Sometimes moderation needs to be public. I don’t think all moderation should be private.
From my experience, it mostly doesn’t. The downside is that it is confrontational. A quiet word is usually more effective and it doesn’t publicly shame the transgressor.
It’s like the difference between making a kid stand in the corner with a conical hat on their head and sending a note home to their mum. Which one, do you think, is most successful in getting the desired behaviour?
Telling an adult, and mostly anonymous poster on the internet that a post violated a rule is not equivalent to shaming a child.
New around here are ya?
My issue with that is that someone newish coming in to a thread may see the post and think “OK, we can do that here” - public moderation covers that case.
Of course, if private moderation becomes the standard and it is actually as or more effective, then the number of problem posts should decline. And of course the newbie will receive their own moderation if they copy a disallowed behavior.
In my forum, we usually delete or modify the problematic post. Sometimes we invite the poster to modify their post to remove the offensive bit.
Look, I don’t necessarily think that these things we do on my forum are right for the Straight Dope — path dependence is a thing. I’m just describing the things that work for us. Maybe some of these ideas would work here. Maybe some won’t.
I do think that the moderation rules here are very different from those I’ve encountered anywhere else and they are less than great at preventing the behaviours that they are supposed to prevent.
Actually I’m finding Staff Notices very handy. Cuts down on flags after the post has been modded and prevents people from firing off an angry reply to something already declared not allowed.
We use PMs from time to time, but Modnotes and staff notice appear to be far more effective.
I’ll admit we could use a cleaning up of the rules. Too many threads, each forum has specific rules, hard to find stuff. The recently repealed no animated image one was largely hidden until I added a link to the thread that contained it in the FAQ thread. The no betting rule is down in the same thread.
It gets tricky enough for mods and for posters probably nearly impossible.
He asked to friend me and I assume he found out who I am through other friends on FB.
At first, I didn’t know who he was other than he was friends with people that I know from the SD, so I figured he was okay.
In all the years we were ‘friends’ he never once spoke to me, never liked a post, nothing.
Which is fine, I have many ‘friends’ who never say anything to me.
Until I posted something he didn’t like.
Then he posted to me in a tone that I didn’t appreciate, talked down to me like I am a child, and then proceeded to tell me that as a poster on the SD he expected better and that I’d better not do it again.
He had every right to say something about the post, but he had absolutely no business bringing the SD into it. Just because he is a moderator over here doesn’t not give him the right to moderate my posts elsewhere.
Do you really think I am going to be comfortable posting here when a moderator from here is trying to tell me what to do elsewhere?
If it happened as described I would agree that is out of line behavior.
The advantages that I see to public moderation are that others can see what’s not considered acceptable; and that others can see whether moderation is fair.
Keeping the whole process private can only be done if either the posts are deleted, or if they’re left up and not visibly modded.
Deleting them would result in anyone who saw them before they were removed wondering what happened, and any posts that replied to them before they disappeared either becoming nonsensical or at best lacking context.
Leaving them up and apparently not modded is likely to result in people continuing to flag them after they’ve already been modded; and, far worse, in other posters thinking that they’re considered OK.
There are two big differences between what you are describing and this forum, and I don’t think we want to change either of them.
This is the first difference:
I also participate in a fruit-growers forum, and a photography forum. Both are probably dead-easy to moderate. They just don’t encourage users to post about contentious issues. When someone said something vaguely political in one of them, it was shut down right away – because that kind of post leads to conflict.
And here’s the other:
In almost every other forum I’ve seen, offensive posts just go away. So no one reads them and thinks, “you can SAY THAT here?!” Because you literally can’t, not for longer than it takes for a mod to see the post and remove it. But this forum has a rule that what’s been posted is sacred, and has all sorts of restrictions against posters making even minor edits to posts.
I’m not endorsing this rule. It’s not the rule I would have picked, frankly. But I acknowledge it, and I observe that it’s central to the culture of this board. Yes, the spammer who posts a link to a cab service in Bangalore in a thread about cooking grilled cheese sandwiches may just disappear, but it’s very rare for a real post by a real poster to go away. (unless an entire thread does.) And once you have a rule that says, “offensive posts don’t get removed” you pretty much need to have a public response that says, “that post violated our community standards”.
Right I guess I don’t actually view posts as particularly sacred here. I think a lot of divisiveness, and things that are super off putting to newcomers to the forum, stem from that very idea, that instead of just removing nonsense bad posts there has to be 2 ATMB threads and a Pit thread about it.
Fwiw, i have moderated another forum that allowed posts to be edited and deleted, and I agree that a quiet PM is often all it takes to fix a problem, and that many posters do, indeed, respond better to that than to public reprimands.
Well, when I was newer here I lobbied for a longer edit window. I am a crappy typist, and I ran into all sorts of issues with it. And I knew it wasn’t a technological limitation, as I had used the same software (then vbulletin) on other forums that let you edit a post … forever, as far as I can tell. And wow, did I hear about how that was NOT THE WAY.
I do try to fit into the style of the board I am on.
I also think the “in thread” moderation is off putting just as a technological/standards thing. I see incidents like this: Champlain Towers South in Miami has caved in {2021-06-24} - #235 and I don’t know if that Ron guy was a sock or a deliberate troll, my opinion is if he wasn’t either, he was unlikely to develop into a high quality or even medium quality poster.
However, I also see a situation like that, and I think, anyone coming into a forum like this with no experience with a forum like this, might frankly find it strange and bewildering someone is posting at them and telling them what to do, and then making other posts “warning” them. Maybe the post has yellow in it, but I don’t know how obvious that is.
Most people have experience on reddit, facebook, etc. On those venues moderators don’t typically pop in and “make posts at you” to behave. They usually pop in to delete your stuff and then you get a notification on the site telling you what’s up. I’m a little torn because I do think anyone of reasonable intelligence can “figure out” what’s going on here, but I also think if someone lands here from a google search and is making a few posts, the format of the moderation here is “abnormal” and I could see it being confusing to people who, given time, probably could have developed into valuable community members. Instead they just remember that time they tried to post on some weird website, got someone posting angry stuff at them, and then suddenly their account was banned.
I am curious who the moderator was. The only moderator who ever asked me to friend them was Idle Thoughts and they are not moderators here now. They last visited 3 months ago.
Upon inquiry, it appears the mod in question no longer serves in that position on the SDMB, so further investigation of this allegation does not seem necessary. Be that as it may, SDMB staff is not to assert mod authority in off-board settings, and the staff has been so advised. If any future incidents like this occur, please bring them to my attention. Thanks.
I wouldn’t hold Reddit up as having good moderation, like, at all. There’s a reason it has the reputation it has, the administration is constantly trying to control the chaos. There’s a reason that problems with the platform make the news: people have found that bad publicity is the only way to get things changed.
I don’t know a single popular subreddit that is able to keep on top of all of the asshole posts, let alone actually moderate so that they don’t occur, which is the ideal. The most common form of public facing moderation is to lock threads because they’ve gotten too far out of hand, and there just isn’t enough time in the day for the mods to handle it all.
There’s also a ton of harassment on the site, and often reporting it does not result in anything happening. This is a very common complain about /r/TwoXChromosomes, which is literally supposed to be their forum for women to talk about things that affect them. Every highly upvoted post seems to have some comment about how the poster got a ton of harassing PMs.
Reddit also has other issues that make is very different from this place. It has a voting system, resulting in what is effectively community moderation based on popularity. Pretty much every subreddit becomes very one-sided on a multitude of topics, to the point many are full on echo chambers. It’s the nature of the system: all it takes is for there to be more people downvoting you than upvoting you, and your post sinks down the page. Eventually it even becomes hidden by default. And, once that happens, it’s a self-perpetuating cycle.
Reddit also does not handle long conversations. It is ultimately a glorified comments section. You comment on the “post.” You can reply to other people, but the indentation and hiding of replies that get to a certain depth result in those petering out. Outside of that system, posts are constantly reordered based on votes, meaning no real conversation can occur. You get tons of repeats, tons people saying opposite things.
And, yet, that voting system is a huge part of how Reddit actually can function. It is in and of itself a form of moderation, albeit a rather capricious one. Without it, the larger subreddits wouldn’t be as manageable as they are.
I do post there. But it feels a lot more like posting in the YouTube comments section than like an actual forum. It fill my itch of being able to comment on websites or stories.
But I would never hold it up as being a place for the level of conversation we have here, nor of being well moderated. I would not recommend websites copy their model.
They have, in fairness, gotten better over time. But it’s been with kicks and starts, and through the use of public shaming and advertisers pulling financial support.
It also, BTW, isn’t profitable. We worry about the SDMB making enough to keep the lights on, but they are still, AFAIK, losing money. They’re just big enough that they’re allowed to keep trying, hoping they’ll eventually stumble into a solution.
I second BigT. Reddit is definitely not the style we want. In many political subs, just hate on libs (or cons) hard, and that’s all they want. In some Christian subs, just post something legalistic or harsh-theology-ish, and that’s all people want. It’s kind of pointless. Big circle jerk.
I actually find that kind of unnerving. A reasonable edit window, sure – long enough to fix typos and accidentally missing/extra/etc words, or deal with having accidentally hit ‘send’ on a post that wasn’t ready or that you immediately thought better of; but to have things just disappear, hours or days or weeks later – that leaves me thinking, did I remember that wrong? should I keep hunting for that reference I really wanted, or has it vanished and there’s no sense? why do these six posts make no sense, what are they talking about, are they referring to something that isn’t here any longer or did somebody massively misinterpret posts that are still here?
– and we’ve had people on these boards saying ‘I never said that’, and somebody else quotes them as saying it. Now if they said it six years ago, or even sixty minutes ago, maybe they just forgot – but if they’re making an argument that contradicts itself, how is anyone to tell if half of it has disappeared? And how am I to make my private best judgement of whether somebody understands enough of a subject that I might want to take their advice about it, if they can just remove anything they said that somebody else posted a valid correction for?
Off the net, in conversations, yes, words disappear as soon as their sound does. But off the net, one has additional things to go by; plus which, it actually seems to me to be an advantage of written conversations that they at least potentially don’t disappear, but can be referred back to.
Plus which, if what a person says is going to stay there, that’s a good encouragement to think about what one’s saying, and not to behave like a jerk.
The internet is absolutely full of sites on which posters post angry stuff at each other. I’m afraid that anybody who gets horribly upset because a moderator says something critical is in for a tough time just about anywhere they go.
I certainly agree that we shouldn’t be snarling at newbies, but I don’t see moderators posting “angry stuff” in general, and especially not at newbies.
reddit doesn’t really do conversations at all. I have poked around the actuarial subreddit, and it doesn’t scratch my itch for discussion at all. It’s just random posts with some replies. You can’t even find the posts if you go back the next day, as the organization is somewhat random, and highly biased towards whatever is recent.
yes, different styles have different issues. But it was unusual for a poster to go back and edit something long-after. That pretty much happened when they realize they’ve outed too much personal information, and didn’t want it to be publicly searchable. And if someone said something outrageous in an argument and the “other side” was afraid that poster will deny having said it, someone would often quote the post immediately. (And mods can still see history, so a fake quote is still actionable.) Of course, if the post was nasty enough, the mods would delete it and every post that quoted it. Which might lead you to guess that yes, that forum was often contentious, as well. I’m certainly not holding it up as a model.
I don’t know of any really well-moderated general discussion boards that allow political and other hot-topic discussions to take place. Maybe they exist, but I think it’s a very hard thing to achieve.