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ZorbaTHut  1yr ago (text post)   12650 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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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.

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.

Maybe it's because I've literally never used the block feature on any website, but I agree. What value is blocking adding in a place like this? If someone is harassing/insulting you then they are breaking the rules and should be banned. If they are not violating the rules, what valid reason could you possibly have for blocking them? Disagreeing with someone or finding them annoying is not a good enough reason, IMO, since this site is supposed to be about open debate where all perspectives are welcome.

There's nothing wrong with deciding "this person is so aggravating I don't want to have to read their thoughts ever again". If you don't ever feel that need, then great. But why should your preference be forced upon everyone? Nobody else is affected if I choose to block someone rather than simply ignoring their posts (or rather this will be the case once the block feature is updated). Therefore it's really none of anyone else's business either, no matter how much someone might think it goes against the spirit of the forum.

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".

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.

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 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.)

A modhat comment showed up in my janny queue. Could the UI preserve the modhat? If I didn't check the context I would tick "deserves a warning", but mods are allowed to say people are being obnoxious.

Came here to bring up this exact problem. I've had modhat (or rather, admin-hat) comments show up multiple times already. Presumably people angry they got told off and using the report button as a super-downvote. I think it would be best if they were just excluded entirely.

@ZorbaTHut

I've seen a half-dozen or so, all from @Amadan. Was half-wondering if this was to test my alignment with the mods, but your explanation probably fits better.

@Tarnstellung is correct - people very often angrily report mod comments that were directed at them, or at a post they agreed with.

I don't know how Zorba feels about excluding them from the queue entirely, since it is possible a mod could actually cross the line and need a talking to (we usually do that amongst ourselves, but it happens). But @popocatepetl is right that the context of being a mod comment is relevant.

I've jannied plenty of mod comments, including plenty of yours, Amadan. At some point in the future, it's possible there will be a bad mod, but today it feels like a waste of my time to mod the people holding the Motte together. Maybe the solution is ignoring reports by users who abuse the reporting mechanism? (As measured by those reported comments subsequently being jannied as good comments)

but today it feels like a waste of my time to mod the people holding the Motte together.

I think it's a good precedent/safeguard even if it isn't useful at the object level. It'll catch the first (ever!) instances of bad modding instead of having to be deployed in the wake of an incident that took longer to detect. "Wasting" a few percent of the janitor duties is a pretty low cost, all things considered.

(sorry this took a while to get to, was at a professional convention)

Interesting, I'm actually surprised it doesn't preserve the modhat.

Hrm. I don't want to exclude them entirely because the number of times I've had to ban a mod has been non-zero. Very low . . . but non-zero. @ulyssesword is correct here, I think; the cost is low, and the chance of getting useful info out is low, but when useful info happens holy shit I really want to know about it.

I think "get the modhat back on, but otherwise leave them in the system" is probably the right solution here. Bug filed, for now.

I'm in favor of the blocking revision. Somebody blocked me, which I realized only after writing a comment to their post which then got rejected. I angrily blocked them as retaliation and it strikes me that this isn't how the website is supposed to function re disagreement.

IMO there should be no blocking.

I disagree. There are users that express views that I find utterly disgusting (e.g. antisemitism). I support their right to express themselves, but if I am forced to constantly see that around, it would significantly detract from my interest in participating in the forum. I'd rather not to see that. But if other people want to engage those people and discuss with them, I think it's their right, and they should not be deprived of it just because I find it too much for me. I think ability to block content which disgusts me for myself personally, while allowing everybody else to choose their level of engagement, is a good compromise. Of course, if the moderator thinks the user is so toxic that vast majority of the forum would prefer not to have them around, that's different thing - but I can not claim my preferences always match the preferences of the vast majority. So having different level of dis-engagement is beneficial.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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

Same happened to me. I resisted the urge to cheekily rate it as good or bad and also went for neutral.

same

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.

Quick Volunteer Janitor analysis update!

I've got it spitting out Pretty Accurate Results, to the point where the best way to find bugs is now to look for posts that it thinks we should have modded but didn't, or posts that it thinks we shouldn't have modded but did, and figure out what happened. As a quick cursory glance, the answer in about half the remaining cases is either "we made a mistake" or "ehhh, that could have gone either way", which suggests it's now about as accurate as the mods are. And there's still things I have left to improve! So this is Very Promising overall.

One of the more fascinating results of this was to look at the most accurate volunteers. Out of top ten, nine of them have made less than 100 comments; in fact, half of them have made less than 25 comments, including two of the top three. My tool spit out a giant list of names and I said "who the hell are these people" and I had to go look them up to see if they were actual people. They are! They're just people who don't post a lot. This all suggests that there's a ton of near-lurkers out there who are reading stuff in detail and who have a very good idea of the community norms.

Hello, lurkers! Thank you for being here! I'm not even directing this to the set of you who are volunteering (but extra thanks to you), but to everyone who's reading; part of my goal here is just to be a place for people to see discussions, and I'm glad to know that there are people who are seeing discussions. Y'all are great.

I've got a few more pieces to put in, then I have to figure out how to connect this to the live database in a useful fashion, then I'm going to be initially setting it up as an assistance tool for the mods. If everything pans out, though, it's going to be handling the vast bulk of the moderation work for us in the future (though we're still going to be the ones verifying warnings and bans and writing the actual messages; no fully-automated harsh penalties will be applied.)

As part of this changeover I plan to set up a bit of a more formal warning/ban system so we can link related posts. Right now there's an issue where if someone goes and spams terrible posts over half the community, we tend to attach the ban message to one of them and just ignore the rest, which leads to people thinking that "the rest" did not get moderator attention. With this tool it'll be easy to group those up and just click a little checkbox that says "make a link to connect all these", and the goal is that users will see a note on each questionable post saying "this was bad and deserved moderator attention, but we applied the actual moderator action to this other message, [click here]".

Anyway, y'all are doing great, thank you for the frankly unexpected amount of quokka-clicking you've been doing. This will all make the community better.

I'm a lurking volunteer. I just had https://www.themotte.org/post/317/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/54744?context=8#context given to me to rate. I felt a three way conflict.

  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."

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 :)

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.

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.

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

I find it really fun to use, too.

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)

For anyone who's reading this, I'm about to push a big change; if you run into weird problems, especially revolving around submitting posts, let me know.

For anyone who's reading this, I'm about to push a big change

Is it that uncensored search engine with results as good as 2010 Google I suggested? Fantastic.

That's next week!

(it is not next week)

I think the cases I find trickiest are the ones where I want to say, "This is a bad post, but the one it's replying to is worse and they both deserve moderation", or "This is bad but not for the obvious reason", or "This is a good contribution phrased in a terrible way", or any other judgement more nuanced than just good or bad.

Oh yeah, those are terrible.

But part of the goal of this is to sorta crowdsource moderation and take some load off the mods. And those are a good example of the tough decisions we have to make all the time.

So, yeah, understood, but nevertheless, at some point we need to make a decision :)

But look on the bright side: just pick a somewhat-approriate option randomly, and chances are good someone else will have picked the other one randomly. This is intentionally set up as a statistical deal, which is a luxury the mods don't have!

I think there ought to be an "other" option with a text box kind of like there is for the report button.

The problem is that we're never going to read those - the entire point of this is to automate it. "Other" would be the same as saying "I refuse to answer", and I intentionally don't want to introduce that because it would let people skip out on dealing with tough cases.

To be blunt, that sounds more like problem on your end. Do you not read the reports that are marked "other"?

Likewise letting non-mods skip out on the tough cases doesn't actually strike me as a downside.

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.

I hope this is the appropriate place for meta discussion unrelated to the crowd-sourced moderation system.

Now that we're no longer on Reddit, can we increase the character limit? I assume there are no technical limitations, given that it's a silly, arbitrary number like 10,000 characters instead of something sensible like 65,536.

The longest multi-comment I've seen was three comments long, so 30k should be enough, but maybe make it higher just in case? 50k? 100k? It's not like it can be abused.

Amusingly there actually were technical limitations, the database table had a character limit and other copies of that same limit were spread throughout the codebase. We actually did fix this recently and now you are right, the character limit is just a code-enforced limitation, but I gotta figure out how this is going to practically work; I'm not interested in dealing with trolls posting ten megabytes of 𒐫𒐫𒐫𒐫𒐫𒐫𒐫𒐫𒐫 spam.

I think maybe some kind of tier thing, where the more reputable a user is, the higher-tier they can post in a single comment, and they can post one tier higher than they're "allowed" but it's filtered? I dunno. Work to be done on that, issue filed :)

https://www.themotte.org/post/383/wellness-wednesday-for-february-22-2023/68713?context=8#context

First of all, I hope this poster has read https://www.themotte.org/post/195/what-to-do-when-you-get

Second of all, I'd like to express my disappointment in nearly every response I've seen them receive. The fact that their question, which appears to have been made in total good faith, is still getting dogpiled and drive by downvotes is vicariously embarrassing. This isn't a culture war issue. It's a person in the life advice thread asking for life advice on interpersonal relationships as it pertains to their trans friends concerns over a tendentious CW item. prof xi o isn't even stating a position, only that they have trans friends and like Harry Potter (apparently this justifies an accusation of trolling, to the tune of a 45 [edit: 30, my back of the skull hangover sums aren't great] updoot difference. An uncharitable read might see some of the responses from prof xi o as sealioning. Cool. Take your uncharitable reading and keep it under wraps). If I was feeling extreme, I might posit being told you shouldn't be friends with my outgroup is not a valuable remark.

If I want to dunk on wingcucks I can go to arr drama. If I want to dunk on globohomo I can go to /pol/. If I want to dunk on chuds I'll join Hasan's discord. If I want to dunk on MAGAts I'll head over to /r/news. If I want to dunk on libtards I'll join the Mug Club. This is it, as far as I know, for frank and civil discussion between people, whose only commonality on themotte are their shared, seemingly intractable differences. This is unbelievably important to me, because there exists a reality where I am wrong. There is a chance that you too are wrong. Having a place where I can be presented with the absolute best argument against my pet philosophy (and those of others) is valuable, and it's valuable because it can if nothing else, diminish the evil I do as I navigate a confusing and confused world.

Overt forum-wide bias of any particular flavor or stripe, in my opinion, is the most pressing threat to the long term health of this site. Please don't fuck it up for everyone.

P.S. I will be appropriately embarrassed if the OP turns out to be another d*rwin, until that point try leaving the internet at the door and treating everyone as if they are, in fact, sincere.

I honestly don't think this is a situation where frank and civil discussion is possible. Imagine a parallel post along the lines of "Some of my really good friends are wildly upset about the fact that people exist who don't follow their religion. I still like Jewish comedians. What should I do?" If it's not trolling, it's a genuinely amazing display of innocence.

In the interest of not talking past each other, I would like to stress that my hopes for frank and civil discussion are for here, not the rule of discourse for some random guy with trans buddies. Everyone is free to dab on the outgroup as much as they like but he shouldn't be berated for having trans friends, not here of all places.

He asked for help navigating a difficult social scenario. He received approximately one genuine response to his question. The rest who deigned to engage did so so they could point at him and say that the people he actually knows and engages with are unreasonable actors and must be educated on facts of the matter, if that doesn't work then they should be excluded from his life. Sure, this is an answer to his question; it is addressed to him/references something written in the OP/is a coherent English sentence. Telling a person to cut someone out of their lives is a big big deal; if someone I didn't know told me to do so myself (for any reason. I do mean any reason), I would dismiss them out of hand and update to devalue their opinions somewhat on everything. If it were done to acclaim from everyone else around I would update to assume that I was in very much the wrong place. People who are interested in your long term wellbeing tend to not give advice that's quite so crazy.

Maybe he's a troll. Maybe he intends to stir shit up, JAQ off, dissemble then flame out. Cool. Wait for that to happen. I'd like to see this place manage discourse a little bit better than mentally installing a script that turns [Blue Tribe shibboleth] into [!downvote] regardless of how ridiculous I or you or anybody else might find the woke catechism. Maybe I've misunderstood the point of this place and I'm going to look very silly in front of everyone, if so you have my apologies in advance.

Sorry for adding to the wall of text, but I just realized you were one of the respondents there (I realized I was getting pretty bummed by the way some posters I really respect had written their replies and I try to avoid hanging feelings on a person online). I want to be clear, I have no specific issue with most of what's being said in that thread. Again, my big problem is primarily with the pile on. His question was fairly innocuous and considering some of the other material posted here made very, very few assumptions. The one mistake was being blue-coded.

Also to your credit and undermining my point, you did in fact seriously engage and provided a thoughtful and reasoned response when asked.

I'm personally a fan of the Wellness Wednesday thread as one of the best random internet stranger advice sources. It escapes the rage-bait/circlejerk flair that the r/*advice subreddits almost universally share.

This isn't a culture war issue.

"Queer interest groups call for social censorship of topics based on witchhunt of the week" sounds like a plausible lede to any CW thread effortpost. Sure, there's a personal spin, where the interest groups are instead his friends, but that's about as CW a topic as you can get without going into "my friends are being beat up by $OTHER_RACE every other week, any (Wellness Wednesday) advice on arming myself for the coming race war?".

That said, not a single comment actually bites and turns it full fledged CW shit-flinging fest, he evens gets a concrete solution with uBlock rules.

As for the downvotes, I'll be charitable and attribute them to a natural response to an obvious troll post. The writing style gives it away

How can I support my trans friends while also being okay with people enjoying the new Harry Potter game?

How should I feel about streamers who choose to play the new Harry Potter game on stream? In some sense they have disregarded my friends' feelings and excluded them from their community!

The level of detail - trans friends (who I love dearly) - coupled with the admittedly amusing false dichotomies is a dead giveaway. There was no need to go into that level of detail to get meaningful advice - "my friends are getting offended because content-creators have different views than them, what should I do" would have sufficed and would have nonetheless garnered, I reckon, substantially the same response.

Arguing that Jesus was gay at $IVY_LEAGUE might not be trolling, but walking into a Texas church and asking the pastor whether there's any evidence to support that claim sure is.

It escapes the rage-bait/circlejerk flair that the r/*advice subreddits almost universally share.

Really? Because what I saw was 8/9 top level replies using varying degrees of effort and wordcount to say essentially the same thing; "your friends are unreasonable, possibly deranged, your continued existence as a mentally stable sophont is in jeopardy if you leave these people in your life". Social circles are vitally important and are precarious things at best, and telling a stranger to rip up a part of theirs (who knows how sizeable that part is, immaterial to my point), especially over a CW topic, is not good advice, by any measure. The problem for me however isn't that this advice was dispensed (I think it's a real position that a reasonable person can have, I'm not accusing anyone of misrepresenting their own beliefs), the problem is it's the only goddamn advice he got, sans the one person who read his post and provided an answer to the actual question within.

Additionally, I believe that you can in fact discuss CW adjacent topics like "how do I navigate a situation where my friends feel strongly about !issue and I really don't, here are my uninformed and nascent opinions, wat do" without the obviously negative reaction he received. He very technically invited this when he said

Any response is much appreciated.

Still not an excuse for the smug dogpile, not in a place allegedly dedicated to good faith discussion.

I suspect if the political valence had been flipped he would've received at least a more neutral/positive response e.g. "My friends are strongly pro-life and think that Roe being overturned is a landmark victory for innocent life, I kind of feel like it's not murder but this isn't an issue I care much about and I'd rather not alienate my friends if that isn't necessary, wat do." "Wow wow sounds like ur friends might have something to teach u, try asking them for profound opinions" (I view the pro-position on both abortion and trans issues to be largely unreasonable along very similar dimensions and to somewhat similar degrees, but I think a differently coded question of the same genre would have prompted a VERY different response, not like my exaggerated example but along those lines).

Is this a troll?

The level of detail - trans friends (who I love dearly) - coupled with the admittedly amusing false dichotomies is a dead giveaway. There was no need to go into that level of detail to get meaningful advice - "my friends are getting offended because content-creators have different views than them, what should I do" would have sufficed and would have nonetheless garnered, I reckon, substantially the same response.

Maybe this is uncharitable of me, maybe I didn't make my point clearly the first two times. Regardless,

Maybe he's a troll. Maybe he intends to stir shit up, JAQ off, dissemble then flame out. Cool. Wait for that to happen. I'd like to see this place manage discourse a little bit better than mentally installing a script that turns [Blue Tribe shibboleth] into [!downvote] regardless of how ridiculous I or you or anybody else might find the woke catechism.

I've lurked this place for years in its various forms, and yes, there are fewer and fewer high quality leftwing/liberal contributors every year (are libbies too thin-skinned for rational discussion? I think so! Does public pontification on the topic of Blue tribe irrationality and pussification drive away left-wing posters? Yes! That's why I will always keep my mouth shut for topics I can't write an evenhanded take on). That's why I feel it's incumbent upon all users of this site to point out the burgeoning Red tribe bias that is contributing to the evaporative cooling here. Is it a problem at the moment? I don't think so, could be wrong. Is this going to be a problem in a year? Probably, and it'll compound over time. This place is neat, I've made my case upthread already for why I think that is. If I come here same time next year and this place is where the 125 IQ groypers and Anime PFPs™ hang out, well, miss me with that shit. I know plenty of smart rightwingers in my personal life, I don't want to go online and read the shitpost version of something I already agree with.

I'll dial back my tone a few notches so we don't talk past each other. I think you've started this thread out of genuine concern for the culture of this place, which is a good common starting point.

I suspect if the political valence had been flipped he would've received at least a more neutral/positive response

Maybe..? I really feel like the trollbait tone attracted more disparaging replies. Picture

I have some Young Earth Creationist friends (who I love dearly) and they are offended by some of the Ice Age movies. When they see Ice Age content (including streams and clips of the new Ice Age 2: The Meltdown game), it can be offensive and threatening for them.

Downvotes are the online equivalent of an eye-roll or a sneer. You're not (at least, necessarily) dignifying the thought with a fully-formed response or counter-argument, but you're shaking your head as your counterpart speaks. Now prof_xi has strolled into the temple and yelled Sibboleth, and though the Gileadites did sneer, they did not slay him.

The Culture War Thread aimed to be a place where people with all sorts of different views could come together to talk to and learn from one another.

[...]

But once you remove [spam, bots, racial slurs, low-effort trolls, and abuse], you’re left with people honestly and civilly arguing for their opinions. And that’s the scariest thing of all.

The one foundational principle of this place, the shibboleth of Mottizens, is the belief that if it can be said respectfully and civilly, it can be said here. This is a bastion of (moderated) free speech. The Motte left reddit (amongst other reasons) because of increasing admin attention, notably around transgender CW conversations. The Motte has survived the Pharaoh chasing them across the Red Sea (r/ssc -> /r/TheMotte) , and wandering the desert for 40 years (r/TheMotte under a fickle and vindictive YWVH/spez), before finding its Promised Land here. An entire Exodus just to keep worshipping at the altar of freedom of expression.

prof_xi wandered amongst the Israelites to ask how people felt about them Moabite thots and gods. He waltzed into a mosque to ask help for his friends who are putting together a Mohammed sculpture visible from space.

I believe that my trans friends should be able to browse the internet without seeing content they deem hateful/disturbing

This is about as antithetical to the spirit of this place as you can get. And as far as a response to the desecration of local idols go, that thread managed to remain essentially constructive and, in my opinion, exceedingly charitable.

What's on display here isn't Red tribe bias lynching a befuddled Blue tribe newcomer, rather overly polite entertainment of a pretty conspicuous troll.

I don't disagree with anything you've written here, sans the reiteration of this guy's troll status. Maybe my trolldar is out of whack but IME even concern trolls don't seriously respond the way he seemed to. Perfectly willing to accept that I'm wrong in this instance, but I still think it's uncharitable to levy that accusation based only off of that thread. That said I still can't help but feel like my takeaway here hasn't been taken away. I can only assume this is due to a lack of precision or unintentional obfuscation on my part, or maybe the point was made, received, and summarily discarded (that's fine, if I've been spazzing out here please let me know, seriously. If that's the case then I sincerely apologize for wasting the reader's attention and server runtime). It was wrong of me to even mention score (I personally loathe that there's even a scoring system here in the first place, but people seem to like it so I'll accept that I'm in the minority and won't be a pest about it), it distracts from what I'm trying to describe.

What bothered me was that after the second or third reply, his post kept attracting rejoinders for days (I know, I know, it's an internet forum and responding to a day or two day old post isn't necroing, but I didn't think it was worth remarking upon until I saw another dunk close to three days after the OP) with an almost identical theme to the rest. What I don't mean is, that if someone already said what you think then you should shut up and not say anything at all. What I do mean is, that after receiving a few replies making it clear in detail that this framing is inappropriate for this place, the dead horse kept attracting blows. It would be more healthy for the site, in my opinion, simply to not try (deliberately or not) to drum others out for such a faux pas. Yes, I think the average person (and especially a Blue1) receiving this degree of reaction one or two times will most likely never come here again. The point I have struggled to convey is: that someone saying something objectionable should be objected to, but just because you disagree with a post doesn't mean you need to say it, especially when you can just scroll down and see your opinion already well represented. It just makes you feel good, and them bad.

To use some verbiage I hate but still find useful, I think the way this community treats the Blues is toxic. Is it justified? I'm willing to concede that point, but I didn't come here to turn the tables on my outgroup, I came here for discussion featuring light as opposed to heat. I hope it isn't necessary to say that it's bad when the Blues do it, and it's bad when the Reds do it. I think themotte has already started down the path of becoming a social media-tier echochamber, just in photo negative. I hold this place and its users to a significantly higher standard than I do twitter or reddit, and it's not because everyone here is smarter than them but rather everyone is trying to be better than them.

Thank you for taking the time to write a serious reply.

1I am perhaps being uncharitable when I say that lefty potential-posters are more easily offended than the righties. For clarity's sake, I do not advocate a two-tier moderation system for the opposing ends of the political spectrum as a solution for this.

Yeah, I think we disagree on the premise (whether it's trolling or not), which then colors our view of the rest of the incident. -- Sidenote: @ZorbaTHut, any chance for troll prediction markets with a karma reward system? Or actually more generally, karma system based around correctly predicting/adjudicating moderation results (i.e., extended comment judgement requires you to slide a probability bar for each of the outcomes).

I personally hate the type of feeling based analysis that pervades forums (it feels overwhemingly X-tribe, so much more than before, halycon days, blah blah blah). I think polling (modulo polling bias) and other analytics can give much better insight into dynamic and culture progressions than any rudimentary glance over a few threads. Since this is the "Something Shiny" thread, maybe optional polling built in to themotte.org? Recurring, get a sense of trends over time. With a system like that, you can conclusively* answer questions like are Blue Tribe folk actually leaving in droves? Maybe they're actually becoming Grey/Purple/Red as they spend time here. Maybe there never were that many, and they got busy with other things in life. Maybe they're actually more common, just more moderate in tone and therefore stand out less. These datasets are now all a SQL query away. I hope the custodians use it wisely.

Sidenote: @ZorbaTHut, any chance for troll prediction markets with a karma reward system? Or actually more generally, karma system based around correctly predicting/adjudicating moderation results (i.e., extended comment judgement requires you to slide a probability bar for each of the outcomes).

I'm entertained by the idea but I do not have even remotely enough time to work on this. If someone else wants to do so, go for it.

That said, note that we have no way of objectively telling whether someone was a troll.

I think polling (modulo polling bias) and other analytics can give much better insight into dynamic and culture progressions than any rudimentary glance over a few threads. Since this is the "Something Shiny" thread, maybe optional polling built in to themotte.org? Recurring, get a sense of trends over time. With a system like that, you can conclusively* answer questions like are Blue Tribe folk actually leaving in droves?

We actually had a polling system originally but it was horribly broken and we just took it out :V Probably wouldn't be hard to put together a new one though. I'm a bit skeptical of data validity, but especially when combined with the Volunteer system we can probably get some actual signal out of it.

Yeah, the question of whether or not the post in question was made in good faith to begin with seems to be the main source of contention here, and what I'm seeing as poor behavior is being read as good and deserved judgement. I'm on board with any idea that pushes an accusation of trolling towards something less immediate and personal, since trolling is both a legitimate problem in any online community (with an exception for those dedicated to the art form itself) and also an easily weaponized memeplex that regularly confuses actual disagreement with malice.

I also agree WRT the "vibe check", it's hardly rigorous and easily motivated by bias and shouldn't be trusted, at least in a vacuum. That's fine! My operating assumption on topics and people I do not have extensive personal experience with, is that I am almost certainly wrong about every aspect of my mental model to some degree (I'm not enough of a schizo yet to believe I've stumbled upon the Grand Narrative of Universe, just enough to have my own pet theory on it).

My assertion that themotte has pushed and is pushing towards higher Red tribe participation is purely anecdotal, based mostly off of how many individual left-leaning posters I can recall from the old SSC and theMotte subreddits, to how many have made it to the off-site, as compared to the more prominent right-leaning posters. Obviously this is selecting for more than just temperature or political bias, and probably should have been lampshaded with the usual epistemic-uncertainty caveats (I'll admit to some difficulties on that front. I don't want to misrepresent my position, I also don't want to write a small essay each time I reply to someone. Balancing precision and concision is hard and I'm awkward with both). Besides, as you point out, there are plenty of good reasons to stop participating here besides feeling unwelcome.

Your polling idea sounds interesting at the very least, and is on-brand for themotte.

I understand the concern, but I also basically agree with all object-level responses given in the thread, and seeing as multiple people have even offered reasonable life advice for the specific problem, which @prof_xi_o seemed to take at face value and appreciate, I don't agree it illustrates some major failure mode of the community.

(For the purpose of this post I shall ignore the question of his sincerity and treat this as a test of our virtues).

Ultimately there's no helping that the issue raised and its implied default solution (to wit, scrubbing mentions of that new game and JKR off the public net) are massive triggers for this sub's culture, which is biased in favor of free speech absolutism by construction and self-selection, even more so than it is biased in favor of right-wing sensibilities and disdain for weaponization of victimhood claims.

Perhaps we need to learn to not engage so... earnestly. You can notice my absence there; I've estimated that the expected marginal value of my input is below the cost of adding to the apparent dogpile, distressing OP and probably diminishing his willingness to read the already provided object-level advice charitably. Others have decided otherwise. Maybe we need to codify this heuristic into a rule (haven't we already?).

But leaving this coordination problem aside, I believe that the response was overall admirable. Some share of snark, to say nothing of downvotes, is extremely hard to avoid when irreconcilable philosophies meet; the measure of the community is whether there is still the will to engage on proposed terms, helpfully and within the bounds of polite discourse. A plurality of posts can be unreservedly described as expressing this will. This cannot be said of the average or even a high-brow community that engages in dunking on an ideological outsider.

You can notice my absence there; I've estimated that the expected marginal value of my input is below the cost of adding to the apparent dogpile, distressing OP and probably diminishing his willingness to read the already provided object-level advice charitably.

I don't blame you for not jumping on the dogpile, but it would be a shame if your views on the matter differ substantially from the other posters (or if you have ideas that haven't been expressed already). Please don't let your estimation of my feelings keep you from being critical in this case, though I can understand how a bias towards caution is warranted.

I also basically agree with all object-level responses given in the thread

Same. I don't disagree that these trans friends hold an irrational, low information and censorious cluster of beliefs, but this is something I believe to be comorbid with the Human Condition™. I too hold a number of irrational or otherwise low information beliefs on a great many topics, and I suspect everyone else here does as well. The idea that one should take the advice to cut ties as a result of ignorant opinions with those in their immediate circle, as delivered by a stranger on the internet (regardless of context or object level content) seems preeminently dim to me, let alone reasonable. I'll confess to some difficulty now squaring your circle: how can someone of your background and obvious familiarity with the history of a culture that rewards filial impiety1 be comfortable endorsing a practice that is at least superficially similar in type? Or is this something you've already considered, and feel that these two are sufficiently (or completely) disparate subjects?2 Please keep in mind I do not mean that there's never a reason to cut someone completely out of your life, or that you even need a good reason for it, only that the idea of someone (who is unfamiliar with your life beyond whatever broad strokes you provide) telling you to do it for political reasons is just wild.

Perhaps we need to learn to not engage so... earnestly.

In essence, that is my point. Being met with a circling of the wagons doesn't assist in the exploration of ideas, even if the point of exploring said ideas is to eviscerate them more effectively.

Maybe we need to codify this heuristic into a rule (haven't we already?).

I also thought that there was something along those lines already enshrined, but the closest thing to such a stricture would be the rules pertaining to consensus and inclusion. Nothing said in any of the immediate replies rises, in my opinion, to the level of requiring moderator action. That said I believe that the letter of the law may rhyme with the spirit, but that they do in fact mean different things. You don't need to say "as everyone knows" when everyone coincidentally seems to know and profess the same thing. No use getting worked up over consensus building when the consensus is obviously already built.

the measure of the community is whether there is still the will to engage on proposed terms, helpfully and within the bounds of polite discourse.

I agree, and I may have gotten carried away with doomsaying; themotte is not even close to declining to the point I would stop visiting, let alone lose its value on the broader 'net. I don't believe this is a problem as it stands, but I do believe this specific ailment I have described will raise its ugly head in the fullness of time. I lack the experience, knowledge and understanding needed for maintaining an online community, and have little to offer as far as adjustments go. I only believe it's necessary to avert this particular future if this place is going to hold any value down the line, and I can at least point out what I see as the first sprout poking up from the soil.

You can notice my absence there

An amusing downside to posting prolifically is that one's absence does in fact become notable, if only for a given genre of topic.

1Apologies for the source, but the internet is inexhaustible and SEO has crippled my ability to confidently scrape for a more reputable source of my illustration in a reasonable timeframe.

2I am genuinely curious, I am not accusing you of any sort of hypocrisy or double standard. I don't even recall if it's a topic you've explored publicly here, if you have done so I'm always ready to read or reread your write ups.

I'll confess to some difficulty now squaring your circle: how can someone of your background and obvious familiarity with the history of a culture that rewards filial impiety1 be comfortable endorsing a practice that is at least superficially similar in type?

Well, this cuts both ways: don't you think Pavlik's surviving relatives were justified in cutting ties with him? Regarding your footnote, I endorse this expose. I mention Pavlik here and that's probably it.

But seriously, what I endorse are technological solutions along these lines. At least 4 of the first-tier replies suggest some form of this client-side filtering. If OP's friends insist that they find it unsatisfactory, this means they're not really feeling threatened by stimuli per se, and this is intrinsically a question of exerting political power at OP's behalf, which puts their friendship into question, and makes the discussion of severing the relationship – such as there is – relevant. I won't reiterate the rest of the discussion on blackmail, whether friends make friends scrub Harry Potter off the web and such here.

Personally I violate Western best practices egregiously and comically, and avoid dropping friends regardless of political differences, psychopathy, psychiatric conditions and material conflicts of interest. It tends to work out in the long run; my loyalty is, eventually, appreciated. But I have lost friends which deemed it fit to not reciprocate this principle; and I think that's for the better. For my better, that is.

Thank you for clarifying, I knew Pavlik was a bad example of what I was attempting to gesture towards but my collection of annotations and bookmarks is a mess right now, and I didn't want to dig through my disorganized references for a better one. Thank you for putting in the effort on my behalf. I understand that Pavlik isn't quite what I intended to describe, but it's something along these lines; authoritarian regimes (it need not be the USSR; North Korea also works and is a more contemporary example), extremist/terrorist organizations and cults as a necessary function of their position in society at large must encourage the individual to atomize, to cut away as much of the social safety net as thoroughly as possible.

I feel no discomfort over the idea someone might terminate a relationship of their own accord (up to and including, sometimes especially, family), but I do find it disturbing to see others advocate that path. It sets off just about every alarm I have in my head and makes me question the moral fibre of those recommending it. Your ideology of choice doesn't have a couch to crash on, it doesn't have that one recipe that it makes every time you visit, it won't provide comfort in your grieving, in short it can provide exactly zero aid or succor to you the human being. A person is fundamentally feeble in a universe that is very, very strong, and it's only inside of a circle of close friends and family that one can move forward, let alone make their mark on the world (there are few loners remembered by history, almost never in a positive light. They also tend to be exceptional human beings for whom a case could be made that they had no peers, at least not locally available to them. I think they can safely be considered an exception that proves the rule). The annulment of any relationship should be taken seriously, even if said relationship is trivial, and telling someone that that is their best course of action borders, IMO, on evil. In the interest of civility and because I know that my gut is imputing motives on others, I'm perfectly happy to settle for calling it inappropriate.

along the lines of this one

Wholeheartedly agree for this specific reply, it's the only one that I felt managed to answer the actual question as posed by the OP without being sandwiched between a few paragraphs of moralizing. I tried to avoid mention of specific posts and posters because I didn't and don't think that hectoring them would do any good and probably would do a modicum of bad, but that was the post I had in mind when I wrote

nearly every response I've seen them receive.
(added emphasis)

Personally I violate Western best practices egregiously and comically, and avoid dropping friends regardless of political differences, psychopathy, psychiatric conditions and material conflicts of interest. It tends to work out in the long run;

Loyalty, in my opinion, is among the greatest virtues a human can hold, and I personally feel it acts as something like the metaphysical cousin to a sacrament the more irrational and unconditional it becomes. I believe that a person's relationship with his friends and family regardless of who they are should be treated as unimpeachable. The person in question may be in fact quite impeachable, as a matter of law or what have you, but the actual relationship itself should be held as sacrosanct. We, as a species, are way too messed up in the head to be able to either afford or justify easy dismissal of one another. Glass houses, and such.

Loyalty, in my opinion, is among the greatest virtues a human can hold, and I personally feel it acts as something like the metaphysical cousin to a sacrament the more irrational and unconditional it becomes. I believe that a person's relationship with his friends and family regardless of who they are should be treated as unimpeachable. The person in question may be in fact quite impeachable, as a matter of law or what have you, but the actual relationship itself should be held as sacrosanct. We, as a species, are way too messed up in the head to be able to either afford or justify easy dismissal of one another. Glass houses, and such.

I do worry a little bit about outing my friend(s) to this community, as in some sense I used our shared experience as fodder for internet clout. Hopefully I can make it up to them by having a great conversation about J.K. Rowling/Harry Potter.

Edit: plurality

Zero is more than some people's family provides.

Second of all, I'd like to express my disappointment in nearly every response I've seen them receive. The fact that their question, which appears to have been made in total good faith, is still getting dogpiled and drive by downvotes is vicariously embarrassing. This isn't a culture war issue. It's a person in the life advice thread asking for life advice on interpersonal relationships as it pertains to their trans friends concerns over a tendent

If you hover over the score, it still got 6 upvotes. All it means is the opinion is unpopular with the majority of people, but nonetheless five additional people still thought it was worthwhile to vote up. It's like politics. Most candidates get few votes compared to the front-runners, but they carve a niche/audience anyway, like Ron Paul and others. Similarly, a TV show or band can still be a success if it has a small and loyal audience.

I thought after writing this that I should've been clear that I didn't mean absolute difference between only positive scores. What I was attempting to highlight was the presence of unjustified negative reactions to what is a pretty banal question. Besides, saying something unpopular should in fact be incentivized, it's (partly) the purpose of a good faith discussion. Heat-forward, inflammatory, noisy shitposts should be disincentivized.

I suspect somewhere around 16 people read his question and made it to the part where he said "my trans friends" for the first time, then decided they hated what they were reading and hit the appropriate button. I happen to believe that is an ugly and stupid way of engaging with someone who is earnestly looking for an answer.

(Edit: the score has also shifted somewhat to the positive since I wrote this post, I believe my point stands)

First of all, I hope this poster has read https://www.themotte.org/post/195/what-to-do-when-you-get

Ah, cool, thanks for that-- I hadn't read it. There is some good advice in there.

Second of all, I'd like to express my disappointment in nearly every response I've seen them receive. The fact that their question, which appears to have been made in total good faith, is still getting dogpiled and drive by downvotes is vicariously embarrassing. This isn't a culture war issue.

Hearing this feels really good, and I can see how you feel that way. The replies were arguably kind of harsh. I am fine with the response I got, although in my ideal timeline the responses would have given me more intellectual ammunition, terms/ideas to google, and examples/stories of how to disagree with your friends.

Before posting I did, for a brief moment, wonder if I should post in the culture war thread instead of wellness wednesday but went ahead because it was clearly framed as a personal issue, and I was basically genuine.

One possible reading of my initial post (and some of the replies) is that I was trying to steel-man my friend's position (without knowing exactly what it was because I had avoided the subject), but in all honesty my views and position on the matter initially weren't all that well-defined beyond some misgivings, and I've refined my position a lot since then.

An uncharitable read might see some of the responses from prof xi o as sealioning.

Hadn't heard of this, I can see how it might fit some of my replies.

apparently this justifies an accusation of trolling, to the tune of a 45 [edit: 30, my back of the skull hangover sums aren't great] updoot difference

I did eventually notice the downvotes (maybe they don't show up on mobile or something? for some reason in some views I didn't see them) and my initial thought was, "that's odd, I should ignore that and consider it a sign of engagement with the content, I shouldn't let it discourage me from posting." I was more excited that I got some high-effort responses.

I also noticed that downvotes don't show up on people's profiles (comments do), and I think comments are a better signal of quality engagement (probably)

One problem with the downvotes is that it's not totally clear what they're about, here's my predictions about what they mean:

  1. 30% Your position is stupid, I'm not going to argue, just downvote, go do some research

  2. 30% I don't like trans people bossing around the internet

  3. 20% This should have been in the culture war thread

  4. 20% this is clearly a troll

P.S. I will be appropriately embarrassed if the OP turns out to be another d*rwin, until that point try leaving the internet at the door and treating everyone as if they are, in fact, sincere.

If my goal as a poster is to drive engagement with my post that aligns pretty well with the goals of a troll, is there an important distinction? I guess I also am interested in learning rather than just driving engagement/outrage, so that might be detectable.

I want to hear the d*rwin story

I did eventually notice the downvotes (maybe they don't show up on mobile or something? for some reason in some views I didn't see them)

Scores for individual posts are hidden for the first 24 hours to encourage users to engage with the actual content of the OP/reply, rather than the numerical value of community sentiment. This also has the lovely side effect of curtailing the more odious forms of karma obsession, such as "E: wow, didn't expect this to blow up!" or "haha the kids are mad, tell ur mom to send more pizza rolls to the basement".

One problem with the downvotes is that it's not totally clear what they're about

A problem you and I share.

30% Your position is stupid, I'm not going to argue, just downvote, go do some research

Far and away the most reasonable excuse for the reaction you received, there's an unspoken assumption here that one needs a fairly comprehensive understanding of the differing views and narratives of sundry CW topics. I don't have a particular opinion on this norm as I can understand both positions WRT how well informed a poster should be when saying something here (pro: you are wasting peoples time by prompting them to explain something that could've been googled. con: you can't expect everyone to stay abreast at all times of the goings on in every genre of the CW in order to contribute to the discussion).

I want to hear the d*rwin story

I am confident you wouldn't once you did, it's boring forum drama and the poster in question either sublimated his rhetoric to the point he blends in with the background or just didn't bother following this forum to its current iteration.

Scores for individual posts are hidden for the first 24 hours

Except for this one and your other reply in this thread, which was made two hours ago but apparently edited 21 hours ago (?). Paging @ZorbaTHut

Edit: nevermind, the times on these posts are what's shifting about, I grabbed a screenshot from my phone showing these as sub-1 hour. Weird.

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?

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.

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.

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 . . .

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)

Given the nature of the forum, could we change the follow feature to notify us whenever another user makes a top level comment? (Or, if we’re really obsessed, every comment? ;) )

added a issue for it on github. not sure, should it go on all comments or just top levels? (i'd probably advocate for no dials)

also worth knowing is that there are potential bad implications here as this could more easily lead to vote rings.

I’d like maybe the option of posts, top level comments or every comment. Personally I want top level comments only in CW

I see it's hiding usernames now. That's good! but..

  • It's not hiding user flair

  • IMO, it's important to always check the context, and that reveals the username anyway

It's not hiding user flair

Should be fixed soon :)

IMO, it's important to always check the context, and that reveals the username anyway

True. I'm not sure there's a perfect fix for this. We made this change just to reduce the first-impression impact, but I don't think we can entirely solve this issue.

Not sure if there's anything you can do about this, but I will confess to a niggling doubt when I do the mod-duty thing: I don't know whether I'm being weighted positively, zero, or negatively, and in the latter two cases I'm wasting my time and/or being manipulated.

So, first, I'm not gonna do the negative-weight thing, it clamps at zero.

I'm not sure how I want to handle it from there. I don't want to waste people's time; at the same time I don't want to give people a strong hint as to whether they're being positively weighted. The nice thing about not telling anyone at all is that it makes it much harder for malicious users to exploit the system.

Suggestions welcome.

I don't want to waste people's time; at the same time I don't want to give people a strong hint as to whether they're being positively weighted. The nice thing about not telling anyone at all is that it makes it much harder for malicious users to exploit the system.

How about making the system blind unless the user spends a substantial amount of time (say, two weeks) with a weight of 0, at which point you graciously let them know they're screaming into a void? Otherwise the capybara gives everyone a pat on the back every once in a while, whether their weight is 0.01 or $MAXVAL.

This makes it hard to game because it's mostly a black box, but gives people assurance that what they're doing matters and doesn't waste their time. A malicious actor probably won't spend a month getting an account into good standing to do janny duty and waiting for Pass/Fail feedback before trying again, especially with no fine-grained data on what they did wrong last time.

Yeah, there's a reason I said "not sure if there's anything you can do about this".

My current understanding is that, right now, you are helping Zorba accumulate the data he needs to determine whether this meta-moderation stuff has any hope of working at all.

After I click on the squirrel and rate some comments, it would be nice to be plopped back from whence I came, typically the current CW thread. A clickable link might be better than autonavigating.

Or you could just open the squirrel quokka link in a new tab, and close it after hitting the submit button.

Yeah but this is what code is for

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.)

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.

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

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

Should be fixed now! Thanks for the report :)

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

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.

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.

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.

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".

I was asked to janny a comment where all of the ancestor comments in the context were “filtered”. The comment was particularly hard for me to understand without context. Maybe let the jannies see the context of what they’re being asked to review?

It appears that the warrant canary on the Contact Us page still states it's for 2022. Although I suppose it's possible we've been contacted by the relevant authorities.

I honestly just haven't had time to update it, although I will note there's some legal question as to whether those canaries are meaningful.

Yeah I heard they can just legally require you to keep the canary up: https://www.cnet.com/news/privacy/warrant-canary-what-you-need-to-know-about-this-online-privacy-warning-sign/

I'm guessing judges' opinions of legal canaries are only a little above their opinion of sovereign citizens.

It probably really comes down to your willingness to get involved in court cases. If the gubmint comes to you with a warrant, and they also say "don't remove the legal canary" then are you willing to get in legal hotwater to disobey that (potentially unlawful) order? Personally my answer is hell no, but that's one reason why I'd never be a good person to run a site like this. Maybe @ymeskhout would have legally relevant advice?

I think in general the only safe things we can do is make our opinions on legal stuff crystal clear before any legal issues pop up. As powerful as the government is, they are still constrained by physics. So we can't be stopped from saying anything before they talk to us.

Yeah, and I will admit that while it would rankle me quite a bit, I ain't fighting the federal government on this one; this is a hobby that I care about a lot but it isn't my life work.

In any case, canary is updated, whatever good that does :D

Might someone introduce a kind of pre-publication censorship feature? I'd appreciate the opportunity to submit a post to a mod for pre-approval rather than to risk getting permanently nuked from orbit.

That's a neat idea, yeah. I could see adding that to the Janitor system. Long way out, but I've added it to the system :)

if you want you can submit a post as a draft. anyone with the direct link will be able to see it so you could maybe ask the mops using modmail with a link to your post

Not sure if there is an easy way to prevent this but I just got served two comments to review that were responses to my own comments. I'd probably wish to abstain from judgement of such comments.

That's a good catch, yeah - it should probably exclude any comment that's a reply to you, and maybe two replies deeper than that as well.

This will not be changed for a while but it'll get changed eventually :)

Some suggestions for the Inbox:

  1. I think displaying the notified comments in context is a bad idea. When multiple people resond to one of your comments it gets unwieldy and you have to scroll around to find the comment thats actually new. Also indentation gore. If I need the context, Ill open a new tab to read it anyway.

  2. Opening Inbox automatically marks all as read, and theres no way to turn it off. Back on reddit it didnt do that, and there was even a button to mark them unread again. I used to leave things set to unread if I meant to respond to them later. I cant do that now and I dont have a good replacement.

Also if I have suggestions for evaluating the volunteer data, where should I make them? Some of you comments suggest you might not want it to be public knowledge how exactly you use them.

Yeah, I think we've concluded that we should change to a Reddit-like display for that, which is probably not happening now but will hopefully be soon.

You're welcome to post it here if you like - initial implementations will have to be publicly available anyway - or send it to me in PM if you'd prefer.

Well, obvious part is getting the regressions for (user, judgement) against various mod decisions. Getting interactions between different users is propably not feasible, but we could try clustering them. (Which reminds me, is there still any interest in this?) This could let us consider interactions between those, and help assign comments to volunteers to get a representative quorum faster. Do you think you can afford to double-check all decisions that went against the user? And there should propably be some report number over which to check approvals.

How would you document actions the system took? You wanted people to not know they had an impact, but the modlog would obviously show the action as not taken by a human, and however the modhat comments are handled would show it too.

I checked the modlog for this and have some suggestions there as well: First, bans arent robustly connected to their modhat comments. If you view all actions you can tell chronologically, but filtering for bans you dont get it. Also there apparently arent modhats for removed comments, or did I just not find them? No list of currently banned users either. I think it would also be nice if the list where you select a mod action to filter for had little numbers showing how many of each occured in the last month or so.

Also: I know how to programm in principle (coming from mathematics), but I dont have experience with git, interacting with databases, etc. How much of a time investment do you think it would be before I could contribute to dev?

Sorry this took a while to respond; life is currently kind of a tidal wave of stuff >_<

(Which reminds me, is there still any interest in this?)

I think this is technically very cool. I question how useful it is for this kind of site, for the same reasons that you go through in the second half; isn't it just going to end up with everyone in an echo chamber? I do think this is potentially very cool for things where that's not a downside, though - /r/funny might get good use out of this, and it might work fantastic for clustering in video games, for example (although there's some gnarly realtime limits with those that cause a lot of problems.)

This could let us consider interactions between those, and help assign comments to volunteers to get a representative quorum faster. Do you think you can afford to double-check all decisions that went against the user? And there should propably be some report number over which to check approvals.

So I'm currently making no attempt whatsoever to cluster users :V

I am trying to get a sense of Confidence Of User. And we are going to ensure that every negative outcome, warning or ban, goes through a mod to verify. In the short term, positive outcomes will also go through a mod to verify - it's just going to be an extra bit of data attached to the comment - but yeah, "too many reports and we forcibly punt it to a mod" is definitely a thing I'm planning.

How would you document actions the system took? You wanted people to not know they had an impact, but the modlog would obviously show the action as not taken by a human, and however the modhat comments are handled would show it too.

In some ways this is an argument against the modlog, or at least against all the data the modlog may currently show. I've never particularly felt like a fully transparent mod log was necessary. It's entirely plausible that we could just change it into "we report on comment approval, but don't report who approved the comment".

First, bans arent robustly connected to their modhat comments.

Yeah this is a giant pain right now honestly. I haven't changed it mostly because it requires a lot of thought about how it should be, and we haven't had time. But I would very much like to change the whole "ban" mechanic into something a little formal, so it gets tied to a mod reply if appropriate and can even be tied to other comments at around the same time.

Also: I know how to programm in principle (coming from mathematics), but I dont have experience with git, interacting with databases, etc. How much of a time investment do you think it would be before I could contribute to dev?

It depends!

Our database layer is very simple; we're using SQLAlchemy, and while I'm having trouble finding simple examples (most of the examples start from the "create your database" point, which you don't have to do here because we already have one), here's a line from my current analysis:

db.session.query(VolunteerJanitorRecord).order_by(VolunteerJanitorRecord.recorded_utc).all()

That's just "get all volunter janitor records, order them by the time they were recorded". There's a lot of example code that does things and it'd be pretty easy to get started from there . . .

. . . as long as you're reasonably experienced with Python. You do get to learn Python if you don't know it already :V

Git, however, is pretty easy to get the basics of. I think I'd say that if this is something you want to toy around with I encourage you to do so; the tricky part is the data, I'm reading this off the internal database because I can do so easily, but I wouldn't be willing to send a full copy of the database to other people. And anything of this sort ends up highly determined by the actual user behavior.

That said, if you wanted to contribute to other things that we need, those are much easier for people to ramp up on.

isn't it just going to end up with everyone in an echo chamber?

I think its less of an echo chamber than sorting by upvotes. And as I said:

Personally I would like to see a replacement for sorting by new. There are fewer deep-in-the-tree discussions and more first-order replies without further replies than there used to, and my impression from memory is that this came gradually after the change to sorting by new.

So clustering could hopefully solve that with less of an echo chamber effect. But if you weigh the risks of partisanship vs declining quality differently, maybe you do want to stick with things as they are.

as long as you're reasonably experienced with Python. You do get to learn Python if you don't know it already :V

If you think thats the time-consuming part, then the whole thing doesnt sound too bad. I hope Ill get to it after finals season.

So I'm currently making no attempt whatsoever to cluster users :V

Well, Im glad I gave a new idea. Feel free to ask me about math details.

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 :)

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.

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".

How many reports do mods typically get/day?

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

Maybe we should bring back the BLR.

As an example - I think themotte might find some articles from this blog very interesting, for instance (title 42, maybe mifepristone ii/iii). I'm not sure they fit a full toplevel post though, and don't have multiple paragraphs of interesting commentary on any of them, as IANAL.

Just because I don't have anything interesting to say doesn't mean other mottizens don't! A good link can be the start of an extended conversation about something related, just like a subthread that goes off on a tangent.

The big problem we had with the BLR is that people used it heavily to post attacks-on-the-outgroup, and often they didn't get interesting commentary, it just turned into "look how bad these people are". I'm not convinced any of that has changed.

I do think it would be nice if we had a way of making this work but I haven't come up with one I'm happy with.

I entirely agree, and said "BLR bad" a lot in the past.

Wouldn't just 'aggressively moderate, delete boo outgroup posts, or ones that even lean towards that, in a single click without spending time worrying about fairness' be enough? It's not very nice to the people who post "boo outgroup" stuff, especially since the poster (who, of course, isn't me or anyone on my side, we never do that) thinks it's a good post. But if that's a blocker, it seems dumb to let 'seeming unfair' or 'people are mad because their stuff gets deleted' get in the way of something useful.

Traditionally the issue has come down to mod bandwidth; we simply aren't able to get to stuff reliably that quickly, and if it stays up for long, well, that's a problem. I guess we could set it up to filter everything in the BLR, so that it isn't displayed until it's approved - this wasn't practically possible on Reddit but we could totally do it here - but I don't want to put that much more weight on the mods' shoulders.

It's possible that once I get the volunteer system working (which I'm literally doing right now!) we'll be able to have much more rapid turnaround and that will solve the problems.

The vote pos/neg breakdown view is broken.

The breakdown shows up as;

Total -> (+Total | -Total)

Instead of;

Total -> (+Upvotes | -Downvotes)

Also keep this thread pinned.

Oops, fallout from a refactor. Will get that solved soon.

I'd rather cut down a bit on the pinned-thread spam; four is too many! (three is probably also too many but it's better)

Edit: Fixed!

Would it be possible in the profile view to add a feature where I could sort comments by most children/responses rather than by upvotes?

Sometimes there are prolific comments that don't actually get very many votes, I'd like to be able to find them more easily.

Should now be done! It's under "comments", it should probably be renamed, but I'm not doing that right now.

Actually, that'd be really easy now, we're caching that info. Request filed, this is the kind of thing we could get to soon :)

Do I understand the database structure correctly, and this site supports sub-"reddits"? If yes, why would you encourage absolutely disgusting demonic behavior like this:

come join the dev discord.

In theory, yes.

In practice we've put absolutely zero effort into making sure they still work properly. They probably don't.

Also, my experience is that realtime chat is a lot more useful for the necessary sort of discussion than Reddit-style posting.

Also, the dev discord predates this site by quite a bit.

Two problems:

  • The place is a ghost town, whatever conversations are happening there, I wouldn't call them "real time".

  • Might be easier to get feedback from other users on how to implement features and fix bugs, if it's all happening on the same site.

But if it doesn't work then meh....

There's realtime conversations pretty often when there's actual dev stuff to talk about. We have limited dev time because it's all volunteer; however, the realtime conversations that do happen are pretty important.

There's also the issue tracker that's available for everyone.

The Motte isn't designed for this kind of communication and the dev time required to make it work just isn't worth it. Better to specialize given our limited resources.

Not getting notifications for responses to many of my comments. Some recent update probably fucked that up.

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.

Argh, that's going to be a pain to track down.

Any idea when it started? Do you happen to have a lot of people blocked?

Edit: Also, do you mind if I trawl around in the database to look at your notifications? Technically this means I'll probably see your private messages, if you have any, but I don't care about that I just want to look at the database stuff.

Started 2-3 days ago. Didn't block anyone. Blocked by 1 user, but that user is nowhere near any of the posts. I think there is some public/private profile tomfoolery going on here, I am not sure about that but one of the users notifications I did not get has a private profile.

Hrm. Maaaaybe?

Do you mind if I trawl around in the database to look at your notifications? Technically this means I'll probably see your private messages, if you have any, but I don't care about that I just want to look at the database stuff.

Go ahead

We currently have no idea what's going on. It looks like you're receiving notifications for all replies to your comments and the database says they're being "read", which mostly means that it generated a page with the notification included, but it does mean it isn't just being skipped by the notification-page code.

It's possible they ended up buried deep in your notification page somehow and they didn't get bubbled to the top, but we tried some stuff and couldn't reproduce that.

I know this might be tough, but is there any way you can find a comment that you didn't get notified for, give me the link, and search in your notifications page to see if you can find it in an unexpected place?

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.

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

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

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?"

"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!

I usually just mark those as neutral

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.

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 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 :)

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 :)

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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

Happy about the volunteering, unhappy about the blocking.

Ooh is this meta general now?

I want to set up a recurring meta post of some kind but I'm not sure what that looks like.

So, kinda, yeah.

Monthly Motte Meta-post? Write up some site news and updates, pose a specific question or two, and have an opening for general comments?

Monthly may be too quick, but I'd hate to give up the alliteration.

The problem ends up being time; writing a good meta post turns out to be a surprisingly large slice of the time I have available :/ Which is why I don't do it as often as I wish I did.

I think, in order to do as much stuff as I wish I did, I'd need to be two or three people.

One thing I find mildly irritating about the janny thing is that the prompt only shows up on thread/comment views. If it wants me to janny, I don't know it until I click into a thread I was interested in reading. Now it wants me to go off and rate posts, and when I'm done, it sends me back to the front page, and I have to go to the thread that I actually wanted to read again. Not a huge deal, but it could be solved by having a prompt show up on the site front page too.

I've actually wanted to do that - part of my end plan for this is to provide some kind of a meter on how much the system wants your contribution, and let people contribute multiple times a day if there's stuff for them to do (with "stuff for them to do" heavily tempered by not letting any one person get too much of the work.) And at that point, yeah, I'd also put something on the front page.

Work in progress, but for what it's worth, I agree :)


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