Hari, if you’re reading this, don’t take this thread as a personal attack of any sort - it’s not. Nor am I calling for you to be removed as a moderator. In addition, all mods and admins deserve a lot of thanks for their unpaid and thankless job that they do.
That being said, you’ve gotten a lot more complaints than any other mod/admin over the past year - most of them pertaining to moderating things according to your political views (such as for instance, your comment last year where you said about a post, “I ought to call this trolling, except that I agree with it”) - or, moderating things in a way they shouldn’t be moderated (such as warning Pinecone for “threadshitting” in a thread in which he did not, in fact, threadshit.)
Hari, as someone who’s served as a moderator on two other message boards before myself, I know that moderation is often a screwed-if-you-do-and-screwed-if-you-don’t Catch-22 situation, that it’s not fun, and that there’s much that goes on behind the scenes that non-mods aren’t aware of. And again, I’m not calling for you to be removed from your moderator job. But…please change how you approach things. This isn’t the first, second or third time that Dopers have been left scratching their heads over a baffling warning that you’ve issued. And, please, separate your politics from your moderating. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with being a mod/admin who happens to hold strong personal political views; AIUI, all the other mods/admins are staunch liberals too. But none of them get complaints about their personal politics seeping into the way they hand out warnings or moderate things.
Might be the right place to express my opinion that the third post (content) is/will be the death of this board.
Post a stupid little video instead of coming up with some actual content or commentary. Allowing that shit is the worst thing I’ve seen in posting here for over 20 years.
What kinda bugs me is the lack of an explanation, both before and after. It seems to me that you really shouldn’t moderate a post unless you have in mind a sentence or two that you would use to explain to others why you moderated it. And I don’t mean just mentioning trolling or the like. I mean specifics.
That said, this isn’t specific to Hari. I got both a mod note and a Warning in situations where I asked the mod what specific part of my post or what specific note I disobeyed, and they couldn’t answer me.
It seems to me that Hari’s issues seem to be around assuming trolling/threadshitting, which are definitely judgement calls. And that’s exactly why I think having a place to discuss those with others is good. Discussing with others why you think it’s trolling allows you to both check your intuition and refine it.
I absolutely do not agree with those who said he should not be a mod. He’s good the vast majority of the time, and he listens and takes into account what others say. I do think he needs to be a bit more communicative and to take a bit more time in situations where he has a known bias, and maybe talk with other mods a bit more.
I still think the board, as a whole, is better since Hari became a mod. It honestly just seems like he’s still getting broken in. (You know, like when you break in a shoe.)
I think the mods here are generally very good and have a thankless job. That said, I have noticed Hari make more questionable moderation calls than the others. Some very questionable. I don’t think he should stop being a mod, but he would probably do well to take some of the constructive feedback offered here.
Would it have been that different if those photos weren’t animated? Before animated gifs were allowed, people posted static meme photos, and I don’t think it was all that different.
And where you don’t allow photos, people just post links to them.
I think your concern is overblown.
On the other hand, I don’t dislike Hari, I don’t want to see Hari stripped of being a moderator, but at the same time the criticism isn’t coming out of nowhere. I do know it’s a hard thing to do and you’re just volunteers so all respect to every mod on this board but sometimes doing things wrong is worse than not doing them at all.
Not for me and I just flagged a content free post a week or so ago that was just a static picture with no content around it. If they had just posed two links to gifs and nothing else they would receive at least a mod note. Communicating in pictures should not be acceptable here and if you feel that
Then by all means type that out otherwise it should be threadshitting and modded accordingly.
There’s a vast difference between, say, a link to an article as the OP of a GD thread - and an image with words on it being used in place of only words.
I have seen people modded for posting a link in a new thread with none of their own thoughts. I have not seen anyone be modded for posting an image or a link in response to someone else. Have you? Or can you quote the relevant bit of the rules?
I have. It was just a simple note along the lines of “don’t just post links tell us why you think they’re relevant”.
You are correct that a gif with words is different than a random picture with no words. I find the above gifs annoying but I wouldn’t flag them as content free.
If they post a bare image or bare link, they should be modded. Especially if it’s simply a generic image with words they could have typed.
Images like the one you posted above add nothing at all to the conversation. They are only there to draw attention to the poster. They are distracting and irritating, and far worse than shouting in ALL CAPS.
This is the rule. An OP can’t be a raw link or image.
An image just as the one discussed here is not “content free” and is acceptable under current moderation.
If you just post a link as a reply, and it doesn’t generate enough of a one-box to be clear why it’s relevant, you might get a mod note. But if enough of it shows to make it clear that it’s a relevant response i think it’s okay.
