Daily Tildes discussion - starting some moderation

Deimos
2018-06-15T23:13:36Z

Alright, this is very late today, but I had some other things to get through first.

If you missed it, I locked this topic earlier today (which involved quickly hacking together a lock method because I didn't have one). There was nothing wrong with the subject itself, and some reasonable discussion did happen in it, but overall it was disappointing to see it start devolving into the same old tired arguments, and it was unlikely to go anywhere productive if it had continued. I don't want to focus on that specific post though, and let's (please) try not to turn this thread entirely into a debate about it.

The thing that I'd rather discuss is that I think this marks the first time I've done any sort of "strong" moderation-like action that wasn't also associated with banning a user (and there have still only been a few of those total). This shouldn't be a shocking or surprising event—introducing some moderation was inevitable if we want to have any hope of maintaining quality, and I'm honestly impressed that we managed to make it a month before it was necessary. From this point, I'm probably going to start doing it a little more (especially as we continue growing), and at least for the near future the actions should mostly be restricted to:

re-tagging topics (and I'll give other people the ability to do this as well)

editing topic titles

moving topics between groups

(hopefully rarely) locking topics, or removing topics/comments

The main thing I'm working on finishing up now is a sort of "topic log" that will show which actions were taken on a topic, and who took them. So for example, once this is deployed, you'll be able to see things like "Deimos added tags x, y, z" or "Deimos changed title to ...".

So what I'd like to talk about in this thread is just general thoughts on moderation—would you like to see a bit stricter moderation to try to set the bar a bit higher to start? How aggressively should I move topics if I think they don't fit? Do you think we need some sort of global log to list topics that are removed? Opinions on those sorts of questions are welcome, so I can take it all into account as I figure out how I want to approach it.

Comments URL: https://tildes.net/~tildes.official/2c4/daily_tildes_discussion_starting_some_moderation

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