So let me get this straight: Excepting myself, we never moderate against snark or sarcasm?
Really? And I could have found more but I decided not to go back farther than a year.
Whether most or all the moderator interventions linked above were protested as being overbearing, I’ll leave as an exercise for the reader to research that.
Without bothering to look at the links, I’ma go out on a limb and say they’re suck-ass decisions, too.
Nah. You should bother, because I did look at the links (hoping for good entertaining snark, though I was sadly let down) and the decisions seemed sound to me in those cases.
Sometimes if a mod doesn’t intervene at all, a thread can easily and needlessly derail into a full-on train wreck. Just like referees in a sporting match with clear rules, sometimes they have to make subjective decisions for the good of the game. As long as they aren’t overdone or unfairly enforced, and nobody gets thrown out of the game due to such subjective decisions, it seems necessary and reasonable to me.
Ah, I see you haven’t met me before.
Hi, I’m Inner Stickler and I think mods should basically spend their time moving threads and thats about it. I think the fact that there are forbidden phrases in the pit is the dumbest shit I’ve ever seen, that derailments are the best threads anyway, and for a messageboard based on Cecil’s columns, there is a stupefying amount of genteelism and pearl-clutching at run of the mill sarcasm here, nowadays. So, yeah, I looked at some and they were dumb decisions.
I realize that my opinion is in the minority but that doesn’t change its innate correctness. 
Agreed.
I don’t know if waiting two days to issue a y’all simmer down is particularly productive, but Moderator presence can keep mere snark from turning nasty.
I mostly agree, but certain things like hate-speech and death threats are over the line, even for the pit. If it were no holds barred, it would attract the wrong element with no way to ultimately get rid of the worst kind of trolls.
I somewhat agree, but only in certain threads/forums. GQ & GD are better off when derailments are avoided before they get out of control and kill the thread.
There is some degree of that, but I would disagree with there being a “stupefying amount” of it. For the level of activity and type of topics on this board, I don’t see that there is way too much mod interference in the natural flow of discourse.
(I was trying to avoid reviewing and weighing in on the specific topic of this thread, but I guess now that I’m posting a second time, I should.)
I don’t really see any unreasonable or unnecessarily disruptive behavior from SFG that required a direct warning. If I were a mod, at the very most I would maybe have issued a general admonishment to the whole thread to “try to keep it civil” without quoting or mentioning any specific poster.
From what I saw, SFG strenuously disagreed with some posts, and IMO she should be able to freely express the extent of her disagreement through the use of a little snark and sarcasm. Particularly in a forum like IMHO, I don’t think it’s necessary to have the same standards as a moderated debate.
Are mods ever called on the carpet by other mods or administrators for snarkiness or sarcasm? I’m not suggesting that they should be criticized for the sarcasm that adds so much spice to the SDMB. But sometimes they can be vicious with the snark.
I can’t remember ever having problems with Czarcasm, but I don’t think that he came by that name by drawing letters out of a Scrabble box. More power to him.
Spectre, meet Tomndebb. Perhaps you’ve heard of him. Two days ago, he said this, in GD, with Mod Hat on.
A) Tomndebb’s response fits my understanding of the rules.
B) Y’all think you could get on the same page on something as simple as “Is snark/sarcasm permitted”? Most of us want to follow the rules, but when Tomndebb is encouraging (correctly so) snark and you’re warning/mod noting people for it in the same forum it’s a little hard to know what the rules actually are. Your understanding of the rules doesn’t seem to match any other mod’s. I can think of a half-dozen occasions of Dex, Tuba, Tomndebb, etc all saying that “Hey, we’re modeled on Cecil’s columns, of course there’s gonna be sarcasm.”
Let’s just say there’s a reason Wombat Gary only has three fingers on his left hand, and leave it at that.
Terrible call. A moderator telling a poster to only “state your opinions and [nothing else]” is absurd. If the interminably snarky lindsaybluth is crossing a line, then fucking call her out on it. If she’s getting close, notify her of that. If she crosses it, then fucking smack her down. Otherwise, I suggest a nap.
This is a perfect example of what you should have done. Please take note of it, and try to model this behavior in the future.
A mass instruction. I don’t have much problem with this at all (and I was involved in it). It was GQ, people were starting to play games with each other, and it was getting close. Colibri didn’t single anyone out, and simply stated that people were getting close to the line (plus all the various post reporting going on). Not seeing the difference between this and your note is simply admission of being tone deaf.
There are plenty of things to moderate code_grey for other than snarkiness, it’s not even funny. This is why ATMB is usually filled with these threads - Moderator A gets a bug up their butt for occasional snark, but ignores a history of reported posts, Pit threads and general annoyance caused by that poster. Other mods have recently stepped up to actually issue suspensions and bannings for such occurrences - and that’s a good thing. But to issue yet another mod note for minor less-than-misdemeanor activity doesn’t cut it. This one’s close though - so I’ll give partial credit.
This entire thread makes my head hurt. I’ll just give it to you in good faith without questioning whether you just did a search on various mod’s names and the word “snark” to pad your links.
Hot button issue, notes issues halfway through the first page, tempers rising - close, but not quite.
Probably a pretty good comparison. But it was not_alice, who’s now banned (and your second link to a not_alice mod note). If you’re trying to tell Shots that she’s skirting the “you’re getting annoying and possible close to suspended/banned”, why not just tell her that?
That’s a warning for personal insults.
A decent moderator action I don’t have much problem with, could do without the semi-official note attached, but that’s just me. Again, it’s code_grey who had been racking up quite a number of notes in a short period of time.
That’s a full year of snark warnings? Then I guess it’s settled - your note was spurious and ill-advised.
It does happen, but said carpet is a priceless Pazyryk rug said to have been the burial shroud of Alexander The Great. And, when called upon it, we are offered a drink of Glenlivet neat, or pure Jamaica Blue Mountain coffee as per our private preferences, before getting down to business.
Joking aside, I’m not sure it’s ever happened in a way that you could refer to as “being called on the carpet.” We do often consult with one another about complaints with regard to our moderating, but it’s usually the moderator in question who opens that dialogue.
With regard to snark and sarcasm from poster to poster, althhough Cecil Adams often loads on the sarc pretty thickly, that doesn’t mean we should do so here. For example, here’s a Straight Dope installment from 1986:
Will pheromones make you irresistible to the opposite sex?
(Bolding mine.)
Calling someone illiterate because they misspelled a word isn’t usually going to fly on the boards, except in the Pit.
I saw what Cecil did there.
I did exclude myself, obviously.
*Dear Cecil:
Please speak out on this disturbing occurrence: each day when I clean my ears with Q-tips I start coughing. Why?
— Glenn F., Chicago
Cecil replies:
Probably because the Q-tip is tickling your tonsils, fogbrain. Try not to worry about these things.*
[sup] A STRAIGHT DOPE CLASSIC[/sup]
Must be open season on Spectre. Twickster, relax for a while.
The point that you seem to be missing, Spectre, is that snark *is *acceptable, so calling me personally out for snark that doesn’t cross the line with the suggestion that the snark itself is against the rules is confusing and counterproductive.
Later in the same thread, I forgot that the stupid thing wasn’t in the Pit, and I *did *jam a foot pretty firmly across the line, at which point another mod (Czar, maybe?) called me on it. Look at the post he gave me a note for, and then look at the post you did. See if you can figure out what’s different between the two of them.
I’m going to agree, Spectre, that Shot From Guns has a valid point about the difference between “your snark in this post is getting close to the line - dial it back” and “don’t post snark”. One is a statement to back away from personal comments, the other is a blanket declaration that snark is not allowed.
That said, “any more of this snark” is a little different than “any more snark”. The “this” in there is perhaps ambiguous enough to cause confusion, except you cited a quote. I find it better to use fewer vague *demonstrative determiners *(this, that) and more explicit descriptions (“comments about so-and-so’s education”).
Shot From Guns, I read that as “your snark is too personally directed” not “no more snark”. The fact that you paraphrased the remark as “stop being snarky” suggests you missed that element of the note. It is, indeed, fine hair-splitting to argue the difference between “don’t post this kind of snark” and “you’re getting close to the line, dial it back”.
Munch:
I compliment you on the zeal with which you checked these. My comments are below; note that I have for the most part avoided mentioning anyone by name:
Terrible example, more like. The other moderator said this:
Try as I might, I can’t convince myself that “knock off the jabs” is anywhere close in meaning to “don’t talk about anything else”. “Citing” another moderator while substantially altering her message isn’t helping to advance your argument.
It’s not often that the person being moderated does such a fine job as straight man.[SUP]1[/SUP] But I’ll certainly keep this in mind for those occasions when that does happen.
He most certainly did single people out, to wit you and three others, by quoting the posts that were over the line. I concede that he didn’t use the construction “Munch, stop the snark…” but that’s just a quibble. If my inability to see the substantive difference here means I’m tone deaf, then I’ll stipulate that I’m tone deaf.
Partial credit noted.
Well, yes, that pretty much was my search strategy, but so what? How else would you recommend doing it? I searched for posts containing the words “moderator” and “snark”, excluding ATMB, and then skipping over the ones I had posted when going through the results. I most likely didn’t get them all, because admonitions for snark don’t necessarily contain that exact word. And, admittedly, it doesn’t rule out false positives as I conceded below. Since the admonition was specifically for snark, I’m taking partial credit here, but I concede the admonished poster in that thread was a lot snarkier than most of these examples.
And again, here’s what the other mod said:
I can’t see any significant difference compared to what I said. “Close, but not quite” seems to be an understatement.
The idea was to get SFG to rein it in a bit, so as to avoid reaching the point where we’d have to consider more drastic action. Here you seem to be objecting because I wasn’t sufficiently severe, but you more or less agree that the link is a good example. That may be, but you seem to agree with me that the snark call wrt not_alice was sound. I’m going to claim partial credit here.
Perfectly correct. It was my error, because the allusion to snark is in quoted text. Still, one false positive out of nine examples isn’t too terribly bad.
I’m not sure why you object to the “semi-official” note here. Obviously it was official, since he was moderating.
To sum up my cites, we have:
[ul]
[li]One false positive as you correctly pointed out.[/li][li]One cite where the other mod got a wonderful lead-in handed to him. Doesn’t happen every day, and it doesn’t apply to the post I was moderating.[/li][li]One “terrible call”, in describing which you inaccurately recount another mod’s post, though said mod was admonishing a poster for snark.[/li][li]One which you concede in good faith.[/li][li]One post where you claim the other mod didn’t single anyone out, even though specific quotes were identified with the posters’ names included in the quote tags.[/li][li]One “good comparison” with the post I moderated[/li][li]One in which you have no issue with the mod note, except for its “semi-official” aura[/li][li]One for which you give me ‘partial credit’.[/li][/ul]
Spurious and ill-advised? I don’t think so.
[sup]1[/sup]I’m not sure if people still understand this term generally. A straight man was the more “serious” half of a comedy duo back in the earlier days of TV and before that. He’d feed his partner the lines on which the the partner would build the jokes.
Any more of this snark vs. any more snark vs. Stop being snarky…?
Irishman, by any chance are you an attorney based in Philadelphia? No, I suppose not, judging by your location.
You do remember that I withdrew my moderation of your statement to Cat Whisperer, right?