We’ve had a lot of threads about transphobia, misogyny, racism, and trolling. Three are somewhat active in ATMB now, but there have been enough that I’m not going to dig them all up and most people who venture into ATMB are going to be familiar anyway.
While bigotry, or at least complicity/ambivalence towards the same is absolutely a problem, I want to have a thread that focuses on some underlying board problems that I think heavily contribute to the issues people have had with moderation.
Mod Notes are too soft, Warnings too severe
Mod notes read just like instructions to stop something, and are often eschewed if other members pipe up to express disapproval of a statement. I understand the mods do keep some record of mod notes and post reports, so they’re not entirely innocuous, but it’s a thread-local “stop doing this” except in very rare cases where someone gets topic banned for accruing too many notes (usually for bringing a hobby horse into unrelated threads).
Warnings, on the other hand, carry a very great weight. Depending on the poster, only a handful of warnings can lead to a suspension or later a banning. Warnings stick around on your profile forever (as I understand it, I don’t have one), and they’re strong enough that people will come to ATMB to appeal a single warning.
I’m not sure how to solve this. I’m not proposing this as a solution, but as an interesting counterpoint, I’d like to say how another board handles it. On that board, warnings don’t exist (formally), they only have suspensions, bans, and permabans. Now this board is pay to be able to post (like how the Dope used to be) along with a few other features (it costs money to change avatars). The closest thing to warnings there are “probations” which are much closer to our suspensions, but probations can be short - I’ve seen 6 hours. They’re mod enforced “cool down” time outs. Of course, they can be longer, probations have existed for 6 months-1 year, but generally I find it’s a couple days to a month. Because probations are so cheap and easy penalty boxes, they’re handed out with a fairly low degree of scrutiny. Not quite frivolity, but if you’re a problem child, but more annoying/disruptive than actively heinous, you can collect a fair number of probations.
To complement this, particularly egregious problems result in a ban. This absolutely won’t work here. A ban is essentially just an “idiot tax” that forces people to pay another chunk of money to get the privilege to post, set a new avatar etc. It’s a useful “knock it off” stick (though it does have the same issue as police fines where it means if you’re rich eating a ban is less bad than if you’re impoverished). Permabans just mean you are banned and cannot reregister. (There are other components here, like a rap sheet any user can view, and a mod note appended to an offending post that says “user was banned/probated for this” that contribute to that board’s culture around rule and culture violations, but they’re not very relevant here).
Now, again, this model doesn’t work here, not the ban system at least, but my point is more that getting a warning is so monumental here, and a suspension so earth shattering, that the mods really have very little power to punish people. Even further, the issue is while warnings have a high psychological amount of weight, they’re also not particularly effective from the perspective of someone who is okay with running afoul of the rules (like trolls). They’re effectively a more sternly worded mod note until oops suddenly they’re not and you’re suspended/banned. It also leads to mods having this mental overhead where only things they can be sure are bad “without bias” get the big scary warning, like canned phrases like “fuck off”.
The Pit is toxic
I don’t mean the Pit itself, I mean the existence of the Pit and the rules surrounding it and how it affects the rest of the forum. I legitimately think the Pit should be closed and the rest of the board should adopt modified Pit rules, perhaps excepting ATMB and/or CS/Game Room (I’d argue not excepting them, but don’t care to go into why in this post since it’s long enough already).
The Pit’s existence allows people to wind others up, essentially baiting people into frustration and a “fuck off”, which as mentioned is one of the things that actually consistently gets warnings (alongside ignoring mod instructions such as not sticking to a topic). It also adds significant overhead towards showing your opinions about a heinous point of view or situation, because it means you have to start a pit thread, or post in a megathread in the Pit which can be safely ignored by the problem posters or only engaged with on their terms devoid of context.
People completely obviously make jabs and attack posters anyway, it just leads to people getting right up to the line, or finding creative passive aggressive ways to say “fuck you”. It also just stifles debate because you’re never 100% sure what you can say about a post without eating a note or warning. “Attack the post not the poster” is a vaguely correct rule, but it’s never clear where the line is – is pointing out/attacking a poster’s obvious bias a line? Catching them in a blatant lie is obviously a line. Calling out tactics they’re using if they resemble trolling is a line.
It’s not like productive debate doesn’t happen in the Pit, but it being the dedicated "slapfight zone’ I think artificially degrades discourse sometimes and gives the illusion that if it didn’t exist, everywhere would be just like the Pit. I think debate across the board would be more productive and less prone to blowups over “decorum” warnings and walking on eggshells if we just allowed Pit rules everywhere, but with modifications that posts have to be at least somewhat substantive/on topic and can’t consist of just insults. I guess the Pit would still have some use as a “lol fuck off” forum for petty insults, rants about current events, or dedicated “okay but this poster sucks tho” threads, but not having this incredibly artificial fuzzy constraint on decorum would do the board good.
Miscellaneous issues
Some of the board distinctions are a bit odd, which would be fine if it wasn’t for the moderator gap between them and the culture that moderators don’t do so outside their assigned boards. For instance, there’s not that much separating IMHO from GD. There are a lot more “frivolous” threads (“what would you do with this dating situation”), but for instance the thread on trans dating could easily go in either forum and aside from small topic differences quite a few threads belong in both (with the more frivolous threads being more MPSIMS material).
Again, this would be fine if it wasn’t for the moderation gap. GD is moderated by 3 active mods (Gaudere hasn’t been on in a year). IMHO is moderated by two semi-active mods (Gfactor hasn’t been on in a month). The Pit has one mod due to the perception that since it’s the slapfight zone it doesn’t need/shouldn’t have much moderation. But big debates with warnable offenses happen in all of these forums, and it significantly affects response time, what is warnable/mod note-able (since different mods have different opinions even if warnings are discussed “in the mod loop” first), and other things, despite all 3 having very similar content at times.
I think there’s a couple more things, but I’d like to let this all sit before I bring more points into it (I have a feeling the thread it going to get railroaded into discussing one hyperspecific point as it is, and adding more things just adds to the number of miscellaneous things it can get stuck on).