Are you excluding this one? or calling this one poorly moderated?
I think there’s some space between “really well moderated” and “poorly moderated”. But yes, I meant to include this one. I think our moderation is far from perfect. I am trying to do my best, as, I believe, all the other mods are. But we are, after all, imperfect human beings.
Ah.
While I’ll agree with “far from perfect”, I think overall the moderation here is pretty good.
By the way, Facebook has horrible moderation. Facebook randomly removes innocuous stuff as violating community standards, leaves actual hate speech in place, and seems to outright encourage long angry slugfests. Even in narrow specialized subfora (square dance calling, for instance) it’s common to find posters attacking each other.
It makes money despite being full of nasty material. Maybe even because of it.
But like others have said - then how would other posters know that particular posts have been modded? Seems like it will just mean more posters will respond to a post that’s been modded via PM. And escalation will ensue.
Trolling is always Pit-worthy
How many now-banned posters went through exactly that sort of escalation process? How many people have gone through the month-long suspension process and actually straightened out? I suspect more of the former than the latter. Me, I think stretching out the process just makes the rest of us suffer. One suspension, then a ban, works better, IMO.
I mean r/AskHIstorians, r/Science I see almost no real issues with. r/CFB (college football) is similar.
Reddit relies on volunteer moderators who mod their communities, where Reddit has serious issues is “toxic” communities in which the moderators are not interested in creating a positive community, and where the community starts delving into some of the few things that are against reddit’s own “official” rules (like doxxing, death threats, planning/advocating violence, etc–ultimately this got r/The_Donald shut down because their moderators were not willing to self police to reddit’s standards.)
And that’s fine, to me it’s not an actual issue of high importance. I’m mostly here for the political, current events, and GQ stuff. I’ve never really made the SDMB a “home” for me to socialize like many people do in MPSIMS and some of the other subforums. For me the SDMB is an interesting board because it’s one of the few places where truly oppositional viewpoints still regularly have arguments, but I know for a lot of people this is a 20-25+ year “online home” for them, and this discussion all started in the “how to retain and get more members” thread, which was started by people who are worried about the SDMB dying off. I’m more in the camp that while I wouldn’t want to see it die off, I think if it’s going to naturally die off then that’s fine, nothing lasts forever.
My whole point for advocating what I’ve seen work in vastly more successful and popular forums I participate in, is simply if you are worried about some of the things in that previous thread, I can’t help but think the fact the SDMB’s moderation is done in a way that many people think is bad, that regularly causes drama, that is confusing and onerous for newcomers, that creates antagonistic relationships between staff and posters–to me this would be a source of why the community isn’t bigger or more successful.
“Well moderated” is pretty subjective. I would say the Ars Technica political forum is better moderated by far than the SDMB. I would say there’s frankly Facebook threads that are better moderated than these forums–largely because you don’t have the equivalent of Mark Zuckerberg wading into the thread arguing with people, Facebook has a set of community guidelines and posts that violate them get removed. Facebook communications are a pretty low bar for quality so I think it says a lot that the moderation of them is more consistent and predictable than these forums.
To me it’s like if someone is getting banned for 3 months every infraction, I don’t think their impact on the forums is huge. If someone is here just spamming racial slurs, spamming advertising links etc, those are permaban cases. But I think of “badly behaved” chaps like BrainGlutton, Shodan, Diogenes etc probably didn’t need permanently banned. I was not actually a major fan of any of those three posters by the way, but BG for example despite rarely participating meaningfully in the threads he started, started a huge number of GD threads that often went on for hundreds or thousands of posts. I think he was adding something to the community.
BrainGlutton, specifically, had multiple warnings, multiple suspensions, often for personal attacks. That he started popular threads is not enough of a positive vs that, IMO.
And all that happened in public, which is how I know, and that’s a good thing.
Well, i can’t disagree with your subjective impression, but my subjective impression is very different. As I said above, I think Facebook is HORRIBLY moderated. It’s neither consistent nor predictable, it encourages echo chambers to a much greater extent than this place, and it inspires nasty fights. And those fights can pop up anywhere, they aren’t tucked away in a forum I can easily avoid if I’m not in the mood for conflict.
(Same with politics, really. There are days when I can’t cope with even polite political disagreement. On days like that, I can read MPSIMS and Cafe Society, but I don’t venture onto Facebook.)
One thing that might help the bickering about moderation is if moderator actions could not be discussed until a certain time had passed. Have a mandatory cooling off period of a day or so. That way people won’t just emotionally react in the moment because a mod told them to stop doing something. If 24 or 48 hours later the person still felt strong enough about the issue, they could start a thread to discuss it. But the cooling off period would hopefully allow many of the minor gripes to dissipate.
Why should they care?
Unless it is a issue with multiple posters, of course.
Except most people just Pit posters as trolls because they disagree with them, making it useless.
- other posters might assume it’s okay to say things like that.
- the mods would get a perpetual stream of reports from the same offensive post, over and over.
The first is more important than the second, but they are both rather serious problems, imho.
But what are they more successful at?
If I don’t want to eat pasta, it doesn’t matter to me how successful the pasta-in-everything restaurant is; I still don’t want to go there. If the restaurant where I can always count on something interesting that I do want to eat is a smaller place with fewer customers, I don’t care – as long as it’s doing well enough to stay open.
Facebook has been doing its damndest to get everyone on the planet on Facebook. I don’t think the SDMB needs to get anywhere near everyone on the planet, and I doubt it would function well if it did. We do need to keep getting more members, both because there’s always going to be some attrition rate of old members and because we need to add more perspectives – but it seems to me that what we want to find is more members who want to eat at this type of restaurant, not more people who’d rather be someplace else.
That’s not to say that we shouldn’t have any pasta, or add any new pasta dishes, or whatever fits the analogy. But I don’t see any sense in trying to turn into Reddit or Facebook or for that matter some very successful within its line single issue board.
Discussing how to improve the moderation makes sense. But I think it should be improved within its current general framework, not tossed out and replaced with some other system altogether. And I think the discussion about improvement best takes place in public – and that can’t be done if the moderation itself is hidden.
– I don’t usually find the moderation here confusing (mileage obviously varies). I disagree with it occasionally, but I can only think of one recent case that I found significantly confusing, and I was able to say what I thought about it. If the poster and the posts in question had just disappeared from the threads in question, I would have had no idea what had happened, which would IMO have been more confusing.
– hmm. I wonder whether it would be useful to run a poll about whether people find the moderation confusing; and if significant numbers said yes, ask in what fashion and what they think would improve it?
Don’t know about you, but I think less overworked mods are happier mods, and we all benefit from that.
That’s not my experience of the omnibus Troll thread at all.
It would be useful, but only if it could be a proper, random poll. I suspect a thread poll would have a lot of sampling bias. The people who didn’t like the moderation would be highly motivated to take the survey, while those who don’t care would be more likely to ignore it. I would guess the results would have 95% of the respondents saying they were displeased with the moderation here.
Like I said, I’m fine with the option of the forum just dying a natural death, too. I do think sans some changes that is the ultimate outcome. It’s possible changes to emulate other forums won’t do the trick, I’m not a message board expert, just sharing what I’ve seen from far more successful communication venues.
My thought is that if other forums were more successful in giving me what I want, I would be there instead of here.
FWIW I don’t find the moderation confusing or even the moderation rules confusing (other than the rules about what you can post in which forum), but I don’t think that’s the main complaint about the moderation.
I do think there are too many rules though.
I don’t think that follows.
We could have a rule about not insulting people & we could argue about whether it’s a good rule in ATMB. But we don’t need to argue about (or even know about) every instance of someone insulting someone else.
This is a good point.
It’s hard to keep people on the appropriately sized leash when the topics are politics & religion. On the forum I manage, arguments about politics and religion are not allowed (except health policy). Most of the times where we need to wield the moderation gavel, the topic is politics or religion.