Evolution's recent activity
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Comment on Daily Tildes discussion - our first ban in ~tildes.official
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Comment on Can the UK Really Do This to Tommy Robinson? [UK ban on reporting on grooming gang, reporter imprisoned 13 months] in ~news
Evolution (edited )LinkI'll shamelessly steal from a couple of reddit comments because the summary / presentation is a bit misleading to say the least. First of all Tommy Robinson was currently under a 3-month sentence...I'll shamelessly steal from a couple of reddit comments because the summary / presentation is a bit misleading to say the least.
First of all Tommy Robinson was currently under a 3-month sentence (suspended for 18 months) [source]. He got that sentence not because he tried to gatecrash a trial but because he stuck around after such an attempt and kept taping, which is illegal in the UK and which he was told to stop by security staff.
After not complying he was arrested and given a 3-months suspended sentence for contempt of court. The full ruling can be found online. Let's look at a quote from the end of said document [source]:
There will be no conditions that need to be attached to that suspended sentence, but you should be under no illusions that if you commit any further offence of any kind, and that would include, I would have thought a further contempt of court by similar actions, then that sentence of three months would be activated, and that would be on top of anything else that you were given by any other court.
In short, Mr. Yaxley-Lennon, turn up at another court, refer to people as "Muslim paedophiles, Muslim rapists" and so on and so forth while trials are ongoing and before there has been a finding by a jury that that is what they are, and you will find yourself inside. Do you understand? Thank you very much.
In the UK court proceedings are protected by the strict liability rule, which means you can't use prejudicial language against defendants in an ongoing trial. The goal is to avoid prejudicing the jury and to prevent trials-by-media.
His current arrest needs to be seen with all of the above in mind. Maybe the officers who arrested him had no cause for it, maybe they did. But from what we know so far it sounds awfully close to him doing, again, precisely what a court already told him to not do.
Keep in mind that this time it's also about protecting the identity of a minor involved, from that view alone it's understandable that police was more aggressive than usual because of his priors. Considering he wasn't just there 'reporting' but literally livestreamining (including the court entry, at the time of his arrest) there was a real possibility of him trying to again push things too far - just this time also endangering the identity of a minor.
All in all this is quite far from "Journalist who simply tried to report on something was arrested with no reason whatsoever", despite that framing popping up quite a bit.
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Comment on Daily Tildes discussion - our first ban in ~tildes.official
Evolution Link ParentThat's something that works flawlessly right now because the community is small and not insular in the slightest, but full transparency when it comes to something like this can also easily be...I 100% approve the disclosure decision and I think this should be done for all/most perma bans
That's something that works flawlessly right now because the community is small and not insular in the slightest, but full transparency when it comes to something like this can also easily be abused.
If the user in question isn't just a random faceless new user but for example someone who is established in a specific community (that approves of his behavior) you would now see a thread that is full of his friends arguing in his favor. If they somehow would be a dedicated group and one would come into the thread late while they showed up early people would easily be led to believe that the ban was excessive and unfair because that's what most comments and the highest voted comments would talk about.
Forcing mods to be held accountable in public for all of their individual actions would set things up for complete gridlock and ineffective moderation. That's something I believe teams should generally manage within themselves (under guidelines set early in in a communities lifespan and with ways of appealing to admins/mediators for example if there is evidence of them violating them).
It's all in all a very difficult balance between allowing moderators to do their job effectively, keeping a degree of transparency as well as accountability and keeping bureaucracy something that doesn't get in the way of day-to-day tasks.
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Comment on Daily Tildes discussion - our first ban in ~tildes.official
Evolution Link ParentAnother method one can consider would be public warnings as a reply to the rule offending comments. From experience I'd say that's a great tool to get good users back on track who are simply...Another method one can consider would be public warnings as a reply to the rule offending comments.
From experience I'd say that's a great tool to get good users back on track who are simply behaving badly in a specific situation - personal attacks by regular and otherwise totally fine users in a heated argument being one of the prime examples.
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Comment on Daily Tildes discussion - our first ban in ~tildes.official
Evolution Link ParentReddit bans being effectively useless unless you're extremely zealous against freshly made accounts (which has other drawbacks) is definitely on the list of terrible things when it comes to...Reddit bans being effectively useless unless you're extremely zealous against freshly made accounts (which has other drawbacks) is definitely on the list of terrible things when it comes to moderating over there.
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Comment on The future of moderation on Tildes in ~tildes
Evolution (edited )Link ParentI would go a bit further than that even. Both the initial mods and an initial idea of guidelines are good things to pick collectively. What I mean by that is that if for example ~music.underground...I would go a bit further than that even. Both the initial mods and an initial idea of guidelines are good things to pick collectively. What I mean by that is that if for example ~music.underground forms the community can decide that this is a group specifically for underground music and that shall be some kind of "eternal" guideline and that should not be something the mods can change, they're serving the community by enforcing what is on- and offtopic for example.
Enforcing and developing these or further guidelines should be up to the moderation team as a dedicated group, the important part is keeping the spirit of the initial idea alive.
In the event of a conflict between mods and their userbase something like that could potentially give a higher authority (admins) a way of moderating the moderators. If there are clear standards you have something they can be judged against in the end.
If one of the mods in the above example starts working for Sony and promoting their content that would be a clear violation of the initial guideline. On reddit, if that mod is high up on the list, the sub would be done for and users would have to migrate.
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Comment on The future of moderation on Tildes in ~tildes
Evolution Link ParentSystems where some form of consensus is needed to confirm an initial decision if there is a conflict are one of the best ways to handle day-to-day moderation situations in my opinion. That way you...Like, any mod-tier user can hide a post from public initially but then a review process takes place where all mods can internally vote to remove or keep.
Systems where some form of consensus is needed to confirm an initial decision if there is a conflict are one of the best ways to handle day-to-day moderation situations in my opinion. That way you can ensure that some form of common agreed upon guideline is applied consistently.
Post was removed and other mods disagree? Have a quick vote.
User was banned, believes it was unjust and challenges it without being a dick? Let a couple of mods have a look at the spot to figure out if the ban should be down-/upgraded or seems appropriate.
That approach only works when you assume good faith on all sides of a discussion. If people are allowed to say basically anything as long as they do it politely you will inadvertently end up with all kinds of extremely shitty situations (and people) within your communities.
"It is my personal opinion that the Holocaust didn't happen, maybe the people you had in your family that you claim to have died back then died of natural causes and you're just misremembering? Sometimes the human brain does interesting things, we don't need to jump to the conclusion that anyone would actually kill 6 million people. Ha, considering how much money Jews are making off this silly story I can totally understand how some people would wish for something like that to actually happen, haha!"
There are analogues to this basic approach for a lot of topics. If you want rules that only keep in check when someone clearly resorts to personal attacks or specific calls for violence you will inadvertently attract these types of people.
This is something that can sometimes be witnessed in larger reddit communities when mods end up being slow with enforcing stricter rules or when they're giving users the benefit of the doubt for too long - you will end up with people who aren't interested in a civil and productive discussion but with people who want to use your lack of rules as a recruitment tool for their platform.