tl/dr 
As an adult I prefer discussing my transgressions in public and n the thread and including the offended as well as the mod, with the hope of getting it through my thick head. I don’t bite.
That’s true. But we can’t have a discussion about whether, for instance, particular terms constitute insults, unless we know what the terms are and what the context was in which they were used.
If someone’s modded for saying x, and all we know is that the post disappeared, we don’t know whether they were modded for saying x, for saying y in the same post, or because the mod thought they were off topic, or hijacking the thread, or were threadbanned, or what. Even if the person modded is informed of the reason, if moderation is private, nobody else is going to know. If x is considered an insult in some communities but not others, others are likely to think they can use x, because they don’t know that it’s a problem. And if people are seeing posts disappear for mysterious reasons, they’re going to have no idea what they can say and what they can’t – which is not going to diminish confusion.
This is what I meant when I said that the Straight Dope is very legalistic and that the surfeit of rules encourage this.
I can’t remember the last time that I wanted to insult someone and scouted around for an insult that I could use that would be within the rules. I just don’t feel the need to insult someone at all.
What if the rule is just “don’t insult people”? If they offend someone by mistake, a mod can whisper to them “you know, that’s considered offensive”.
I was involved a thread earlier where someone wanted to comment on a woman’s appearance. It wasn’t relevant to the discussion that we were having. He wanted to know how far he could go before he crossed the line. Eventually, he crossed the line and asked why he got away with the earlier comments but not that one. IMO, if you are wondering where the line is, you have probably already crossed it.
It’s not difficult to eschew commenting on a woman’s appearance.
I was thinking of mistakes when I wrote my previous post, not of deliberate edgepushing.
Absolutely! Anything we can do to improve tooling for staff is a priority.
There is https://boards.straightdope.com/faq – but that’s boilerplate we ship with Discourse. The pinned rules are at
https://boards.straightdope.com/t/registration-agreement-rules-and-faq/823562
There’s quite a bit of cruft accumulated over time in there. I’d recommend paring it down to the essentials? Perhaps the key takeaway here is
Let’s revisit the rules, simplify them and update them for 2021?
Yeah, we could probably use a rule simplification.
Those are better moderated than average, but they’re not great. /r/History, despite these clear rules, still has so many deleted posts because people don’t get it. It still has to shut down threads entirely because it would be too much work to deal with all the violations. /r/science does a lousy job of making sure that anything posted is actually science, and then has the same problems as /r/history.
And then, well, they actually stifle conversation. Their rules are strict. There’s a lot you can’t say on either one of them. For Reddit, this is not a huge deal, as you can pull up another subreddit. But you can’t do that here.
That said, this isn’t my main reason for returning to this thread. It’s that I just realized your stated reason for wanting this change doesn’t work.
You say that it’s not good that people can know someone has been moderated and gloat about it. If the moderation changes to private messages and deletion, people would still know that someone was moderated. So there’s no reason any “gloating” would stop.
Plus, going to objective rules simply means that people would be jerks in ways that didn’t technically violate the rules. No forum has all objective rules.
I just came across this in the comments on Aeon Magazine. Again, I am not advocating that we copy this model for moderation here (path dependence is still a thing), but I thought it was an interesting model and almost the polar opposite of SDMB’s pages of rules.
First, here’s a comment that had been moderated (scroll down for the comments section).
I am not sure what to make of this. [Part of this comment has been removed because it contravened the Aeon community guidelines .] I admire you and very much appreciate that you were open to comments.
I checked out the guidelines and found this list:
That’s it.
The Aeon comments section is very polite and constructive and they cover difficult topics. IMO, it provides a powerful rebuttal of the idea that moderation should be public.
I think it would be a useful exercise to think about why Aeon is able to moderate with only 7 rules (8, if you include the one about treating people with respect).
What rules are they missing?
My guess is they’re missing a giant ASTERISK that says “except in the BBQ pit”, which is kind of a problem…
that looks like public moderation to me.
Maybe.
My point is there is no great discussion of why it violates the rules.
+1 to simplifying the rules.
+1 to having uniform rules across fora (with a small set of specific forum rules, e.g., factuality in GQ).
+1 to doing without the pit. I understand that it has its own history, but it does strike me as schizophrenic that the community gives itself a set of rules, and then decides that they only apply in some places. It’s like if the community was admitting that the rules are unbearable, and people need a place to vent. If that is the case, the rules are wrong, or at the very least they don’t suite the community. I have been reading this board for a few years now, even though it’s only recently that I started posting. And it’s only very recently that I started reading the pit. I found especially puzzling that some of the mods, or the very polite and thoughtful posters that I read in the other fora, would indulge in far worse behavior than what they condemn or moderate elsewhere. I do understand that this is the “style” of the pit. But again, it feels schizophrenic, and it can give newcomers the wrong impression.
I disagree. Moderation should be public, because when mods fuck up, or are blatantly partisan, it should be out there for everyone to see.
There is literally no recourse to bad or biased moderation (check out Miller’s modding of the pit, where he basically will never step in when a conservative poster is being attacked but will issue warnings against them for defending themselves from attacks), so there is no reason for it to be public.
Link to the bad moderation?
I agree with you for the most part (and I am in no way a conservative), but I still think it should be public. At least it’s visible that way. Secret modding would only make it worse.
I know, I’m just more than tired of people whining about how terrible things are here when I, and I hope others, know they’re complaining about being held accountable for the things they’ve said here.
Sure. Absolutely. And I’m with you, at least in theory.
But here’s the thing. There’s form, and there’s content.
And people should be held accountable for form. Trolling is form. Abusive language (in some subforms) is form. Going wildly off-topic is (to some extent) form.
Content is content. I do think (sometimes despicable, and mostly stuff I’d never endorse or agree with) “conservative” (for want of a better word) content is often “held accountable” in a way other content wouldn’t be.
Basically, I think sometimes moderation takes into account who a poster is rather than what the actual content of a post is.
I mean, that’s the question. Sure, people (including me, once in a blue moon) complain about “being held accountable for the things they’ve said here.”
But (with some exceptions which should be clearly defined), should people be “held accountable” (which often means “punished”) for what they’ve said, rather than how they said it?
Obviously, there are going to be things said that shouldn’t be tolerated. The most obvious example I can think of is Holocaust denial.
But those should be defined up front. Or at least defined and codified after their first appearance.
I’m sorry, I haven’t expressed myself as clearly as I’d like. But hopefully you see what I mean.
That’s just not true, for example I recently got deservedly modded by Miller for attacking a conservative poster. Of course, I didn’t get warned - because I listened the first time I got mod-noted. As opposed to drawing out Miller’s sweet nature past a second mod note into a warning.