27 votes

Civil disagreement (or, how to get people to consider your meta-opinions while not singling out individuals)

A Short Summary and Introduction Before the Actual Content of This Post:

A site—especially a small one, like Tildes—is going to have growing pains. That's natural. It's also natural, and to some extent, necessary, for users to raise issue with remedies for these growing pains. However, there's a spectrum of correct ways to do this, and a way to not do this. If you aren't interested in—or think you already have a firm grasp on the subject of—this post, you might want to skip it.

Tildes has reached its first major streak of growing pains, as I'm sure everyone active or lurking's noticed. We've also reached our first few incorrect methods of handling these. There are a few obvious things you shouldn't do, and everyone knows that—tantrums, slurs, personal attacks, etcetera—I'm going to be discussing a less realised one, and ways you could handle it instead.

Now, onto the good stuff.


Repeatedly, when handling issues, Tildes has seen a recurring circumstance. User makes post, upset. User namedrops and or subposts a user (the most apt description I could think of for a term lifted off of Twitter—subtweet—for example, "I'm not saying it's Garfield I'm talking about, but there was a suspiciously large orange cat with a mild food addiction with a fondness for lasagne who really pushed my buttons!" and etcetera). User hits "send." The targets of it feel offended, and the poster gets yelled at by the community for hurting people. No one wins.

The trick to fixing this: stop going out of your way to call out users, directly or indirectly. If you have issue with something someone said, either take it to an administrator, or directly message the user in question (politely, of course.) There's no reason to air dirty laundry in public, and there's no reason to bring personal grievances into the public eye for minor things.

If you notice an issue, do the above, and nothing changes, wait a short while before making a post on it. There's a fair chance it will resolve itself. If you end up feeling the need to make a post, do not mention individual conversations. Do not give examples from actual conversations; make an analogous example and put it into quote blocks. Never name a name or names, don't allow hate to be directed at anyone.

We're all (presumably) adults (or close enough,) here. If you have any desire for Tildes to flourish, act like an adult. Passive aggression isn't the behaviour of one. Aim to have better behaviour than the docs recommend; you might slip up sometimes, but you'll never fall too far if you keep that in mind.

Anyway, if you ended up reading this; thank you for taking the time. I appreciate it. I've spent a lot of time handling large forums, and in comparison to most of you, fairly small, incredibly high-volatility subreddits with immeasurably close communities. If you can't get a community to do the above, or something close to it, it's more or less going to be a death warrant for it. We'd all prefer not to have that happen to Tildes, so I—and presumably, most of us—would really appreciate if people made an effort to stop that from occurring.

Hate to copy reddit's slogan, but really:

Remember the Human.

Thanks again,

Eva.

6 comments

  1. [2]
    Gaywallet
    Link
    If your immediate thought after a thread is that you should create a thread calling out a user about their behavior, I think it's time to reassess whether you've had too much internet for the day....

    If your immediate thought after a thread is that you should create a thread calling out a user about their behavior, I think it's time to reassess whether you've had too much internet for the day. Go take a walk, work out, a hot shower, play a game, chat with your family and friends - anything to take your mind off what just happened and give yourself time to process.

    It's probably not worth it.

    20 votes
    1. [2]
      Comment deleted by author
      Link Parent
      1. Eva
        Link Parent
        Definitely! That's a fantastic approach to it.

        Definitely! That's a fantastic approach to it.

        4 votes
  2. [2]
    Comment deleted by author
    Link
    1. Eva
      Link Parent
      Absolutely. Cheers.

      Absolutely. Cheers.

      3 votes
  3. Leon
    (edited )
    Link
    It's not an effective strategy to attempt to change the users of a site to fit your world view, especially not via call out posts. As the quote goes "We but mirror the world. All the tendencies...

    It's not an effective strategy to attempt to change the users of a site to fit your world view, especially not via call out posts.

    As the quote goes

    "We but mirror the world. All the tendencies present in the outer world are to be found in the world of our body. If we could change ourselves, the tendencies in the world would also change. As a man changes his own nature, so does the attitude of the world change towards him. This is the divine mystery supreme. A wonderful thing it is and the source of our happiness. We need not wait to see what others do."

    Said another way, ducks is on point.

    3 votes
  4. est
    Link
    The mechanical solution: hide all user names by default. (At least in certain subs like ~talk or ~politics) If you are interested in someone, you follow him and the identity is revealed. So are yours.

    The trick to fixing this: stop going out of your way to call out users, directly or indirectly

    The mechanical solution: hide all user names by default. (At least in certain subs like ~talk or ~politics)
    If you are interested in someone, you follow him and the identity is revealed. So are yours.

    3 votes
  5. Zekka
    Link
    Hey, I was originally tempted to quotesnipe this post (because it's obviously directed at me, goldfish, and Tenlock, and a few lines made me feel glaringly misunderstood) but instead I want to be...

    Hey, I was originally tempted to quotesnipe this post (because it's obviously directed at me, goldfish, and Tenlock, and a few lines made me feel glaringly misunderstood) but instead I want to be nice and polite and comprehensive.

    In a super ideal world everybody would approach every topic with a ton of patience and civility. The problem is that it's way easier for people who don't really care to conjure up patience and civility. This is where you get glib concern trolls, etc, who post the same thing again and again, pretending to be slightly clueless bystanders who happens to support victimizers instead of victims.

    Websites that prize civility tend pro-racism. This is anecdotal, but I've posted on a lot of web forums under a lot of aliases, so I'm going to pull out Reddit, Quora, LessWrong, and Medium as examples. If you tell someone the thing they're saying is racist on any of those websites, whether you're nice about it or mean about it, you get brigaded by very polite people who will whatabout at you until you snap at them or leave the site. People act as if the word "racist," even justified, is a slur.

    Holding people to the standard of writing a mod and the involved user before posting about a user they don't like basically amplifies established members and silences new or quiet members. Your average quiet person will drift off the site before they actually complain about a thing that is bothering them, and that's even more true if they feel like they're shouting into a void.

    The problem with complaining to a user directly, in private, is that they don't really think the thing they did was wrong, or if they know it was wrong, they don't care. You will most likely be ignored. Also, everyone knows this -- PMing someone to say "you did something wrong and here's a link" looks seriously stalkerish, no matter how polite you are. If you hold me to doing this, I now have to deal with the prospect of being told I'm being weird and taking things too personally.

    Here are some examples of things I've heard from mods elsewhere online that have made me more likely to quit a website than to bother dealing with them:

    • You're the only person who complained.
    • Did you wait another day for [problem user] to respond?
    • They'll catch a ban next time they do that.
    • I know I said they'd catch a ban, but [problem user] actually acted out in a different way this time than the last time you complained. I warned them on that topic too.
    • The mod you contacted is actually away right now. I just found out about this situation. To be safe, I've given the user a warning.

    Any user who has a history of making good-faith complaints has already been in this situation a bunch of times. You can say "our mods will be better" but they never have been on any site I've ever posted on. Something about this almost-imperceptible increase in power makes normal people incredibly hard to deal with, and when I was a mod I quickly caught myself saying the exact same things. It especially doesn't bode well that many of our current posters are actually mods from Reddit, a website whose default moderator culture is just like what I just described.


    Here are my opinions about why civility rules do not work as intended.

    People who want to post bad shit have a specific kind of content they want to post on your forum. They're very disingenuous, so to post it, they'll adapt to any set of form-oriented standards. If they have to look nice, they will -- if they have to message a mod first, they will. If they have to refer to their targets euphemistically, they will. If they have to refer to their targets chronologically, they will. (like in this thread: "this happened recently, I think you all know what I'm talking about," in clear reference to Tenlock, goldfish, and me)

    As a person who gets hit by form-oriented standards a lot, who tries really hard to be civil and nice on the internet anyways, please don't come up with guidelines like this and hold people to them! Please keep your guidelines internal and try to evaluate them from first principles in every situation -- "this guy posted a callout thread -- did he actually hurt anybody, and do I really care about how those people feel?"

    This (from the OP) is an example of the kind of thing I want to avoid:

    The targets of it feel offended, and the poster gets yelled at by the community for hurting people. No one wins.

    When becoming offended earns moderator actions, bad actors will manufacture offense until the people opposing them capitulate completely. It doesn't even need to make sense -- I've been banned from an ostensibly center-left forum for having the gall to refer to a self-described neo-nazi as "a little racist," because it apparently bothered him.

    The other problem with this is that the kinds of people doing the yelling -- that is, the people in a community who spend the most time condemning dudes who a moderator has already singled out for criticism -- are the people with no skin in the game. Every forum has a subset of members that really likes validating moderator decisions, whatever they are -- and it's not the same as the subset that identifies actual bad behavior. So treating this situation as bad by default means assigning a lot of weight to the opinions of people who registered to post bad things and to bystanders who don't care.