Is there a such thing as rude moderating?

Dex, that is pretty disingenuous.

"As posters, we have the same rights to be snarky as any other posters. "

Sure, but other posters don’t have the rights to close a thread, ban people or whatever AND abuse them at the same time with no comeback.

I don’t believe Mods are any different from ten years ago- I believe the same topics which emerge have a sharper edge- so I’m not protecting any viewpoint.

Nevertheless, I believe discussions of Mod decisions should have stayed in the Pit where a robust decision could occur, rather than the Star Chamber of ATMB.

Well, it’s hardly a star chamber. It’s available to all to participate as opposed to being a closed and secretive group.

Seems to me there’s something a bit unfair when the mods can snark doing their moderating, but the members can’t reply in kind because that is commenting on moderating. Can’t Pit a mod for moderating.

Now the “good old days” where discussions of moderation occurred in the Pit set the tone of how moderating is done, but that was a different time with different circumstances. Specifically, the members could reply in kind. That’s off limits now.

It seems to me with the current rules of not pitting moderators for their acts of moderation, the moderators should eliminate the rudeness and snark from their moderating.

Repeated for emphasis.

FTR, I presented a half-completed analysis in the other thread. I wanted flexibility to make adjustments on the fly and I wanted to swat down certain pesky objections (which haven’t been made as of yet.[sup]1[/sup]) Dex indicated that he wasn’t keen on continuing the hijack of that thread, so I didn’t. But I did spend more time on the data after reviewing Giraffe’s feedback. I might be able to incorporate splatterpunk’s concerns, but I need more information.

For certain? I don’t. And the quantitative analysis only provides a piece of the puzzle anyway.

Another poster in the other thread (Munch, IIRC) also agreed that the feel in 2001 was different back then. This is not remarkable: things evolve and devolve. I think I can substantiate my claims of deference back then, and it’s reasonable to infer what remains.

Oh sure. Most people back then and most people now don’t bother to harass the mods. They may have a range of reasons for doing so. I suppose we could compile a list. But I think my characterization provides a reasonable spin on the behaviors of the 3 eras.

Well, entertainment value is an obvious consideration. But as I see it, the board has a mission and its mission is to fight ignorance. It’s not to adjudicate moderator behavior or establish “Fair”. This isn’t a playground – or rather in many ways it is but that’s not its central mission.

Step back for a minute. In my experience most message boards deal with problem posters in a more perfunctory manner. They sometimes joke that they have assumed dictatorship, but mostly what they provide is radio silence. You don’t get the detailed thinking that mods provide here. I suspect that’s because our unpaid moderators actually do think of themselves as posters, fellow soldiers in the fight against ignorance. The other factor is that the verbal ability of the mods at this website is pretty high. Way higher than my own anyway.

Let me paraphrase something from another board (no citation): “Discussion of administrative policies can be diverting but it is also at odds with getting shit done.” That is not the framework that is practiced here. Some day it may be: it certainly has some justification. Personally, I can handle a range of strategies in the battle.

Well sure, none of those characters wear jackboots. Sheesh!

[sup]1[/sup]eg “Correlation does not imply causality”, or “Cherry picking”. These would be weak sauce. Correlation provides evidence of causality and I welcome other possible interpretations of the data. And I outlined my methodology in detail precisely to address the cherry picking concern.

In the particular case of the Pit thread, I just saw it as the mods responding back in kind. You insulted the mods, they should at least be able to snark back at you.

There have occasionally been other such situations, but my naive analysis is that it’s a lot better than it used to be. I usually only see it in regards to people being banned for trolling or insults, where, again, I see it as response in kind–in this case, them responding in a way the posters wish they could.

The main rude issue I still see involves not snark like in the Pit thread, but impugning the character of the poster. Sometimes the mods seem to see mistakes made out of frustration as calculated attempts to break the rules or annoy people. Even if that is what you believe is happening, I don’t think stating it is usually all that helpful. The majority of the time, such issues are not going to be deliberate. And, even when they are, there’s usually another way to deal with it.

If nothing else, you can just say, for example. “You are coming across as if you are posting just to annoy the mods,” rather than “Stop posting just to annoy the mods.” Both may seem to be about behavior at first glance, but the latter is also about motives. And if that is not my motive, it comes off as insulting. And, if it is my motive, you’ve just let me know that I’ve succeeded.

On another forum a moderator gets by with saying F#$k -you etc where as just a poster isn’t allowed to post shyt. I find so far in my association here a lack of over bearing moderators. Are they paid here. Or all friends of the groom?

I agree with you that the moderation at the SDMB is better than any moderation I’ve experienced at any other message board. I also agree that one of the reasons for that is the level of verbal ability of the mods that allows for that higher standard. At other message boards, the level of moderation is constrained by the mods’ ability to explain why they’re taking a certain action. On most message boards I’ve posted on, that level is comparatively low.

But if the entertainment value is an obvious consideration in using snark, then using your logic, wouldn’t allowing posters to snark back double the entertainment value?

Also, if the goal is not to establish what is “fair” behavior on the part of the mods, why are mod complaints allowed in this forum? If the mods are allowed to behave in any way they choose (which happens on some message boards), there wouldn’t need to be a place where people can place mod complaints.

I think that one of the reasons that the modding at the SDMB is great is because of the mods’ willingness to answer questions put to them by the posters and attempt to be fair, consistent and explanatory. I think they do a great job of it. Their patience and tolerance amaze me sometimes.

btw, I did see your half-completed analysis of the threads in that other thread. In that thread, you seemed to want to base your conclusions on some evidence, whereas in this thread, your generalizations seemed much more biased.

Please realize that I was characterizing an era that has passed. And no, part of the hilarity was reading the utter bewilderment combined with outrage by posters who had received the stern smackdown by manhattan in GQ. The policies then were probably unsustainable, but remember that they were still feeling them out. Consider that manhattan modded GQ alone for many years while holding down a job as a Wall Street trader. Now 5 handle the task. It was a riveting battle between the teeming millions and manhattan’s sanity, and eventually the latter gave way.

Beats me. My point though was that the standard should be something along the lines of “Reasonable” or “Workable” rather than “Best”. Here’s why: there are a lot of member proposals that make some surface sense but don’t really hold up to scrutiny. And furthermore, the mods simply have a better intuition for what works in practice than the membership, including myself. Look, I’ve made a recommendation in ATMB and have had it adopted. It happens. But the signal to noise ratio here is disappointing, as is frankly some of the pettiness of the membership. There’s work to do.[sup]1[/sup]

I disagree on the former and agree that they attempt to be fair consistent and explanatory.

Me too. Some of the wordsmithing on this board blows me away as well.

When I analyze the data, I feel constrained by the data. Other times I ramp up the rhetoric. I mean c’mon: “People had thicker skins back then.” Yeah, and I used to have to go to the backyard pump and fill the bucket up with electrons so I could feed the modem. You young-uns have it easy with your wall plugs and the like. :smiley:

[sup]1[/sup]At this point I’m told to get off my high horse. Fair enough. TPTB note correctly that this board is about building a community. My implicit point is that a strong mission statement (see the masthead) can be a powerful and constructive glue.

No wait. It gets better. IIRC, there was no report button. It was believed by some that manhattan opened and scanned every single thread.

Get a room!

I think rudeness is unbecoming in a moderator situation.

Imagine sports officiating:

“Pass interference, number 24” - okay.

“Pass interference, the hapless loser wearing number 24” - not okay.

I don’t know, that might get me to watch football.

I see you like Boot Camp DIs. You insult us and poke at us because you WANT to weed out the weak, those who can’t control themselves, the one issues wonders – and you want to do it fast so they don’t pollute our precious internet fluids more than necessary. You poke us so we’ll punch back and then you can put the heavy duty beat-down on us.

I’m just imagining you all as the DI in Full Metal Jacket, and we have to prove our worthiness to be in your Beloved Corp.

See, this is why I forsook my charter member status. This place is an arm of a for-profit entity. The moderators are, by choice, unpaid employees of that entity. I am willing to tolerate a certain minimal surliness from the staff in a space where I am there for free. Once even a trivial amount of money comes into play, though, I expect the staff to be uniformly and unfailingly polite, even if it is as they show me the door.
In fairness to the staff here, it is only a portion of them who are petty chickenshitphiliacs. It’s the same situation you see with cops, though. The ones who aren’t close ranks with and protect the ones who are. Interesting when you consider that they are unpaid employees. Must mean a lot to them to have that title under their usernames.

I haven’t been successful in obtaining clarification, but I was able to dig up a few threads. I found no evidence that any attacks on the moderation of this board were ever deleted. Of course spam has always been routinely deleted.

During the first year of this message board, in August 1999, Lynn Bodoni (RIP) assumed dictatorial powers as is the custom across most message boards. Because she was… grossed out. From the OP in the Pit thread, Ok, that’s enough:

Next post, “How about a hint as to what’s allowed and what’s not?” :smiley:

I’m not sure, but I think the offending thread was entitled “My Pet Trolls” which according to Mr. Zambezi sounded like, “…a couple of 13 year olds trying to outgross one another. I can’t even tell what the subject is.”

Ok, now fast forward to July 2001: respected poster Esprix creates the Deleted threads? thread. That happened just a few months after my sample frame. The OP wanted to know what the policy was. Here were the answers from moderators:

Lynn continued:

I think it’s fair to say that serious threads questioning moderator behavior were not being deleted in 2001. I welcome evidence to the contrary. As of now though, I see no need for adjustments to my data analysis.

Serious threads have never been deleted, so far as I am aware, regarding any topic. Deletion occurs when threads are spam or trolling. I think Lynn (RIP) deleted individual posts from time to time that were too gross for her to endure (it took a LOT to gross her out), but not full threads.

When we catch a troll or a returning sock, we often delete all the threads they started in the past. The logic is that they are out to create a stir, no matter how. Leaving their threads open just encourages them to come again under a different name. We hope that causing their posts to disappear will discourage that. We have no idea whether it works, but we don’t like to “reward” such people by leaving their feces about.