Mod annotations for removed comments

balooga
2019-04-16T20:13:57Z

I just came across this field of 13 admin-removed comments and frankly it left me feeling rather unsettled. That's a lot of content to just nuke all at once. Contextually, the thread up to that point was genial and non-controversial, so it seems especially odd that there's just this black hole there. What struck me mostly was how opaque the moderation was. There is no indication of what kind of content was removed, why it was removed, or specifically who did the removal or when it happened.

Then I scrolled down and at the very bottom I found what I guess is meant to address these concerns, a comment from Deimos:

Sigh, I saw this thread was active and thought it was going to have an actual on-topic discussion in it. Let's (mostly) start this over.

It's not always clear online so I want to say that I'm not rage-posting or bellyaching about censorship or any of the usual drama that tends to crop up on sites like Tildes from time to time. I trust Deimos' moderation and give this the benefit of the doubt. What I'm actually doing, I guess, is making a feature request about better annotation for removed comments.

Would it make sense to show a note (like Deimos' comment) in-thread at the position of the deleted content? Instead of down at the bottom of the page or unattached to anything relevant? In my opinion some kind of "reason" message should always be provided with any moderation activity as a matter of course. Even if it's just boilerplate text chosen from a dropdown menu.

Also, would a single bulk-annotation for all of the related removals make for better UX than 13 separate ones? I think that would be both easier to read, and easier for Deimos to generate on the backend.

I feel like we may have had this conversation previously, but I couldn't find it. Apologies if I'm beating a dead horse.

Comments URL: https://tildes.net/~tildes/ceg/mod_annotations_for_removed_comments

Votes: 13

Comments: 16