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I moderated a forum once.
Like many forums it struggled with one of the basic problems of forum moderation — how much niceness do you enforce, which I'll explain by way of some endemic user types in any forum with enough people and anything but the most milquetoast topic.
A: Here's the troll who comes by only to post egregiously offensive "go kill yourself [list of slurs]",
B: Here's the more subtle troll, who keeps toeing the line as much as he can get away with.
C: here's the user who is not a troll. They actually do participate in discussion and are clearly trying to be a part of the community. They're also abrasive and/or obnoxious and/or inflammatory.
D: And then here's the final type of user that's problematic as a mod: They're a sensitive snowflake. Honestly they need to be sub-divided further, because some of them are just born snowflakes that can't handle any opposition to their viewpoint at all, and others are retaliatory snowflakes, because if I got a ban for three days for saying this opinion is dumb then that guy also needs to get a ban for three days for saying this other opinion is dumb.
The forum was one that was trying really hard to be heterogenous in terms of opinions and also to be nice and moderating it was a nightmare, not because of the obvious ban on sight trolls but because inevitably when you want to moderate niceness now 90% of your mod time — and the mod time becomes a balloon that expands to fill all available space — is spent on dealing with constant playground supervision of the snowflakes. Also you've been slowly but steadily banning your type C members when they eventually accrue enough complains from the type Ds, and because they're really annoying you initially don't miss them until you realize that conversation in your forum is drying up a bit and also some of the valuable forum members who were friends with type Cs also got pissed off and left and also mixed into the type Cs and their friends were, inevitably, some of the more useful members of the forum who knew a lot (and hence got into arguments that annoyed snowflakes).
Also it turns out snowflakes are basically never satisfied as long and are just a self eating death spiral of a forum culture.
After my experience moderating that forum and swearing off moderating ever again, I ended up lurking the notorious kiwifarms. It was full of people who engaged in what would definitely be termed elsewhere as hate speech against me. Now, I never actually made an account there, and I also stopped visiting a few years back so idk if things have changed, but at the time I remember being struck by how much less of a threat I felt reading kiwifarms, because yeah slurs were being thrown around but users were actually arguing, you didn't just have someone with the viewpoint that was the forum consensus and then everyone else against that consensus gets to tiptoe around what they can say or get banned. Everyone shared their most idiotic opinions and had other people arguing with them no holds barred, the forum also had reaction emojis so you could freely post your insane conspiracy theory but wou would get 50 "lol look at this insane conspiracy theory" reactions.
I remember a few years ago people were still making fun of t*kt*kers and how they would asterisk everything or use idiotic word substitution like "krill myself" because otherwise they'd get blackholed by the TikTok algorithm.
Meanwhile I took a long long break from reddit and only recently returned, to a forum dedicated to a game I play, and discovered that in the interim reddit has added some kind of probably AI based site-wide moderation against violent language (or actual human beings are being this dumb idk) and it's impossible to talk like a normal person there anymore, because if you say, in a joking and friendly fashion perfectly understood by you and the person you are talking to to be friendly, "you said my build was bad, I'm gonna have to shove you off a cliff" (this example is not great because I forget the actual exchange, but whatever, fill in something more normal) then you get banned from all of Reddit and the poor guy you were talking with gets to post your exit speech from the discord you're both in as well. It does appear to be a strike system where first you get warned, since I got my first warning for telling someone who posted about a pedophile moving into their neighborhood that hopefully the pedophile would die suddenly.
It's hard not to turn this into some kind of doompost about how the internet is turning into a horrible little hellhole where no one has a normal argument anymore just constant barricading themselves into their own opinions lest they be offended by the not niceness of having to hear someone else's opinions, each little forum and its own narrow band of acceptable ideology, all while the biggest social media sites are enforcing the most transparently fake bullshit kindergarten language upon us all. It brings out the free speech absolutist instincts in me, it really does.
But what if you don't want an aggressively anti-censorship forum that will involve a forum culture of calling everyone slurs? You want the veneer of respectability and gentility but also the ability to have an actual conversation?
Well I already listed the shitty experience I had trying to moderate such a forum, against what was not bad faith actors but just human actors acting predictably human hence this being a pattern you can see all over the place, and now I have to address the flip side of the coin.
Let's by analogy discuss locker room culture. I don't actually know if locker room culture is a real thing irl so I'm going to discuss hypothetical locker room culture.
It's a group of like fifteen guys in a guy's only space. They're basically all normal guys, plus rapey Kenneth and edgy Doug. Sometimes rapey Kenneth makes a joke about how some girl in the school really needs to be fucked into her proper place in society and Doug will make some follow up joke and everyone else is maybe thinking "c'mon man can we not do this" if it's been like too many times that day but usually you're just trying to finish getting dressed and maybe John also is like "that's not cool man" and pushes back. But like, the rest of the time the atmosphere is just a comfy men's only space plus the occasional rape joke or comment about how women suck or are all gold-diggers or are responsible for everything wrong with society.
Anyway, if for whatever reason that locker room decided it wanted to actually be a co-ed discussion space instead, it would have a little problem, which is that any individual woman walking in would get the vibe — they're the barely tolerated outsider — and then leave unless they're like extra autistic/socially challenged.
Because there's just the microculture of what kinds of things are ok to say there and what aren't, and sometimes what's ok to say is anything negative about group A and what's not ok to say is anything negative about group B, and it's not really about an active policy one way or another it's just this is the overall culture of the social group, read the room and get out.
This is, unfortunately, the part where I admit that I've spent weeks now debating if I should just quietly show myself the door. I didn't mean to enter themotte under false premises, I just decided my first post wouldn't be some "here's all my labels and opinions" and would be an actual post about a controversial topic I wanted to talk about. And then before I had the chance to like, casually drop the relevant information about me and get it over with (I despise sharing personally identifiable information online, but it was nonetheless something that needed to happen eventually if I wanted to talk about any number of topics I wanted to discuss), my government did a surprise attack on Iran. I quite vividly remember someone posting a comment about there being a siren and someone else saying "can't find any news confirming it" and not piping in with "it's me, I'm the news, posting from the spotty internet in the bomb shelter". And then it became just increasingly not the right moment for it (also I was quite sleep deprived and dealing with lots of other more immediate concerns).
And in the meantime I got to have the uncomfortable sensation of listening in on conversations I felt were very obviously not meant to include me. For several days now I've been debating doing a rip the band-aid off kind of post (how? What framing?) to get it over with and be able to discuss things again or to just... Leave.
Because of course the alternative is to figure out the correct, respectful way to tiptoe around the conversation over whether Jews control the American government/assassinated Kennedy, since we aren't doing kiwifarms style dialogue where someone talks about the kikes ruining everything and someone else responds by calling him a retarded autist, you've got to politely request sources and carefully have respectful mutually productive dialogue.
Or to just like ignore that the conversation is even happening? Stick to discussion of feminism and essentially continue faking being a normal non-Jewish mottizen...
Polite respectful mutual dialogue.
But only for some opinions, because others are an "immense pain in the ass".
Yes this is the actual reason I ended up writing this comment instead of continuing to waffle over if I should just leave. Because it is actually really annoying, if I need to play nice with the neonazis and have polite and measured conversations — I am willing to do this, even though conversations with people who are (only theoretically!) interested in me and my family being dead are a "pain in the ass" to conduct civilly — and to then see someone else express some opinion that is more objectionable to the baseline motte culture, but expressed according to all the rules of the site, and get banned (temporarily) for it. Because it just means setting the lines around what kinds of people are in the locker room, which is pretending to be a co-ed discussion space, but isn't. And yes I'm biased by being more inclined towards free speech over banning and thinking that it's better to have the opinions and talk it out then constantly police what people say, sure, but if the forum can tolerate holocaust denial I think it can also stretch itself to tolerate libtards. I'm not interesting in doing some tit for tat thing where I'm like "well if you banned them for this, why didn't you ban that other person for that" because like I stated up front that's just the path to a death spiral where almost no one interesting sticks around. But still, come on, you didn't ban them for constantly sticking their conspiracy theories into every discussion couched as consensus building obvious fact. Apply the same low bar consistently. Let people have an actual conversation with actual disagreement.
Welcome to The Motte! We've got cookies--
Oh.
You seem like a nice person. You've politely framed your discomfort and concern without flaming out, which is more than can be said about some of our longtime users with plenty of AAQCs. Some of them even come back whistling away, hoping nobody remembers their peformative crash out.
I think I can speak for the other moderators when I say that we'd like to have you around. Everything that follows is an attempt at an explanation for why The Motte is the way it is:
Look, no forum is perfect. The Motte tries to find a delicate and hazy balance between freedom of expression, politeness and avoiding the FBI raiding Zorba's home.
There's no other place like it. Believe me, I've looked. You can drop the restrictions on politeness and most pretenses of moderation, and you end up with 4chan or Kiwifarms. You can tighten the screws, and end up with a nicely mowed lawn like Scott's substack comment section, but at the cost of killing a whole swathe of politically incorrect worldviews. (Though he has slightly warmed on the whole no discussion of CW thing, but you can't really run a community off substack comments, the layout sucks).
This is what motivates me to stay, and to take on the occasional unpleasant task of mowing the lawn myself. With a light touch; one man's weed is another man's wildflower. There's no other place like us, and what we have is worth expending the negentropy to keep going. Yes, even if it's herding cats, and often cats with rabies.
Our forum, like any place that does more than just pay lip service to freedom of speech, has one principled libertarian and a zillion witches.
I'd call myself the principled libertarian, but I think there's a mugshot of mine next to a stall selling signed copies of the Malleus Maleficarum. Perhaps it's a rotating, honorary position.
What we succeed at, mostly, is getting the witches to temporarily LARP as "principled libertarians", sometimes with the same disgruntled attitude as a rambunctious boy forced to sit through Mass, when they'd rather be calling people slurs or setting houses on fire. If you can be polite and not break the rules, then the candy you get is access to a rather thoughtful and discerning user base willing to seriously engage with just about any topic under the sun.
(Sometimes, if they do this long enough, the mask sticks)
@SecureSignals is our resident antisemite. Yet he mostly behaves. Not always, he's been rapped on the knuckles often enough, and banned for significant amounts of time. These days, he even talks about things other than the Jews, because we were quite clear that this forum isn't his personal hobby-horse, and he needs to figure out some other way to pay rent.
That is why you see SS. What you don't see are the dozens of people who can't keep it in their pants at all, who DM insults to people like @2rafa. They get caught in the filter, and are swiftly banned.
Keep in mind the very important distinction between the moderators tolerating something, and the denizens of this forum doing so. We don't control upvotes, we can't compel people to engage with tracts they hate. We choose what gets rounded up as an AAQC, but the initial reports as such? All you guys.
Yet, more often than not, articulate and reasoned claims get their due.
Us mods take such claims seriously. We would appreciate examples, and if it became clear that we were egregiously biased, we would seek to correct ourselves.
We're not monolithic. There are significant differences in personal opinion, though we aim at consensus.
We are also not omniscient. If one side is consistently getting their rage-bait reported, and the other isn't, the odds of us noticing decline dramatically. There was once a point where I could claim to ready every single comment posted on this site, but alas, due to gainful employment, that's no longer feasible. The other mods probably have even less free time. We also impose significant costs on ourselves by seeking to explain ourselves in warnings and ban messages, instead of just firing them off from on-high.
That being said, there are probably hundreds or thousands of kind, well-spoken people who we would have loved to keep around, but who were scared off by the topics (and less commonly, the tone) of what's discussed here. That sucks, but to an extent, that's a price we have to pay to keep The Motte open for most, if not all. We also keep away a whole lot of witches so vile that they're not tolerated by us witch-adjacenf folk. You really can't please everyone, not even nice people with reasonable desires. But we've kept the lights on, and us mods have a vested interest in preventing this from becoming a dead and desolate place racking up unjustified AWS bills.
We would hate to see you go, and I hope you can find reason to stay.
I've long thought that one simple additional mod rule would improve the moderation, and particularly complaints about moderation here significantly: The most user visibly active mod or two at the time (say for the last month or two) doesn't get to make or participate in any decisions about good but controversial contributors. Zorba banning the legendary TrannyPorno? Regrettable but kosher. Someone like HLynka doing the same? Not kosher (I hope I recall who was the most active mod at the time correctly).
From ordinary user perspective there seems to always be one or two mods who are way too trigger happy in non-obvious janitorial duties. This rule would IMO help quite a bit against that.
Please tell me more, I tried to look up their account but it 404'd so I can't even see the context.
I actually tried to find which mod made the announcement back when the forum was on reddit but couldn’t. I’m pretty sure it wasn’t Zorba tho (which was my point).
TrannyPornO was one of the best and most interessting contributors The Motte ever had. He also had a tendency to sometimes use rather colorful language. The mods had a policy of escalating bans based on previous bans and their own internal notes and an overactive mod or two who give such notes very easily. This meant that unless you toed the imaginary line of that specific mod, you were more or less guaranteed to end up on the mods’ shitlist with every previous ban being used to justify you getting even deeper on that list.
Thus my suggestion that the most active mods not be allowed to moderate a small specific subset of users.
Ohhhh he was on Reddit, cheers
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