Moderators and assumptions of good/bad faith

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1

Before I get started, let me make it clear that I am not arguing about whether or not the Mod Note against me was appropriate. This more nuanced, and thus takes a while to articulate. (I have made it as short as I can without leaving things out. )

There is a thread about AI psychosis. It got heated when one poster believes they are being accused of having AI psychosis, and they lash out a bunch of times.

There was moderation for this poster, where they were not singled out, and none of their posts were in any way modified. The moderator assumed good faith that people had just gotten angry. This is good moderation.

After this moderation, the poster in question once again misunderstands a post as an attack on them, before saying they are going to leave the thread.

In reply to this I said the following (click to read the entire post, but I truncated it to the relevant part, since my post is quite long):

You can argue about my wording. Maybe it wasn’t the best. (For example, I don’t immediately say no one is accusing him of AI psychosis, I do later say that of course none of this is AI psychosis.)

What it isn’t is any sort of dig or even hateful. It’s just a straightforward claim that people stopped being convinced by his posts once he started taking things personally and lashing out. It’s not an attack of any kind on the post or the poster.

In fact, the rest of the post is deliberately empathetic, with me going out of my way to identify with how he feels, pointing out how we are the same. (I also use AI sometimes to help me write.) That’s hardly the way someone would talk if they were trying to attack someone.

And yet, here is the mod note I got:

And the summary when hiding my post is this:

hidden as started with a dig ignoring the recent modnote

This assumes bad faith. It chooses the most negative interpretation of my post, and accuses me of ignoring a mod note.

The mod note I am accused of ignoring:

All it says is to calm down because people are getting too heated. My post, both the first line and the rest, is calm. I have no reason to think anything in my post would violate this note.

So we have my post which is calm, lacks any heat or anger being told that I go super close to a Warning. We have several posts that are extremely heated which get an understanding “calm down please.”

And then, unlike the usual standard, where only the bad part of the post gets hidden, my entire post is hidden. Yet I am told flat out that it is just the initial part that is a problem.

It seems to me that I am being treated like I am some miscreant who deliberately tried to get around the rules. I don’t care to speculate why, but it is definitely hurtful, as I hold myself with integrity.

And this far from the only time I’ve seen this, where the mods seem to assume someone is acting in bad faith, that they are actually deliberately violating the rules. They usually are not. I have pointed this out in other ATMB threads, so I won’t dwell on it here.

I simply ask that the mods choose to respond more like the first mod note, and not the second. That they do not jump to negative conclusions when positive or neutral conclusions are possible.

And, of course, nothing in this post is in any way intended to be any sort of attack.

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I am not @What_Exit of course, but I very much agree it wasn’t the best. As has been discussed umpteen times here in ATMB, we moderators can’t see your intentions when posting.

So when I look at just the truncated bit (I have checking in that thread periodically though) one plain reading (not the only one) is that you have the appearance of putting words in another posters mouth, and describing their feelings and intents to them, in a quite negative way.

That’s very personal, and can easily come across as an attack. Now, we do this all the time to off board personages, but we do expect more careful treatment of our fellow posters.

A second point - again, speaking for myself, when I come to the point where I’m issuing a Formal mod note to Calm down because things are getting too personal/too close to attacking the poster, it’s because in all honestly it’s actually stepped over the line. It’s to calm the thread down because it’s already going out of control.

So it’s a NOTE because I don’t want to give out warnings in the immediate future if it doesn’t calm down. Again - we’re at the point of having to step in, even if we’re choosing to keep it to just a note.

To further emphasize this, and put it in context of the specific thread and moderation in question, please note that @What_Exit was serious enough about this to give the thread a one-hour time out to cool the tensions. This is, and should be, a sign of how seriously he was taking it.

For the last point, about hiding the whole post, or just the first part of it is more a style/time thing than any given SOP. Trying to hide just a part of a post, while still keeping the rest of it in context can be very challenging.

Especially when it comes to posters like the both of us who write BOOKS when we post. When a mod is trying to head off the continuance of an ongoing issue, sometimes speed becomes more important than a light touch.

So, to sum up (said book) I -do- think you got too personal, and too close to attacking the poster, but I don’t think it was your intent. I think it happened in a thread that was already heated, and had been moderated for just that issue 10 hours and three posts earlier, ONE of which was the poster in question dropping out.

I believe that WE is actually giving you credit for the poorly chosen phrasing and timing because he didn’t end up giving you the warning.

Enough of a book from me, I’m sure everyone else will weigh in eventually.

3

So I’ll have more to write later probably but for what it’s worth, I think BigT was operating in good faith and thoughtfully trying to give me feedback. I don’t think it was an attack. I trust his good faith. He definitely didn’t stand out in terms of hostility or tone in the thread - he just had unfortunate timing to post after the mod note. But his intentions were good. In case my opinion matters on this.

I would say in that same thread @Maserschmidt was clearly engaging in personal attacks on me by (very clearly implicitly) calling me a liar. That was clearly bad faith. I didn’t report it because I tend not to report anything on these boards unless it’s really flagrant, but their posts were by far the most aggressive and toxic in the thread.

@steronz is more complicated and I’m not quite sure what to say – because I think he’s trying to be thoughtful and he’s not trying to insult me just to insult me, but his position is essentially “I don’t really want to hear what you have to say because I think you are contaminated as a source, but I’m still going to interact with you and ask you questions and expect you to ask me questions” which is, itself, not really good faith. So it’s kind of a weird paradox with him that’s hard to classify as good or bad faith.

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We can’t argue the thread here, of course. So we shouldn’t.

I totally agree with @BigT .

I think he was picked out because he was last to post. I see no way he was attacking anyone. Just my opinion.

5

I’m only going on what is in this thread, so please take this with a grain of salt, but I’ll say it on the off chance that it is helpful. I often fall into the trap of discussing other posters and what I think is in their heads, rather than continuing the topic of the thread. Then I rush back and edit the post because such things are so easily misunderstood and then lead to unpleasantness. Even though I always mean well, and am just fascinated by people and trying to understand them, I recognize the powder keg nature of trying to define other’s thoughts or feelings to their faces.

It sounds as if that might have been the trap that you fell into. Your post was about the other poster, rather than being about the topic at hand.

6

Thank you, this sums it up nicely.