it was good for triggering discussion, I didn't say it was good at all. I specifically said it was bad.

I didn't say you loved the first comment, but you're defending it by appealing to the discussion that follows it, which I think is fairly summarized as "it can trigger good discussion".

There are two failure modes of moderation. One failure mode is not moderating enough and the place descends into a hell hole. The other failure mode is moderating too much, and the place goes silent (or turns into an echo-chamber of moderator-approved content).

You and @ZorbaTHut are both going to the "true positives / false positives" argument. I can't say I can complain, since that does ultimately seem like the disagreement. It also makes further discussion seem mostly moot -- any false/true positive discussion is ultimately quantitative and it's unlikely any of us can come up with meaningful data.

I can only say that "don't say mean things" was the default civility norms while I was growing up, it's second nature to me, it's what I expect from my friends, it's what my elementary school teachers expected of me, and I struggle to put myself in the shoes of somebody who would rather be silent than have to talk about politics without insulting their enemies. I think people do it because they can get away with it. If you think we risk losing valuable discussion then I guess further discussion isn't likely to be fruitful.

I'm not even convinced we'd gain more Kamala Harris supporters in the discussion. After all, we'd be enforcing the rule accross the political spectrum. So there would be 'no insulting Trump' rules as well.

I sort of agree. There are lots of forces that drive out Kamala Harris supporters, and drive-by insults are basically the lowest hanging fruit that doesn't endanger good discussion. Probably more significant are anti-woke dogpiles, but barring absolutely crazy ideas it's much harder to moderate that. But low hanging fruit is still low hanging fruit, it's a continuum not a binary, etc.

Politicians insult each other all the time. There is a problem in the news where repeating someone else's slanderous remarks isn't slander. We would have the same problem here.

I would literally prefer "[Trump says Kamala Harris is an airhead](https://foo.bar) " over the current state. I'm not trying to solve all civility problems here. I think this is one particular problem with an easy solution, and the more inconvenient it is to wage drive-by culture war the better.

Insults vs opinions are a thin line. "I hate Trump" vs "I hate how Trump looks like a fascist clown and has ruined the image of the presidency" vs "Trump is a fascist clown". All these statements are sort of expressing a similar thing...

The mods (i.e. the three that have discussed it publicly) seem pretty united on the stance that "it's just my opinion" is a sensible defense.

For me, this is just "one man's modus ponens" and I'll easily bite the bullet: if you're insulting somebody, it's relevant to your point or you're booing outgroup. That's true if it's a factual claim and it's true if it's your opinion.

I've lost track of whatever specific post we are talking about. I'm probably going to say something that might make you think "why the heck didn't you moderate the post I'm talking about!" And the answer is pretty straightforward: I think I'm one of the strictest mods on the payroll right now, and also one of the least active. Former honor for strictest used to go to Hylynka. Anytime there is a mod discussion of 'should we do something about this' I usually say yes. Anytime there is a mod discussion of 'should we perma-ban this user' I usually ask why we haven't done so already. Having said that I still support the other mods and the decisions they make. They are more lenient, but I find it is often a few degrees of each other. We agree on who needs a perma-ban, I just arrive at that conclusion a temp-ban sooner than them. We agree on the posts that need moderation, we just disagree on what level of punishment/warning to hand out.

I didn't say you loved the first comment, but you're defending it by appealing to the discussion that follows it, which I think is fairly summarized as "it can trigger good discussion".

I don't feel like that summarization fits. I'm fully willing to moderate low effort top level comments, even when they spawn good discussion. If I saw a low effort "kamala is an airhead" top level comment, with no other substance, it absolutely would be a ban from me. And it would be a ban much faster than a low effort comment that just said something like "kamala is a bad presidential candidate".

We want to encourage good discussion and discourage bad discussion. And specifically we want to make good discussion visible, and bad discussion either less visible, or at least shown to be punished if it is highly visible. There is of course a huge middle ground of mediocre discussion. I think me and the rest of the mods generally don't want to get in the way of mediocre discussion.

Visible bad discussion is something I try and moderate. "Kamalla is an airhead" within a few posts of a top level comment, and nothing else in the comment would have gotten some amount of mod sanction from me. If it is buried within a discussion like 5 or 6 levels down, or buried within a comment that has other useful things to contribute I'm gonna leave it alone. Cuz at that point I've mentally catalogued that downstream thread or that whole comment as "mediocre" discussion, and I'm not gonna get in the way.

It also makes further discussion seem mostly moot -- any false/true positive discussion is ultimately quantitative and it's unlikely any of us can come up with meaningful data.

Zorba does have some data based on the reporting functionallity, and the mod helper thing.

I can only say that "don't say mean things" was the default civility norms while I was growing up, it's second nature to me, it's what I expect from my friends, it's what my elementary school teachers expected of me, and I struggle to put myself in the shoes of somebody who would rather be silent than have to talk about politics without insulting their enemies. I think people do it because they can get away with it. If you think we risk losing valuable discussion then I guess further discussion isn't likely to be fruitful.

Politics confused me for a long time growing up. Don't say mean things seemed to be the "real life" civil behavior. But then those same adults trying to teach me that lesson would make mean comments about George Bush being an idiot, or John Kerry being a coward. And it was only a few years later when I realized that same vitriol could be turned on me if I spoke up as a libertarian. I guess I grew up in a very different environment than you. Politics has always been contentious in my mind, and aside from some early interactions when I didn't understand the game its never really felt personal. To me its looked like two sports teams yelling at each other and hurling insults. I think a lot of people like me sort of expect that norm, and they get confused when someone is upset about the ra-ra-ing. I guess its a cultural difference.

The mods (i.e. the three that have discussed it publicly) seem pretty united on the stance that "it's just my opinion" is a sensible defense. For me, this is just "one man's modus ponens" and I'll easily bite the bullet: if you're insulting somebody, it's relevant to your point or you're booing outgroup. That's true if it's a factual claim and it's true if it's your opinion.

There are some opinions we don't allow. But we usually want to have good justifiable reasons for banning the expression of an opinion. My distinction about personal insults in the previous post applies here. If your opinion of another poster is that they are an asshole, then keep that to yourself. However, we definitely don't want to ban opinions on policy. That is a road that all the other social media platforms have gone down, and we think it easily strays into the mistake of "too much moderation". Opinions on politicians are pretty close to opinions on policy.

Its understandable to have your stance. IDK I feel like I've modded things like this before within the past 5ish years of being a moderator. And those mod decisions are often highly controversial with other users. It triggers a lot of their fears of "oh no they are going to start moderating more of our opinions", and we work hard to not break that trust.