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As of this time @HlynkaCG has been permabanned. I'm posting this message at the top of the thread, because its not really for Hlynka, its for the community to know. There were a few different posts I could have chosen in the modqueue, and many of them were too buried to be visible. The mod team has given him repeated warnings and bans. And I personally reached out to him last ban to warn him that a permaban was likely coming if this behavior continued.
I mostly do not feel this is a good thing, but it is a necessary thing. Hlynka had quite a few quality contributions, and I don't think I was alone in appreciating his often unique (for themotte) perspective. But he repeatedly did it in a way that just wasn't acceptable for the rules around here.
I would like people to have a few takeaways:
Please keep any discussion civil.
I would be a lot less frustrated over this if the group here hadn't done the following:
Allow a community of like minded people to congregate on /r/themotte
Encourage those people to leave
Lock the door behind them once they do
Maybe you don't like hylnka, but a lot of people did. The whole pitch on moving everybody here was that we could avoid the overbearing influence of reddit admins, but now we just have...you guys.
Hylnka was a dick, and banned me at least once on themotte...but as I have pointed out before: you guys (specifically you, cjet) over way overtending this garden. Most of the discussion here just sounds like (and I suspect heavily is) chatbots talking back and forth to one another. Many have pointed out that a version of a captcha for chatbots is if they are willing to say naughty words or not. What you're basically doing with this ban is saying "you have to sound like a chatbot in order to post here". I think this is a bad idea.
Here's a suggestion for how to improve themotte and course correct it: give us something like "showdead" on hacker news. Give me the option in my userprofile to have a non mod curated experience where I can see naughty posts and interact with them. People who want the more curated experience can untick this "show naughty" option, and never have to see it. I don’t think you will do this since it takes the power of being a mod away (although keeps the practical purpose), but it would be appreciated.
I am honestly confused by your accusations.
Yes, we have done this, where others have not. If others were doing this, we would probably not bother.
Leave what? Leave reddit? No, we only encouraged people to also be on themotte website. There is no requirement or encouragement to leave reddit. I still have an account there for subreddits I enjoy.
What door has been locked? We also permabanned people over on the subreddit.
No, I like Hlynka. If there is such a thing as "internet friends" I would consider him one. I was the most reluctant among the mods to ban him, and have stuck up for his behavior quite often in the back-channels. The fact that I am the one to ban him is more similar to a "George shoots Lennie" situation. Not comparing Hlynka to Lennie, but the social dynamic of the situation where the most ardent defender of the accused who gave them as many chances as possible has to be the one to carry out the execution.
And yes you have us. This was always the agreement. If you want the reddit admins and some other set of moderators, you know where reddit is. We have gotten significantly more lenient since moving off of reddit, because there is more of a worry of eroding our user base and having no replacement source. If you want no moderation there are places on the internet like that. This isn't such a place, never has been, and never will be given that zorba will probably just shut it down if it came to that.
People are allowed to say "naughty words" here. They aren't allowed to put words in other's mouths. Accuse people of beliefs they don't hold with little or no evidence/discussion. And throw out broad sweeping insults to others.
You can say cunt, but you can't call another user one without breaking our rules. If you are not a fan of "politeness" as one of the rules of discussion, I'd again suggest that most of the rest of the internet is still out there.
No. Zorba has been asked about this multiple times before. He has a post somewhere about trash in a river as a comparison. The general point is that our users actually do most of the filtering for us, and mods are here as a backup to make sure there is a clear bright line.
People do this to me (I'm guessing) 70% of the times I post here.
I don't think it's malice, I think it's the inferential gap. When someone from outside your local hivemind cluster reads your post, they don't take away from it the same things you put in. So their response often assumes a lot of things about you that are not present in the post and are dead wrong.
I could report every time that happens to me, but it would be counter-productive. I think it's a symptom of people with different contexts finding an area where they both have something to learn, and should be explored rather than punished.
(which I don't always have the emotional energy for, but, you know. In theory.)
People getting things wrong in good faith is one thing.
Blatantly disregarding clarification is an order.
There’s still enough diversify of thought here that any given stance is going to risk an inferential gap with someone, and consistently striving to pass an ITT is the best we can do.
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Every post on /r/themotte is locked for comments and nobody can post anything new. That's the door that has been locked.
Wasn't it locked when the migration happened? The motive was to prevent the division of the community between the two platforms, and make sure it launches successfully, right?
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Why do you believe more moderation (relative to our reddit level) would lead to greater attrition than less moderation? It's not at all obvious to me.
Speaking for myself, if there were a bunch of jannies lording over people constantly with a long list of rules, I wouldn't participate.
The whole move here was because of the reddit admins making clear they wanted more bans, more policing, etc.
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I don't think this is an entirely baseless claim, but I do think the mods generally do a great job of modding for tone and not content, which is what we want from them. This is the only public forum I'm aware of where Nazis and progressives both make regular contributions to the discussion. We want to curate and preserve a space for that kind of ideological diversity, and if the cost of that is that the tone of the average post becomes somewhat more stilted, then that's an acceptable loss. A complete withdrawal of moderation would lead to people with minority viewpoints self-selecting out of the discussion even more than they already have.
Many of the regulars were posting here before ChatGPT (or even before GPT-3).
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I liked Hlynka well enough, but my biggest issue him was the near constant question dodging whenever he got challenged with something difficult. Now mind you in a lot of those cases there are wats he could have responded/answered from his own viewpoint (even if I think the arguments would have been wrong) but he didn't even do that. But he would continue responding to other people's posts that didn't contain hardball questions in the meantime.
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Producing heat in a place dedicated to productive political discussions is a bad idea.
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If you think being a mod for a place where charged political discussions happen is a power trip, you are so far off base that you aren't even in the stadium. I've modded a forum like that before, and let me tell you: it fucking sucks. You spend almost all of your time dealing with shitty posters who are spoiling for a fight and deliberately antagonizing others, but who are just on the good side of the rules most of the time. They are the equivalent of a child who runs up to a line in the sand going "haha, you can't touch me" the entire time. They make the experience worse for everyone except themselves, and the moment you give them a warning (let alone a ban) they will raise bloody murder about how you are biased and persecuting them. Meanwhile, the good users aren't giving you shit but they don't really care about the work you do either. The "janitor" analogy is apt here, because people rarely take notice if you're doing a good job but notice right away if you're doing a bad job. In general it's a thankless job which can easily lower your opinion of humanity if you aren't careful to not let it get to you. Any minor power trip you might be able to get from moderating a backwater politics forum simply is not worth it, and nobody is doing that.
Contrary to your assertion, the mods actually use a pretty light touch. FFS you can go look yourself and see all the times Hlynka got temp banned and given a lot of lenience. And in many of those cases you can find people bitching "ah, so Hlynka continues to get away with posts like this and the mods do nothing". So even the "overbearing" mod presence you decry is considered by many posters to be far too light. That by itself should tell you that you are way out of touch if you think that this is overbearing.
Thankfully, we have wildcard rules allowing us to mod people for repeatedly toeing the line, even if they can claim with a straight face no individual line has been crossed. This is rarely used, unless someone has been consistently obnoxious, or low level obnoxious while just avoiding what they perceive as the threshold for mod action.
Regarding Hlynka's second chances (all 25 of them), in general we give additional leeway to longterm users in good standing.
If you have multiple AAQCs, a history of quality posts and are generally in good standing, then if you have an off day, the mods will consider that and go easier on you. A ban might be shortened, or converted into a warning. A warning might be replaced by "knock it off" that doesn't go on the record.
But the leeway extended is not absolute, or infinite. Hlynka pissed me off to no end, beginning with unwarranted personal attacks and casual racism, so if I hadn't recused myself from moderating him, he'd have been shown the door ages ago. But this ban came when his friends in the mod team, people who had worked alongside him for years back when he was a mod, had enough.
Re: racism, I just realized that's funny that he was somewhat racist to you, considering the recent topics he was arguing in.
He's gone to other extremes to demonstrate his hostility against me, including impugning the validity of my medical degree.
Thankfully the medical registration authorities of two different countries respectfully disagree, but if I ever end up working for the VA, his back pain, tinnitus and so on will inevitably turn out to not be service related, and good luck getting anything stronger than motril.
(For legal reasons, this is a joke. Leaving aside that's how the VA does things by default)
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I think you're typical-minding. There are people for whom it is a power trip.
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Oh get out of here with this. Dude routinely reserved the right to ignore others actual posts and try to call them out over arguments they never made, and would sit there fantasizing about what they "really" thought and what bad people it made them. There's never been a version of this place where that was tolerable, other than in the case of Hlynka himself and the "999 strikes and you're out" rule he was allowed to live and die by. It's absurd that he lasted this long.
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