There's a pretty big set of changes coming down the pipe. These shouldn't have much impact on users - it's all internal bookkeeping - but there's a lot of it, and if there's bugs, it might cause issues. Let me know if anything weird happens! Weird, in this case, is probably "comments you can see that you think you shouldn't be able to", or "comments you can't see that you think you should be able to", or anything else strange that goes on. As an example, at one point in development reply notifications stopped working. So keep your eyes out for that. I'm probably pushing this in a day or two, I just wanted to warn people first.
EDIT: PUSH COMPLETE, let me know if anything goes wrong
Are you a software developer? Do you want to help? We can pretty much always use people who want to get their hands dirty with our ridiculous list of stuff to work on. The codebase is in Python, and while I'm not gonna claim it's the cleanest thing ever, it's also not the worst and we are absolutely up for refactoring and improvements. Hop over to our discord server and join in. (This is also a good place to report issues, especially if part of the issue is "I can't make comments anymore.")
Are you somewhat experienced in Python but have never worked on a big codebase? Come help anyway! We'll point you at some easy stuff.
Are you not experienced in Python whatsoever? We can always use testers, to be honest, and if you want to learn Python, go do a tutorial, once you know the basics, come join us and work on stuff.
(if you're experienced in, like, any other language, you'll have no trouble)
Alt Accounts: Let's talk about 'em. We are consistently having trouble with people making alt accounts to avoid bans, which is against the rules, or making alt accounts to respond to their own stuff, which isn't technically against the rules, and so forth. I'm considering a general note in the rules that alt accounts are strongly discouraged, but if you feel the need for an alt, contact us; we're probably okay with it if there's a good reason. (Example: We've had a few people ask to make effortposts that aren't associated with their main account for various reasons. We're fine with this.) If you want to avoid talking to us about it, it probably isn't a good reason.
Feedback wanted, though! Let me know what you think - this is not set in stone.
Single-Issue Posting: Similarly, we're having trouble with people who want to post about one specific topic. "But wait, Zorba, why is that a problem" well, check out the Foundation:
The purpose of this community is to be a working discussion ground for people who may hold dramatically different beliefs. It is to be a place for people to examine the beliefs of others as well as their own beliefs; it is to be a place where strange or abnormal opinions and ideas can be generated and discussed fairly, with consideration and insight instead of kneejerk responses.
If someone's posting about one subject, repeatedly, over and over, then it isn't really a discussion that's being had, it's prosletyzing. I acknowledge there's some value lost in removing this kind of behavior, but I think there's a lot of value lost in having it; letting the community be dominated by this behavior seems to lead to Bad Outcomes.
Feedback wanted, though! Let me know what you think - this is also not set in stone.
Private Profiles: When we picked up the codebase, it included functionality for private profiles, which prevents users from seeing your profile. I probably would have removed this if I'd had a lot more development time, but I didn't. So it exists.
I'm thinking of removing it anyway, though. I'm not sure if it provides significant benefit; I think there's a good argument that anything posted on the site is, in some sense, fair game to be looked over.
On the other hand . . . removing it certainly does encourage ad hominem arguments, doesn't it? Ad hominems are kind of useless and crappy and poison discourse. We don't want people to be arguing about the other person's previously-stated beliefs all the time, we want people to be responding to recent comments, in general.
But on the gripping hand . . .
. . . well, I just went to get a list of the ten most prolific users with hidden profiles. One of them has a few quality contributions! (Thanks!) Two of them are neutral. And seven of them have repeated antagonism, with many of those getting banned or permabanned.
If there's a tool mostly used by people who are fucking with the community, maybe that's a good argument for removing the tool.
On the, uh, other gripping hand, keep in mind that private profiles don't even work against the admins. We can see right through them (accompanied by a note that says "this profile is private"). So this feature change isn't for the sake of us, it's for the sake of you. Is that worth it? I dunno.
Feedback wanted! Again!
The Volunteer System is actually working and doing useful stuff at this point. It doesn't yet have write access, so to speak, all it's doing is providing info to the mods. But it's providing useful info. Fun fact: some of our absolute most reliable and trustworthy volunteers don't comment. In some cases "much", in some cases "at all". Keep it up, lurkers! This is useful! I seriously encourage everyone to click that banner once a day and spend a few minutes at it. Or even just bookmark the page and mash the bookmark once in a while - I've personally got it on my bookmark bar.
The big refactor mentioned at the top is actually for the sake of improving the volunteer system, this is part of what will let it turn into write access and let us solve stuff like filtered-comments-in-limbo, while taking a lot of load off the mods' backs and maybe even making our moderation more consistent. As a sort of ironic counterpart to this, it also means that the bar might show up less often.
At some point I want to set up better incentives for long-time volunteers, but that takes a lot of code effort. Asking people to volunteer more often doesn't, so that's what I'm doing.
(Feedback wanted on this also.)
I want your feedback on things, as if that wasn't clear. These threads basically behave like a big metadiscussion thread, so . . . what's your thoughts on this whole adventure? How's it going? Want some tweaks? Found a bug? Let me know! I don't promise to agree but I promise to listen.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
link
A post that is 100% culture warring, and booing outgroup scores (+44/-5) and has no mod action. If the majority of readers here want to read posts that dunk on leftists, then they should expect to run out of leftists to dunk on.
Either we all need to spontaneously coordinate and suppress our base instincts, the mods need to start cracking down on culture warring (as distinct from analysis, which is what the Culture War thread is purportedly for), or we all need to make peace with the fact that our community has exactly the amount of ideological diversity that we deserve.
Edit: previous discussion
Coincidentally, I just banned him (but before I saw this post) because I just saw the report, which as far as I can tell, is the first time it was reported in the six days since it was posted. He was banned not for saying mean things about Sotomayor and Jackson, but for posting a low effort dunk that was pure culture war (and because he now has a pattern of that kind of crappy commenting).
Takeaways for you:
We don't always catch every single post, and if you want our attention drawn to a post, reporting it is a better strategy than complaining again about why we do not conduct moderation according to your precise specifications and timetable.
IIRC, almost the same thing happened on the old site: Someone made a bad comment, there was a public complaint about it, and a mod replied that there were zero reports filed about the bad comment (including by the complainant, obviously).
I'm not sure if it's universal or just Motte-like, but I definitely sympathize with the urge to talk about an issue rather than acting on it (and clicking on the Report button is "acting on it"). I'm also not sure if it's a good predilection or not, but I try to fight against my instincts while I'm here.
Yeah, this happens all the time.
And meanwhile there are a few people who keep reporting stuff just because they disagree with it. Welp.
Strongly recommend using the Report button when you think it's deserved!
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I'm quite sparing in my reports, at least in non-egregious cases, because it always makes me feel mildly like a tattletale.
I report constantly. Especially aaqc. Seems valuable to bring it to people's attention.
Oh I definitely make AAQCs all the time, I just didn't mentally think of them as the same kind of report!
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Nah, clicking the Report button isn't "acting on it", not here. It might effectively be acting in places with rubber-stamp mods that ban anything with a lot of reports, but these mods aren't a rubber-stamp. I could report your post here 100 times, and all that would happen is I'd get banned for spamming reports.
It is true that not all reported comments get acted upon, but it is also true that virtually no unreported comments get acted upon. If you think a comment deserves mod intervention, report it.
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The entire split between "words" and "actions" is false, but that doesn't mean people (including me) feel that way. Composing a comment evokes different emotions than clicking a button, even if the results are identical.
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The point is you can't reasonably expect for a comment to get modded, if no one reports it. In that sense reporting is acting.
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I guess I assumed at least one mod had seen a 6-day old, second level comment and the 10th highest comment of the week. If I was wrong, mea culpa.
I assumed one of you had seen it, but, given your policy of not banning people for saying mean things about politicians, chose not to ban a comment that was merely insulting a politician.
I can only be grateful at what must be the best possible outcome for me. Moderation certainly seems less insane than my past conversations with mods has made it seem. It kind of seems like the real disagreement wasn’t with banning such comments, it was whether to ban them as “boo outgroup” or “uncharitable/unkind”. I will only be reporting such comments as “boo outgroup” going forward.
(Though to be clear, is “Trump is a venal fascist clown” a violation of the “boo outgroup” rule?)
Fortunately I’m not particularly interested in arguing for a specific rule, since fundamentally the reason these comments are harmful is they make productive and diverse discussion more difficult.
I can't speak for the other mods, but when I'm reading over comments I'm often not thinking about them with mod-brain, if that makes sense. There's been times I've browsed recent comments, gone to look at the mod queue, and said "oh shit, yeah, that comment I literally read a minute ago was awful, wasn't it".
Reports absolutely help, and reporting it for the right thing is also important, but if it's ambiguous, don't stress too much about it - choose a report reason that's defensible and you're in the right ballpark.
(Every once in a while someone reports a twenty-paragraph megapost for "low effort" and I tend to just sort of approve those after a quick skim to make sure it's not the word "cheese" repeated a thousand times, so if someone is being antagonistic in a megapost, and you report it for "low effort", that might be a wasted report; don't do that. "Not reporting megaposts as low-effort" is basically the bar of report-quality that I ask :V)
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Maybe someone did. Maybe I skimmed past it the first time I saw it. I don't always read through the latest threads looking for things to mod.
That isn't really an accurate description of our policy. You can certainly say "mean things about politicians" that will get you banned, but that alone isn't likely to. It depends on context and what you are saying.
Do as you please, but if someone criticizes a politician (even using mean language) and you report it as "boo outgroup," we're still not going to mod that comment just because they weren't nice to Kamala Harris or Donald Trump.
But you will mod it as boo outgroup, correct? If not, what is the difference between
And
Those don't sound similar. The latter is based on things that Sotomayor and Jackson actually did. The former just calls Trump names; if it is based on something he did, it certainly doesn't say so.
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Not necessarily. It depends.
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