I know that we have many new moderators and there’s a learning curve, but I have seen more of what seems to be partisan moderation with some of the new moderators.
I have no issue with noting or warning people who debate disingenuously, but some of the mod notes seem very partisan to me in a way that it didn’t before.
Since there’s a learning curve, maybe the moderators should be more reticent about going the warning route and start with a mod note first. Of course, if the noted poster doesn’t change behavior in a thread, then a warning for failure to follow instructions is appropriate. Not following instructions is a clear violation, and takes any partisanship out of the question. Disagreements with the original note could be taken here.
No, I can’t publish a list of warnings and I think it would be frowned on for someone to search the Dope for the warnings and publish a list. Kind of like public shaming which seems to fall into the category of jerkish.
That seems fair to me. We also have to be pretty clear when giving warnings for more than one posts that it is part of the warning. I’ve been working on that part.
I also try to make it clear a modnote is not a warning and just a guidance.
I assume this is mainly about GD and P&E? So let me call the attention of said Mods. @Hari_Seldon@raventhief
That’s where drilling down into the data gets interesting; What if the data shows that conservatives are more often the jerks? Of course, lack of moderation against progressives being jerks might reveal a bias as well. There’s AI software available that can analyze sentiment (Positive, Negative, Neutral). From a strictly academic point of view, might be interesting to do that kind of deep analysis given how much data has been collected over the years.
That probably shouldn’t count, yeah. But the perception of bias may contribute to the ‘going ballistic’, even if there is no actual bias.
It would be interesting, but extremely hard to determine in a non-partisan fashion. If software can be racist then it could also have a built in political lean.
This is exactly what is happening, and much of the whining about it (not necessarily in this thread, but in general) is down to people who have been making use of that same slack and are worried they’ll be next.
For sure. We’ve been using it for some analytics on customer feedback comments and it ain’t perfect but it is interesting with a large enough set of data. And it can be tweaked so it “learns” not to interpret “Customer service is da bomb” as a terrorist threat.
What Exit has hit on the issue, I think. On a message board that has identified as 80% liberal (if most of the IMHO surveys we had before were reasonably accurate,) of course a conservative post that is a “7” of offensiveness on a scale of 1-10 will get a lot more reports than a liberal post that is also a 7 on the offense scale.
DamuriAjashi was a liberal Democrat (compared to the country as a whole), but he had some opinions where his positions were to the right of this board. All of his warnings were in connection with those viewpoints. (I believe the same also applies to the hostility to him in the Pit.)
Same exact guy, but somehow when he expresses a more RW viewpoint his debating style is suddenly flawed and/or he becomes a jerk. What this really suggests is that there’s something about adopting a minority viewpoint on this MB which makes one be perceived as a jerk or otherwise in violation of the rules.
Possibly moderation (whether ideological bias or the weight of public opinion or similar) or possibly just the dynamic of being in that position vis a vis the majority. Personally I think all of the above.
I think you mean a more “evidence free” viewpoint, judging by the warnings you linked. In each case, DA presented a viewpoint with no evidence, got called out on it, doubled down, and crossed a line.
My guess, and only a guess is that there are plenty of left leaning posts that do break the rules that just don’t get flagged.
I’ll be honest, I largely avoided GD for years as I got tired of the parsing debates and nitpicking. This actually seems to have improved since the GD rule revisions. Bravo to the late Jonathan Chance.
IMHO: The quality of debate is generally better than it was 5 years ago.
Or, it could be that those positions were just wrong. For example, imagine someone who is left of center but is a climate change denialist – just because they get all kinds of crap for climate change denial, but not for their other positions, that’s not evidence of bias. It’s evidence that they’re wrong about climate change. Then, if they argue disingenuously on that topic but not other topics, they could get warned for that.
I think DA had some issues with racism, IIRC, and that’s where he ran into trouble here.
Anyway, that all seems like a topic for another thread.
I’ve been thinking about it that way, too. Mods can’t realistically scour every thread to see who’s breaking the rules. They rely largely on reports. Conservatives stepping out of line are more likely to get reported.
That said, I get the sense that the new class of mods tend to intervene on most reports. I dunno what’s going on behind the scenes and I could be wrong, but I’ve seen some mod notes that seemed pretty heavy - handed, and I can only guess it’s because some overly sensitive person reported a post and mods felt compelled to act on it.
The most recent one I can think of was a thread about tiny civilizations and how they could be exploited. Someone made a joke about exchanging work for sexual favors (not explicit at all) and it got modded. Are sex jokes not allowed now? It would be a shame if they aren’t. But I imagine one poster got a bug up their ass and reported it.
I don’t think that’s all it is, as above. But no real difference, for practical purposes. Even if it’s some sort of ideological or structural bias, there’s little or nothing that can be done about it.
But the real difference is in assessing overall behavior, rather than any particular warning. Suppose someone has managed to rack up X number of warnings. Now the question is what that says about them as overall posters. And here is where the issue becomes relevant. If for whatever reason, conservative posts are more likely to receive warnings than identically “flawed” liberal ones, then having X number of warnings says less about a conservative poster than it does about a liberal poster.
No, I can’t publish a list of warnings and I think it would be frowned on for someone to search the Dope for the warnings and publish a list. Kind of like public shaming which seems to fall into the category of jerkish.