You seem to conflate “shut down” with any criticism of conservative propaganda. “Shut down” implies censorship, which no conservative has encountered on this board. Quit exaggerating your experiences to engender sympathy; it is misleading and unseemly.
I have no desire for sympathy, and the only personal experience I’m talking about is what I’ve observed on this board.
Which is not censorship, so no conservatives have been “shut down”.
What, you don’t remember the time the mods required all posters to participate in the Three Minutes of Hate? You don’t remember the time Bricker was publicly executed for his views? You don’t remember when Steophan’s head was shoved into a box full of rats???!
It’s literally Orwellian, man!
(Okay, okay, okay. Having your views criticized by people is at least as bad as the hungry rodent torture. I shouldn’t make fun.)
Which leaves unanswered the question I asked several times in the linked thread - why is it running up to the very edge when I post it, but when liberal posters do the same thing in the same thread, it goes unmentioned?
Regards,
Shodan
Terr has. Two warnings after a suspension is enough to show that a conservative is not getting the message and must be banned. Five warnings after a suspension is not, for a liberal.
Regards,
Shodan
Alternatively, we could take the position that no one’s views should be “shouted down”, but rather they should be argued against. After all, “correct” in the realm of politics depends on what your starting assumptions are, and we don’t all start from the same place.
Two warnings after a “final step” month-long suspension, versus five warnings after a much shorter, much less serious suspension. Oopsie daisy!
Where did I say anything about shutting anything down? I was commenting on what the majority on this board may perceive, even though they are not “left” or “liberal”
We’re talking about politics here - there is no “truth” and dmn little “factual” anything.
I save my ignorance-fighting for GQ, and possibly some GD threads. But some other GD threads, IMO threads and especially Pit threads? Naah, not really in it to debate reality with people who have their own version of it.
“Orwellian”, you mean standing up to Fascists? That sounds like a great thing to be.
Yeah, you keep fighting the good anti-anti-racist fight, history will come around to your side any day now…
By “Shouted down”, I’m talking about the sheer volume of people (not just liberals) saying “No, that’s a stupid idea” to some conservative talking point. There’s no other form of shouting down possible here other than number of posts, in any literal sense.
And no, calling racists racists isn’t shouting anyone down. Plus, verboten outside the Pit.
Roger that. Most of my warnings have been: A. From Colibri, and B. For political jabs in GQ. One was rescinded, one was, is and always will be totally bogus, and the others were totally deserved.
And I am quite proud of the people in this thread for letting post #263 go by without snark.
I don’t really think a difference in the number of reports of a “problematic post” is going to make a difference. If it gets reported, it gets reviewed. Mods can correct me if I’m wrong, but I have the impression that the number of reports does not really weigh in their decision of it if is a rules violation.
There’s a miniscule zone where one set of posters may not report something because they don’t think it will get treated fairly/modded “right”, whereas something from the other side would be reported a dozen times because that side expects it will at least be reviewed. I don’t think that makes a significant difference in the amount of modding around here.
What is also possible is that certain posters get modded more frequently for their behavior, but because their politics are also counter the culture, it becomes easy to mistake that as a factor. However, the conservatives are trying to look at overall patterns to negate this effect. So that’s reasonable.
With regards to Terr vs BrainGlutton, while it is interesting to look at the specifics, it is difficult to make a fair comparison because their records are not identical. It’s not just number of Warnings, but timing of the events, severity of infractions, and repetition of behavior that drew warnings.
So Colibri thinks it is only fair to look at the same time frame. There’s a sense to that, because one poster racking up 5 Warnings in one month is different than a poster racking up 5 Warnings in 15 years. So he went back to the earlier suspension (Nov 2013), and totalled stats for both in that time window.
But Bone feels like what is more important than the same time window is to look at whether their respective suspensions had the desired effect of altering their behavior. So we should evaluate each poster by his own suspension. From that method, Terr was warned twice after a suspension, whereas BrainGlutton clocked 5 Warnings after a suspension. That’s an imbalance, yes.
But that doesn’t take into consideration the nature of the suspensions given. There are the full one month suspensions that are typically the last attempt at curbing behavior, and there are shorter suspensions that are used to get attention but fall short of putting someone on final notice. By that category, BrainGlutton had the second kind of suspension while Terr had the first, so of course Terr was on thinner ice.
But then we could step back one step further and try to evaluate why Terr got a full suspension but BrainGlutton got a short one. Why the difference in their punishment levels? Now someone has to go look at the individual cases and decide whether BrainGlutton really deserved more leniency than Terr. And that’s where the real challenge comes, because it situation was different, and so there is a lot of room for judgement calls. Judgement calls by moderators on the severity of each infraction and why it was a Warning, not a Note. Judgement calls by people reviewing for themselves and trying to decide the same question. Judgement calls over whether other factors (like personal animosity) affected those decisions.
And that neglects the record for Notes, which as far as I know are not tallied anywhere, which means someone would need a really extensive research project to review each and every post in both their histories to tally corresponding Notes and their behavior in each thread, and try to find some way to amass a database of overall impressions of the “badness” of their behavior.
ACK!!!
I think it’s fair to say each of these posters had valuable contributions, and each has problem behaviors. Each situation was evaluated independently, and moderated by the same standard that the moderators try to give everyone. If there is an imbalance in results, it is not an intentional slighting of one side versus another, it is merely a perceptional interpretation of who was doing what when and how bad it was and what the overall result should be for that individual.
I think, in theory, there is a reasonable concern that if conservatives consistently get slightly more calls against them, that imbalance will rack up to form an overall bias against conservatives when Warning counts are assessed against posting privileges.
Not that I believe this has been demonstrated to be happening, but it isn’t a ridiculous position to be concerned about.
I think the most important point, though, is to ask what can we do to prevent it?
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Try to ensure there is fair representation within the moderators themselves.
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Pick moderators who have a reputation for fairness and self-scrutiny.
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Foster a culture within the moderators to look at the situation, not the politics of the posters.
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Foster a culture within the moderators of double checking their own motivations when moderating, and having them internally review each other.
I’m not saying any of the above are not being done. These are the ideas that I can think of that would help mitigate unintentional bias.
Ultimately, the hardest to prevent is the imbalance of situation that I described previously. Minority positions get overwhelmed by more arguments and attacks, and can be put more on the defensive simply from numbers. A few snarky remarks from a lot of posters adds up the hostility factor for the smaller number on the receiving end. Trying to keep the number of quips and barbs equal is going to make the smaller side fielding more comments per person, making them look more aggressive, and thereby more troublesome.
E.g. if 15 people each make one remark to a poster, that poster makes 15 remarks back, that one poster looks more troublesome. And if you’re making more remarks near the line, you’re more likely to have one caught on or over the line, more likely to amass those notes and Warnings that build you a record of being a troublemaker.
But that’s not really the moderators’ fault. They deal with the behavior they see.
The reality is that the minority position has to accept an imbalance of hostility and snark. The only other option is to cut all snark and moderate the board to death.
IOW liberals get shorter suspensions, and they are less seriously meant. And conservatives are on a much shorter leash - two warnings get you banned. For liberals, five warnings aren’t nearly the same - you just get suspended (again).
Regards,
Shodan
It’s the calling non-racists racist, in an attempt to avoid debating their views, that is the problem. The continual assumption that, because you know one thing about someone, one view that they hold, that you know enough about them to just assume they are wrong.
But, calling a view or a person “racist” and leaving it at that, rather than showing why they are wrong, is shouting them down. That’s why “racist” has been ruled an insult here (correctly). Ideally, the same would happen to using “conservative” or “liberal” as a descriptor when all you are doing is presuming someone’s views on something based on unrelated views. Obviously not all uses of those words, but ones when it’s used as an insult.
You’ve just extrapolated two individual cases to all “liberals” and “conservatives” while dismissing any actual individual differences in the two cases which may have justified the different treatment. That’s not really a compelling argument.
And since we’re discussing unfair moderation and errors, I will mention that I went back and looked, and there’s this nifty discussion of BrainGlutton’s original one week suspension.
I will point out that the third incident appears to have been strangely applied to BrainGlutton. Subterraneous described a thread as “pretty fucking dumb”. BrainGlutton replied “The OP is pretty fucking dumb. Subsequent posts show some intelligence, or at least some serious attempts to exercise it.”
By my reading, BrainGlutton was actually defending the poster, and was describing the original post as fucking dumb, but only echoing the words of Subterraneous. He wasn’t really threadshitting, certainly not as much as Subterraneous who wasn’t given an infraction. He wasn’t insulting the poster, though a certain reading could look like he was - poor phrasing, but context makes clear the intent.
So, now we have a case of a liberal being overly modded and it affecting his posting privileges. Does that help balance the scales? Or just annoy everyone more for no sensible reason?
Which of the current crop of moderators is fairly described as “conservative?”
How far back in time must we go to find an example of a conservative moderator?
I’ve been meaning to start a thread about the following for awhile. And I still may.
IMO these mini suspensions, be they a week or for fracks sake 3 days!, are bullshit.
They just cloud up the issue (see this thread) of what a suspension means and is supposed to do.
While I think the model of you’ve had enough warnings and now are banned for life is a bit much, I think if you give a suspension that is supposed to be the final warning before the suspension death penalty, it should actually have an impact.
A week doesn’t mean a thing. Any remotely normal human can do a week without just about anything less important than breathing, drinking water, urinating, and taking a dump.
And three days, not even over a weekend? That’s just laughable. And the guy that got that? Had he pulled that crap and been right wing I bet he woulda been insta banned.
IFFFF warning suspensions are supposed to be the LAST CHANCE before the big cornfield in the sky suspension, make it hurt. At a minimum make it 3 or 4 months. Six months might even be better. Give the poster time to reflect on what its like to not be able to post. Give them time to cool off, or (as I suspect is often the case) time for whatever bad shit is going on in their life to blow over (and if they have such going on, the last place they probably need to be is here wasting time and getting pissed off).
Loach has implied in this thread that he is conservative, or at least not a Democrat.
What do you mean by “conservative”? More conservative than you?
Frankly, I have no idea of the politics of most of the other mods, because it almost never comes up in our discussions.
I would think it does. In addition, since everyone is more likely to report a post from a poster with differing politics, the chances of a borderline post from a conservative being reported are much greater than one from a liberal. There just aren’t the same number of conservatives on the boards as liberals.
Plus, at least one of the mods has stated that he tends to discount posts when I report them, because it is his perception that I only report posts from my political opponents.
In a recent thread (to which I will NOT link; that’s not the point) I was accused of trolling in a not-particularly-veiled manner. As an experiment, I did not report the post. No one else did either, apparently. I am not complaining about that, I am simply observing it. The idea that each side should police itself doesn’t happen. So anyone in the minority is in somewhat of a dilemma - report all the cheap shots and get a reputation as a whiner and at least one of the mods will treat your reports less seriously, or not report them and put up with an increased level of abuse.
See also a thread of some years back where a mod accidentally included a Doper on the e-mails the mods were sending back and forth, which included a disparaging reference to “even a blind squirrel finds a nut sometimes”. ISTM that at least in some cases, they discount reports if they get too many of them, for one reason or another.
Regards,
Shodan