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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Well yeah, I'd be happy with that if that is how the new blocking will work here. What I'm saying is the old blocking when TheMotte was still over on Reddit and which was being abused. See what Amadan is saying down below. Reddit changed rules about blocking, and then suddenly someone who Had A Little List was able to prevent people from participating in any comment thread they got involved in, and nobody knew why this was since they had no idea Our Little Pal had blocked them. So now suddenly where they were able to have a discussion with OldJoe'sWearyBonez yesterday, now they were getting error messages for no apparent reason when trying to reply to OldJoe today.
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The point of the forum is to discuss complex things. If we prevent a blocked user from replying to a blocker's comments, we lose some discussion, some post, some potential understanding. If we allow the blocked user to reply to the blocker's comments - maybe the blocker will be a bit upset that holocaust deniers exist? They can't see the comment, so, who cares?
Even blocking is an unnecessary feature (in a well-moderated community) - if you don't like /u/libertAryanPedonazi, you can just look at a different part of the screen when he shows up, if he isn't spamming or anything.
Let us consider an example then, A blocks B, A makes a post, B responds to it (hidden to A). Now A is stuck, others see the response but not them and they can't properly defend their post. What if A posts something, then C posts B's shitty argument that A has already dealt with and blocked B over; now they have to do it again? What was the point of the block then?
I don't work this way and I think most other people do not either. This is a theoretically possible but practically impossible ask. I don't habitually check usernames first, and I have no desire to manually sanitize a thread with perhaps thousands of comments every week. Blocking is a nice QoL feature for this.
Which is fine. If you block someone, you're choosing to not defend or respond to their arguments. There's no need to deny the rest of us the ability to see them!
Then C gained from reading A's argument, and B is free to block C if they want!
"How people work" in many senses, especially complex intellectual ones, is very contingent on intent and culture. While the presence of disgusting, taboo material that one can't bear to contemplate or look at is universal, the content of said material is not. Which suggests that, in any particular case, a person (or culture) can choose to not care. And if you can't, you're more or less 'in the thrall of your culture', as opposed to 'mechanically not working like that' (not that that's better!). However, most people could not care, by intent, tbh. The purpose of being offended / pissed off, is to be so things that are harmful in some way - but not looking at offensive text on a forum is a great way to not know what it its, and thus act less competently in relation to it in the future - particularly problematic if there is something morally wrong with it, and an individual block doesn't serve any purpose in that case.
That's a mischaracterization, my intent with a block is to opt out of conversations with someone. They're free to make their arguments with anyone else, to post them anywhere else.
I'm not exactly looking to deal with someone I've blocked in perpetuity at second hand.
I'm a little confused with where you went, I meant that, mechanically, ignoring people manually takes some minor effort that only causes annoyance, like being approached on the street for various stupid stuff. Yeah, theoretically I can just ignore everyone who seems like they're trying to con me, but that requires me to observe and process who they are and what they're asking before I refuse them. In the same way, I can't just "look at a different part of the screen" for free, I have to observe and process and then look away.
Yeah, nah, I don't need to listen to the arguments of xXpuppykickerXx, I'm good in my views on animal cruelty, you are overrating the power of an obscure internet forum. They're free to make their arguments to everyone else though, go right on ahead, but I don't have the inclination to explain that I really do like puppies and don't want them kicked. I wouldn't even block them just for the username, but maybe if they made it their hobby horse here; I think that's a reasonable ask.
You can do it easily by never responding to them.
Even if ShitHead2941 keeps following you and replying to every your post, what exactly is he "winning"?
Are you afraid that other mottizens will see that you never answer him and think that ShitHead2941 completely demolished you with facts and logic?
Several people, including the mods, have brought up weaponized blocking being used to get in the last word of an argument, so I don't think I'm going on out on a limb alone here to say it's a real thing that bad actors will try to use to their advantage. Ceding the last word completely wouldn't even require facts and logic then since, of course, there will be no response at all from them.
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Some people just can’t see eye to eye and the argument goes on but nowhere. Pre committing not to speak is probably best for all parties involved.
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I thought about writing in more detail about that, but didn't end up doing so.
The biggest part, in my opinion, is that blocking someone shouldn't inconvenience the person who's being blocked. If it does, then it'll be weaponized; it'll turn into a tool used against people who are disliked, not a tool used to shape your own experience.
If it's going to inconvenience anyone, it needs to inconvenience the blocker; it needs to be something where they say "eh, it's worth it so I don't have to see that guy anymore".
If someone is *actually rule-breaking" then that's a problem for the mods to deal with. In all other cases, we shouldn't allow random people to gain pseudomod powers at the click of a mouse.
If they're breaking the rules then report them.
If they're not, then putting that burden on you instead of on them seems like the right solution here.
Can you explain more what burden or inconvenience is being put upon anyone here? How is it a burden if they can't see it? If I type up something and don't post it, have I burdened everyone here with... not seeing it?
They're restricted from joining the conversation. With the Reddit implementation, it also let people get the last word in, by replying and then blocking.
You shouldn't be able to unilaterally exclude people from the community unless you're one of the people who has that specific power.
Let's not conflate blocking during a conversation with blocking against future conversations. There are ways to de-weaponize the former without affecting the latter; I suggested elsewhere that if someone has a reply to a post or comment, they can be effectively unblocked for that branch, which eliminates this last word effect.
I think this overstates what is happening, and substitutes "my comments" for "the community." A block doesn't restrict any conversations but one branch of a tree, one that is ultimately always going to be small in relation to the total community (I don't think anyone dominates conversations enough to subvert that). I see blocking as analogous to walking away from someone at a party. I haven't restricted their conversations with anyone else. Having them reply to me, extra scrutiny or not, undermines my opt out. A conversation should be snipped at my comment, or theirs, when blocked.
I think that's a good analogy, and I disagree with your conclusion. If you walk away from me at a party after a discussion got heated, I still get to look at everyone else and say "PR's parting comment was wrong though, right?" If you walk away, you don't get to enforce having the last word - the people left still get to discuss what you said, you just won't hear it anymore.
Blocking should mirror that, so people don't get to make a flawed argument and prevent counterarguments by blocking interlocutors.
I will bring up my proposed solution of having a reply override the block feature to prevent any sort of last-word effect. This neatly solves that issue.
As for blocking any counterarguments, I can just point to my arguments elsewhere. Let's see the evidence of actual effect and some cost-benefit analysis.
Why are you putting the onus on others? You have as much ability as the users you have said that to to get the evidence you require. I'm sure this isn't what you mean, but it feels a bit like you are trying to use the lack of provided evidence to positively weight your argument, instead of as an opportunity to discover facts.
Generally the onus is on people who present an argument to present their reasoning and evidence for it, right? If I make an argument it's not your job to convince yourself that I'm right, but my job to present the evidence for my position. I can't link to future posts or the future state of the site, but it would be nice to see some existing set of posts pointed out that shows there is a serious problem. We know that there are flaws with the current blocking system, but there doesn't seem to be a perfect solution, and the current one has not led to any catastrophe, plus there are ways to fix some of the worst problems with it. But I'm under no illusion that Zorba or the other mods have to convince me, personally, of anything; I hold no veto power here.
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That helps, but it's still blocking people from participating in the discussion if the blocker posts something else that needs counterspeech (or worse, repeats their arguments in an another branch without acknowledging the counterarguments.
This is just a natural consequence of human behavior. People will get pissed at interlocutors and want to stop them from interlocuting, people will want to get the last word, and people will repeat arguments when they didn't find counterarguments convincing. Bad faith isn't even necessary, but using tools at your disposal to get an unfair advantage is, sadly, also human nature.
The cost is negligible: People who leave the discussion don't get to demand other people stop discussing, so preventing them isn't very valuable.
I think the cost will come in who participates on the site. I really don't have the inclination to go into discussions with xXpuppykickerXx, and blocking supports that. They can post anything they want anywhere else on the site. But this change seems like a troll's dream, they can always (civilly) harass someone and blocking them just cedes all discussions to them entirely and in perpetuity. Bad actors will weaponize anything.
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You are restricting their conversations with anyone else. Here's a pattern I've seen quite frequently:
Party A: "schools with poor kids are underfunded that's why NAMs do badly in school."
Party B: "False <link to data on funding levels by family income/percentage NAM>"
Party A then blocks B, possibly after making some argument why they are right.
In the reddit implementation it prevents me - party C - from engaging with B in the current conversation. Perhaps I want to know more about his data source or reasoning, but I can't do that except by starting a new thread.
But the real weaponization comes from repeat interactions. A few days later in a different thread:
Party A: "schools with poor kids are underfunded that's why NAMs do badly in school."
Me: "that sounds reasonable and no one is refuting it."
I suspect this is a pattern that at least one person was using this on reddit, though I have no way to prove it.
As I have brought up in the quoted post, a logically straightforward workaround is to have blocking only prevent new replies in the future; the existence of a reply can override the blocking feature, so there is no possibility of getting in the last word. I agree that the Reddit implementation has flaws, but there are better ways to correct those flaws, IMO.
As for this weaponization, I will first say that although several people have brought it up I have yet to see any evidence that it has occurred, or that it has had a deleterious effect on the forum. And then, trollish behavior should be treated accordingly, no matter what form it takes, and someone blocking anyone who disagrees with them is surely leaving evidence in e.g. the number of blocked users. And even if this weaponization occurs, I don't see it worthwhile to bring in a new, worse block feature; a little intellectual hygiene goes a long way here. There are numerous ways for bad actors to influence conversation. Should we implement a ID verification system to prevent using alt accounts to prop up a bad argument? No, even if that is a failure mode the cost is not worth it. Let's see the cost-benefit analysis here.
This really doesn't solve the problem I described at all. The conversation I'd like to have:
Party A: "blah blah lies"
Party B: "A is lying "
Party C: "B, can you clarify that a bit? I'm uncertain about X."
Party B: "Clarifying statement"
You've now prevented this from happening.
This is only accessible to someone with programmatic access to the DB and the time to run a statistical analysis to identify such things.
The only cost I see is that when you bail on a conversation, others are allowed to continue it which might make you feel (self-)excluded. That seems like a negligible cost in my view.
I think there's a misunderstanding, that would absolutely work fine with the workaround I described. If B makes a reply to A, B would be unblocked for that entire thread from A. C replies to B, B can reply to C, or A, or D, anywhere in that thread.
I'm not much of a programmer, and I don't know how the site is built. I assume that the mods can get access to who has blocked whom, as they would need that anyway to know to apply the extra-civility rule. And I doubt if someone is seriously abusing the blocking that they would need a whole "statistical analysis" to find out, someone blocking everyone will show up with many more blocks than a normal user right?
The workaround just solves that completely. Everyone can continue the conversation. They can post about it too elsewhere.
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Hasn't happened on here. Did happen over at the old place, in the last days of the dying republic when the old institutions were crumbling and chaos and anarchy threatened with the prescriptions of the Second Triumvirate - hang on a sec, got my declines and falls mixed up there. But yeah, blocking was being used as a weapon.
I don't doubt that it was used as a weapon, I do remember some posts and discussion about it, this is not the first time Zorba has mentioned that they would like to change the blocking system. But the new system can be weaponized too, as an example, harassing someone (within the bounds of the rules) with the intent to drive them off or get blocked, which would cede any and all future discussions to them, a permanent "last word."
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And reasonably so, but I really don't want them writing their own posts and creating an illusion of consensus by having already blocked anyone who has the patience to reply and contradict them.
It would be worthwhile to have some annotation that gets displayed on any reply to a comment by someone who's been blocked by the commenter, though.
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https://www.themotte.org/post/383/wellness-wednesday-for-february-22-2023/68713?context=8#context
First of all, I hope this poster has read https://www.themotte.org/post/195/what-to-do-when-you-get
Second of all, I'd like to express my disappointment in nearly every response I've seen them receive. The fact that their question, which appears to have been made in total good faith, is still getting dogpiled and drive by downvotes is vicariously embarrassing. This isn't a culture war issue. It's a person in the life advice thread asking for life advice on interpersonal relationships as it pertains to their trans friends concerns over a tendentious CW item. prof xi o isn't even stating a position, only that they have trans friends and like Harry Potter (apparently this justifies an accusation of trolling, to the tune of a 45 [edit: 30, my back of the skull hangover sums aren't great] updoot difference. An uncharitable read might see some of the responses from prof xi o as sealioning. Cool. Take your uncharitable reading and keep it under wraps). If I was feeling extreme, I might posit being told you shouldn't be friends with my outgroup is not a valuable remark.
If I want to dunk on wingcucks I can go to arr drama. If I want to dunk on globohomo I can go to /pol/. If I want to dunk on chuds I'll join Hasan's discord. If I want to dunk on MAGAts I'll head over to /r/news. If I want to dunk on libtards I'll join the Mug Club. This is it, as far as I know, for frank and civil discussion between people, whose only commonality on themotte are their shared, seemingly intractable differences. This is unbelievably important to me, because there exists a reality where I am wrong. There is a chance that you too are wrong. Having a place where I can be presented with the absolute best argument against my pet philosophy (and those of others) is valuable, and it's valuable because it can if nothing else, diminish the evil I do as I navigate a confusing and confused world.
Overt forum-wide bias of any particular flavor or stripe, in my opinion, is the most pressing threat to the long term health of this site. Please don't fuck it up for everyone.
P.S. I will be appropriately embarrassed if the OP turns out to be another d*rwin, until that point try leaving the internet at the door and treating everyone as if they are, in fact, sincere.
I honestly don't think this is a situation where frank and civil discussion is possible. Imagine a parallel post along the lines of "Some of my really good friends are wildly upset about the fact that people exist who don't follow their religion. I still like Jewish comedians. What should I do?" If it's not trolling, it's a genuinely amazing display of innocence.
Sorry for adding to the wall of text, but I just realized you were one of the respondents there (I realized I was getting pretty bummed by the way some posters I really respect had written their replies and I try to avoid hanging feelings on a person online). I want to be clear, I have no specific issue with most of what's being said in that thread. Again, my big problem is primarily with the pile on. His question was fairly innocuous and considering some of the other material posted here made very, very few assumptions. The one mistake was being blue-coded.
Also to your credit and undermining my point, you did in fact seriously engage and provided a thoughtful and reasoned response when asked.
I'm personally a fan of the Wellness Wednesday thread as one of the best random internet stranger advice sources. It escapes the rage-bait/circlejerk flair that the r/*advice subreddits almost universally share.
"Queer interest groups call for social censorship of topics based on witchhunt of the week" sounds like a plausible lede to any CW thread effortpost. Sure, there's a personal spin, where the interest groups are instead his friends, but that's about as CW a topic as you can get without going into "my friends are being beat up by $OTHER_RACE every other week, any (Wellness Wednesday) advice on arming myself for the coming race war?".
That said, not a single comment actually bites and turns it full fledged CW shit-flinging fest, he evens gets a concrete solution with uBlock rules.
As for the downvotes, I'll be charitable and attribute them to a natural response to an obvious troll post. The writing style gives it away
The level of detail - trans friends (who I love dearly) - coupled with the admittedly amusing false dichotomies is a dead giveaway. There was no need to go into that level of detail to get meaningful advice - "my friends are getting offended because content-creators have different views than them, what should I do" would have sufficed and would have nonetheless garnered, I reckon, substantially the same response.
Arguing that Jesus was gay at $IVY_LEAGUE might not be trolling, but walking into a Texas church and asking the pastor whether there's any evidence to support that claim sure is.
Really? Because what I saw was 8/9 top level replies using varying degrees of effort and wordcount to say essentially the same thing; "your friends are unreasonable, possibly deranged, your continued existence as a mentally stable sophont is in jeopardy if you leave these people in your life". Social circles are vitally important and are precarious things at best, and telling a stranger to rip up a part of theirs (who knows how sizeable that part is, immaterial to my point), especially over a CW topic, is not good advice, by any measure. The problem for me however isn't that this advice was dispensed (I think it's a real position that a reasonable person can have, I'm not accusing anyone of misrepresenting their own beliefs), the problem is it's the only goddamn advice he got, sans the one person who read his post and provided an answer to the actual question within.
Additionally, I believe that you can in fact discuss CW adjacent topics like "how do I navigate a situation where my friends feel strongly about !issue and I really don't, here are my uninformed and nascent opinions, wat do" without the obviously negative reaction he received. He very technically invited this when he said
Still not an excuse for the smug dogpile, not in a place allegedly dedicated to good faith discussion.
I suspect if the political valence had been flipped he would've received at least a more neutral/positive response e.g. "My friends are strongly pro-life and think that Roe being overturned is a landmark victory for innocent life, I kind of feel like it's not murder but this isn't an issue I care much about and I'd rather not alienate my friends if that isn't necessary, wat do." "Wow wow sounds like ur friends might have something to teach u, try asking them for profound opinions" (I view the pro-position on both abortion and trans issues to be largely unreasonable along very similar dimensions and to somewhat similar degrees, but I think a differently coded question of the same genre would have prompted a VERY different response, not like my exaggerated example but along those lines).
Is this a troll?
Maybe this is uncharitable of me, maybe I didn't make my point clearly the first two times. Regardless,
I've lurked this place for years in its various forms, and yes, there are fewer and fewer high quality leftwing/liberal contributors every year (are libbies too thin-skinned for rational discussion? I think so! Does public pontification on the topic of Blue tribe irrationality and pussification drive away left-wing posters? Yes! That's why I will always keep my mouth shut for topics I can't write an evenhanded take on). That's why I feel it's incumbent upon all users of this site to point out the burgeoning Red tribe bias that is contributing to the evaporative cooling here. Is it a problem at the moment? I don't think so, could be wrong. Is this going to be a problem in a year? Probably, and it'll compound over time. This place is neat, I've made my case upthread already for why I think that is. If I come here same time next year and this place is where the 125 IQ groypers and Anime PFPs™ hang out, well, miss me with that shit. I know plenty of smart rightwingers in my personal life, I don't want to go online and read the shitpost version of something I already agree with.
I'll dial back my tone a few notches so we don't talk past each other. I think you've started this thread out of genuine concern for the culture of this place, which is a good common starting point.
Maybe..? I really feel like the trollbait tone attracted more disparaging replies. Picture
Downvotes are the online equivalent of an eye-roll or a sneer. You're not (at least, necessarily) dignifying the thought with a fully-formed response or counter-argument, but you're shaking your head as your counterpart speaks. Now prof_xi has strolled into the temple and yelled Sibboleth, and though the Gileadites did sneer, they did not slay him.
The one foundational principle of this place, the shibboleth of Mottizens, is the belief that if it can be said respectfully and civilly, it can be said here. This is a bastion of (moderated) free speech. The Motte left reddit (amongst other reasons) because of increasing admin attention, notably around transgender CW conversations. The Motte has survived the Pharaoh chasing them across the Red Sea (r/ssc -> /r/TheMotte) , and wandering the desert for 40 years (r/TheMotte under a fickle and vindictive YWVH/spez), before finding its Promised Land here. An entire Exodus just to keep worshipping at the altar of freedom of expression.
prof_xi wandered amongst the Israelites to ask how people felt about them Moabite thots and gods. He waltzed into a mosque to ask help for his friends who are putting together a Mohammed sculpture visible from space.
This is about as antithetical to the spirit of this place as you can get. And as far as a response to the desecration of local idols go, that thread managed to remain essentially constructive and, in my opinion, exceedingly charitable.
What's on display here isn't Red tribe bias lynching a befuddled Blue tribe newcomer, rather overly polite entertainment of a pretty conspicuous troll.
I don't disagree with anything you've written here, sans the reiteration of this guy's troll status. Maybe my trolldar is out of whack but IME even concern trolls don't seriously respond the way he seemed to. Perfectly willing to accept that I'm wrong in this instance, but I still think it's uncharitable to levy that accusation based only off of that thread. That said I still can't help but feel like my takeaway here hasn't been taken away. I can only assume this is due to a lack of precision or unintentional obfuscation on my part, or maybe the point was made, received, and summarily discarded (that's fine, if I've been spazzing out here please let me know, seriously. If that's the case then I sincerely apologize for wasting the reader's attention and server runtime). It was wrong of me to even mention score (I personally loathe that there's even a scoring system here in the first place, but people seem to like it so I'll accept that I'm in the minority and won't be a pest about it), it distracts from what I'm trying to describe.
What bothered me was that after the second or third reply, his post kept attracting rejoinders for days (I know, I know, it's an internet forum and responding to a day or two day old post isn't necroing, but I didn't think it was worth remarking upon until I saw another dunk close to three days after the OP) with an almost identical theme to the rest. What I don't mean is, that if someone already said what you think then you should shut up and not say anything at all. What I do mean is, that after receiving a few replies making it clear in detail that this framing is inappropriate for this place, the dead horse kept attracting blows. It would be more healthy for the site, in my opinion, simply to not try (deliberately or not) to drum others out for such a faux pas. Yes, I think the average person (and especially a Blue1) receiving this degree of reaction one or two times will most likely never come here again. The point I have struggled to convey is: that someone saying something objectionable should be objected to, but just because you disagree with a post doesn't mean you need to say it, especially when you can just scroll down and see your opinion already well represented. It just makes you feel good, and them bad.
To use some verbiage I hate but still find useful, I think the way this community treats the Blues is toxic. Is it justified? I'm willing to concede that point, but I didn't come here to turn the tables on my outgroup, I came here for discussion featuring light as opposed to heat. I hope it isn't necessary to say that it's bad when the Blues do it, and it's bad when the Reds do it. I think themotte has already started down the path of becoming a social media-tier echochamber, just in photo negative. I hold this place and its users to a significantly higher standard than I do twitter or reddit, and it's not because everyone here is smarter than them but rather everyone is trying to be better than them.
Thank you for taking the time to write a serious reply.
1I am perhaps being uncharitable when I say that lefty potential-posters are more easily offended than the righties. For clarity's sake, I do not advocate a two-tier moderation system for the opposing ends of the political spectrum as a solution for this.
Yeah, I think we disagree on the premise (whether it's trolling or not), which then colors our view of the rest of the incident. -- Sidenote: @ZorbaTHut, any chance for troll prediction markets with a karma reward system? Or actually more generally, karma system based around correctly predicting/adjudicating moderation results (i.e., extended comment judgement requires you to slide a probability bar for each of the outcomes).
I personally hate the type of feeling based analysis that pervades forums (it feels overwhemingly X-tribe, so much more than before, halycon days, blah blah blah). I think polling (modulo polling bias) and other analytics can give much better insight into dynamic and culture progressions than any rudimentary glance over a few threads. Since this is the "Something Shiny" thread, maybe optional polling built in to themotte.org? Recurring, get a sense of trends over time. With a system like that, you can conclusively* answer questions like are Blue Tribe folk actually leaving in droves? Maybe they're actually becoming Grey/Purple/Red as they spend time here. Maybe there never were that many, and they got busy with other things in life. Maybe they're actually more common, just more moderate in tone and therefore stand out less. These datasets are now all a SQL query away. I hope the custodians use it wisely.
Yeah, the question of whether or not the post in question was made in good faith to begin with seems to be the main source of contention here, and what I'm seeing as poor behavior is being read as good and deserved judgement. I'm on board with any idea that pushes an accusation of trolling towards something less immediate and personal, since trolling is both a legitimate problem in any online community (with an exception for those dedicated to the art form itself) and also an easily weaponized memeplex that regularly confuses actual disagreement with malice.
I also agree WRT the "vibe check", it's hardly rigorous and easily motivated by bias and shouldn't be trusted, at least in a vacuum. That's fine! My operating assumption on topics and people I do not have extensive personal experience with, is that I am almost certainly wrong about every aspect of my mental model to some degree (I'm not enough of a schizo yet to believe I've stumbled upon the Grand Narrative of Universe, just enough to have my own pet theory on it).
My assertion that themotte has pushed and is pushing towards higher Red tribe participation is purely anecdotal, based mostly off of how many individual left-leaning posters I can recall from the old SSC and theMotte subreddits, to how many have made it to the off-site, as compared to the more prominent right-leaning posters. Obviously this is selecting for more than just temperature or political bias, and probably should have been lampshaded with the usual epistemic-uncertainty caveats (I'll admit to some difficulties on that front. I don't want to misrepresent my position, I also don't want to write a small essay each time I reply to someone. Balancing precision and concision is hard and I'm awkward with both). Besides, as you point out, there are plenty of good reasons to stop participating here besides feeling unwelcome.
Your polling idea sounds interesting at the very least, and is on-brand for themotte.
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I'm entertained by the idea but I do not have even remotely enough time to work on this. If someone else wants to do so, go for it.
That said, note that we have no way of objectively telling whether someone was a troll.
We actually had a polling system originally but it was horribly broken and we just took it out :V Probably wouldn't be hard to put together a new one though. I'm a bit skeptical of data validity, but especially when combined with the Volunteer system we can probably get some actual signal out of it.
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In the interest of not talking past each other, I would like to stress that my hopes for frank and civil discussion are for here, not the rule of discourse for some random guy with trans buddies. Everyone is free to dab on the outgroup as much as they like but he shouldn't be berated for having trans friends, not here of all places.
He asked for help navigating a difficult social scenario. He received approximately one genuine response to his question. The rest who deigned to engage did so so they could point at him and say that the people he actually knows and engages with are unreasonable actors and must be educated on facts of the matter, if that doesn't work then they should be excluded from his life. Sure, this is an answer to his question; it is addressed to him/references something written in the OP/is a coherent English sentence. Telling a person to cut someone out of their lives is a big big deal; if someone I didn't know told me to do so myself (for any reason. I do mean any reason), I would dismiss them out of hand and update to devalue their opinions somewhat on everything. If it were done to acclaim from everyone else around I would update to assume that I was in very much the wrong place. People who are interested in your long term wellbeing tend to not give advice that's quite so crazy.
Maybe he's a troll. Maybe he intends to stir shit up, JAQ off, dissemble then flame out. Cool. Wait for that to happen. I'd like to see this place manage discourse a little bit better than mentally installing a script that turns [Blue Tribe shibboleth] into [!downvote] regardless of how ridiculous I or you or anybody else might find the woke catechism. Maybe I've misunderstood the point of this place and I'm going to look very silly in front of everyone, if so you have my apologies in advance.
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I understand the concern, but I also basically agree with all object-level responses given in the thread, and seeing as multiple people have even offered reasonable life advice for the specific problem, which @prof_xi_o seemed to take at face value and appreciate, I don't agree it illustrates some major failure mode of the community.
(For the purpose of this post I shall ignore the question of his sincerity and treat this as a test of our virtues).
Ultimately there's no helping that the issue raised and its implied default solution (to wit, scrubbing mentions of that new game and JKR off the public net) are massive triggers for this sub's culture, which is biased in favor of free speech absolutism by construction and self-selection, even more so than it is biased in favor of right-wing sensibilities and disdain for weaponization of victimhood claims.
Perhaps we need to learn to not engage so... earnestly. You can notice my absence there; I've estimated that the expected marginal value of my input is below the cost of adding to the apparent dogpile, distressing OP and probably diminishing his willingness to read the already provided object-level advice charitably. Others have decided otherwise. Maybe we need to codify this heuristic into a rule (haven't we already?).
But leaving this coordination problem aside, I believe that the response was overall admirable. Some share of snark, to say nothing of downvotes, is extremely hard to avoid when irreconcilable philosophies meet; the measure of the community is whether there is still the will to engage on proposed terms, helpfully and within the bounds of polite discourse. A plurality of posts can be unreservedly described as expressing this will. This cannot be said of the average or even a high-brow community that engages in dunking on an ideological outsider.
Same. I don't disagree that these trans friends hold an irrational, low information and censorious cluster of beliefs, but this is something I believe to be comorbid with the Human Condition™. I too hold a number of irrational or otherwise low information beliefs on a great many topics, and I suspect everyone else here does as well. The idea that one should take the advice to cut ties as a result of ignorant opinions with those in their immediate circle, as delivered by a stranger on the internet (regardless of context or object level content) seems preeminently dim to me, let alone reasonable. I'll confess to some difficulty now squaring your circle: how can someone of your background and obvious familiarity with the history of a culture that rewards filial impiety1 be comfortable endorsing a practice that is at least superficially similar in type? Or is this something you've already considered, and feel that these two are sufficiently (or completely) disparate subjects?2 Please keep in mind I do not mean that there's never a reason to cut someone completely out of your life, or that you even need a good reason for it, only that the idea of someone (who is unfamiliar with your life beyond whatever broad strokes you provide) telling you to do it for political reasons is just wild.
In essence, that is my point. Being met with a circling of the wagons doesn't assist in the exploration of ideas, even if the point of exploring said ideas is to eviscerate them more effectively.
I also thought that there was something along those lines already enshrined, but the closest thing to such a stricture would be the rules pertaining to consensus and inclusion. Nothing said in any of the immediate replies rises, in my opinion, to the level of requiring moderator action. That said I believe that the letter of the law may rhyme with the spirit, but that they do in fact mean different things. You don't need to say "as everyone knows" when everyone coincidentally seems to know and profess the same thing. No use getting worked up over consensus building when the consensus is obviously already built.
I agree, and I may have gotten carried away with doomsaying; themotte is not even close to declining to the point I would stop visiting, let alone lose its value on the broader 'net. I don't believe this is a problem as it stands, but I do believe this specific ailment I have described will raise its ugly head in the fullness of time. I lack the experience, knowledge and understanding needed for maintaining an online community, and have little to offer as far as adjustments go. I only believe it's necessary to avert this particular future if this place is going to hold any value down the line, and I can at least point out what I see as the first sprout poking up from the soil.
An amusing downside to posting prolifically is that one's absence does in fact become notable, if only for a given genre of topic.
1Apologies for the source, but the internet is inexhaustible and SEO has crippled my ability to confidently scrape for a more reputable source of my illustration in a reasonable timeframe.
2I am genuinely curious, I am not accusing you of any sort of hypocrisy or double standard. I don't even recall if it's a topic you've explored publicly here, if you have done so I'm always ready to read or reread your write ups.
Well, this cuts both ways: don't you think Pavlik's surviving relatives were justified in cutting ties with him? Regarding your footnote, I endorse this expose. I mention Pavlik here and that's probably it.
But seriously, what I endorse are technological solutions along these lines. At least 4 of the first-tier replies suggest some form of this client-side filtering. If OP's friends insist that they find it unsatisfactory, this means they're not really feeling threatened by stimuli per se, and this is intrinsically a question of exerting political power at OP's behalf, which puts their friendship into question, and makes the discussion of severing the relationship – such as there is – relevant. I won't reiterate the rest of the discussion on blackmail, whether friends make friends scrub Harry Potter off the web and such here.
Personally I violate Western best practices egregiously and comically, and avoid dropping friends regardless of political differences, psychopathy, psychiatric conditions and material conflicts of interest. It tends to work out in the long run; my loyalty is, eventually, appreciated. But I have lost friends which deemed it fit to not reciprocate this principle; and I think that's for the better. For my better, that is.
Thank you for clarifying, I knew Pavlik was a bad example of what I was attempting to gesture towards but my collection of annotations and bookmarks is a mess right now, and I didn't want to dig through my disorganized references for a better one. Thank you for putting in the effort on my behalf. I understand that Pavlik isn't quite what I intended to describe, but it's something along these lines; authoritarian regimes (it need not be the USSR; North Korea also works and is a more contemporary example), extremist/terrorist organizations and cults as a necessary function of their position in society at large must encourage the individual to atomize, to cut away as much of the social safety net as thoroughly as possible.
I feel no discomfort over the idea someone might terminate a relationship of their own accord (up to and including, sometimes especially, family), but I do find it disturbing to see others advocate that path. It sets off just about every alarm I have in my head and makes me question the moral fibre of those recommending it. Your ideology of choice doesn't have a couch to crash on, it doesn't have that one recipe that it makes every time you visit, it won't provide comfort in your grieving, in short it can provide exactly zero aid or succor to you the human being. A person is fundamentally feeble in a universe that is very, very strong, and it's only inside of a circle of close friends and family that one can move forward, let alone make their mark on the world (there are few loners remembered by history, almost never in a positive light. They also tend to be exceptional human beings for whom a case could be made that they had no peers, at least not locally available to them. I think they can safely be considered an exception that proves the rule). The annulment of any relationship should be taken seriously, even if said relationship is trivial, and telling someone that that is their best course of action borders, IMO, on evil. In the interest of civility and because I know that my gut is imputing motives on others, I'm perfectly happy to settle for calling it inappropriate.
Wholeheartedly agree for this specific reply, it's the only one that I felt managed to answer the actual question as posed by the OP without being sandwiched between a few paragraphs of moralizing. I tried to avoid mention of specific posts and posters because I didn't and don't think that hectoring them would do any good and probably would do a modicum of bad, but that was the post I had in mind when I wrote
(added emphasis)Loyalty, in my opinion, is among the greatest virtues a human can hold, and I personally feel it acts as something like the metaphysical cousin to a sacrament the more irrational and unconditional it becomes. I believe that a person's relationship with his friends and family regardless of who they are should be treated as unimpeachable. The person in question may be in fact quite impeachable, as a matter of law or what have you, but the actual relationship itself should be held as sacrosanct. We, as a species, are way too messed up in the head to be able to either afford or justify easy dismissal of one another. Glass houses, and such.
Zero is more than some people's family provides.
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I do worry a little bit about outing my friend(s) to this community, as in some sense I used our shared experience as fodder for internet clout. Hopefully I can make it up to them by having a great conversation about J.K. Rowling/Harry Potter.
Edit: plurality
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I don't blame you for not jumping on the dogpile, but it would be a shame if your views on the matter differ substantially from the other posters (or if you have ideas that haven't been expressed already). Please don't let your estimation of my feelings keep you from being critical in this case, though I can understand how a bias towards caution is warranted.
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Ah, cool, thanks for that-- I hadn't read it. There is some good advice in there.
Hearing this feels really good, and I can see how you feel that way. The replies were arguably kind of harsh. I am fine with the response I got, although in my ideal timeline the responses would have given me more intellectual ammunition, terms/ideas to google, and examples/stories of how to disagree with your friends.
Before posting I did, for a brief moment, wonder if I should post in the culture war thread instead of wellness wednesday but went ahead because it was clearly framed as a personal issue, and I was basically genuine.
One possible reading of my initial post (and some of the replies) is that I was trying to steel-man my friend's position (without knowing exactly what it was because I had avoided the subject), but in all honesty my views and position on the matter initially weren't all that well-defined beyond some misgivings, and I've refined my position a lot since then.
Hadn't heard of this, I can see how it might fit some of my replies.
I did eventually notice the downvotes (maybe they don't show up on mobile or something? for some reason in some views I didn't see them) and my initial thought was, "that's odd, I should ignore that and consider it a sign of engagement with the content, I shouldn't let it discourage me from posting." I was more excited that I got some high-effort responses.
I also noticed that downvotes don't show up on people's profiles (comments do), and I think comments are a better signal of quality engagement (probably)
One problem with the downvotes is that it's not totally clear what they're about, here's my predictions about what they mean:
30% Your position is stupid, I'm not going to argue, just downvote, go do some research
30% I don't like trans people bossing around the internet
20% This should have been in the culture war thread
20% this is clearly a troll
If my goal as a poster is to drive engagement with my post that aligns pretty well with the goals of a troll, is there an important distinction? I guess I also am interested in learning rather than just driving engagement/outrage, so that might be detectable.
I want to hear the d*rwin story
Scores for individual posts are hidden for the first 24 hours to encourage users to engage with the actual content of the OP/reply, rather than the numerical value of community sentiment. This also has the lovely side effect of curtailing the more odious forms of karma obsession, such as "E: wow, didn't expect this to blow up!" or "haha the kids are mad, tell ur mom to send more pizza rolls to the basement".
A problem you and I share.
Far and away the most reasonable excuse for the reaction you received, there's an unspoken assumption here that one needs a fairly comprehensive understanding of the differing views and narratives of sundry CW topics. I don't have a particular opinion on this norm as I can understand both positions WRT how well informed a poster should be when saying something here (pro: you are wasting peoples time by prompting them to explain something that could've been googled. con: you can't expect everyone to stay abreast at all times of the goings on in every genre of the CW in order to contribute to the discussion).
I am confident you wouldn't once you did, it's boring forum drama and the poster in question either sublimated his rhetoric to the point he blends in with the background or just didn't bother following this forum to its current iteration.
Except for this one and your other reply in this thread, which was made two hours ago but apparently edited 21 hours ago (?). Paging @ZorbaTHut
Edit: nevermind, the times on these posts are what's shifting about, I grabbed a screenshot from my phone showing these as sub-1 hour. Weird.
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If you hover over the score, it still got 6 upvotes. All it means is the opinion is unpopular with the majority of people, but nonetheless five additional people still thought it was worthwhile to vote up. It's like politics. Most candidates get few votes compared to the front-runners, but they carve a niche/audience anyway, like Ron Paul and others. Similarly, a TV show or band can still be a success if it has a small and loyal audience.
I thought after writing this that I should've been clear that I didn't mean absolute difference between only positive scores. What I was attempting to highlight was the presence of unjustified negative reactions to what is a pretty banal question. Besides, saying something unpopular should in fact be incentivized, it's (partly) the purpose of a good faith discussion. Heat-forward, inflammatory, noisy shitposts should be disincentivized.
I suspect somewhere around 16 people read his question and made it to the part where he said "my trans friends" for the first time, then decided they hated what they were reading and hit the appropriate button. I happen to believe that is an ugly and stupid way of engaging with someone who is earnestly looking for an answer.
(Edit: the score has also shifted somewhat to the positive since I wrote this post, I believe my point stands)
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Not getting notifications for responses to many of my comments. Some recent update probably fucked that up.
Argh, that's going to be a pain to track down.
Any idea when it started? Do you happen to have a lot of people blocked?
Edit: Also, do you mind if I trawl around in the database to look at your notifications? Technically this means I'll probably see your private messages, if you have any, but I don't care about that I just want to look at the database stuff.
Started 2-3 days ago. Didn't block anyone. Blocked by 1 user, but that user is nowhere near any of the posts. I think there is some public/private profile tomfoolery going on here, I am not sure about that but one of the users notifications I did not get has a private profile.
Hrm. Maaaaybe?
Do you mind if I trawl around in the database to look at your notifications? Technically this means I'll probably see your private messages, if you have any, but I don't care about that I just want to look at the database stuff.
Go ahead
We currently have no idea what's going on. It looks like you're receiving notifications for all replies to your comments and the database says they're being "read", which mostly means that it generated a page with the notification included, but it does mean it isn't just being skipped by the notification-page code.
It's possible they ended up buried deep in your notification page somehow and they didn't get bubbled to the top, but we tried some stuff and couldn't reproduce that.
I know this might be tough, but is there any way you can find a comment that you didn't get notified for, give me the link, and search in your notifications page to see if you can find it in an unexpected place?
Alright, I'll summarise it for you within a day.
After noticing this issue, I went back to my profile and reopened some of my comments to make sure I didn't miss any replies, this could explain them being "read".
I'm not discounting the chance that I missed something, I'll work backward and let you know tomorrow.
So the way "read" works, as I understand it, is that it just marks things as "read" once they're displayed on your notifications page. It doesn't matter if you open them or not, it matters once you open the page. It's there mostly as a check to ensure that they're being displayed at all - there's some theoretical ways they could be hidden, but the "read" bit is set after all those checks are applied.
My vague theory is that there's a problem with sorting, not with actual display, so they were there, just possibly deeply buried in an unintuitive place. But this is conjecture.
Anything you can find out is appreciated; in a day or two we're also going to be putting some more code in to help diagnose this and/or solve the sorting problem, if we can unearth it. So keep me posted, regardless of what you figure out - if it keeps happening, we'll keep messing with it until we figure out what's going on.
All the responses to my comments are there on my notification page. I think the ordering is correct.
However, to be more specific, In this specific comment. I only got the notification when 'SomethingMusic' responded to me, notification as in the red bell icon. The other two responses are there in the /notifications page, but I don't recall seeing the red bell icon for them.
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FWIW, I've noticed something kind of related - if you make a post that gets a lot of direct replies, you do get notified for all of them, but the newest ones are at the bottom of the comment responses on the notifications page, so you have to scroll past all of the older replies and their full subthreads to see them, which is kind of easy to miss. It might help to sort the replies on the notification page as newest-first.
The weird part is that I've had this reported, and seen this personally, and I cannot reproduce it.
Ugh. Will go file a bug for it and pester our devs.
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+1. Same problem, same timeframe, did not block anyone, my interlocutor does not have a private profile though.
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Just a theory: you don't have like a million tabs open with one of them including your notification page, do you? Just asking because the same thing happened to... uh, my girlfriend... in canada.
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I've just signed up after lurking for a good while, please forgive me if I'm a little out of the loop and this has already been addressed or explained. Is there a reason why I'm automatically upvoting my own comments? It seems like kind of an odd feature for the community (if anything I would think you should, by default, upvote the comment or top level post you're responding to) plus I feel a little self conscious looking at the little highlight showing the implied numerical value of how proud I am of myself(1). I'd be very curious to see if anyone else has/had any feelings whatsoever about it.
Reddit has the same feature.
My interpretation of this feature is that, if you find yourself embarrassed at being forced to upvote a comment that you made, then you shouldn't have made the comment in the first place.
Thank you, and greyenlightenment too! I have never and would never make an account on reddit and probably not hn either, so I guess this is one of those little shibboleths that you wouldn't even think about if you were familiar with those kinds of message boards. It still seems odd to me like laughing at your own joke before anyone else does, but if that's the industry standard I'm not complaining. Learn something new every day.
Just curious: how did you end up here? When we moved offsite a lot of people worried about being cut off from the pipeline of new users. But, if you never even had a reddit account, then you're a proper newcomer.
As RBG has personally attested to but I can confirm is a non-unique case, there exists a set of people who wanted to participate but didn't want a Reddit account. I, for instance, have a "no big platforms" rule, and /r/ssc and /r/themotte are the only things that even tempted me. So obviously, you move off Reddit and you get all of us, but that's not an ongoing thing.
I too would pretty regularly lurk, but didn't have a reddit account, because that would lead to even more endless timewasting than already goes on. This may be similarly unhealthy, but should be more manageable.
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I stumbled across Scott with Meditations on Moloch back in 2014, slithered down the rabbit hole, lurked the CW thread in its different iterations ever since, following this particular group of people (as opposed to the various branches and offshoots ie. schism, CWR). I've never been on board with Rationality™, but I found Scott's writing sometimes excellent and often thought provoking and I enjoyed reading the kinds of discussions that happen here. As I mentioned above but could've made more clear, I wouldn't want to participate in discussions like these on any type of social media that obviously and consistently works an behalf of the assorted intelligence agencies. Not making an account here immediately after the off-site move was a function of my personal laziness and also not really wanting to participate. I happen to have a large amount of free time at the moment however, and have been meaning to practice my ability to write well.
I don't know that I could be considered the modal new user for the site.
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I'd also say that this removes the incentive to upvote your own comment, which is an incentive I'm happy to eliminate.
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I agree that 0 as the initial state would be preferable. I've always thought this to be inspired by mechanics for hiding downvoted posts: if you get yourself an unprincipled hater and he goes around downvoting all your fresh comments, they instantly go below 0 and may become collapsed by default, which would prevent them from being seen (or gaining upvotes), so there's an extra 1 to start with.
Of course this is silly, you can get 2 haters, and anyway there are better solutions.
P.S. it was exciting to think you are the Ratboy Genius, but surely we cannot be so lucky, can we?
As valuable as it would be for the simulation narrative if I were the original article, no, I am not Ryan. Just a long time fan of his work, before he became a staple on /f/
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Or a downvote-maximizing AI
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The default is always 1. Same for reddit or HackerNews.
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I would like to suggest we replace the blocking functionality with an "auto-collapse all comments by this user. " Or even just a solid how-to and template for setting that up in the "custom CSS" setting tab.
I mean, I don't think any of you see my name and wish you had a "+" button that could be clicked—perhaps with an audible sigh—before my comments were displayed...
But let's get to know each other.
Maybe it's because I've literally never used the block feature on any website, but I agree. What value is blocking adding in a place like this? If someone is harassing/insulting you then they are breaking the rules and should be banned. If they are not violating the rules, what valid reason could you possibly have for blocking them? Disagreeing with someone or finding them annoying is not a good enough reason, IMO, since this site is supposed to be about open debate where all perspectives are welcome.
There's nothing wrong with deciding "this person is so aggravating I don't want to have to read their thoughts ever again". If you don't ever feel that need, then great. But why should your preference be forced upon everyone? Nobody else is affected if I choose to block someone rather than simply ignoring their posts (or rather this will be the case once the block feature is updated). Therefore it's really none of anyone else's business either, no matter how much someone might think it goes against the spirit of the forum.
I do think there's something wrong with deciding that. I think it's definitely counter to the ethos of TheMotte, which as far as I can tell basically boils down to: (1) engage with arguments rather than people, and (2) an argument's validity depends on the facts and reasoning used to defend it, not how "gross" or "aggravating" the argument is. You're not obligated to respond to every user, but if you post here I think you should at least feel obligated to read all the non-rule-breaking responses to your post (especially the "aggravating" ones). We're supposed to seriously engage with criticism here.
Consider someone making lots of detailed, high quality posts on Romanian politics and nothing else. I might block this user simply because I DGAF about Romanian politics, and there's just soooo much of it.
This could also be solved with "mute toplevel comments by this user but not replies to something I wrote".
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Exactly. I feel like blocking people on this site runs counter to the spirit of engagement—heck, I'd probably make more use of a anti-ignore feature that lets someone who replied to me know: "I read your response, I don't have enough to say about it for a Motte-quality comment, but I do actively appreciate your time and am giving you the last word..."
Is there some emoji (maybe only available to and visible to users who've commented on a thread) that could mean, "I have read everything up to here, and you make some good points, but I am now politely excusing myself to take a phone call."
[So that's the anti-ignore feature, but then there's the ignore feature, which is like taking a fake phone call—but 100% guaranteed not to ring at the exact wrong moment so everyone notices like at that dinner party I made incredibly awkward last summer. And it's easy to code, because they're the same button.]
I actually want to add Discord-style reacts for stuff exactly like this, though that's waaaay down the line and it will not surprise me if I end up changing my mind on it.
And we'd end up making our own reacts (idea stolen from Something Awful, yeah I'm pillaging everything from everyone) so hopefully someone would end up making an appropriate react . . . even if it's really obscure, like how I'm on a few communities that use 🦈 to signal agreement.
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I've blocked a few users on other fora because I simply dislike their writing style, or they're too long-winded and boring.
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I think this is a very valuable change. There are certain users I would personally auto-minimize, not because I find their posts bad, but just because I find their choice of submissions personally uninteresting. But I definitely wouldn't block them, and if somebody I have "blocked" responds to one of my own comments I'd definitely like to know.
I don't see a reason for a block functionality to exist on this site, except as a short-term spam mitigation feature (e.g. for PMs).
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I'm thinking I like that idea as the right implementation of how "hide comments" should work - it autocollapses, it's up to you to uncollapse if you want.
I think Discord does the same thing. It's a good idea.
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Quick Volunteer Janitor analysis update!
I've got it spitting out Pretty Accurate Results, to the point where the best way to find bugs is now to look for posts that it thinks we should have modded but didn't, or posts that it thinks we shouldn't have modded but did, and figure out what happened. As a quick cursory glance, the answer in about half the remaining cases is either "we made a mistake" or "ehhh, that could have gone either way", which suggests it's now about as accurate as the mods are. And there's still things I have left to improve! So this is Very Promising overall.
One of the more fascinating results of this was to look at the most accurate volunteers. Out of top ten, nine of them have made less than 100 comments; in fact, half of them have made less than 25 comments, including two of the top three. My tool spit out a giant list of names and I said "who the hell are these people" and I had to go look them up to see if they were actual people. They are! They're just people who don't post a lot. This all suggests that there's a ton of near-lurkers out there who are reading stuff in detail and who have a very good idea of the community norms.
Hello, lurkers! Thank you for being here! I'm not even directing this to the set of you who are volunteering (but extra thanks to you), but to everyone who's reading; part of my goal here is just to be a place for people to see discussions, and I'm glad to know that there are people who are seeing discussions. Y'all are great.
I've got a few more pieces to put in, then I have to figure out how to connect this to the live database in a useful fashion, then I'm going to be initially setting it up as an assistance tool for the mods. If everything pans out, though, it's going to be handling the vast bulk of the moderation work for us in the future (though we're still going to be the ones verifying warnings and bans and writing the actual messages; no fully-automated harsh penalties will be applied.)
As part of this changeover I plan to set up a bit of a more formal warning/ban system so we can link related posts. Right now there's an issue where if someone goes and spams terrible posts over half the community, we tend to attach the ban message to one of them and just ignore the rest, which leads to people thinking that "the rest" did not get moderator attention. With this tool it'll be easy to group those up and just click a little checkbox that says "make a link to connect all these", and the goal is that users will see a note on each questionable post saying "this was bad and deserved moderator attention, but we applied the actual moderator action to this other message, [click here]".
Anyway, y'all are doing great, thank you for the frankly unexpected amount of quokka-clicking you've been doing. This will all make the community better.
I'm a lurking volunteer. I just had https://www.themotte.org/post/317/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/54744?context=8#context given to me to rate. I felt a three way conflict.
It is a superb piece of satire, obviously good.
I'm satired-out. There is a lot of satire on the internet. Too much, give me a break. Gut says: puke!
I like the https://www.themotte.org/rules#Disagreement rule, which the comment is breaking. That should be a warning.
I went with "bad". The instruction do say go with your gut.
I think that the disagreement rule is a good rule that we should uphold, partly for the stated reason, partly for my point 2. It might be easier for the volunteers to uphold it if there were a button with a label that was the terse version of "Brilliantly funny sarcasm, but bad, because brilliantly funny sarcasm is fentanyl for discussion."
Sometimes I suspect I've been handed an AAQC reported comment because I can’t see what’s wrong with it. Then I check context and I instantly see why someone thinks it’s bad. Sometimes the inverse happens.
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Yeah, there are absolutely nasty edge cases.
The big reason I've been avoiding adding more buttons is because the decision I'm asking you to make is the same decision the mods have to make. You're right in that that is a good summary! But at some point we need to decide what to do about it, whether we need to respond or not, and saying "there are both pros and cons to this comment" is a completely accurate statement that nevertheless fails to answer the question.
Also, this is all planned to be algorithmically handled, so if a computer program gets that response, well . . . what's it going to do with it?
Even in the tests right now, I'm boiling all the responses down to "bad" and "not-bad". I do plan to extend that in the future to capture some of the nuance people are providing, but that's hard, and I have no idea how I'd deal with something complicated like you're suggesting there.
tl;dr: Yeah, it's a tough situation, thank you for making a decision, that is exactly what I wanted you to do :)
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Are people who conduct more ratings given higher weight than those who conduct fewer? There are some days when I don't get around to checking The Motte, and I'm wondering if my "score" suffers as a result.
In the current implementation, it takes a reasonable number of ratings for it to start being confident that you're consistent. But I think once you've rated twenty or thirty posts, that effect is essentially gone.
Right now there's no time-based falloff; I'll probably add one at some point, but it's going to be on the order of months, not on the order of days.
I have no plans to turn this into a Daily Quest :)
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The last janitor-duty thing I got gave me only two posts. Have you changed it? (I think two might be a bit worse effect/friction ratio than three.)
At the moment it pops up the window if there's any posts, then gives you up to three. It's possible to get as low as one if you're unlucky. I'm going to end up tweaking this to something like "wait until you have three posts unless one of them is getting kinda old, in which case just give up and give the user what you have available".
(it's actually possible to get "zero" if the last one got approved between you seeing the banner and clicking on it, but it'll just show you an apology and not start the cooldown timer)
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This is a really cool feature/stab at crowdsourced modding! Well done!
I find it really fun to use, too.
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Hi to you too and thanks.
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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:
Or
Or
Or
"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!"
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:
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.
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.
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.
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".
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 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.
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.
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 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.
Zorba does have some data based on the reporting functionallity, and the mod helper thing.
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.
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.
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I think some of those fruit might as well be on the Moon. The biggest thing "driving out" Harris supporters compared to Trump supporters is simply that Reddit/Facebook (and a ton of smaller-but-still-massive forums like SpaceBattles) allow the former and not the latter while we allow both, and so the Harris supporters have less reason to bother coming here in the first place. Allow any form of witchcraft that the mainstream doesn't and you'll be disproportionately showered in that kind of witch. Hell, I personally am an example; I don't think I'd have come here if I hadn't been forced off SpaceBattles for SJ-heresy (I left before actually getting permabanned, but it was obvious I was headed in that direction).
You could theoretically avoid a large anisotropy in this regard by allowing all the witches (since if you allow e.g. stalkers you will get showered in both pro-SJ stalkers and anti-SJ stalkers, and if you do this on enough distinct points then the signal on any one point will be mitigated by the noise from the others). But "good discussion" would indeed be totally abdicated by such a move.
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I wrote up a reply in respond to the original thread before I saw that, but here, pastin' it in:
Alright, I went looking for a post I had in mind, possibly written by Scott, and totally couldn't find it. Sorry. You're getting a crappy cliff-notes version of it.
The cliff-notes version is that you shouldn't always need to prefix things with "I think". That it is, sometimes, pretty obvious that you're referring to an opinion. If I say "anchovies are tasty" then I am probably not suggesting that anchovies are objectively tasty; it's a phrase that maps to "I think anchovies are tasty".
This is, to some extent, how I think about statements like "Kamala is an air-head".
At the same time, I don't think we want to go full force on that. The bigger your claim is, the more wide-reaching, the more antagonistic, the more it's aimed at a person in the community, the more I want people to couch things carefully. In this case it's a single target who isn't in the community. Is that good? No, not really, I wish they'd stop. But it's maybe not lethal to the community we're trying to build.
I don't really know how to phrase this in the rules, and I'll admit that a perfectly strict reading of the rules probably wouldn't allow that. We've always allowed a bit of flex, and part of me has always been unsatisfied by this just because it makes moderation a lot more subjective. But the alternative is, I think, worse, and the flex will continue until I figure out a way to formalize it.
tl;dr:
The rule technically doesn't allow it, practically we kinda allow it as one of many ways that people can flex the rules a little if they've built up cred, I'm not totally happy with this, I'm not convinced there's a better alternative, it is definitely not true that "insulting public figures is tolerated, full stop" because I don't want people to just start flaming public figures; the rules, as always, cannot be fully complete because humans are kinda dicks.
(if anyone can find the post i'm thinking of, it would be appreciated, I'm not having any luck)
I don't think the "opinion/fact" axis is the right way to think about this.
The problem with "Kamala is an air-head" isn't that people might mistake it for a fact and get misinformed. It's that the goal is to be insulting (i.e. waging culture war, demonstrably showing you couldn't care less about Kamala Harris supporters, etc.).
I take your argument as roughly
And true/false positive debates are ultimately quantitative and we can't even express the tradeoffs we believe in, let alone actually argue whether we're on one side or another (i.e. what does "every 1% increase in censorship" even mean?).
That said, I think there's a pretty clear alternative which is the Victorian Sufi Buddha Lite policy: if you're going to say something mean about somebody, it should be necessary and true.
This has always been my preferred philosophy for moderation, and it's also puzzled me why it's never been part of TheMotte moderation (given our ancestry). After these discussions I'm guessing the moderators here agree it's too restrictive for discussion.
Yeah, that's a reasonable paraphrase.
Oh yeah, you are absolutely right there. I don't have even remotely the tools I need to formalize any of this, I'm workin' in the dark.
If anything, the problem isn't that it's too restrictive, it's that it's too lax. How do you judge "necessary"? If the poster judges it, then the site turns into a flamewar because everyone thinks it's absolutely necessary to flame their opponents. If the mods judge it, then we're right back to Maximally Subjective Moderation, and I admit we're close to that anyway but we at least try to avoid that when possible.
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Do the "deserves a warning" and "deserves a ban" (and "actually a quality contribution") options on janitor duty generate reports for the mods? I was asked to review a bad comment earlier, and I think that would streamline it a bit.
At the moment, no; in fact, the janitor-duty messages are chosen from reports.
The current next-step is to rig things up so the mods get Warning/Ban May Be Justified confidence feedback from the janitor system. This has not happened because I'm going through Fun Employment Adventures (tm) but it's in process :)
Is there really no random stuff in there? Even aside from the obvious quality contribution reports, 70+% of the posts are totally unobjectionable
There is absolutely no random stuff in there. Every single comment you see has been reported at least once.
This is a large part of the mod workload, and is why I'm trying to solve that :V
I thought for sure that this meant some of the comments in the volunteer set were not chosen due to a user-initiated report, but were system-chosen, and I've been confidently wrong about that assumption. Mea culpa.
I agree with @Bernd, though--that means the report button is being massively overused. I assign "neutral" a lot.
So there's a gap between "as originally planned", "as implemented", and "as currently planned" :)
The original plan is that it would in fact use some well-established comments as references now and then. The current implementation was me saying "eh, you know what, this doesn't matter, I'm just not going to worry about it for now, let's just base it off reports".
The current plan is that maybe I just don't need to worry about introducing reference comments because I'm honestly getting tons of good calibration data off reported comments.
But once this gets hooked up to making actual decisions, that might not work anymore. It might be that I then have to introduce comments that have already been decided on in some way. This is still up-in-the-air.
Your assumption was right about my original plans and may be right later on as well, it's just not right at the moment because I wanted to get something working. This is a completely reasonable assumption to make.
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On a similar note, since bans vary pretty greatly in severity here, should there be some way to distinguish between a comment deserving a short ban and a long ban? A one-day ban is more similar to a warning than to a long ban, I think.
Maybe.
A large part of the distinction between a large ban and a short ban comes from how often they've been banned. But not all of it.
I do want to avoid having too many checkboxes, though - honestly I think we may already have too many.
Balancing act :/
If you were going for a shorter list, I'd omit "good," "bad," and collapse "deserves a warning/ban" into one option and have a mod consider the appropriate response. The current list might be superior if you're looking at calibration of the user input, though.
Quality contribution speaks for itself. For egregiously bad comments, I'll usually tag them "deserves a warning," since I'm hoping that will flag mod attention, which will escalate to a ban if reasonable under the circumstances. If my opinion is good/bad/neutral, I'll usually tag "neutral" because that correctly signals my view of "no mod action needed" and my subjective opinion of the comment isn't really important past that point.
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The janny duty should have the comments anonymized.
Edit - And ideally should be shown to users who didn't view that comment chain already. But I am not sure if there are enough users and enough comments in the queue to facilitate that.
Yeah, that's a very fair suggestion.
It's tricky because context is important and I don't think I can provide an easy-to-implement interface for that besides "just go look at the thread", in which case anonymity is gone anyway. But removing the name from the initial impression would still be a good step.
This is harder to do than you might expect, but yeah I think it's a good idea.
Can the link to context in the janny duty link to an anonymized context? I guess you'd have to use pseudonyms in the context because a single poster can have multiple comments in the context. And it wouldn't help a dedicated de-anonymization effort b/c it's simple to just load up the site in another window, but maybe it would still help preclude casual biasing.
In theory, but yeah, this starts becoming less effective and more work to implement. Might still do it, but it'll take a bit to get there.
It would be good to see, at least, the comment that is replying to (is there an easy way to do this that I'm missing?) some are completely baffling without that.
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Yes, name is the first thing I look at reading any post.
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seems like overkill and would not work. someone could just search for a string matching the post to see who posted it
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Seconded, came here to say the same thing,
Having voted in a few of these, I notice that I recognize several of the names, and struggle to detach my opinion of the comment from my preexisting impression of the user.
Other observation, if the comment is a response to another comment, sometimes the context of the comment I'm supposed to be judging is tricky to parse, it might be useful to include the original comment for context (understanding that some people will screw up which comment they're supposed to judge).
Anyway, just my thoughts from having voted for a few of these, take them for whatever they're worth.
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A modhat comment showed up in my janny queue. Could the UI preserve the modhat? If I didn't check the context I would tick "deserves a warning", but mods are allowed to say people are being obnoxious.
Came here to bring up this exact problem. I've had modhat (or rather, admin-hat) comments show up multiple times already. Presumably people angry they got told off and using the report button as a super-downvote. I think it would be best if they were just excluded entirely.
@ZorbaTHut
I've seen a half-dozen or so, all from @Amadan. Was half-wondering if this was to test my alignment with the mods, but your explanation probably fits better.
@Tarnstellung is correct - people very often angrily report mod comments that were directed at them, or at a post they agreed with.
I don't know how Zorba feels about excluding them from the queue entirely, since it is possible a mod could actually cross the line and need a talking to (we usually do that amongst ourselves, but it happens). But @popocatepetl is right that the context of being a mod comment is relevant.
I've jannied plenty of mod comments, including plenty of yours, Amadan. At some point in the future, it's possible there will be a bad mod, but today it feels like a waste of my time to mod the people holding the Motte together. Maybe the solution is ignoring reports by users who abuse the reporting mechanism? (As measured by those reported comments subsequently being jannied as good comments)
I think it's a good precedent/safeguard even if it isn't useful at the object level. It'll catch the first (ever!) instances of bad modding instead of having to be deployed in the wake of an incident that took longer to detect. "Wasting" a few percent of the janitor duties is a pretty low cost, all things considered.
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(sorry this took a while to get to, was at a professional convention)
Interesting, I'm actually surprised it doesn't preserve the modhat.
Hrm. I don't want to exclude them entirely because the number of times I've had to ban a mod has been non-zero. Very low . . . but non-zero. @ulyssesword is correct here, I think; the cost is low, and the chance of getting useful info out is low, but when useful info happens holy shit I really want to know about it.
I think "get the modhat back on, but otherwise leave them in the system" is probably the right solution here. Bug filed, for now.
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Rather than this random sampling, isn't an alternative to just harness the already-existing upvotes and downvotes? Users whose downvotes are correlated with mod action on a comment can be used as signals for which comments to surface to the mods, or even automatic action (whatever that may be) if the signal is strong enough (e.g. several pseudo-moderators downvote it).
The problem is users' ability to cherrypick. I could become a Very Reputable User easily by just finding comments that are unambiguously good and bad and voting appropriately on them, and now I can influence the site by voting on stuff that I want shifted towards a ban or towards a quality contribution.
With the Volunteer system, you don't get to choose the comments that you score; the system will be giving you difficult cases and it (intentionally) doesn't accept "I don't know" as an answer.
This is true, but feels solvable with more sophisticated statistical techniques.
Like, as a simple example, just use Item Response Theory to effectively down-weight easy questions.
That’s a neat article, and I’m envious that psychologists managed to stake a claim on the term “psychometrics.”
I’m not sure I understand how the item information functions are determined. I work with radar—half the trouble in setting up a Kalman filter is characterizing the various noise terms! Determining whether a question is easy/hard/controversial with very few data points sounds challenging.
So, if it were me, and I decided to use IIT, I would probably just set up the Three parameter logistic model and just use a Bayesian framework to optimize that. I'd choose a prior that made questions have poor discrimination by default, so you'd only get significant credit for answering questions correctly that other people answered incorrectly.
But it occurs to me, that I might actually be barking up the wrong tree. Here is my new idea:
Let X be a vector where X[i] = vote_by_user_i # only before mod action
Train a model to predict mod action based on user votes, but bound it so that dY/dX_i ≥ 0 at all points. A plausible choice would be simple logistic regression.
Train the same model but with a user dropped out
Now compute the change in loss/accuracy between the two models and subtract the ∆loss that you'd expect by simple chance. This change in accuracy is a measure of how much a user has improved the voting system on the margin. Call it Q [a].
Finally, choose some monotonically increasing function, f, to convert from Q to how much weight a user's votes should get in displayed upvotes, mod queue priority, etc. The only real constraint is f(0) = 0; otherwise, f can be chosen by the mods in some "reasonable way".
Note, this system will cause users who vote randomly or negatively (in favor of garbage, against gems) to be assigned Q=0. Since f(0) = 0, this gives their votes zero weight in whatever you're using them for. The only way to reliably achieve a positive score is to find hard-to-identify garbage for the community and not pump up your own garbage too much.
[a] For bonus points, incorporate a time component to give bonus points to early voters, which encourages identifying garbage earlier.
Ah, so the truth source is eventual mod action. That makes sense.
I was originally thinking P(you + | other users -), which would seem to require lots of data per comment.
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this suggestion is why "the system asks for feedback" is important. Organic user upvote and downvotes are probably not equally distributed across posts.
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A bit off topic, but in the spirit of wishful thinking as we near Christmas, could the admins comment on if there are any low hanging fruits on improving the site's loading speed?
I was going to post as supporting evidence the results from the top sites that rank a website's loading speed, except when compared against a large Reddit thread, the Motte's culture war thread came up about equal in one, better in a second, and worse in a third. So perhaps these sites aren't very rigorous, and are ultimately marketing tools for whatever SaaS and consulting they are selling.
Still, I'm curious what might shave say 1-2 seconds off the loading time. Is it principally about having to shell out more money for a higher tier on AWS? Or is it code? And if the latter, is it something doable in the foreseeable future by the site's volunteers, or would it require refactoring by paid professionals into a different backend language and so pretty much is unlikely to materialize barring a windfall injection of cash from SBF 2.0?
The code fuckin' sucks :V
Loading the Culture War thread is doing literally thousands of sequential database queries. This is a known issue and one of our coders is actually working on it. It's kind of on hold right now, partly due to their own lack of time and partly because I'm trying to solve the intermittent crash issue (which itself is on hold because I've been busy).
But it is a known issue and we do have a path to solving it and it is a high priority, it's just a matter of putting the time in.
tl;dr: code, difficult to fix, not impossible to fix, near the top of the priority list but not at the top.
I notice loading the cw thread really hangs by the end of the week. Is that just my shitty browser, or is it all the accumulated comments?
Probably the accumulated comments, but if you're curious, open up dev mode in your browser, look at the performance tab, and see how much of it is the network traffic and how much of it is stuff like parsing and scripts.
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Gotcha thanks for the update!
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This actually may be improved now!
It feels faster! Thanks Santa!
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Making rationalatosk open in a new window should be a top priority imo. I want to help out, but every time I do all the new comments turn old and sometimes that's hundreds of replies, and I end up missing new posts on old threads.
I have been on a couple of forums with a magic system which only marks a post read if it has been on your screen - would that be a feasible option? Because that would be even better.
You should be able to just open it in a new window manually, for what it's worth; we can make it a default, but you can do it on your own also.
I do plan to add a link to make that easier but nothing's stopping you right now!
I'm curious how that's implemented; the concern is always server load. On the other hand, maybe we could make that clientside? Wouldn't be persisted across devices but maybe that'd be okay.
Because the system kinda sucks, honestly, and we've had more critical things to deal with than fixing that.
Sorry. There's still warts in a lot of places. We're slowly taking care of them.
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God damn it I am a fuck up. I must have been jittery when I tried to do that the first time because it didn't work, so I thought it was some kind of button. Never mind me. I also meant to write this as a reply to crows' post -_-;
Hah! No worries - you're actually not the first person to ask this, so if you're a fuckup, so are other people. And that suggests it's something we need to improve :)
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I think the cases I find trickiest are the ones where I want to say, "This is a bad post, but the one it's replying to is worse and they both deserve moderation", or "This is bad but not for the obvious reason", or "This is a good contribution phrased in a terrible way", or any other judgement more nuanced than just good or bad.
Oh yeah, those are terrible.
But part of the goal of this is to sorta crowdsource moderation and take some load off the mods. And those are a good example of the tough decisions we have to make all the time.
So, yeah, understood, but nevertheless, at some point we need to make a decision :)
But look on the bright side: just pick a somewhat-approriate option randomly, and chances are good someone else will have picked the other one randomly. This is intentionally set up as a statistical deal, which is a luxury the mods don't have!
I think there ought to be an "other" option with a text box kind of like there is for the report button.
The problem is that we're never going to read those - the entire point of this is to automate it. "Other" would be the same as saying "I refuse to answer", and I intentionally don't want to introduce that because it would let people skip out on dealing with tough cases.
To be blunt, that sounds more like problem on your end. Do you not read the reports that are marked "other"?
Likewise letting non-mods skip out on the tough cases doesn't actually strike me as a downside.
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You are not making the decision for the mods. You are telling them where/which direction to look at/away from. Low resolution/dimensionality is sufficient for that.
Sure, I understand that I'm not modding. I also understand that more detailed feedback would create additional workload for mods, which is the exact opposite of what this system is supposed to do.
I just stress a little when I worry that the option I select might be misleading.
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If there's somewhere better I should be commenting things like this let me know, but I think the + and - composition of the vote counts were not showing up in the child comments of the parent comments to which I was replying when I had added a comment but not yet refreshed the page.
Probably worth verifying before trying to fix.
I will admit I'm actually not sure what you mean here. Sorry. Can you rephrase?
I meant that if I try to do the following process, it doesn't work, so far as I can tell:
Go to a thread that's been around for long enough for vote counts to appear.
Reply to a comment that already has child comments with vote counts showing.
Don't reload the page or anything.
Hover over the vote count of a child comment of the one I replied to to see the values of + vs - votes. (this doesn't happen).
I can still see the vote counts of the other comments, just not ones that are descendants of the ones that I replied to since I last loaded the page.
Sorry about not saying that more clearly, that was a little obscure.
Hah, probably just isn't decorating that mouseover properly.
I'll put that in the bug list, thanks!
If I run across more bugs, where is the proper place to put them?
If you feel up to writing a developer-friendly bug description and either have or don't mind getting a Github account, put it straight on the Git page.
If you want to talk to developers and either have or don't mind getting a Discord account, come hang out in the dev discord (and if you know Python we can always use help :V).
Otherwise, honestly, here is fine, I don't mind getting bug reports!
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i'm having a hard time reproducing this bug but i also may just be misunderstanding what you mean here so just necroing here to try to see and if i can get a better description
in order to reproduce this bug, where should i create the comment given this example thread
and what steps should I take after I've made the comment?
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Is there a feature (or working on one) to skip to new posts like the old ~new system on SSC?
I'm honestly not familiar with that system; can you explain how it worked?
New posts (to you) were displayed with the word ~new at the top (much like how new posts here have a bluish hue).
This meant you could ctrl-F and jump to things you had not read.
Oh, that makes sense. Yeah, that'd be really easy to do - in fact, you could probably do it yourself in a custom CSS stylesheet, but it sounds useful enough that I'd rather just add it to the site.
Thanks for the suggestion!
That sounds great.
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As an alternative that would be very useful to me but maybe not everyone would be some kind of internal comment content collapse and a button somewhere at the top of the thread to "collapse" all read comments.
/images/16746070202280202.webp
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I was asked to review a comment that was just "comment deleted by user." I gave it a neutral, just wanted to point out that if the comment was deleted because it was heinously awful, it may mess up your calculation of whether people are good meta-mods if that isn't taken into account. And also, kind of pointless to spend reviews on deleted comments.
Same happened to me. I resisted the urge to cheekily rate it as good or bad and also went for neutral.
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same
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Same here, including the judgment of "deleted by user" as "neutral".
I suppose there maybe should be a "mu" option.
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Yeah, gonna just filter them out entirely. Thanks for the headsup :D
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Yeah, I just left the page because I didn't really know what to do for that. I felt like giving a neutral to a bad comment would be seen as poor meta-modding and I have no idea if they can still see deleted comments or if they can see the time that I rated the comment in relation to when it was deleted and I'd rather earn my bad meta-mod reputation honestly.
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I'm in favor of the blocking revision. Somebody blocked me, which I realized only after writing a comment to their post which then got rejected. I angrily blocked them as retaliation and it strikes me that this isn't how the website is supposed to function re disagreement.
IMO there should be no blocking.
I disagree. There are users that express views that I find utterly disgusting (e.g. antisemitism). I support their right to express themselves, but if I am forced to constantly see that around, it would significantly detract from my interest in participating in the forum. I'd rather not to see that. But if other people want to engage those people and discuss with them, I think it's their right, and they should not be deprived of it just because I find it too much for me. I think ability to block content which disgusts me for myself personally, while allowing everybody else to choose their level of engagement, is a good compromise. Of course, if the moderator thinks the user is so toxic that vast majority of the forum would prefer not to have them around, that's different thing - but I can not claim my preferences always match the preferences of the vast majority. So having different level of dis-engagement is beneficial.
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Sometimes, the siren call is strong and you need to tie yourself to the post.
There are certain posters that I’ve engaged in long conversation that goes nowhere. Maybe it’s me. Maybe it’s them. Maybe it’s us. But blocking such user is a way of removing them temptation of me (and them) wasting time.
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Oh, so blocking doesn't make the whole thread invisible so you can't reply to anyone in it? That's way better than reddit at least, although it'd be hard to be worse.
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