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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   12654 thread views

[META] Something Shiny and Two Things Boring

I've got a new feature almost ready to go. I'm pretty stoked about this one because I've been wanting it for quite literally years, but it was never possible on Reddit.

Hey, guess what? We're not on Reddit!

But before I continue, I want to temper expectations. This is a prototype of a first revision of an experimental feature. It is not going to look impressive; it is not going to be impressive. There's a lot of work left to do.

The feature is currently live on our perpetually-running dev site. Log in, click any thread, and go look below the Comment Preview. You'll see a quokka in a suit asking you for help. (His name is Quincy.) Click the cute li'l guy and you'll be asked to rate three comments. Do so, and click Submit. Thank you! Your reward is another picture of Quincy and a sense of satisfaction.

So, uh . . . . what?

Okay, lemme explain.

This is the first part of a feature that I'm calling Volunteering. Once in a while, the site is going to prompt you to help out, and if you volunteer, it'll give you a few minutes of work to do. Right now this is going to be "read some comments and say if they're good or not". Later this might include stuff like "compare two comments and tell me if one of them is better", or "read a comment, then try to come up with a catchy headline for it".

These are intentionally small, and they're entirely optional. You can ignore it altogether if you like.

I'm hoping these can end up being the backbone of a new improved moderation system.

Isn't this just voting, but fancy?

You'd think so! But there are critical differences.

First, you do not choose the things to judge. The system chooses the things it wants you to judge. You are not presented with thousands of comments and asked to vote on the ones you think are important, no, you are given (at the moment) three specific comments and information is requested of you.

This means that I don't need to worry about disproportionate votecount on popular comments. Nor do I need to worry about any kind of vote-brigading, or people deciding to downvote everything that a user has posted. The system gets only the feedback it asks for. This is a pull system; the system pulls information from the userbase in exactly the quantities it wants instead of the userbase shoving possibly-unwanted information at the scoring systems.

Second, you can be only as influential as the system lets you. On the dev site you can volunteer as often as you want for testing purposes, but on the live site, you're going to - for now - be limited to once every 20 hours. I'll probably change this a lot, but nevertheless, if the system decides you've contributed enough, it'll thank you kindly and then cut you off. Do you want to spend all day volunteering in order to influence the community deeply? Too bad! Not allowed.

But this goes deeper than it sounds. Part of having the system prompt you is that not all prompts will be the system attempting to get actionable info from you. Some of the prompts will be the system trying to compare your choices against a reference, and the system will then use this comparison to figure out how much to trust your decisions.

That reference, of course, is the mods.

I've previously referred to this as the Megaphone system or the Amplifier system. One of our devs called it a "force multiplier". I think this gets across the core of what I'm aiming for. The goal here is not majority-rules, it's not fully decentralized moderation. It's finding people who generally agree with the mods and then quietly harnessing them to handle the easy moderation cases.

(We have a lot of easy moderation cases.)

There's another important point here. The mods are only human and we make mistakes. My hope is that we can get enough volunteer help to provide significantly more individual decisions than the mods can, and my hope is that the combined efforts of several people who don't quite agree with the mods in all cases is still going to be more reliable than any single mod. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if there's people out there who are better at judging posts than our mods are! It's just hard to find you; some of you may not even comment, and you're pretty undiscoverable right now, but you will certainly get a chance to volunteer!

Also, this will hopefully improve turnaround time a lot. I'm tired of filtered comments taking hours to get approved! I'm tired of really bad comments sticking around for half a day! There are many people constantly commenting and voting, and if I can get a few minutes of help from people now and then, we can handle those rapidly instead of having to wait for a mod to be around.

Wow! You get all of this, with absolutely no downsides or concerns!

Well, hold on.

The big concern here is that virtually nobody has ever done this before. The closest model I have is Slashdot's metamoderation system. Besides that, I'm flying blind.

I also have to make sure this isn't exploitable. The worst-case scenario is people being able to use this to let specific bad comments through. I really want to avoid that, and I've got ideas on how to avoid it, but it's going to take work on my part to sort out the details.

And there's probably issues that I'm not even thinking of. Again: flying blind. If you think of issues, bring 'em up; if you see issues, definitely bring 'em up.

Oh man! So, all this stuff is going to be running real soon, right?

Nope.

First I need some data to work off. Full disclosure: all the current system does is collect data, then ignore it.

But it is collecting data, and as soon as I've got some data, I'll be working on the next segment.

This is the first step towards having a platform that's actually better-moderated than the current brand of highly-centralized sites. I don't know if it'll work, but I think it will.

Please go test it out on the dev site, report issues, and when it shows up here (probably in a few days) click the button roughly daily and spend a few minutes on it. Your time will not be wasted.

Blocking

Right now this site's block feature works much the same as Reddit's. But I want to change that, because it sucks.

My current proposal is:

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

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

  • If they attempt to reply to your comment, it will include the note "This user has blocked you. You are still welcome to reply, but your replies will be held to a stricter standard of civility."

  • This note is accurate and we will do so.

That's the entire proposed feature. Feedback welcome!

User Flair and Usernames

We're going to start cracking down a bit on hyperpartisan or antagonistic user flair. Basically, if we'd hit you with a warning for putting it in a comment, we'll hit you with a warning for putting it in your flair. If anyone has a really good reason for us to not do this, now's the time to mention it!

Same goes for usernames. On this site, you can actually change your display username, and we're just leaving that in place. So we'll tell you to change your name if we have to. Extra for usernames: don't use a misleading or easily-confused username, okay? If it looks like you're masquerading as an existing well-known user, just stop it.

I'm currently assuming that both of these fall under our existing ruleset and don't need new rules applied. If you disagree strongly, let me know.

The Usual Stuff

Give feedback! Tell me how you're doing? Do you have questions? Do you have comments? This is the place for them!

Are you a coder and want to help out? We have a lot of work to do - come join the dev discord.

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virtually nobody has ever done this before

A similar proposal I've heard of is recursive prediction markets. E.g,. you hold a prediction market on what the probability another prediction market will/would assign when asked what the chance that a researcher spending a lot of time on a topic would conclude. I did some early work on this here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/cLtdcxu9E4noRSons/part-1-amplifying-generalist-research-via-forecasting-models and here: https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/FeE9nR7RPZrLtsYzD/part-2-amplifying-generalist-research-via-forecasting, and in general there is some work on this under the name "amplification".

Log in

Heads up that I couldn't log in with my normal username and password.

The dev site is completely separate--including user accounts. So to use the dev site, you have to make an account on the dev site.

Cannot believe I won't own the monopoly on quokka images on the motte! Unacceptable

I really like the volunteer modding. Ive been hoping that kind of thing would come around here. I don't have the time commitment to become a mod but sometimes I feel motivated to warn other people when their posts are really, really bad. I noticed a few users criticizing wanna-be moderation so I hope this pans out well.

Why include a short note or title about the post? Is the idea to collect data for either quality vault or AAQC? Is the reason secret? The vault repo hasn't been updated in a long time, is that basically dead and no longer being updated?

Why include a short note or title about the post? Is the idea to collect data for either quality vault or AAQC? Is the reason secret? The vault repo hasn't been updated in a long time, is that basically dead and no longer being updated?

The "title" idea is for the vault, yeah.

The big problem with the Vault right now is that it takes volunteer effort to edit posts for uploading, and I've been aiming volunteers at the main codebase here instead. Coming up with good titles is part of the issue here.

The other big problem with the Vault is that a lot of posts are high-quality in context but don't really work as standalone posts. This is what the whole "compare these two posts" thing is for; I actually would intentionally not give context, basically presenting them as blog posts. This would let me take the AAQC results and boil out the absolute best for the context of a blog.

Happy about the volunteering, unhappy about the blocking.

Right now this site's block feature works much the same as Reddit's. But I want to change that, because it sucks.

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 don't want them building their own conversations on what I post

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.

But I can't see how allowing someone you've blocked to check your comments really is a better solution, and it seems worse.

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:

"BillyGoatz dared to contradict me that nine million witches were genocided". Hence, censorship.

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.

No need to give permanent commenting power when blocked just to overcome this edge case that is inherently temporary.

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.

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.

I will submit to you my proposal that a reply overrides blocking for that thread, which neatly solves this issue.

They don't realise this, they then have to start a new post about "hey mods, what happened here?"

The straightforward solution here seems to be giving improved notification for blocking.

And A then gets to block B from participating in conversations with others, even if B is not directly interacting with A.

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.

B can interact with any other conversation that wasn't originating with A.

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?")

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.

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.

A non-mod should have zero power to affect how another poster interacts with the forum.

The proposal already concedes that this isn't the case, it's in the text:

If they attempt to reply to your comment, it will include the note "This user has blocked you. You are still welcome to reply, but your replies will be held to a stricter standard of civility." This note is accurate and we will do so.

And it may be even stricter, from Zorba:

We might just need to write that to be even stricter; "if you want to reply, respond to their points in a way that doesn't directly address them". Or "that doesn't demand a response from them".

How will you police all this? But:

anything else would be allowing me to "punish" you.

Nobody has a monopoly on posts here, nobody is "punished" by not responding to something directly.

If you think they should have their posting privileges restricted, you need to report them and let the mods decide if action is warranted.

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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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

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.

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.

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?

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?

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.

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.

Now A is stuck, others see the response but not them and they can't properly defend their post.

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!

What if A posts something, then C posts B's shitty argument that A has already dealt with and blocked B over

Then C gained from reading A's argument, and B is free to block C if they want!

I don't work this way and I think most other people do not either

"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.

If you block someone, you're choosing to not defend or respond to their arguments.

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.

Then C gained from reading A's argument, and B is free to block C if they want!

I'm not exactly looking to deal with someone I've blocked in perpetuity at second hand.

"How people work" in many senses, especially complex intellectual ones, is very contingent on intent and culture.

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.

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

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.

That's a mischaracterization, my intent with a block is to opt out of conversations with someone.

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

The biggest part, in my opinion, is that blocking someone shouldn't inconvenience the person who's being blocked.

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?

How is it a burden if they can't see 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.

exclude people from the community

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 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.

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.

In the reddit implementation it prevents me - party C - from engaging with B in the current conversation.

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.

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.

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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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,

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.

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.

This is only accessible to someone with programmatic access to the DB and the time to run a statistical analysis to identify such things.

Let's see the cost-benefit analysis here.

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.

This really doesn't solve the problem I described at all. The conversation I'd like to have: [] You've now prevented this from happening.

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.

This is only accessible to someone with programmatic access to the DB and the time to run a statistical analysis to identify such things.

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 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.

The workaround just solves that completely. Everyone can continue the conversation. They can post about it too elsewhere.

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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.

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.

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.

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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I will bring up my proposed solution of having a reply override the block feature to prevent any sort of last-word effect.

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.

Let's see the evidence of actual effect and some cost-benefit analysis.

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.

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.

I like the idea of crowdsourced moderation, although I'm a bit apprehensive since I haven't seen it used anywhere else before.

By the way, do we have anything that does automated moderation reports? I think a specific user used to do it back on Reddit now and then, but it would be good to have that automated.

There's a Moderation Log. I don't vouch for this being complete, I haven't put any effort into maintaining it, but it should be kinda complete at least.

How many reports do mods typically get/day?

Somewhere in the few-dozen-per-day range, I think.

My current proposal is:

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

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

If they attempt to reply to your comment, it will include the note "This user has blocked you. You are still welcome to reply, but your replies will be held to a stricter standard of civility."

I don't see an issue with blocked people seeing comments, since they can see them by logging out or opening an incognito window. But by allowing them to reply, and notifying them that the user blocked them, you create a situation where the blocked person can respond and undermine the OPs comment, and the OP has no clue.

Like if the OP says "I love dogs" and the blocked user responds "Really? Because last year you said your dog" but they are just taking something out of context, then some readers will simply believe the blocked user.

If you're going to let blocked users know they've been blocked, then they certainly shouldn't be able to reply to comments the blocker makes. For threads, it might make sense. For subcomments that aren't made by the person blocking, sure.

Also, one behaviour I've noticed on Reddit is that a user will reply, say their peace, and then block. This is the most infuriating experience. And people block over the stupidest shit, the mildest pushback. The other day there was a thread about a woman who visited an ape everyday, and it escaped and beat her up. I replied to some comment that said the woman was antagonizing the ape and wondered why she wasn't banned from the zoo. I simply pointed out that the incident began when kids were throwing rocks at the ape, and the dude replied calling me ignorant and blocked me. lol

I don't see an issue with blocked people seeing comments, since they can see them by logging out or opening an incognito window. But by allowing them to reply, and notifying them that the user blocked them, you create a situation where the blocked person can respond and undermine the OPs comment, and the OP has no clue.

Honestly, this feels like a reasonable part of the cost of blocking someone. If you don't want to be involved in their conversation, then that's fine; it's similar to just not responding except it's automated.

The question we have here is whether someone should be able to prevent other people from responding to their comments, and I'm having a hard time coming up with a situation where they should.

Like if the OP says "I love dogs" and the blocked user responds "Really? Because last year you said your dog" but they are just taking something out of context, then some readers will simply believe the blocked user.

Keep in mind the whole "held to a higher standard of civility" thing. I think this kind of gotcha would maybe actually earn a warning.

We might just need to write that to be even stricter; "if you want to reply, respond to their points in a way that doesn't directly address them". Or "that doesn't demand a response from them". That's badly written but maybe you get what I'm sorta going for.

Honestly, this feels like a reasonable part of the cost of blocking someone. If you don't want to be involved in their conversation, then that's fine; it's similar to just not responding except it's automated.

Sure, but if you don't respond to someone they don't get a notification saying "so and so isn't responding to you". If you want to make blocking a user feel like automated ignoring someone, then there shouldn't be a message to the blocked user.

I'm currently planning for the only notification to be if they try to reply to one of your comments - they don't get a message notification, only a little visible message when they hit "reply".

I like the proposed changes for the blocking system. You're absolutely right about the Reddit version. Giving users the ability to exclude others from the conversation was a foolish design choice which has already been weaponized and I think will only get worse once more people figure out how it works.

I'm interested in the moderation feature and see it as promising. Not sure how it will fit in the regular interface--Qlippy asking for help is a little on the nose. But maybe that's appropriate. One perk of an effectively text-only community is that volunteers aren't playing roulette with porn/gore/etc.

Your blocking proposal also seems reasonable. There is an argument to be made that only blocking PMs is really necessary, as sufficiently aggressive harassment ought to violate one or another core rule. I don't really mind this supererogatory version. Opting out of the interaction feels, to me, like the correct level of exit rights in a public forum.

Regarding the usernames: I think this should be an explicit rule of its own. The most egregious names may violate all the Courtesy and Engagement rules. Sloganeering and ideological usernames may only hit one or two. To minimize litigation, it needs to be clear that names/flairs are (regulated) speech and not just a formality.

"Usernames and flair will be moderated as if they were taglines appended to each post. Other rules apply accordingly."

"Usernames and flair will be moderated as if they were taglines appended to each post. Other rules apply accordingly."

That's a good way of phrasing it, yeah. I'll probably end up using it.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I feel like the "blocking" feature is really a combination of two different features. One is an actual blocking feature and the other is an ignore feature. And all the problems arise because people want an ignore but instead have to use blocking as a substitute.

How I'd divide the features:

Blocking works the same as you proposed.

Ignoring only has the effect of not adding to your notification count. All incoming messages / comments are just automatically marked as "read" from the person you have ignored. There would be no way to tell that you have been ignored. Distinguished mod comments bypass the ignore filter. Ignored users always have their comments collapsed by default.

Blocking would be for trolls, but honestly trolls shouldn't be surviving very long on a single user account.

Ignoring would be for people that rub you wrong. Maybe you find them boring, or the points they make annoying and uninteresting. It would be rude to tell someone that you are ignoring them.

"Ignoring" seems like "blocking as proposed, except without the message requesting civility", yes?

It would also not prevent PMs. And I think whether other people know that they have been blocked or ignored really changes the whole situation. It seems like blocking someone is a not so subtle "fuck off" message to them. I think Reddit Enhancement Suite had an "ignore" option that I used quite often. I think blocking just tends to cause drama, and sometimes I was just annoyed at a user, but they weren't breaking any rules.

There also might be subtle differences with how you proposed blocking and how I think of ignoring. For example:

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

Does the bolded part mean the comments are auto-minimized or is it like a mod deleted comment that is completely gone? Ignore would auto-minimize in my mind, but block might just completely remove the comments.

The ignore would also still allow their comments and replies to end up in your inbox, it just wouldn't tick up the notifications counter. So you can look through your inbox and see them, but they can easily be missed.

Just to add my two cents in: blocking shouldn't have any externally visible effects.

For sane people, if you get blocked, you probably 1) reevaluate whether you're being an asshole and 2) disengage from interacting with the blockers' comments, just out of civility.

Blocked people are often not in this category, though. Sometimes, when someone finds out they were blocked, they are drawn to the blocker and make it their personal life mission to shit on the blocker as much as possible. They respond to the blockers' comments more than they would otherwise and do so in a less civil way, since they know the person who they're attacking isn't going to respond. They even sometimes make unblocked alts to harass the blocker.

In principle, other moderation tools exist to handle this. Reporting etc. But this increases the moderation burden, and some stuff seeps through the cracks; there's also a continuum, and someone can shift to being less civil and less positively impactful without crossing the line.

The benefit to letting a user know they were blocked is that it encourages reflection and improves future comments. But I would guess that most of the time blockers' contributions would decline in quality after knowing they're blocked, not increase. (I may be wrong about this; if your intuition suggests otherwise, it might be worth some kind of AB test in the future to answer the question.)

Tested it on the dev site, and had a couple of thoughts about the small details:

  • Is the constantly-repeating comments an artifact of it being on the dev site? If not, check the selection algorithm.

  • Should they display upvotes? Should there be context included by default?

  • When you're done, it says "Head back to the main site". Could it return you to the originating page instead? (also, it's in a normal typeface so I read it as an instruction instead of as a link) (also also, an automatic redirect might be good instead of needing a click)

I'm looking forward to seeing if it works. It's a gamble for sure, but there's not much of a danger associated with failures IMO.

Is the constantly-repeating comments an artifact of it being on the dev site? If not, check the selection algorithm.

Yeah, it is.

On the actual release version it's got a few filters, including "have you already reviewed this comment". I've got those disabled on the dev site simply because otherwise you wouldn't be able to use it.

Should they display upvotes? Should there be context included by default?

I kinda went back and forth on this one. Context is important, so I want to have the option to view it, right? But unless I just provide a link to the actual message, that starts making the interface really complicated. And if someone really wants to go find the original comment they could just copypaste the text into Google and find it that way, so maybe I shouldn't be trying to stop something that I can't stop?

Then I realized that the comment rendering code had absolutely no easy way to filter out individual components, so I said "fuck it" and just left all of them in for the sake of getting the prototype up and running.

This is definitely something that might get changed in the future.

When you're done, it says "Head back to the main site". Could it return you to the originating page instead?

This is absolutely on the Things To Polish list :)

If we're going with the "decisions correlated with mod decisions implies high quality decisions", I'm curious if there's any plan to change voting as well, so votes that correlated with mod votes get more weight.

The idea is basically that upvotes/downvotes ultimately play a role in the topics and opinions in this community, and that if the goal is a discussion of a wide variety of topics and viewpoints, upvoting/downvoting for things like effort, charity, etc. is good, whereas upvoting for things that agree with your beliefs is bad -- one leads to our ostensible goals, while the other leads to an echo chamber.

The counter argument is that the people have the right to self-determination, though if we're already happy to be moderated, this seems more like an argument of extent, rather than kind.

I don't seriously expect this option to be adapted (I'm not sure if I seriously endorse it), but I am interested in hearing counter arguments against it.

If we're going with the "decisions correlated with mod decisions implies high quality decisions", I'm curious if there's any plan to change voting as well, so votes that correlated with mod votes get more weight.

Yup.

But that's further out, and won't be happening until a few revisions of the volunteer stuff happens. If it turns out it's generating good results then I can start applying it other places, but I'm not pulling that switch until it's established.

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).

Rather than this random sampling, isn't an alternative to just harness the already-existing upvotes and downvotes?

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

  1. 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.

  2. Train the same model but with a user dropped out

  3. 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.

this suggestion is why "the system asks for feedback" is important. Organic user upvote and downvotes are probably not equally distributed across posts.

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.

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.]

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..."

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.

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.

There's nothing wrong with deciding "this person is so aggravating I don't want to have to read their thoughts ever again".

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".

I've blocked a few users on other fora because I simply dislike their writing style, or they're too long-winded and boring.

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).

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.

This is awesome! I'm looking forward to the volunteering feature. Thanks Zorba for your hard work shepherding this community.

I've worked on similar product features at big tech companies, and my instinct is that there are some easy-ish things that could be done with the data already available (upvotes, reports). One idea (similar to what @you-get-an-upvote suggested below, as well as others; it's not an original idea) is to train a recommender system or a statistical model to predict how each user will vote on each comment. Then the default behavior for sorting and auto-collapsing could use the recommendations to the moderators, representing the "community" recommendations. The model would learn how predictive each user's voting is of the moderators' votes and actions, and could even have negative valence ("this troll upvoting something means the moderators will downvote it"). Your own personal recommendations could also be available if you want to see The Motte as you wish it was moderated.

Does the volunteer comment moderation feature show the comments completely out of context? I can imagine that there are situations where a comment could look like a bad comment out of context, but in context the comment is perfectly fine. I would worry that people or comments could get flagged as being bad but that are fine in context. Hopefully the human reviewing the volunteer judgment of the comment would look at the comment in context before taking action on it, but that seems like it would result in extra work, depending on how the whole thing is implemented.

I can imagine that there are situations where a comment could look like a bad comment out of context, but in context the comment is perfectly fine.

And the reverse, like a comment that seems sensible in itself, but actually egregiously strawmans its opposition.

It currently uses the same format that the profile comment view does, which means there's no context built-in but you can click the appropriate links to see context.

This is absolutely something that I'm not perfectly happy about and would love some feedback on once people have been using it for a bit.

(it's also surprisingly a pain to change in any significant way, but I'll have to deal with that issue at some point anyway)

Just an FYI, the volunteer feature is slightly on hold because we're having some segfault issues that we can't track down, and I want to get that solved before I go adding anything major and new. If anyone knows how to solve Python segfaulting in the garbage collector, let me know :V

“This kind cannot be driven out by anything but prayer.”

Some Python modules implemented in C have pure Python implementations for portability. Depending on your background it may be obvious, but I’d try swapping in pure Python versions wherever possible. If the segfaults stop, you know someone was taking indecent liberties with the object graph.

But mostly I’d be praying that it’s not actually a bug in the runtime.

Yeah, right now I'm trying to duplicate the crash locally (so far with little success), but partly because I want to augment our testing structure anyway and this is kinda killing two birds with one stone.

If that doesn't work, what you've suggested is the next step.

If that doesn't work . . .

For anyone who's curious:

This appears to be correlated with Python 3.11. I haven't figured out what the exact cause is, though. I thought it might be the SqlAlchemy C module, but, nope, a custom build of SqlAlchemy with the C module disabled has the exact same problem.

Right now we're rolled back to Python 3.10.

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.

Gotcha thanks for the update!

This actually may be improved now!

It feels faster! Thanks Santa!

In the volunteer workflow there is a link to the rules, but the target is localhost/rules which obviously is useless.

Should be fixed now! Thanks for the report :)

(also, boy, that was a dumb mistake, sigh)

If you're not already running a local developer instance of TheMotte, then you're not the volunteer material Zorba's looking for.

RE: He Really Does it for Free? Volunteer Janitor Duty.

There's something frustrating about the multiple choice format. An "other" box with text defeats the purpose of efficiency, but mayhaps we could send additional context into the abyss and you can pretend to read them? Mods get the chance to write their reasoning down in a modded comment.

Perhaps I'm just not cut out for the high stakes decision making required for internet discussion moderation.

Can we define "neutral"? In this context I consider a neutral comment as not the best comment, but it doesn't break the rules. It's not a bad comment in that it provides some value to the forum's mission, but to be a good comment it would have benefited from more evidence, information, or clarity. Is this the general intent or is it meant to be a cop out option?

Maybe even a second section. Leave the first options as is, good, bad, neutral, aaqc. Then a yes/no to a "does this break the rules." Would complicate how the rating is done. Definitely a fan of the distributed janny work though. Great idea!

but mayhaps we could send additional context into the abyss and you can pretend to read them?

Understandable!

But I explicitly don't want to do this because we won't be reading them, and I don't want people to waste their time on it. Yes, this can be complicated, but I'm intentionally asking people to boil it down to a simple decision so I can do math to it. The individual results are going to be rarely looked at, the gestalt is what I care about, and the amount of noise created by people making hard decisions is absolutely irrelevant compared to the noise intrinsic in this sort of thing.

Can we define "neutral"? In this context I consider a neutral comment as not the best comment, but it doesn't break the rules. It's not a bad comment in that it provides some value to the forum's mission, but to be a good comment it would have benefited from more evidence, information, or clarity. Is this the general intent or is it meant to be a cop out option?

That's basically the intent, yeah. Where if you saw it in the wild, you'd neither upvote it nor downvote it.

Maybe even a second section. Leave the first options as is, good, bad, neutral, aaqc. Then a yes/no to a "does this break the rules." Would complicate how the rating is done.

One of the things I'll be looking for is also "ratings with high variance", i.e. "we got a bunch of trusted people to review this comment and half of them think it should be a ban and half of them think it should be a quality contribution". I think I can pull the signal I need out of that instead of needing to complicate the voting system; I'd much rather load that complexity into the algorithm than shove it back onto people.

Definitely a fan of the distributed janny work though. Great idea!

Thanks! Here's hoping it works well :D

A question; it is possible to know the statistics of the motte? Regarding user growth, number of users and comments and excetera.

Number of comments: Comments are currently numbered sequentially, so just look at the comment ID of the most recent comment you can find. Your comment is #44284, so, 44,284 comments as of that writing.

Number of posts: Same deal, 240 posts as of this week's Culture War thread.

Number of users: Also numbered sequentially but no good way to see the most recent user, though the user ID is on your profile page. Anyway, 1997 so far. Note that this is registered accounts, not "users"; presumably some of them are spambots and some of them are alts. Also, a lot of them are probably dormant/abandoned.

User growth: I'd need to do some database work to get info on this and I'm not likely to spend the time on it right now :)

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.

Yes, name is the first thing I look at reading any post.

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.

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.

seems like overkill and would not work. someone could just search for a string matching the post to see who posted it

Numbered lists don't seem to work in quotes:

  1. We
  1. Love
  1. Zorba

Strangely, it works in the preview when editing or first posting, but not when it's actually posted.

Edit:

  • We
  • Love
  • Zorba

Same with bulleted lists. It works in the preview when editing or first posting, but not when it's actually posted.

In general, the preview not matching reality is a known bug, though more examples are always helpful. Added this one to the pile; I'm hoping I get some time to start dealing with smaller stuff soon.

I never thought I'd say this - and this is 100% earnest - but the main thing this place suffers from is insufficient bullying.

I can shove you in a locker, if that's what makes you happy.

Bug report: thread view counts not showing for submitted links , posts

Oops! I bet that got missed in the performance revamp. Will get that working again, though it won't be able to record old stats.

ok another problem: I got assigned janitor duty. When I clicked context, which is important when determining quality, I was unable to get back to the original page. https://www.themotte.org/volunteer is blank.

Yeah, at the moment you can't go back. There's supposed to be a popup warning you about this but it may be disabled on some browsers.

If you want to look at context, right now you'll have to do so in another window.

I'd like to improve this also.

Is it intended that the 'janitor duty' link only seems to appear when you view threads directly and not when browsing other pages like the comments view (https://www.themotte.org/comments )?

Yeah, I just sorta didn't add it to those yet. I think stuff like that is on the table once the whole system is set up and functioning. Right now, it's vertical slice time, not polish.

Re: community moderation, two notes:

  1. I have been asked to evaluate comments from people I've blocked. Idk if anything can reasonably be done about this (or if you even want to), but it seems like a conflict of interest.

  2. I have been asked to evaluate mod-hat comments. While I have no problem doing that, it seems like a different question.

I have been asked to evaluate comments from people I've blocked. Idk if anything can reasonably be done about this (or if you even want to), but it seems like a conflict of interest.

Huh. I'll have to think about this one - honestly, "can you properly moderate even people you dislike" seems like a good thing to test. At the same time, presumably this would happen rarely, and it would kinda suck if someone were generally a good moderator but then were predictably awful regarding people they dislike. Not sure what to do here right now.

I have been asked to evaluate mod-hat comments. While I have no problem doing that, it seems like a different question.

Nah, I'm fine with that. In an ideal world they should all be fine, but sometimes they aren't, and I want to know about that.

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.

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.

same

Same here, including the judgment of "deleted by user" as "neutral".

I suppose there maybe should be a "mu" option.

Yeah, gonna just filter them out entirely. Thanks for the headsup :D

Regarding comment reviews, I wish these was a middle ground between bad and neutral.

Not the biggest deal but probably need at least some button to deal with this situation

/images/1672327478115631.webp

I'm actually just going to filter those out from the possible chosen comments, they won't show up at all.

What should I do if I got Janitor Duty but the post was "Deleted by author"?

Oops, found the conversation below.

Yeah, as a general rule, "do anything you want, then report it just like you did here" is the right response, I'll filter stuff like that out of the data once I'm working on it.

Fix should now be pushed, though :)

It would be great if the preceding comment was included when you're doing janitor duty. Context is important.

It's on the list of things to fix. Right now, recommend opening the Context link in a new window.

I agree, and would specifically like to have just the parent post. Seeing the full context is often too distracting IMO. Plenty of things, especially short things, are tough to evaluate as good or bad without seeing the 1 or 2 level parents of the discussion - was it a nasty sneer in response to a reasonable point, or a continuation of a well-received round of joking around?

Too many people I think seem to be using the flag button for disagreement instead of the post breaking a rule

Yeah, I think we generally end up ignoring something like 90% of reports.

Although note that you get Quality Contributions in the mix as well.

I keep getting slates of comments that are all good or all quality. It reminds me of those multiple choice tests where the answers are all the same letter, and you start to wonder if the examiner is messing with you.

I admit I'm slightly tempted to put that weighting into the system intentionally, entirely because it's funny.

But nope, just pure luck right no w:)

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.

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.

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.

Please make the "click here" link open in a new tab.

That's reasonable, yeah. Lemme add that to the list.

(But you should be able to do that manually if you want, that's just normal web browser functionality.)

Any updates on the volunteer data? "Who knows" is perfectly acceptable, but I'm just very curious about it. I think it's a neat experiment and would like to see this on other websites.

The holidays were busy and I'm finishing up another task before I get to it. No updates beyond that, sorry. Soon, I'm hoping!

I've started getting posts old enough to have vote counts visible, I think it'd be a good idea to at least hide these on the screen even if it'd be trivial to find them. I'm sure it slightly biased me.

Whoops, didn't think of that. This is also hard to do right now but I've tossed it into the list.

what s wrong with vote counts visible?

Maybe it pings your social approval bias and you think if you shouldn't go against the possibly better informed crowd. Or it triggers contrarianism and makes you prefer the underdog. In any case I don't think it helps you soberly compare it to the fair rules.

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 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.

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.

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.

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 :)

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.

"you can be only as influential as the system lets you"

A small step toward a AI ruled world. So far so good!

Are you planning to use deep learning here, or explicit algorithms?

Explicit algorithms. I don't think we have enough sample data to train something up from scratch.

Okay, good.

EDIT:

https://www.themotte.org/search/comments/?q=banned

I'm glad we're still doing sensible moderation, and not the permaban on the slightest misstep that is now common on /r/SSC, sadly.

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.

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.

Hi to you too and thanks.

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.

  1. It is a superb piece of satire, obviously good.

  2. I'm satired-out. There is a lot of satire on the internet. Too much, give me a break. Gut says: puke!

  3. 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.

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 :)

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 :)

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)

This is a really cool feature/stab at crowdsourced modding! Well done!

I find it really fun to use, too.

I have a little trouble with using this, since there are some comments I think are Poor but not Bad (but they're not Good, and Bad is the only option I have) while others are "made me laugh but um, probably deserves a finger-wagging" (but Deserves A Warning seems too harsh).

Otherwise, it's interesting to engage with this, as it makes me put aside my immediate reactions to think "never mind how it appeals or does not appeal to me, do I think it is good, bad or otherwise in general?"

I usually just mark those as neutral

"The janitor feature makes people more thoughtful posters" wasn't an intended result, but now that I'm thinking of it, yeah, I can totally imagine that.

And yeah, you're running into roughly the same problem other people do. I think I should probably write a paragraph of About that goes over that, but the tl;dr is that the hard problems are the ones we most need people's attempts to solve.

But don't worry too much because every actual warning or ban will go through a mod :) There is an upper limit to how much you can screw up without someone responsible assisting you!

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.

+1. Same problem, same timeframe, did not block anyone, my interlocutor does not have a private profile though.

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.

More comments

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.

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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