Daily Tildes discussion - banning for bad-faith/trolling behavior
I've just banned the user @Hypnotoad for some repeated bad-faith behavior. Some of this is still visible in their history if you want to look, but some has also been edited or deleted which will make it less obvious (this post explains some of it, not all). I also know their reddit account (but hadn't looked through it previously) and there's a bit of bigotry and general poor behavior there as well.
No, I did not send them a warning, and no, I don't intend this ban to be temporary. I know that some of you will think this is too harsh, but to be honest, some of you are way too forgiving. It will be completely impossible to maintain any semblance of a high-quality community if we have to constantly give low-quality, trollish users the benefit of the doubt. Good users don't want to (and shouldn't have to) spend most of their time on a site trying to educate other people how to behave. That gets tiresome extremely quickly, and results in the good users just finding somewhere else to spend their time instead.
So... in terms of discussion topics, feel free to give opinions on this specific ban, as well as thoughts about how this type of decision should be made in general. Having some standards is absolutely necessary though, Tildes can't possibly serve as both a high-quality discussion site as well as a "troll education space".
I'm not happy it had to happen, but I think it had to happen.
Multiple users over multiple threads expressed to Toad that there was a problem with posting so many threads with little to no engagement with the topic after posting. The creation of devisive topics with (imo) inflammatory language, and the subsequent lack of engagement struck me as classical troll behavior.
It's a shame. They weren't fundamentally bad topics, and I enjoyed some of the subject matter. But the manner in which they acted did not foster much worthwhile discussion, and they had every opportunity to chime in and address what others were concerned with.
edit: typo
I had a hard time believing some of those posts, especially as they were originally worded before the edits, weren't explicitly designed to troll. Toad had multiple people over multiple posts tell him that how he posted the subjects was pretty inflammatory and not conducive to discussion. So I agree, it absolutely had to happen.
I would have been less supportive of a ban if those were comments instead of posts.
And, yet, those posts did prompt discussion. The homosexual marriage post has 49 comments, and the post about religion has 42 comments.
Prompting discussion and prompting productive discussion are two distinctly different things. It I make a topic expressing blatant hate speech in it, that will likely prompt "discussion" as well... but not the kind that ~ wants on the site.
And productive discussion coming in spite of someone's clear efforts to bait angry/emotional responses isn't exactly a point in their favor either, especially since those discussions could have easily gone sideways given their bad-faith framing of the "questions" in the first place.
I commented in the thread about homosexual marriage, and am still commenting there. Are you implying that my comments are not "productive discussion"?
My point is that the whether the discussion is productive or not is up to the people discussing the topic. If I choose to comment somewhere, it's with the intent of being productive - even if, or sometimes because, I'm disagreeing with people. Discussion is an exchange of ideas among various people. It's up to us to be productive, not rely solely on someone else's post to be productive for us.
I never accused your comments of being unproductive, but you were operating under good faith whereas @hypnotoad was not. In fact, you were even directly a victim of their bad-faith behavior:
You missed the edit where Hypnotoad explicitly spelled out that they were directly opposed to the idea of gay marriage.
Read the rant in Hypno's latest topic (the one that prompted the ban) and tell me that was done as a good faith effort to "assist" the site or "contribute" in any meaningful way, with a straight face.
p.s. Agent provocateurs are not a noble thing, as you seem to imply they are. They exist to undermine peaceful movements by falsely implicating them in the violent actions and crimes the provocateur orchestrates while they are pretending to be representative of said peaceful movement.
But you accused Hypnotoad of prompting unproductive discussion, and my discussion was prompted by their post, so either you're accusing me of conducting unproductive discussion or their post did prompt productive discussion.
I found that out later. However, even if Hypnotoad had left that statement in their post, that doesn't make it unproductive. In fact, I had previously accused them of holding back from their own posts and not committing to them. Including a statement in their post which nails their colours to the mast seems like an improvement to me.
Or is someone not allowed to post an opinion that the majority of us disagree with?
In my time moderating Reddit I've seen lots of people who try to contribute in good faith, but fail because they don't understand the subtleties involved (I've even tried to help some of them). Hypnotoad laid forth their premise, with a lot of individual points, and tried to open up a debate. Sure, they didn't do it well, but I'm not willing in this case to attribute to malice that which could be attributed to incompetence. I don't see evidence of bad faith. I see evidence of a lack of knowledge about how to participate in an online forum.
^ Read my first reply to you. I never accused your comments of being unproductive and so I would ask that you stop accusing me of doing so.
There is a difference between posting a dissenting opinion in a good faith effort to open up dialogue and a bad faith effort to stir up anger in hopes it results in other people being banned.
Show me any evidence whatsoever of good faith in the rant that got him banned.
And it certainly doesn't help their case that they kept editing their bad-faith efforts out on multiple occasions after being called out for them. I have been watching them ever since their now incredibly ironic "communism bad, religion good" topic, as I made clear in my original response on the topic that got them banned:
Patterns of behavior matter. The pattern was 100% clear this was not just "incompetence" but malicious on their part. Especially when their behavior on reddit is taken into account as well, which @deimos made clear was a part of this decision as well.
Did anyone officially tell Hypnotoad that their posting style was not welcome here, and that they should change it? Was Hypnotoad given a chance to change their pattern of behaviour?
Several people had told Hypnotoad that his inflammatory style of posting alongside his lack of engagement in his posts was no acceptable.
Lots of people act as gatekeepers but get it wrong. I'm continually educating people in /r/DaystromInstitute that what they're telling someone else about our subreddit is wrong ("That's not canon!" Sorry, but we do discuss non-canon. "No real-world discussion here!" Sorry, but we do discuss real-world aspects of the show.) Similarly, people on Tildes are declaring how they think the website works, or should work, but that doesn't mean Deimos agrees with them. (I noticed, after the thread about requiring submission statements on link posts, that Deimos himself posted a link without a submission statement.) Just because a bunch of users tell someone something, that doesn't mean they're right.
Did anyone officially tell Hypnotoad to change their ways?
I believe no one officially told hypnotoad to change his ways, as the only one who can officially tell anyone anything is @demios. However, the top voted comment on multiple of his posts told him that what he was doing is wrong. I think that is a reasonable stand in.
Out of curiosity, are the people who have incorrect claims about what is done on your subreddit ever highly upvoted?
"I rest me case, m'lud!"
Sometimes. Ignorance about how our subreddit works isn't isolated to just a few people.
@cfabbro said "Officially, not that I am aware of". Deimos did mention that it was a ban without any warning so the answer to your question probably is indeed a "No".
I've been noticing this a lot too. Everyone here has a different idea on how they want the culture of ~ to be and that's causing a lot of headbutting to happen.
Uhm... there is no submission statement from @deimos there. What are you talking about?
edit: NM misread what you were saying. Deimos specifically addressed "submission statements" and why he doesn't support them: https://tildes.net/~tildes/3s/why_do_we_need_link_or_test_and_not_both#comment-8t
So your point is still a bit moot. People are free to suggest how they think ~ should operate (god knows I do) but ultimately it's not up to them or me or you, it's up to @deimos and he has made it clear how bans are going to operate until ~ is equipped to do otherwise.
No. My point is that, despite a LOT of users saying "the website should work this way", the one and only person who can say how the website should work didn't agree with them.
I was told repeatedly in that thread that I should post submission statements when I make link posts. But they were wrong, as demonstrated and stated by Deimos. Who should I listen to - the many users who were wrong, or Deimos who is right?
Users are not always the best people to tell other users how a website works. It is always best for an official admin or mod to step in and give people the accurate information.
I'm applying this principle to Hypnotoad's situation. Just because a lot of people told Hypnotoad something, there's no guarantee they were right. The only person who can correctly tell Hypnotoad what behaviour is and is not acceptable here is Deimos. But he didn't. So Hypnotoad didn't know they were doing the wrong thing.
Officially, not that I am aware of. However go through their topics. Dozens of users on multiple occasions called them out on their behavior. They never responded to a single comment in their topics and in fact their posts just kept getting more and more inflammatory as they went on. And as @deimos has said before, not all bans require warnings and until ~ is equipped to issue things like temporary bans or empower the trusted users to manage issues like this themselves, people shouldn't expect anything but straight site bans. This is an alpha, after all. And he has also stated he is open to the possibility of reinstating accounts should the user choose to apologize for their behavior. They have his email address should they chose to do so.
However I very much doubt they will apologize since banned users more than often double down on their asshole behavior instead, as perfectly exemplified by one of the other previously banned users:
https://old.reddit.com/r/tildes/comments/8nm9wb/banned_from_tildes/
So how could Hypnotoad know that their pattern of behaviour needed changing? How could they have prevented their ban?
I just covered that point in my reply to someone else (sorry, they got in first!).
One banned person does not speak for all banned people. And if you go from merrily posting with no official indication you're doing the wrong thing to suddenly being banned, you're liable to become slightly miffed.
Does Hypnotoad know that? I assume that, after being banned, they can no longer read this website so they can't see Deimos' post saying that an apology would be accepted.
I'm not seeing a lot of opportunity here for a user to know they're doing the wrong thing before getting banned, or to appeal that ban after it's imposed. It's just... WHAM! A sudden bolt of lightning from the gods, and you're out.
Uhm... common sense?
@deimos is ridiculously busy and can't be expected to gently hold the hand of every user on the site and teach them how to behave in a civil manner. And neither can I so we're done here. I will not be replying to you again on this issue.
Maybe he needs some helpers to take care of that for him - some official helpers (rather than self-appointed gatekeepers). You seem to be in the know. Maybe you could ask to become a helper-mod here, and speak officially on behalf of Deimos and Tildes.
EDIT: I accidentally a word.
My assumption is that how to handle modding is either:
I’m getting the same vibe from you that I got from hynotoad. Sealioning and ignoring information people already gave you in multiple responses (and in the OP itself) so you can ask inflammatory questions like this.
Wow. Just... wow.
It just doesn't pay to have a different point of view on the internet. No matter where you go, you get accused of sealioning or trolling if you don't toe the party line.
I don't think it's necessarily true that it's everywhere on the internet. I really think the demographic of the seed this community is drawn from has at least some bearing on it here. :/
But I wasn’t talking about having a different point of view. I was talking about how you’re disingenuous with the questions and statements you’re making.
You can't possibly know that.
Sometimes you can.
Please elaborate.
edit: oh shit, did I just sealion you? do you see how even the accusation destroys the ability to have a conversation?
Sometimes you can tell someone is being disingenuous. You’re more than welcome to prove that’s impossible.
I am reminded of the debates I've seen with atheists when faced with someone saying "oh yeah? well if god doesn't exist, then prove it!" to which the atheist says "you can't prove a negative" or something about the burden of proof being on the claimant.
Dude do you have a point? If not, please stop replying. I’m not changing my mind about how I feel about how that user acts here.
There was a point to my questions.
Oh I saw all of your questions. It’s laughable you went and found a Wikipedia article, especially the one you chose, in order to justify your behavior. I’m not buying what you’re selling. There’s really nothing that can be gained from discussing this any further. Have a good weekend.
That's completely unfair. Asimov has been civil and isn't remotely like Toad at all. People won't always be in total agreement in everything.
When did I say we all have to have the same opinion?
This feels really inappropriate. Asimov's been a bit more rigid than I'd personally like, but I would never say that it's even remotely the same behavior. One of the better things a moderator can do for a community is absorb this decision-making so that we don't have awful situations like this cropping up.
I think that a feedback mechanism like Asimov is asking about isn't completely outside the realms of a rational suggestion (I've said in a later comment chain that I am rather fond of that idea). So this user pressing on that issue makes sense in that specific context, even though I'm pretty sure he knows the answer is likely "no."
I disagree. It is what it is.
I've probably deleted five re-writes of a response to this because it made me so angry. Anytime i see someone accusing someone else of "sealioning", that is an indicator of bad-faith participation on the part of the accuser to me.
So how do you disprove someone's mind-reading of your intentions to poison the well?
I don't think cfabbro would be wrong to be frustrated that he's been misinterpreted. While cfabbro has misinterpreted once himself, he copped to it and tried to get back into genuine discussion. Meanwhile, I don't think I've seen any pretense of polite give on Asimov's part (this is what I mean when I talk about his rigidity; another way to put it is unwillingness to find common ground). That probably led to a feeling of unaddressed frustration more than anything. It can be frustrating to read too.
Sealioning can happen, and I do think that Asimov has at some points misinterpreted what cfabbro was saying as they go back and forth throughout this thread about this ban. Maybe not willfully, but some crossed hairs seem to have happened.
On Sealioning, I think it can be very hard unless you're the victim to see this type of behavior happen (and I had to deal with a couple of very clever sealioning cases back in that life I pretend is behind me). The usual case is that this happens over several threads, over several weeks, so that searching a comment history to find it happening is nearly impossible. So I'm pretty reluctant to sign onto the idea that sealioning happened here, especially because I can see in later comments what Asimov is arguing for and how that relates to the questions he has been asking in this comment chain.
It does seem like one of those terms that gets tossed around as an attempt at a mic-drop. I had actually never heard it before making the jump to Tildes.
I've mostly seen it on toxic places like /r/negareddit and other far left social justice subreddits as an insult for anyone they disagree with.
If seeing someone use the word sealioning makes you this irrationally angry I’m not sure what I can do to help you. Maybe go to the beach and have a beer if you live close to one.
Now you're just being unnecessarily combative. I think you're the one who needs a break.
I’m being combative because “sealioning” makes someone else irrationally angry?
Your being combative because you are accusing someone and saying your evidence is of course person is doing thing, but refusing to state actual evidence for why it is obvious.
I don’t even know what you want. I gave an opinion about someone’s else’s behavior and I don’t have to justify why I feel that way to you or anyone else. I’m allowed to form my own opinions about how people act here. Who are you to ask me to justify my feelings?
I am not asking you to justify your feelings. I am simply responding to your question. You asked why people though you were being combative. I gave my opinion of why I thought people thought you were being combative. What I saw was that you called another poster disengenous.
The poster replied, asking how you could know this. Your response was:
This annoyed others because it seemed like you were doing the same thing you were accusing others of doing, where you would say something inflammatory with no evidence to back it up aside from
you can tellthat they are being disingenuous.What is the point of discussing anything with you if all you want to do is state your feelings and then refuse to justify them?
you're basically doing a mini version of what hypnotoad was doing; posting inflammatory remarks like
and then, when confronted, refusing to justify them.
that's what I mean when I say you're being rude and combative:
you're demanding that others accept your "feelings" (which is what you've decided to call your abusive comments) while refusing to even consider the feelings or needs of the person you're talking to.
I think that the way you are misrepresenting anti's point here to frame it in a way that suits your point rather than best represents your discussion partner's meaning is pretty close to the definition of bad faith.
your tone is combative, and your responses are targeting emotions and people rather than the argument you are responding to.
you're coming off very rude here; perhaps this could be an opportunity to reflect on your comments and consider why you might be getting the responses that you are.
MAJOR EDIT FOLLOWS:
to be fair, I know from experience that the kind of accusation I'm making is hard to respond to. for example, I've often been in the trap where someone calls me pedantic and I feel that I'm not. How am I supposed to respond to that when saying "I'm not being pedantic, I'm ..." sounds exactly like what a pedantic person would say?
so it might feel like the sort of trap that I've called you combative and rude and now you're in the position where if you say "I'm not being combative and rude!" you'll be saying exactly what a combative and rude person might say.
well, I'll help make the distinction more clear.
If your post is something like, "so I'm combative and rude because anti can't speak their mind clearly?" then that would be you falling into that exact trap. That's the behavior I'm trying to point out to you; the behavior of passing the burden of communication onto others when communication is a two way street. Your willingness to understand others is just as important as your ability to articulate yourself.
If you respond with something more along the lines of, "I don't think I was being combative and rude, but I can see how you might have thought that. I'm sorry for the misunderstanding, what I meant was ..." then I promise that nobody would think ill of you for that.
Someone said me using sealioning made them irrationally angry. I told whomever that was that if using one word is enough to get you foaming at the mouth you need to take a break and chill, preferably at the beach with a beer.
Now you and whomever that other person was have the nerve to call me combative?
Nah, the lot of you need a time out. The original user is entitled to their opinion, I’m entitled to mine, as are you. I’m not changing mine no matter how many high effort posts the rest of you choose to write.
I said what I said and I meant it.
You've repeated this a few times on this page, but it isn't true. I said your false accusation made me angry. It's your own judgment that that anger was irrational. That anger subsided relatively quickly - though that doesn't mean i no longer disapprove of assuming bad faith.
Disagreeing does not equal trolling. The discrepancies you're referring to can just as easily be attributed to the inbox flooding AA has been dealing with on this comment chain, let along any other posts he's made. He's made quality contributions here and elsewhere on ~.
Never said disagreeing equals trolling
I'm trying to make a point. You keep saying that Hypnotoad's posts either weren't intended to prompt, or did not prompt, productive discussion, but they did prompt that discussion. Given that outcome, and given that we can't read Hypnotoad's mind, it's a bit difficult to claim they weren't trying to prompt productive discussion.
I thought Hypnotoad was banned for showing bad faith, not merely for a lack of good faith. The lack of a positive is not the same as the presence of a negative.
It's not "100% clear" to me. Of course, I'm not privy to their Reddit history: I can only judge them on their behaviour here. (Would it be okay for me to ban someone on Reddit based on their behaviour on Tildes?)
I can't speak for @cfabbro, but I think his point seems to be more that the starting point for those debates was such that many users were made uncomfortable (which is obvious from how people reacted, including someone taking the rare step of making an anonymized attempt to ask what the best practice should be for addressing this behavior). There gets to be a point where regardless fo the in-fact productive discussion that some thread has caused, that you have to also wonder about the run-off impacts.
In this case, you had people who were speaking openly and plainly about wanting to avoid these types of threads, to the point that in some cases you had users saying "not another thread from this user" and feeling bad about putting it in those terms, and then being told that they're being rude. You had users (some appearing in this thread) saying that they planned on saying just once that this user appeared to be trolling, and held to that pledge.
In other words, this was behavior that was having run-off impacts of discouraging people from engaging in meaningful discussion. THAT is the problem that needed to be addressed.
Unfortunately, Hypnotoad's "true intention" isn't very irrelevant because (as established):
The combination of these behaviors is the problem. Any one of them? Pretty shrugable. But combined they form a picture of behavior that, intended or not, isn't something that makes for a healthy discussion environment.
I neither know nor care. What you do on Reddit in your own communities as a moderator is your own business. I would think more information to help guide a decision is better than less information. You would not knowingly blind yourself to potentially helpful information when trying to gauge someone's intent, would you?
The central question we should all be focused on here is this: how do we keep as high-quality a user experience as possible in the early stages of this community before we have the tools that help us keep it? Anything that gets us closer to that goal is fine by me, including banning people based on a conjunction of their posting history here and their user history as known by Deimos.
Now maybe it isn't 100% clear to you and me that this user was being malicious (I don't like using 100% as a probability anyway). What % certainty is acceptable before deciding it's probably better for the community for a user to be banned?
It had been said already but "do not prompt productive discussion" means a precise thing and it's not a statement of fact.
It means that the premises it laid out didn't help a productive discussion.
That a kinda productive discussion still happened is only a testament of how good, luckily, the tildes community has been in dealing with that situation.
Something that cannot be taken as a given.
And more than half the posts weren't constructive, basically at all. That wasn't a "discussion" that this site aims for, it was anger/offensive positing. Both of those posts could have been made and phrased better with a minimum of effort, and that's after the editing out the inflammatory parts.
E: a word
Well, maybe I should be banned, because I happily participated in that discussion. Not angrily, and not offensively: productively, I like to believe.
You're missing the point man; you engaged productively despite what he said, not because of it. Correlation != causation. He intentionally made an angry and aggressive post hoping people would respond equally angrily; just because we are adult enough not to doesn't excuse his behavior.
Yeah they were good ideas, just executed poorly and with no continued love once put up. Edit: The bigger problem in my view was the frequently changing starting points to contextless OPs. I think I saw a couple different threads where he started off saying one thing that was pretty controversial without much support, and then deleted it shortly after.
I am behind having a more deletionist and punishing approach than Reddit seems to, but being open and accountable is extremely important IMO.
I think the addition of the full site changelog will help in this area a lot - especially if it shows a ban reason or a snapshot of that account's state when banned. Of course, this will probably also lead to a lot of "I don't think this one deserved a ban" but that seems inevitable to some extent.
I remember seeing somewhere that the changelog might only be visible to trusted users - what's the plan with this?
By "changelog", you mean like a public log of all moderation-like actions that are taken?
There isn't really a specific plan yet, that sort of thing is a difficult topic. It's definitely nice from a transparency perspective, but there are also users that will watch it constantly and try to bicker about every decision that they don't fully agree with.
I'm not necessarily opposed to it, but I think it will be difficult to do in a way that doesn't result in every moderation action taking 10x as much work because they all need to be heavily justified and defended.
Yes, people will always complain about anything you do, but that doesn't make limiting user knowledge a viable alternative. If your choices are defensible (as they generally are), other users will make the defense for you and you won't have to "take 10x as much work" on every action. If they aren't defensible, then it's a good thing the information was public so it can be brought to your attention.
That seems to assume that all information used to make decisions will always be public, which isn't feasible.
If a user gets banned for sending harassing messages to someone, I'm not going to make private message conversations public as part of the ban. If a user creates 5 accounts and uses them to manipulate the site mechanics, I'm not going to publish information like IP addresses to prove that they're all the same user. Even if I did make things like that public, how could you know that I'm not just making it up?
At some point, users have to trust that decisions are being made correctly.
I have zero mod experience, but from a user POV, one thing I feel is lacking in most Reddit subs is some transparency. Sometimes it feels like a sub is much more heavily censored than the public image lets on.
One great example I have found that is transparent is r/AskALiberal. I am sure this takes extra effort, but I really respect the transparency. Here is an example of their monthly report. The stats are aggregated, no specific users who were banned are mentioned. Maybe something along these lines?
Transparency is an issue, and plenty of Reddit mods have abused the behind-closed-doors culture of moderation. But that culture exists for a reason, constant scrutiny does not always lead to improvement, because the people scrutinizing might not be looking for said improvement, but rather to abuse the system to swing public opinion in a way they desire.
The decision of transparency vs. discretion is a difficult one because you're weighing multiple, possible avenues of abuse against each other and trying to determine which will be more detrimental to the community.
I think another direction, instead of having a full log with info, would be to at least show that a user was banned and why they were banned on their page. This can be as descriptive or vague as is necessary for the offense, but would give the community the information they want.
You could also publish a monthly “This is how many of these things we’ve done” with a list of all admin actions (delete, ban, unban, etc)
We could even do a page of shame where every user that was banned is listed with a reason.
Don't know if anyone would want that, though.
But there is no 'at some point'. It's only at the beginning where there is time to inform the community at all, not to mention revealing any details.
Later there will be other moderators, admins, and with time people tend to make mistakes or even change.
The suggestion is to keep a public record in good faith of as many details of mod actions as viable.
Also, nothing stands against tiering read access based on the trust levels.
/r/conspiracy is a large controversial community, and one of the earliest adopters of a public moderation log - with a community that is primed to look for abuse of power probably moreso than any other community on reddit. It might be good to ask the moderators if they have had the sort of issues you're predicting.
I don't think other users care. The only people that will participate in a community that discusses mod actions are the people with a direct reason to be in them - the people doing the mod action and the people receiving the mod action.
Unless you give a high-incentive to other users to be there they won't bother because it's not fun, it's not interesting, it's highly negative, it's not something hardly anyone wants to do with their day to day.
So it'll just be a place where people receiving mod actions (typically deserving of them) back one another up in attacking the mods for their mod actions. So in order to reduce this the mods will have to write enormous walls of text detailing and justifying every single action ever.
This will be exhausting.
I’m glad you made this post. It shows others what behavior is unacceptable. That said, I don’t think you should provide info about all bad users and bans. It’ll end up with all your decisions being questioned. People getting riled up. A lot of people will naively think that users should get the benefit of doubt. You’ll end up defending yourself instead of improving the site.
Bad actors know what they are doing and do it intentionally.
Democracy doesn’t work on Internet forums. Taking into account user preference is fine, but the community shouldn’t get to vote on who gets banned. I prefer a totalitarian dictatorship where trolls are swiftly executed.
Keep up the good work. Without swift and permanent bans, this site could devolve quickly. You have a tough job ahead of you and I’m greatful for what you’re doing and also that it’s not my job.
A public ban log may be more feasible and also more functional: other then banning for technical reasons (spambots etc.) ban reasons can allow other users to see what kinds of behaviors/posts will or will not incur moderator or even admin action.
Simple moderation actions like removing comments or removing spam threads should not need to be explained. It would only make the log harder to read and add more overhead for moderators.
Yeah, probably not the best word for it but it's what I remember reading in other threads.
Moderation is a tricky problem, and I doubt ~ will have the resources to hire staff to look after quality like some sites, but I also wouldn't want you to be forced to do that job inbetween everything else, so surely community moderators from the trust system will have to play a role (this also makes having a log more important IMO as these moderators otherwise have few people to answer to).
That doesn't fix the issue of bickering about ban reasons - in fact, it makes the moderator job even less appealing, but I don't really see another way.
On the other hand, I don't really think bickering will be that big of a deal. Most people don't care about random other users' punishments. There are third-party tools to monitor admin actions on HN in the name of transparency and they don't seem to get much attention.
Finally, if there are to be community mods, would they have access to the private ban evidence you mentioned? Or would they only be able to suggest bans to you for you to execute? At this point I'm just making more issues, so I think I'll stop here haha.
That's exactly the problem—most users really don't care, but a tiny group cares a lot. So you end up having to do all the extra work related to publication and justification for the benefit of a very small group of people who want to dig through everything and yell "gotcha!" every time they think they find anything slightly off. It's a lot of work that you're doing almost entirely for the benefit of people that are going to try to use it to discredit you, and it gets exhausting.
It depends, there's certain information that I don't think any non-admins should ever get access to, like users' private messages. Cases like that will probably never be feasible to let users handle, or it would need to be strictly regulated somehow.
I understand the aversion to having checks on use of power. It's why the police hate internal affairs, why some police hate being recorded, and still there are cops who make mistakes and there are people who get very very angry at some of those cops getting mere slaps on the wrist (if they find out about it at all).
When I was an admin for a minecraft server, there was a group that i considered toxic that would try to stir up drama alleging misconduct, and it got really emotionally draining. In retrospect now years later, some of their criticisms (not all) were spot-on - and in fact the mistakes that I and others on my team made which these rabblerousers were screaming about ended up leading to much worse problems for our server.
I know that your mention of trusting users in the tildes docs was mostly about users trusting each other, and it strikes a dissonant chord to hear the dismissal of that portion of your userbase which might be hypersensitive to error, assuming bad intention or a 0% accuracy/utility ratio.
I know that the concern about users bickering about whats going on in a public moderation log is real, and it's also part of the reason why a public moderation log would be desired - to keep a check on potential moderator misconduct or mistakes.
That said, /u/publicmodlogs is being used on 300+ subreddits on reddit right now. Do you have some instances of this sort of phenomenon happening and being problematic enough that it outweighs the benefits?
The subreddit I moderate has (or at least had) a reputation of being troll-free, which was never the case, but at least we did a good job of deleting DBAD comments and banning troublemakers. If we had had a banned user log, I think people would have seen it, seen the number of people banned, concluded (inaccurately, in my view) that we were heavy-handed with the ban hammer, and felt less comfortable speaking their mind. Instead, I think we ended up with the opposite effect, where people felt that our community was reasonable enough that they could speak their mind even when others strongly disagreed.
I ruefully admit that Hypnotoad's post titles made me cringe and back away. I had been wondering if there was a way to not see just their posts, and this thread popped up!
I support this ban. Thank you for high standards, @Deimos!
While I don't disagree with this particular users ban, as we open up to more contentious discussions there is going to be a lot of heated debate. I urge those making punishment decisions to keep in mind that disagreement is not trolling or bad-faith behavior, and that the community should also not see it as such. Too often I have seen those with opposing views call the other a troll for having the "wrong" view. And if that mentality takes over on this site, then good discourse will be unable to exist here.
I think this got fairly hashed out on the thread @Lovich posted. It wasn't what he was saying that made him deserve the ban, it was his behavior in making and editing the posts
I know, I'm bringing up a point for us to keep in mind going forward. I didn't mean to insinuate that that is what happened here.
Can we say for certain that the edits were made in bad faith as some means to escape criticism rather than recognizing expressing his opinions was triggering people and deciding to remove it for altruistic purposes? Is it possible, at least in theory, that this was a misunderstanding? I'm not saying it was, but there does seem to be some mind-reading that is going on.
I'll cede that I cannot prove bad faith. Circumstantial evidence (other topics that appear to have a primary goal of shit-stirring) is what lead me to that belief.
I would have preferred a temporary ban, but the tooling may not be in place. Being able to see the edit history seems to be a necessary feature now as that would allow users to see what the poster is doing and avoid the obvious bait
I'm pretty opposed to displaying edit history, and I think it's very unlikely that I'll add it. Users should be in control of their own content and free to edit/delete it if they want or need to. It's an attempt to solve one specific type of issue that causes other issues instead.
There is a trade off there. In that case do you have an idea about how to tackle this explicitly sort of behavior? The one with posting something with inflammatory language, wait for a few posts to get activity, and then editing it to something innocuous? It leads to the comment chains being fairly divisive since that's what the root posts started as
If it happens often enough to be significant, people will notice it, the same as happened here. I really don't think it's a common or significant enough occurrence that we need to hurt everyone's ability to edit their posts solely to try to prevent it. There are very few sites that you can view an edit history on, and all the others generally get by just fine without it.
Right- too many people make huge mistakes when writing posts - especially on computer/programming related boards it is a very common occurrence that someone will post an IPv4/access token/plaintext password and quickly edits to fix it. An edit history completely breaks this.
If it were up to me, here’s how I’d do it:
User edits: always viewable to protect against edit trolling
User deletions: original comment accessible to other users, but not the username of the person who said it. we’ve all regretted saying things before and decided better of it after hitting send.
Admin/mod deletions: not visible to other users. there should be some ability to strike awful stuff from the record.
Edit history would be absolutely useful. Thanks for that idea. And while I may have handled it differently (warning/mute/temp ban/etc) I don't disagree that something had to be done. It's up to Deimos to decide how to run his community ultimately. We might simply suggest less harsh methods or an edit history ability to see why he chose to go with the reason he did.
Normally I’d agree with you, but context is important and the user in question was being intentionally divisive.
And while you might argue a different word than divisive is appropriate, and that the word you use to describe it might be desirable, if disagree and as a result I’m pretty alright with the ban.
I saw enough of the user’s posts to be alright with this specific ban.
I was speaking hypothetically, not arguing this ban in particular.
Perhaps it's not "trollish" to have the wrong view, but I think that there are certain things that most of us can agree are bad opinions and we can have a place that does not tolerate them. I think the issue here is that more and more of us are adding "homophobia" to the list of opinions that are intolerable.
If we're in a place that doesn't accept people who are homophobic, then I am 100% okay with that because that's the kind of place I want to be in.
I disagree. It's a slippery slope when you start not allowing opposing opinions to even have a voice to when you have an echo chamber of opinions and only those. Who decides what opinions are "ok" and which aren't? Allowing everyone a respectable voice is the best solution to quality discourse if that is indeed your goal.
Some things aren't respectable. Let's consider this:
Person A has the opinion that killing and eating babies is okay. He starts a discussion: "Killing and Eating Babies should be allowed."
Is this something that we can respectfully talk about? Is this actually worthy of any kind of discussion?
Note: I'm not comparing being homphobic to being a cannibal; I'm saying that there is a baseline of things that we can generally agree aren't things that we really need to discuss. More and more people are moving towards any kind of homophobia being something that is not worth discussing.
Edit: I hate appeals to a slippery slope. I'm not having a formal debate here. Some things are bad; we can agree that some things are bad. The people who make these agreements are the top users, or in this case the admin. This isn't a slippery slope.
Yes and yes.
Anything should be open for discussion. It's not like we're actually sharing recipes for "bébé au gratin". If we want to discuss the morality and ethics of eating babies, we should be able to do that. That topic is a ripe field of philosophical discussion: when does a human being become a person entitled to the rights and privileges of personhood; the history of exposing unwanted babies; not wasting resources; and so on.
Just because you find a topic personally repulsive, that's no reason to shut down discussion about that topic for everyone else.
And what of hate speech? E.g. "I think black people are subhuman and don't deserve the same rights as white people"
That is classified as discriminatory hate speech in Canada and for good reason. Should that be "open for discussion" on the site?
I disagree and so too, I suspect, does @deimos given his specific mention that "Tildes will not be a victim of paradox of tolerance" in his announcement blog post. Some ideas do not deserve to be tolerated nor should debate on them be humoured or facilitated.
https://blog.tildes.net/announcing-tildes#limited-tolerance-especially-for-assholes
That's a lot less hypothetical and philosophical than "Killing and Eating Babies should be allowed." It's a direct statement of hatred and prejudice. I would have less tolerance for that sort of statement.
Okay. I find guns personally repulsive. I hate 'em and hate the culture that seems to come with them. I recommend we shut down all discussions in favour of people carrying guns. Agreed?
That's not the way to run a website for high quality discussion. You shouldn't get to decide what topics will and will not be discussed on the basis of personal likes and dislikes.
Man, I think you got your work cut out for you here because
Someone legitimately said that and they seem to believe it.
Edit: Like... I tried to pick something so preposterous that you could not engage on it in good faith and not be completely reprehensible, and yet someone actually said that it's something that should be discussable in good faith on this site. I think I'm going to take a break from the internet for a while.
I didn't say I would advocate for eating babies! I merely said the topic should be open for discussion. It's a hypothetical. It's also a way of exploring a few philosophical ideas.
For example, I have read a legitimate and sincere treatise from a Professor of Philosophy, saying that killing new-born babies is not ethically wrong (look up Peter Singer). So... why is that? What makes a person a person? What qualities constitute personhood? Does a dog or a cow have more right to life than a human baby? There's a lot of very rich material there to discuss about ethics.
What about societies that abandoned unwanted babies on hillsides? This has been standard practice in many societies throughout human history. Chinese people used to abandon girl babies, Romans used to abandon disabled babies. What was in the cultures of those societies that permitted that behaviour? There's an opportunity for some historical discussion.
What about abortion? If it's not okay to kill babies after they're born, is it okay to kill babies before they're born? When? How developed do they need to be? More philosophy.
I don't think you realise just what an interesting philosophical topic you came up with!
My wider point is that many supposedly repulsive topics have this same potential to open up high quality philosophical discussion if they're approached calmly and without a knee-jerk emotional response equivalent to "that's yukky!"
That isn't very conducive to discussion but what about the supreme court ruling about the baker? His opinion wouldn't be allowed under your rules nor would those who supported him. It is a slippery slope and where does it end? We shouldn't censor opinions just because we don't like them.
It isn't a slippery slope.
Some things are okay, and some things are just not okay. The slope ends at being prejudiced against people. One of the main things outlined to me when I joined Tildes was to circumvent the paradox of tolerance.
I'm not super familiar with the baker thing you're referencing (I just looked it up), but his opinions is objectively wrong, even within the confines of his own belief (ie - not doing something for a gay couple because he claims to be Christian):
He's not being a Christian; he is being a bigot and using his misunderstanding of what he claims are his beliefs to be awful to someone.
These things shouldn't be tolerated.
Do you think we should allow Nazi propaganda here?
Do you think we should allow my previous example (baby cannibalism)?
What possible utility do we get from discussions like this?
Propaganda is different from discussion. What if I told you I took a class on Issues in World History or whatever it was called and was able to defend why some of the soldiers did what they did. Not the actions themselves but how they were all roped into doing these things through blackmail, fear for their families, not wanting to stick out from the crowd (if their friends/squad mates were doing it), etc.
I certainly am not a Nazi but that is an argument that opposes all views you or I hold. If you want to host open and candid discussions the need to have all sides present in a non-trolling, non-propaganda, purely respectful format is a necessity. Now if we ban certain conversations altogether I understand that. But banning any one particular side simply because you disagree with it is wrong and IS a slippery slope. If not, allow the opinions to speak for themselves and get destroyed in the discussion.
Where does the line get drawn? and I don't see how he was being a bigot. The baker said he won't make a custom cake but would be happy to sell them a generic one or point them to another bakery that will serve them a custom one. He didn't refuse to serve them period.
The baker being objectively wrong doesn't matter. Being against homosexuals whether it's mention in the bible or not is very common among the religious. The baker has every right to his beliefs as all of us here do to ours.
You can believe what you believe, but if some has beliefs include things like failing to serve people based on gender, religion, sexual preference, or anything else intrinsic about that person, then everyone else has the right to think poorly of that person, and we here at ~ are certainly not under any onus to be a place to spread thoughts of that kind.
Any belief that limits someone's rights or privileges based on intrinsic qualities or abilities of that person is something that we should stop (except in cases where a privilege is naturally based on an ability that is necessary - for example, it's not bad that blind people cannot have the privilege of driving).
It's a pretty simple line. It's not on a slope. It's not really slippery at all. We're all people, we all have rights and privileges that we enjoy, and being gay or straight or brown or short or female or deaf or chinese or anything else should not have an effect on those rights and privileges. Included in those should be the right to spend our lives with whomever we want to spend our lives with, buy things from shops and not be turned away, or to generally just live as a normal person.
I never said we can't. My only point is he has the right to his beliefs. What he did was not illegal. Is he a bit of a dick? Sure but he's entitled to what he believes.
A single baker not wanting to bake a custom cake isn't taking away any rights. Sure they can't get a custom one there but they were pointed in the direction to where they can. Being denied in one place doesn't mean you'll be denied everywhere.
That's not really your only point though. This whole chain started because I'm saying that this website
doesn't have toshouldn't allow his beliefs to exist here. To be clear, I am not advocating for him to not be allowed to have his beliefs. I just am disinterested in reading about them here.I specifically included the word privileges in there.
You should never be denied service somewhere based on who you are.
So basically you want this to be a website with only like minded people? You have to accept that some people have different beliefs and they have every right to post on this site so long as they are civil.
Why do you pick and choose little bits of things to reply to?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Principle_of_charity
Edit: I hit save too fast. here's the rest of my response.
No, there are lots of different, respectable opinions. However, there are lots of opinions that I don't think are respectable or worthwhile, and I don't think that we need to tolerate them. Homophobia is one of those things that we need not suffer to have around.
But... they don't. They have every right to post on this site until they get banned. There's nothing in this site that says that civility is the only thing that is required to post here.
[Second reply in response to your edit]
I'm not talking about the people who'll randomly go into a thread and say something offensive. I'm talking about those who post in a topic that is related to the views. Hypnotoad's thread about the Gay Marriage for example. If someone were to post that they don't believe in it because so and so you think they should be instantly banned?
That's...my point? If they keep civil and not lash out they should not be banned.
I'm not? You said it yourself.
You said this website shouldn't allow people with that Baker's beliefs to exist here.
Gonna have to agree here. I can already see the slippery slope carrying on as now we don't want to allow the belief that they shouldn't be forced to use their art for things they don't agree with to be here. This is precisely how echo chambers get started and we shouldn't allow that type of thing here.
For reference - the baker's cakes are considered art aka expression, and he cannot be forced to use it in ways he doesn't agree with. But he didn't refuse them all services as he offered to serve them a different cake or gave them numbers of different bakers. He was very accommodating.
I saw this coming but I do hope it doesn't deter other users from speaking out when they have opposing views from the majority. A lot of topics Toad posted if presented tactfully would probably still have sparked an emotional response from most of the userbase here. That's the nature of certain subjects.
What I want to know is where is the line drawn between being in the minority and trying to cause trouble. If someone were to post again "I do not believe in homosexual marriage because so and so" I have no doubt that things will get emotionally heated again no matter how civil it's presented. The moment one side starts boiling up both will and it leads to a full on flame war.
I think a very good example of the distinction is the user who made a post asking if there were any more Trump supporters on the site. There were some pretty controversial views thrown around in that thread, but the OP was willing to engage in the discussion, explain their reasoning, and respond to criticism in a civil way. It wasn't perfect, but it was pretty decent for the topic being discussed.
Now imagine someone posting "I believe anti-Trump people are whiny librulz: change my mind" and then vanishing. It's not a difficult line to draw, I think.
If it looks like a duck and quacks like a duck, it's probably a duck. Repeatedly and silently editing comments/posts to remove inflammatory sentiments after those comments have had time to spread FUD is what I consider a clear sign of trolling.
Emphasis is mine. A lot of things in this world would have played out differently if they'd been presented to their targeted audiences more tactfully. There are going to be plenty of people who bring up controversial and inflammatory topics on Tildes who won't be banned because they had the presence of mind to present those views in a measured and well thought out way.
At some level, of course you're right that some topics are, by their nature, likely to spawn controversy. The abortion discussion we had not too long ago showed two things: first, that some topics will get a huge amount of attention simply by being at a controversial crossroads. But second, that if the topic is entered into genuinely and tactfully, there is meaningful opportunity for discussion even with people who you very much do not agree with.
That’s the only thing that caused the ban, I believe, and it’s an important message to push: Tact matters on this site.
How do we enforce this? What should the ban description be? "Failed to employ sufficient tact" :P
Tact in presenting a controversial idea is just as important (though tact was not the main problem here) as discussing it civilly. As @Gatonegro also stated, there are good ways and bad ways of presenting an idea and if a person doesn't know how to do that they probably don't need to be participating in the discussion at this time.
No matter how innocent and naive a person is, there are certain norms that the tildes community was formed around that we hope to uphold. And unfortunately that will come at the price of certain types of people not being able to participate.
Some friends and I were playing on some minecraft servers a long time ago where some people would purposefully ruin the fun for everyone on the server by 'gaming' the rules that were set in place. Most people were open to allow a temporary ban and see if those people would learn their lesson and play along once their ban resolved.
Once they were able to get back on, they would play according to the rules for a little while until they eventually fell into the same behaviour that got them banned. This happened in a cyclic manner that resulted in multiple temporary bans and took up a lot of the admin's time.
My friends and I had many discussions about this, and we came to the conclusion that it would be best to simply hard-ban any bad actors. It also sets a precedent for anyone else that might do the same things. If you don't want to play by the rules, then don't be surprised when no one wants to play with you.
Why not escalating punishments for repeated infractions?
There could be fewer steps:
The point is that this process doesn't go on forever, continually wasting the admins'/moderators' time: there is a defined end-point. The miscreant and the moderator both know how it goes and where it ends. The miscreant is given many opportunities to redeem themself and change their behaviour but, if they don't, they end up banned.
It all depends on how much time those with the power to ban want to spend on the troublesome user. As someone who's administrated a number of different Minecraft servers, IRC channels, and moderated a few high-profile subreddits, I don't think I've ever seen a user get temp banned for trolling and not become a problem later on (although I'm sure confirmation bias plays a role in this).
In my experience on reddit if you give someone a temp ban there's a good chance that as soon as the ban has expired they will come back and wallpaper the comments sections of various posts with even more nonsense. They tend to double down on the behaviour that got them banned, it will be different here at the minute because invites are required.
... which is when you perma-ban them.
Indeed, it just feels like an extra step, when you get jaded after years of doing it you sort of forget the very few who reform their ways and just assume everyone is going to be an arse.
I have tried very hard not to get jaded, even after being a moderator for nearly 6 years.
In my experience, temporary bans might not be ideal BUT being forgiving when there are ban appeals works well 98% of the time.
I don't do ban appeals: because I tend to give people repeated warnings and multiple chances to redeem themselves before I ban them, it's not very credible for them to claim they'll change after I've banned them when they didn't change all the previous times I asked them to change. (from here)
I'm forgiving and lenient before I ban someone, but not after.
I speak mainly from my experience on a public minecraft server. We've had a few people who promise to be good and then go on to break the rules months later - but those are usually met with longer bans, and like i said, 98% of the time those who make appeals never break the rules again.
In my experience this is not always a given but it did occur frequently enough that I extended temp bans to permanent bans if the user showed no signs of repentance or was outright hostile in modmail.
I moderate a subreddit for in-depth discussion. This approach I've described is one we use with problematic posters. It has worked sometimes: we have helped some people improve their posting and become productive contributors to the subreddit. It has not worked other times. But this approach is something we're committed to. We'd rather give people a few chances to redeem themselves than ban them irrevocably as our first step.
EDIT: I just noticed your username. If you're on Reddit, check out /r/DaystromInstitute, the subreddit I'm talking about. I think you'll be interested. ;)
I'm familiar the the subreddit. You guys run a good board over there.
Thank you!
I've spent some good time at that sub, but as a lurker.
I used to mod on reddit and we used this approach, in theory. The problem was that the first two steps were used by trolls to cry about oppression and censorship ('they gave me a warning?? it was a joke! you fascists!') and as a justification for even more bad behaviour. Then, when they inevitably got banned very shortly after, other trolls in their troll group (who maybe weren't as bad before but were watching from the sidelines) took this as a sign that we actually wanted to ban that user all along because we were biased against them. Didn't matter if you showed them exactly what you banned them for, they would downplay it and complain that the mods were trying to remove users who disagreed with us. It was all bullshit, but it took over the community for a good while, eroded other users' trust in the mods, and was a really hard time for the mod team (which consistent of very friendly and lenient people who were not used to being perceived as fascists all of a sudden).
So honestly, I would go for either a warning and then a permaban, or just a permaban, based on the situation. But I do agree that it all needs to be out in the open.
Actually, we take the opposite approach. We keep the official warnings private. The friendly reminders are public, because they're also learning opportunities for other people to understand what behaviour is not acceptable. However, once we step up to issuing official warnings, we do that in private. We think that there's no need to embarrass the problematic user (Who is not always a troll! We've had some troubled users who try hard, but just can't grasp how our subreddit works.), nor to give them a public platform to start abusing the moderation or moderators of our subreddit if they're so inclined.
Of course, our subreddit doesn't really attract trolls, as such. It's mostly just people who don't understand that when we say we want in-depth discussion, we actually mean we want in-depth discussion and we won't compromise on that.
Sorry, I meant the info on bans and why they happened - I agree that the warnings should be private!
Yeah, I think our problem was in part that we had a dedicated troll group who were more interested in being contrary than actually participating in the subreddit. They were rude to new users, kept posting 'announcements' that were supposedly shedding a light on how we mods were hypocritical and targeting them in particular (because we were actually being too lenient and subsequently inconsistent with the rules), and just straight up harassed mods. I don't mod there anymore, but it was a very good lesson on why it's better to be strict than lenient when modding an online community.
Really? Wow. I would not do that! Imagine making an announcement post that says "User abc got banned today for continually posting memes in our subreddit despite repeated requests not to." Fuck no. That's the "public platform to start abusing the moderation or moderators of our subreddit" that we want to avoid. Also, we want the subreddit to focus on the topic of the subreddit, rather than get into continual meta discussions about how to run the subreddit. Moderation happens behind the scenes so that people in the subreddit can get on with discussing Star Trek.
Actually, you know what. I agree with you 100%. I was still in the 'have to please the user at all costs' mentality that mod group was fostering.
However, how do you solve the gossips flying problem then? We'd have users opening new meta threads, posting in unrelated but popular threads, and once those were done, opening threads on other subreddits and then sending PMs with links to active users on the main sub. I personally believe that a swift enough ban would help with this a lot, but I can't really know.
People can't gossip about what they don't see. We post lots of friendly reminders throughout the subreddit, so that's seen as business as usual. Nothing threatening, no big deal: just the friendly local mods doing the rounds, keeping their eye on things. But when we need to escalate matters to an official warning, we send the miscreant a PM. Noone knows who is being dealt with on the more serious level, so there's nothing to gossip about. Even though someone is in trouble with us, we won't publicly shame them. It also stops other people sticking their noses in.
The server we played on did have those steps as well as the ability to submit an appeal for a ban as well.
The only people that went through that process continued to do so repeatedly.
How can someone go through the process repeatedly if the end result is a permanent ban? They reach the end and they're out. For good.
We don't allow appeals in my subreddit. If we've already given you repeated warnings and multiple chances to redeem yourself, it's not very credible for you to claim you'll change now when you didn't change all the previous times we asked you to change.
I just want to say that I'm a huge fan of informal warnings, formal warnings, and temporary bans of escalating lengths before getting to a permaban for most generic bad behaviors (with some rare, obvious exceptions- breaking the law, for starters). The more points for feedback, the higher chance a user will reform. I proved that empirically at one point a few years back, but it's also just something that should be intuitively true. When you're dealing with a population in the millions, chances are pretty dang good that many of those millions don't even know that what they are doing could be considered a generic bad behavior.
The problem for Tildes is that sort of set up requires moderators, and there aren't any yet. So while I am SUPER supportive of a system exactly in line with how you describe it, it's hard to see it implemented before there is some system worked out for moderators.
Let's put this in context: we've got 1 admin/mod and about 3,000 users. Lots of subreddits operate quite happily with that ratio. I myself run a subreddit of about that many subscribers and, while I have two other moderators, I'm the experienced one and I carry most of the moderation load myself (I also spend a lot of my "moderation" time in that subreddit teaching the other two mods or answering their questions).
This sole-admin model definitely will not scale up, but I think it's workable for now.
Of course, I don't know how much time Deimos spends writing code for this site every day, and how much paid employment he might be committed to over a week.
Although I get your point, there really has to be an expectation of self moderation, whether it is explicit or not. In your example what happens is out of 3000 or so of the users only a small minority run into issues with self moderating their posts and that ends up making it workable for you. If even half of the 3000 users decided to see how far they could push the envelope in what was acceptable and what is not, I don't think it would be workable for you.
This is especially relevant on tildes. For a constructive discussion to take place here, people have to self moderate a lot more than they would elsewhere and that is ok. The more people self moderate the easier it will be to maintain an atmosphere of mutual respect in spite of differing opinions. If an individual is trying to be a part of this community, they need to come into it reminding themselves that they are the first line of moderation on this site. Most users should be trying to stay near the middle in terms of how they act (not necessarily how they think) instead of searching for how far they can go before they get reprimanded.
Absolutely true. However, if that were to happen, I would recruit more moderators - just like every subreddit does as its traffic (and therefore trouble) grows. This is one reason I have two moderators-in-training on that subreddit: so they can take on more of the duties as the workload increases.
I have learned through long experience that not everyone is capable of self-moderation. In some cases, it's because they don't understand the rules or culture. In some cases, it's because they don't understand how their behaviour is against the rules or culture.
The most notable example for me was an autistic person who just didn't understand why his perfectly valid questions were getting downvoted and even attacked in a history-themed subreddit. It took me weeks of patient explaining to convey the idea that including specific years in his questions ("What was life like for a serf in 1324AD?") was putting off the historians who were unwilling to narrow down their answers to that degree of specificity. He was simply incapable of grasping the idea of asking about "the 14th century". He had to include a specific year in his questions. He was totally incapable of self-moderation in that context. I basically had to give him instructions on how to post questions that people would accept. He later turned up in another subreddit I moderate, and proceeded to alienate those people as well. However, he was never posting in bad faith. He simply didn't get the cultures of those subreddits, and needed to have things explained to him in very precise detail. Overall, I spent months helping that young man. As a result of my help, he's still posting his historical questions years later (although we did sadly have to finally ban him from the other subreddit). Meanwhile, all the users in those subreddits were attacking him as a troll.
It's cases like this that make me think twice when I see someone being attacked as a troll or as posting in bad faith. Is the person really posting in bad faith, or are they simply failing to get the culture of the forum they're trying to participate in?
Very well stated and a great example.
There is so much potential in creating a welcoming, accepting, patient community and a lot of that comes from how the 99% behave themselves. That's why rules are there as guide not a limit so that those who are able to read and understand the rules won't take up the time that could be devoted to those who are not able to do that for whatever reason. Mod's are a great resource because they can usually see a more complete picture and act with discretion in those cases.
At the same time if you know the person is acting in bad faith, they're just inside the boundary of the rules but it's causing issues for others, I don't feel any need to extend compassion or leniency for those types of people even though they are still "technically" still within the rules.
We're not that naive! This multi-step process is only for people who we think can be redeemed. Obvious trolls get banned very quickly - sometimes on our first interaction with them, sometimes our second. We like to give people the benefit of the doubt where we can, but the welfare of the tens of thousands of other people in the subreddit is more important than letting any one troll run rampant.
People who "game the rules" (to use minecraft example) will use the ban rules as a template for how hard to push the envelope of their troll behavior. This just drags out the trolling behavior.
User interaction with ~ should be like a third date with the hottest person you've ever met: the positive feeling they like you and want to hear what you have to say combined with the strong motivation not to say something stupid and screw up a really good thing!
I like your analogy, but I love your username.
I agree with the ban. Better to set a harsh example early, than try to stem the tide of shitposts later.
I have been having some concerns over tildes on how to control trollish behaviour. There have been 3 bans now, and we are only at 3000 members. I think as the site grows, you won't have time to monitor every thread, or ban all the trolls. I've read a lot on the trust system, and I think it's a great idea, but it is just that right now - an idea. I would guess that it'll be at least a year until a version of that is fleshed out and put to use. What until then?
I don't know how well this will be received, but maybe consider closing the reddit invite threads for the moment? Many users that do not read the docs and behave poorly seem to be from the mass invite reddit threads. They can't be blamed entirely, because they cannot know what tildes is like without going on it. However, many people come here seeking a reddit replacement and are disappointed that tildes is not that. Perhaps just rely on word of mouth from users here, and open the mass threads after you make tildes open to public viewing. That way people can gain a sense of what tildes is before deciding to ask for an invite.
It's so easy on the internet for any of us to forget that we're talking to real people online, who have their own lives, their own problems, etc.
I try my best to remember this.
Example, I remember that I was passionately debating something with someone in a computer subreddit, and they eventually made a mistake due to being tired. Rather than pounce on the mistake, I offered to suspend the debate until they got some sleep.
The internet would be a nicer place if we all tried to keep in mind that these aren't just words on a screen - They come from flawed, feeling, and sometimes tired humans, and we should try to be civil with our fellow man.
Even more than the threshold for civility, the issue feels more like "as long as I am within the rules what I did was ok". As much as pushing the envelope is fun, it is also destructive and harmful for others.
I checked out his post history and, frankly, a lot of it seemed like very juvenile arguments with choppy evidence and false logic. Sometimes there are people like this in communities, and that's okay, it isn't a bannable offense. But what tipped it off to me was his subversive behavior. He edited posts to be blank so that nobody could debate or argue with him and he almost never commented in his own threads. He seemed to be treating this site like a soapbox for him to spout his thinly veiled opinions without receiving or giving any feedback. He seemed to be a user who was not going to produce good content for the site or inspire good discussion.
When a site is huge, trolls like this are easily annoyed because they fall between the cracks. Tildes is not large, and one troublemaker here could spoil the attitude of the site and users alike. I think it's important to reinforce the fact that this site was created for the discussion of many things. It was not created for people to shout their knowingly flamey opinions with impunity. I think it was necessary
Is it possible the edits were made for other reasons than avoiding criticism? Why would that be the first assumption we should make about his intentions with the edits? It might be true, but I can think of at least a couple of other possible motivations: might have realized he was angering people and didn't want to anger more, might have realized that expressing his own opinions was distracting from debate.
What is more likely, I can't say - and it may be that this person was a legitimate troll and not just someone with strong opinions and a bit oblivious to how people might respond to his phrasing. I haven't really looked in-depth at his posts... but i see a lot of people assuming his intentions for his edits, which sets off a red flag for me of confirmation bias.
You forget that Deimos said that he also knew this guy's Reddit account - because the guy revealed it - And he based his ban decision off of the conduct not just here, but on Reddit as well.
I thought he specified elsewhere that the ban was prior to looking at his reddit account, since someone said that it was disconcerting to have bans issued for content off-site...
edit: I mean, I know I've said things elsewhere in the past on the internet that potentially would violate the rules here. Should that in conjunction with any borderline conduct on tildes be enough to ban me?
I think I'll have to include myself in this group.
I had noticed Hypnotoad's posts. The one that really brought them to my attention was the one where they asked people to share accomplishments they're proud of - but Hypnotoad wouldn't share their own achievements. Something felt a bit "off" about that, but people disagreed with me and I let it go. Then I saw their post about homosexual marriage. I didn't see their original stance against homosexual marriage, so I assumed they were playing agent provocateur again. I assumed they were just someone who was posting questions to generate activity, as their contribution to this website.
Even now, I'm not quite sure what Hypnotoad did that was ban-worthy. I'm not sure that being stubborn is a ban-worthy offence. If it is, you might as well ban me now: I'm a middle-aged man who's very set in my ways. ;) Nor is posting questions without participating necessarily a ban-worthy offence.
Then again, the moderation policy we've deliberately adopted in the subreddit I've spent most of my time moderating is educational rather than punitive. We would take (and have taken!) a user like Hypnotoad under our wing and try to teach them to be a better participant. This has worked sometimes, and has not worked other times. But, even if it fails, it's part of the culture of that subreddit's moderation team, and it's something I support.
But this is your website, not mine. You run it your way.
Hypnotoad was posting inflammatory and insulting sentences along with his non inflammatory paragraph. He kept editing the inflammatory sentences out after he had gotten a few responses which, of course, we're responding to the inflammatory sentence. Whether or not this was on purpose, he was called out in his posts about this multiple times but continued to do so
Just out of curiosity, if someone is being called out for posting something inflammatory, would you rather them keep it up to inflame others, or take it down?
False dichotomy. You can edit to remove them, acknowledge you did so and admit your mistakes, which not only did Hypnotoad not do, but then he doubled down on the inflammatory rhetoric while still remaining absolutely silent in the comments sections criticising him for it.
The difference between his and your behavior is precisely why I gave you the benefit of the doubt when so many others accused you of acting in bad faith. You showed a genuine willingness to engage and were willing to defend what you believed in... and continue to do so. Hypnotoad did not.
p.s. I may disagree with most of your stances but I still respect the hell out of you for being the seemingly lone dissenting voice about US politics on the site and managing to do so while remaining civil.
I agree. If someone stays civil, I'll debate just about anything with them. As long as it's truly a debate, and both sides are open to evolving their opinions, that is.
Hmm. This has me wondering, if I had expressed my opinions in response to questions, and then stopped responding to the angry replies like i was tempted to, would that have increased my chances for a ban?
I'm not saying hypnotoad was not acting in bad faith (I don't know that I have enough evidence to judge objectively), but if we are going to extrapolate this incident into a set of guidelines, it seems like it's something like: "if people are angry at something you said, you have to respond." or maybe "if you express an unpopular opinion/viewpoint, you have to stick around and make more comments"
Even if it isn't something like an official ban policy (though it does seem like it may be part of a de facto one at this point), it could go into an informal set of guidelines for preferred conduct if we can nail it down into some better phraseology.
IMO, that’s not the hardline rule that should be extrapolated from my point. I have walked away from several conversations/debates/arguments (in this very comments section, even) when it became clear nothing productive was going to come out of continuing.
Walking away when you’re getting overwhelmed, angry or are at risk of letting it get too personal is a valid strategy for deescalation. People also can’t be expected to reply to everything, especially when they are being overwhelmed with responses as you were. However making a good faith effort to engage with at least some of the other people also making good faith efforts to debate the issues goes a long way towards demonstrating your intentions were pure.
Hypnotoad did none of that though. He contructed his little set piece battles using contentious issues as bait then sat back and watched the carnage unfold on every occasion. That is a very clear sign of bad-faith behavior IMO.
We could amend the guideline to something like, "make an effort to engage with at least some people who are making efforts to debate an issue with you - expressing an unpopular opinion and not responding to your detractors will make people suspect you are just trying to upset people."
That's a fair enough assessment of the general rule for good conduct in a topical debate, I would say. Whether it needs to be codified in those exact words, I don't know, though I am sure there is probably something similar in the /r/changemyview wiki somewhere we could look up.
r/cmv requires the poster of a topic to respond to everyone within 3 hours, which is basically what you are referring to.
what happens if you have to like, go to work? just asking 'cause that seems really strict. why not 24?
I think the idea is that you pick a time when you have a decent amount of free time to do it. If a poster goes 24 hours between responses, it can lead to a more fragmented conversation.
Edit: 24 not 34 hours
I think for certain groups on ~ that is not unreasonable, expecting people to set aside a decent amount of time before setting off a potentially contentious debate so they can actually participate in it, e.g. in ~talk.serious or the political groups (if/when they get created). However as a standard for the whole site it's a bit much IMO. I think @mumberthrax's general phrasing of the rule would be a lot more appropriate for a site-wide policy or even my own from a few comments earlier:
"making a good faith effort to engage with at least some of the other people also making good faith efforts to debate the issues you brought up goes a long way towards demonstrating your intentions are pure"
I'd rather them edit that they remover something that was unintentionally inflammatory. Removing it silently seems like it's just trying to stir shit without getting caught. Once is coincidence, twice is a trend, third time is enemy action and all that
Good decision.
I honestly don't notice these kinds of bad faith posters much. I only notice the commenting versions of them.
Looking at the history, it's very clear this was a user posting highly divisive and inflammatory topics without ever actually having any intention of taking part in the topics. This itself will create inflammatory and negative discussion while (hopefully) making the user less visible and less reported for being a troll.
I'm impressed that you or others noticed it to be honest. It's an insidious and under-the-radar style of disruption.
Huh. I looked at their history and the comments were so few and bland, it feels like they wouldn't really be able to coherently object to the decision to ban them, if given a warning.
Also, I think you should make the Code of Conduct more clear on this. "Don't act like an asshole" doesn't quite describe what was done wrong this time.
The reason for their history looking bland is that they had a habit of posting inflammatory comments and then editing them out after a few people had responded. They had little to no engagement in any of the controversial threads they posted.
Provided that the reasoning behind bans is clear and standards are consistently enforced, I have no problem with having little tolerance for trollish or otherwise inappropriate behavior. Now is the time in Tildes' life cycle to make it clear that such participants are not welcome.
That's the tricky part though, isn't it? How do we break down this ban into specific criteria that constitute a bannable offense?
my attempt:
I’m glad you did it. If this is going to be a community with higher standards, then some people aren’t going to live up to those standards almost by definition. The question we should always keep in mind when considering a ban is always “who is this going to dissuade?” In other words, restricting someone’s speech will inevitably have a chilling effect on other users.
In this case, people are going to look at this incident and realize that posting inflammatory shit and edit-trolling is not allowed here. Anyone object to that?
As a side note, I’m pretty sure Hypnotoad was testing the boundaries of ~ intentionally, and I think we, or should I say @deimors, passed the test.
Edit-trolling is a phrase I've not heard before outside of this thread - is this a widespread technique? A web search didn't turn up anything useful. How do we identify and quantify it?
I just made up the term; there's probably a better and more common term out there somewhere. I think being able to track edits will help us identify and quantify it. I think it'd be very rare for anyone to care so much that they go back through the edit history, and usually when they do it'll be clear why the edit was made. But in the rare cases where someone's actually playing a trick on you via edits, having that visibility would be nice.
hmm. So how do you feel about this line in the code of conduct?
It seems to me that tracking edits might violate some of the principles of respecting users' privacy which the site seems to enshrine as fundamental. I know that in this instance the edits were probably not made for privacy protection purposes (although now that i think about it, a banned user has no ability to remove any content they deem to be personal information...) but if we were to implement a mechanism to view edits for situations like this, the consequences to privacy might be in conflict with other values tildes is built upon.
I believe the key word in this is
maliciously. If you are doing it for the sake of context, or because you are worried that the other person will change their comment, it is fine. It is only not fine if you are, for example, posting information they removed because they accidentally posted their credit card number.I think you’re right that there’s a conflict here between the values of privacy and good-faith discussion. My feeling is that it’s worth having a means to stop bad-faith edit-trollers, but it does make it harder for people to make edits and not be responsible for earlier mistakes. I’d like to think the culture here would be more forgiving, i.e., if someone edited out something offensive, maybe they just misspoke. But on the other hand, if someone says something obnoxious and then edits that part out, would I be so inclined to think they didn’t mean it? I don’t know.
At the risk of not being substancial enough here we go:
Thanks. In addition to the user centric focus of Tildes I got attracted and enjoyed the general meatyness and freshness and the atmosphere here at around 1400 users. It felt like a safe and calm place/port where I felt I belonged.
I'd be fine with a stricter policy on which threads are fluff. If I want fluff there are enough places for that already.
Edit: While on the topic of fluff: Is this topic fluffy or substantial? what_are_some_quintessential_90s_00s_albums?
Well this is timely. I just spoke with my only invitee, and he saw the post in question on top of the default feed and it really turned him off right away about the site/community. I explained about the default activity feed sorting behavior, and said it was a really bad example of the community so far. So yeah, banning is really tough, but seems like a good call. But it is really tough. I'm not sure if any effort was made to ask the user to self-moderate or not.. maybe a good idea in general to not be too abrupt.
On another note, this did bring up the fact that I had to explain that the top of activity was not the most upvoted/popular post on the site. Though he was a brand new user.
edit: clarity, added the part about self-moderation
Curious: Does that user have a lot of experience with Reddit? I wonder if it's just a direct association between how the frontpage looks and how Reddit does, or does the website itself communicate that? Though I guess there are no neutral users who don't have experience anywhere similar, so that's not the most useful distinction to make.
Yes on the Reddit experience. It’s kinda funny, when I explained it, he said “oh, so it’s the troll algorithm :)” even funnier, he works on an enterprise product that uses the same default sort.
Personally, I like it right now. Edit: but I know how it works already.
I feel that this ban is too harsh. I respect the thought process behind it but feel a tempban or formal warning would've been more appropriate. I respect the policy of low-tolerance for bad-faith posting but think that this highlights the need for a more developed disciplinary system. It's not that I'm worried about being banned unfairly - I do trust the judgement of the admins - but I think that for the sake of tildes' reputation having some sort of document that outlines clearly the disciplinary process is necessary to stop the site developing a reputation as being presided over by power-tripping admins. We've all seen forums like that, and by-and-large they suck pretty badly - I wouldn't want potential users to assume that tildes is like that, when from the inside it so evidently isn't.
I understand the opinion, and I'm not trying to pick on you about it, but to follow up more on what I said in the post on this topic: why? Look at the user's posting history. Imagine a site with thousands of users that post at that level of quality. Would you consider that a high-quality site?
No. And I still feel like, "Get me once, shame on you. Get me twice, shame on me.", should be the Golden Rule. I think it's difficult to surmise intention from a handful of posts. This person looks like someone who came from reddit expecting a reddit-like (but better) experience and recognition system and failed to realize that pretend internet points are not the end goal at ~Tildes.
I feel one warning with a reminder that this site is a place
and, "X" won't be tolerated should be sufficient before a ban. If they don't, "get it" after that. See ya.
I think the "Why?" is a belief that the user will change their behaviour afterwards.
(they won't)
Or... They might... But it won't be on a 1 to 2 week timeline. It'll be on a 1 to 2 year timeline. Which is NOT a timeline that a community can work on for behavioural change of users. Not if the community wants to do what's best for the experience of the rest of the community.
If they get a ban for it and come back in a few days and actually want to stick around then they WILL behave or they'll simply receive another ban. It works better. The temporary step is unnecessary. It's only a step that should apply in user disagreements/conflicts imo, and possibly things that only affect the activity of a user within on group as opposed to all groups on the site as a whole. I can't give an example of what that would be easily though.
I feel like after their first inflammatory post it would have been appropriate to give the user a warning. I'm curious if you intentionally sat back and waited for @Hypnotoad to make further posts of the same nature to make the judgement to perma-ban them or not. Not trying to imply that's bad, just wondering. That could be a quicker way to deal with these types of users. If they start to make trouble and you warn them they may simply sit in the shadows for a while until they feel confident enough to start more trouble later. They haven't learned anything and you end up waiting much longer to get rid of them.
No. I had noticed them making a couple kind of strange posts before but didn't really think much of it. Then someone mentioned that their religion thread today was especially bad so I took a look at that point.
No, I wouldn't consider it high quality, but I'd rather see a small proportion of content dip below quality standards than have tildes gain a poor reputation. I'm not totally convinced that the user was genuinely posting in bad faith, either - some people are naturally just very abrasive and confrontational. It's a fine line - finer still when the disciplinary options are pretty much binary.
Irregardless of rules users (mods and posters) have to be reminded of that you can be within the rules but still be wrong. The more individuals try to act within the rules while ignoring the fact they are acting in bad faith, the more a community will suffer.
I think I understand your motivation behind not making this site a troll education camp. But maybe there is a middleground? Maybe a 2 or 3 strike policy?
I would not want this site to get a bad rap for being ban happy or something.
If the behavior was noticeable enough for several users to comment on it, it probably was a deserving ban. For those people who are concerned about well-meaning edits being construed as malicious, I would reiterate my suggestion in another thread about this topic that we make an effort to make "EDIT:" type notes when making substantial changes to an original comment. I've noticed a bunch of people already starting to do it and I think it will be helpful for transparency. I don't know if it should become a "rule" or community standard, that's up to the rest of you.
EDIT: Link to comment I'm referencing: https://tildes.net/~tildes/1w2/standard_procedure_to_deal_with_someone_that_seems_like_a_troll#comment-jh9
While this ban seems warranted, it makes me slightly uncomfortable that you're making judgments based on their actions on reddit. It seems like a privacy-oriented site shouldn't have admins tracking users across the Internet.
That makes sense, so, to clarify: I knew his reddit account because he posted comments in at least one Tildes-related post on reddit saying that he was Hypnotoad on Tildes. It wasn't from me keeping track of which user the invite was sent to, or anything like that. It was a connection he made publicly of his own accord.
To me, this reads like @Deimos looked at @Hypnotoad's reddit history after the decision to ban was made, but I could be wrong.
Yeah, I read that the same way. I just wanted to make the point that admins intentionally associating Tildes accounts with accounts on other websites is a violation of user privacy, even if it didn't contribute to the ban in this case.
I still don't get what I have to watch out for. Am I going to get banned for disagreeing with someone now? There is a pseduo philosophy discussion going on somewhere. Am I going to get banned for dismissing the idea? I am not making any personal attacks but still, this guy is getting banned for just posting ideas people dont like?
I'm not defending this guy, but I dont really get what "bad faith" behavior constitutes.
I just need to know where your rules are. It sounds like it amounts do "dont do the things we dont like, and dont not know what thet are because WE are too good to be bothered with explaining them". It seems entirely unreasonable to both not offer temp bans, AND not offer warnings, AND not offer clear posting guidelines, AND not offer a clear definition of the rule you're setting in banning him. You're shooting yourself in the foot, because every single person will think that THEY are one of the good users and follow their own rules and conceptions that go with such a title.
It just seems like he got banned for not replying to his posts. That's all I know from this post and the user history. That is not okay. This is why I haven't donated on Patrion yet, because we have no idea what this site will turn out to be, and this is a red flag to me.
I used to mod r/Summonerschool, with 100k subs, and we always had a few users here and there who did this sort of thing. It really wasn't hard for one of the 12 mods to explain our goals and guidelines and direct them towards more helpful posting patterns. And you know what, they usually listened! And those who didn't usually flamed in response, making bans a really easy decision.
Don’t repeatedly and silently edit comments/topics to remove inflammatory sentiments after those comments/topics have had time to spread FUD, especially if you’re not making any efforts to engage in the discussions you started.
Seems pretty simple to me.
But my problem with this decision comes down to a lack of clarity in the rules. This sort of highlights my point: now I'm hearing it's about editing posts? I thought that was just a side note. I'm not sure if it's as simple as that, and the confusion is problematic.
From the Tildes Code of Conduct:
Don't act like an asshole. I will neither argument for nor against the ban, but I believe this is the part that legitimized the ban.
What is it specifically that this user did which was making other peoples' experiences or lives worse? How do we quantify this ban into policy going forward?
Good questions, I'd like to refraing from continuing the conversation.
Right on. sorry if my comment came across as anything other than inquisitive.
You're fine buddy.
I think it's a bit hard to describe (better than what's already in this thread anyway), but when reading his posts, and edits in real-time, they honestly did feel like they were made in bad faith. I understand, this is super hand-wavy. At the end of the day, they were contributing to a negative experience on this site, and it's not what the community wants.
Like I said, I'm not defending the guy. I don't have strong feelings one way or the other about banning him.
The problem is: what about us? What are we supposed to take away from this?
This post was made with the apparent intention of showing us what not to do, but it doesn't actually show us.
Do not post inflammatory content, edit out the content as soon as you get a few responses, then refuse to speak again in the post.
That seems to be what I'm seeing as well. Also not expressly stating when he edited his posts to remove content users were objecting to.
Both of which are being put forward as signs of arguing in good faith.
One thing I see people mentioning is that we can't read Hypnotoad's mind to determine whether or not their actions were true trolling or the result of not understanding the social norms and guidelines on tildes. The implication seems to be that since we can't determine intent, tildes should be more lenient so as not to accidentally ban well-meaning people who need to learn the culture of the website.
Maybe that will be the case when there are systems in place for things like temporary bans and reducing trust levels and permissions, but I think by focusing on intent of actions we miss the effect of them. Hypnotoad's actions were determined to look and act like trolling; even if all of those actions were actually genuine mistakes, they had the same effect as a dedicated troll (such as causing confusion/strife when the more objectionable parts of comments were removed).
So yes, we can't read Hypnotoad's mind. But since they made no attempt to explain themselves, even after multiple people expressed concerns, any mod action can only go by what Hypnotoad wrote and the effect it had on the community.
(I feel awkward making this a top-level comment after so much discussion, but this issue of not being able to read minds came up in a few different places.)
I'm still trying to figure out exactly what it is that hypnotoad did that constitutes trolling. So far what I've seen is that he:
posted topics to ~talk and with discussion prompt questions and topics to ~books, but did not go in and discuss the topics himself (though other people did)
expressed his opinion that he did not like gay marriage, and then removed it when criticized. this led to some confusion in one thread where a user responded, asking why he had that opinion and a couple of users said that he didn't say he had that opinion.
made a post about religion with opinions that some people disagreed with, and within the first hour was blasted by a prominent user (someone who I for a little while early on in my time here thought was an admin because of how he spoke about the website), accused of posting in bad-faith etc.
allegedly made a derogatory comment about students in canada being behind the curve developmentally, deleted the offending comment, and then had it quoted by the same prominent user (which may or may not be in violation of the code of conduct depending on whether malicious intent in the quoting was involved).
I don't believe #1 should be considered trolling. His posts mostly generated interesting responses and discussion, even if he was not involved directly in them. There should not be a policy mandating responses to comments on posts. His "change my view" one (#3) is slightly more debatable - but i think given that he was blasted by someone who has the demeanor of an administrator and might be mistaken for one, it is understandable why he might shy away from responding to comments after that.
For #2, saying he does not agree with gay marriage may be illegal in canada, in which case it is understandable that he might need to be banned - however he deleted that very shortly after posting. Much inference has been made about his intentions in this removal, without any concrete evidence. apart from the brief confusion in maybe four comments, I am not sure this had any wide success as a troll if it was intended as one.
The alleged comment about canadian students (#4) is less defensible - but all that I have is the allegation from that same user who blasted him for posting in bad faith, which is not an unbiased source. The comment has been allegedly deleted, so i can't review it or the context in which it happened. IF it is as alleged, then this one I could definitely see as being an attempt to get a rise out of people, and it is insulting a group so might be in violation of the code of conduct about being an asshole.
Am I overlooking anything?
Honestly? I'm not very interested in trying to justify or propose reasons for a ban that I didn't actually make, which is why I didn't focus on the reasons in my comment.
Deimos (and likely others) thought that it was ban-worthy, and while there's certainly a discussion to be held about that (as seen in tons of other comments in this topic), my post was purely about whether intent matters. I don't think it really does; if something is considered trolling/behavior that's harmful to a community, it doesn't matter if it's an accident because it has the same effect on the community as genuine trolling.
EDIT: Sorry, I think my initial paragraph comes off stronger/angrier than intended (irony~). I was just a bit frustrated because I'd avoided discussions about whether the ban was justified on purpose. :)
I want to apologize too - i started off my comment intending to focus on purely the concept you described, that we should judge based on effect rather than intent, and ended up going off into analyzing his intent anyway. xP
I guess to rephrase the overall sentiment underlying my previous comment: how do we quantify trolling via effect? Is it just if people believe it is a troll, and get angry and accuse the person of being a troll?
If we decide that a ban is justified when people get outraged over some behavior, even if there is no clear rule violation or means of inferring intent, this gives a vocal minority the ability to ban whoever they want through being what people on the right refer to as "crybullies".
Please don't feel obligated to respond - I didn't intend to cause any bother. I just thought your idea was an interesting perspective and thought it deserved some fleshing out. sorry again for my initial comment being all about this specific ban incident.
Eh, not much to add. I gave him the benefit of the doubt in a recent exchange this afternoon but its response has been to "shut down" and I really felt bad for it.
I agree that especially in this first phase the rules must be strict and enforced quite swiftly. Once the community will be formed and shaped it will be possible to be more lenient with mistakes from the occasional new user.
Right now the user-base must have well clear what kind of content have to be there otherwise it will all fall apart in a matter of months from now and we wouldn't even notice until too late.
I moderate a subreddit of about 200k subscribers, r/FloridaMan. There is a team and they help, but I've had a big hand in shaping the moderation direction. It's an interesting subreddit because it's basically a collection of police blotters, but the goal is to be humorous. Morbid posts are disallowed, and we have a zero tolerance policy for bigotry - racism, misogeny, homophobia, transphobia, etc. We also ban people from shilling and only posting links to a single source (usually a blog but sometimes actual newspapers) - they've realised an easy way to get clicks is to put 'Florida Man' in the title. By banning bad actors quickly, we have maintained a positive subreddit environment despite the innate challenges.
It is a fine line to walk. Allowing unpopular opinions is crucial, as long as they aren't expressed with the sole intent to offend. If they get heavily downvoted it demonstrates communal disapproval. Sometimes someone posts a rebuttal, and even if it doesn't influence the troll, it might influence other readers. However if someone's sole intent is to offend, we ban them immediately.
(Edit: Another important thing we do is encourage users to use the report function. We have automod set up to message us at 2 reports and auto-remove links at 5 reports. It messages us at both stages so we can put human eyes on it too. Having users involved is a good way to tell which side of the line questionable content falls on. If it may be objectionable but nobody has reported it, it usually stands. If it may not be that different from another post, but if it's been reported something about it is causing issues.)
Most of our bans these days are for spam, which I consider a major success.
I support this.
He does the same shit on Reddit and I've reported him more than once to the admins there to no avail. Good riddance.
You're going to find it hard to curate the userbase like it's a bonzai tree -- clipping undesirable branches here and there with the hope of it growing to the right shape. If I understand the idea behind tildes it's that you're trying to take a systematic approach to creating good discussion. This doesn't seem all that systematic. In fact, your system appears to have encouraged his posts to be rather active (and dare I say successful at generating discussion?)
Given that you've created the site you know what kind of user you want, there's no arguing whether that user should have been banned or not. But, going through his posts I'm unconvinced he was all that bad; I think if you set the bar that high you're ultimately going to be disappointed.
I'm honestly surprised that you think that. This is a very, very low bar. I think he made one comment longer than a single sentence, and almost all of them didn't contribute anything to discussions at all.
Probably a lesser offense, but the "Daily Book" threads he was creating were beyond worthless. He was literally copying and pasting Wikipedia articles with the entire plot of each book and contributing no thoughts of his own or starting any real discussions. It just made no sense; it was as if he was attempting to farm votes. Gotta get those internet points!
Once again you've issued a ban where a public and visible warning was appropriate. You understand that most users don't read vision documents and lengthy codes of conduct, right? Enforcement is the first point at which most people develop even an inkling about the rules and norms governing a community, and at that point of contact you guys are wildly flailing a sledgehammer for minor offenses.
Your technical chops are obviously impressive and given all the navel-gazing about communities you do in ~tildes.official, it's clear to me you have a solid big picture understanding of what Tildes should be. But at an operational, day-to-day level, you don't appear to know how to moderate a community dedicated to in-depth, constructive discussion effectively. This style of banning with no warning and then justifying it after the fact is not going to improve the community and certainly wont scale. You need to be active in threads, issuing warnings, explaining what people are doing wrong for all to see, if you want the culture you envision to "catch." Otherwise it just looks like you are randomly banning people for imagined slights.
This was a user that:
A public warning doesn't magically convert that person into a model, high-quality user, and if you think banning users like that means that I don't know how to moderate a community, I really don't know what to tell you.
I hope a more robust set of moderation tools is made available for community moderators when community moderators become a thing around here. I get the sense that I'm going to be cast as defending this user and the shitty things he said if I attempt to argue in favor of process any more than I already have, so that's all I have to say about bans and moderation.
On another note, I get the feeling that most of the "inner circle" are also developers or techies in some way. It might pay Deimos to recruit one or more non-techies to handle the human side of moderating 3,000+ people.
You try to discourage me from doing this too much in Daystrom! :P
Of course I agree with everything you've written here: it reflects my own personal moderation technique, as well as what we do in Daystrom.
Well some people can't be helped! To be clear I wasn't advocating for no public warnings... of course not. In fact I just left a few over in Daystrom.
The three Tildes bans so far run the gamut: they were right to ban the transphobe on the spot, but the guy who told the Trump supporter off, and this guy, well they could have just been warned.
I know! I'm just being cheeky. :)
It's all about finding the right balance, and I do sometimes go too far.
I think part of the problem might be that Deimos probably has no way of tracking who he's warned - this site doesn't support advanced moderation features like that yet. He has also said that temp bans aren't built yet: it's permaban or nothing. Anything else would require manual workarounds for tracking warnings and temp-bans.
Ah you mod there? Always seems an interesting sub
Thanks.
Yeah, I'm using the same username here as on Reddit, so you can see what subreddits I moderate by checking my user profile page on Reddit.
In the interest of disclosure @deimos revealed the ban action and his reasoning for it. That is not "smearing" someone, especially when the user's actions speak for themselves. He didn't reveal their real name (he doesn't know it) and even though he knows their reddit username (because they revealed it publicly) he didn't reveal that either. How is any of that "smearing someone by name"?
In Progress - https://gitlab.com/tildes/tildes/issues/90
Banning with no disclosure leads to growing mistrust of the administration, accusations of abuse of power and conspiratorial thinking. Just look at reddit and the way people accuse the admins there of misdeeds if you think otherwise. And in fact, one of the banned users on ~ already tried to spin their ban exactly that way and the only thing that stopped it from spreading was because the reasons for their ban was publicly disclosed here:
https://old.reddit.com/r/tildes/comments/8nm9wb/banned_from_tildes/
So how exactly do you propose @deimos be "tactful" while also ensuring his own decisions are judged openly, honestly, fairly and so he held suitably accountable for them... while also soliciting feedback from the community on said decisions to make sure the right one was made... without presenting the evidence against the person (of which the username is part so people can independently verify the facts)?
@deimos is open to suggestions and if you can come up with a viable system other than public disclosure that can accomplish all that, then I will even push the idea myself.
In the future, once the trust and moderation mechanics are fleshed out, I doubt user bans will be as publicized as this one. This ban is being used as an example of what kind of behavior will not be tolerated on Tildes, thus the extensive detailed post and conversation. The site is still in its infant stages, with very little exposure to the rest of the internet. This level of detailed transparency on what happened and why will help set a precedent for the future of Tildes and explain the motivations behind its philosophy and future mechanics of trust.
Obfuscation of a banned user's username is certainly a possibility in the future ... and I do like the idea. However that still doesn't really prevent people from being identified, especially when they are well known to begin with. Nor does it address other systemic issues that go along with not being totally transparent with bans, e.g. on the self-professed "transphobe" user, the community at large was complaining quite loudly that they couldn't believe such behavior was being tolerated on the site given the announcement statements about limited tolerance for assholes and zero tolerance for hate speech. If @deimos had simply quietly banned him, only displaying it in some back room that not many people visit, or potentially obfuscated his username then many users might still be operating under the false assumption that the user in question was still on the site and their behavior was being tolerated.
However with that said, these public displays are very unlikely continue for long and will likely be relegated to the meta-moderation section of the site if/when it's implemented and site policy gets formally codified. However at this early stage, making a public example of someone is the most effective way to prove to the community that users are being held accountable for their actions, to make the community standards clear to everyone and also solicit feedback from the community at large.
What a waste of a sick handle.
As a reddit mod I wield a very strong and decisive ban hammer. Better safe than sorry. Warnings are a waste of the limited time of volunteer moderators.
My question is: What about un-banning protocols? On reddit, we ask people to write breifly on the rule they broke and to draw us a picture. Seems to cut down of people who are faking their apologies.
I think at this early stage when each user, especially active poster, has a big impact on the overall tone then @deimos was right to do this. I think bad faith fairly justified skipping to a ban. As we scale out I think that some warning for potentially fixable behaviour is maybe more reasonable. Still gonna call in the ban hammer for egregious bigotry.
Can I also suggest that once trust is implemented, loss of trust status will be a powerful mechanism for warnings.
That is definitely the idea. Loss of trust (perhaps permanently zeroing it for egregious cases), loss of ability to do the "mod"-like actions that were abused ever again (e.g. no longer able to edit tags), etc...
this makes me think of an episode of The Orville: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jHuy4hswDTE
The planet's entire justice system was driven by a kind of democratic social credit. Get downvoted enough and you get arrested, and given a chance to go on an apology tour to attempt to redeem those votes - get downvoted to a really low score and you get effectively lobotomized.
Heh... I would hope we never get to the point of lobotomizing people, there is no downvotes here nor is the mechanic inherently dystopian, but it is an apt comparison in terms of potentially losing rights for shitty behavior and requiring users to earn them back once they do.
p.s. I love that show. It’s far from perfect but it’s a far better Star Trek show than the actual new Star Trek show and movies. :/
We don't have downvotes right now, but the talk of the trust system seems to imply some means of marking a user as being in violation of some rule or norm by some form of democratic vote.
We already have this on reddit - get nuclear downvoted, especially as a new user, and you are rate-limited to posting a comment every ten minutes, which makes it nigh-impossible to engage in any in-depth discussion. Not saying there isn't value in such a system for deterring actual spammers or whatever, but if the punishment for not conforming to the mob's expectations is a warning and potentially a ban, we had better be sure the judgment process is fair and just.
You and I both know that people are irrational. Regardless of whether this user was objectively malicious or not, I think you would probably concede that some of the people condemning hypnotoad are demonstrating confirmation bias - some of the people asserting that his edits are proof of his bad-faith are not even considering the possibility of any other explanation. This doesn't mean he wasn't acting in bad faith, and as you said there are other things he maybe should have done and didn't - and this is still not 100% concrete.
I don't know what the answer is, but on the orville, the guy humping the statue was oblivious to the norms and rules of the society he was in. Maybe it would be a good thing if he didn't have the ability to moderate or vote etc. there, and a warning probably would have prevented a lot of the strife in the episode. And still, if the mob is irrational, and i get a big flashing red warning about deviant conduct for making an honest mistake, that's a bit disconcerting. not talking about hypnotoad here, but about the potential consequences of even a small design decision in this trust system.
edit: iirc, in that game of trust thing, the ones who were forgiving of potential mistakes tended to win.
Downvotes are used for more than just violating rules, in fact I would argue they rarely are used for that, and in most cases they are used as a means to suppress dissenting opinions. With downvotes it's a binary choice with harder to determine context behind it, and you also can't identify who downvoted so there is no way to ascertain intent behind the action or hold abusers accountable.
However ideally the metrics behind trust will only be about rule braking and neither ambiguous nor opaque. Misuse of tools gained through trust is far easier to determine than what drove a binary choice such as a downvote since there is added context to the actions. If someone adds a derogatory tag to a topic, that is clear misuse. If someone removes a topic or comment they simply disagree with despite it breaking no rules, that is a clear misuse. If someone tags every comment of a user despite it not being warranted (as what happened with you) that is a clear misuse. If someone bans a user from the group just because they had a disagreement despite the person acting in good faith, that is a clear misuse. In the vast majority of cases determining proper vs improper use of trust based mechanics is trivial and clear cut especially with user history in the mix. And since all actions will likely be logged and open to public scrutiny then identifying such abuses will be far easier and more likely to occur than on reddit where mod actions are hidden from public view.
As for reformation of behavior, on the Orville episode the punishment for breaking the norms is being lobotomized... the punishment on tildes right now is bans (because that's all @deimos is equipped to mete out) but as the trust system develops can potentially range from:
minor loss of trust to permanent loss
temporary loss of trust based actions that were abused to permanent loss
temporary group ban to permanent ban
temporary site ban to permanent ban
...and many more appropriate punishments of varying severity we can think up
All of which can may be undone if the user shows a good faith effort to reform and slowly regains trust again by using the trust based actions correctly going forward... unlike being lobotomized which is a point of no return.
And you're right, until we can read people's minds nothing will ever be 100% certain when it comes to determining intent... but as patterns develop certainly level increases, often to the point where "reasonable doubt" can be dismissed. The law operates under similar principles and for good reason... historic patterns of behavior and situational context are the only means we have to determine intent so we must, by necessity, rely on them as a means of judgment.
And yes, the mob can be irrational, but what sense do you get about rationality from @deimos' opinions and actions so far? Does he strike you as irrational? He doesn't me and I have known him a long time. In fact sometimes I might even accuse him of being a bit too rational. ;)
And I hope I don't come off as irrational either but if I do <shrug>, I honestly don't know what else can be done about that other than to say... watch my patterns of behavior and the context under which actions I take are made. Then get back to me on that. ;)
Oh, I definitely didn't mean to imply that you were acting irrationally, nor that the decision to ban was particularly irrational, nor even that there is an unusual level of irrationality in the comments here. I'm almost certainly not a qualified judge of that sort of thing, and probably have exhibited signs of confirmation bias and maybe even cognitive dissonance in the comments on this thread.
I was specifically talking about a subset of the comments which appeared to be exhibiting confirmation bias, e.g. assuming that the only reason for editing his comments must have been because he was trying to avoid criticism (obviously a flawed strategy since he has continued to be criticized, and now is banned - does this mean he was stupid and irrational in his fiendish plan, or that he had other intentions?). The tone of some of these comments indicates that any alternative explanation has not even occurred to their imaginations. Comments like yours have been thoughtful and you and others have made compelling arguments against these alternative explanations for his conduct, so i certainly did not mean to imply widespread irrationality here, just that it does exist. :P
I used this one instance as a handy example of the fact that people generally are irrational. I guess i didn't think the general principle needed much defending, but that may have been an error on my part. The reason i mentioned it was because of the image i had in my mind of a mob acting irrationally in condemning some innocent person with a ban through the democratic use of whatever the trust system evolves into. I merely mention it to convey a hope for careful advancement of this system with caution. It sounds like based on what you've described there are checks being envisioned already for these sorts of things, and that is reassuring. :)
I’m totally supportive of this.
The way Tildes works is heavily on a trust system. When you ask to be invited and are granted an invite code, you’re being trusted that you’re going to be a productive member of the community. You are being trusted you’re reading the mission statement of the site and how the site is going to be planned to run. You are being trusted to be responsible and respect these rules in place.
Regardless of whether or not this user came in through a supplemented invite code or directly by Deimos, he should have known what to expect the moment he was told to read the community rules when he joined.
Either way, totally fine with the permanent ban. After modding /r/leagueoflegends for two years, you learn that there really are just some people who you know don’t change and won’t change for the better.
Good ban. I think allowing people to show themselves for having a poor method of engagement online is enough to establish the need for removal from a community, especially when the focus is on not forcing people to sift through the chaff.
Do you think, you could in future post list of posts/comments that caused user to be banned? As you said, he deleted some of his posts/comments, but if someone looks at his profile, the most troll-like post is the one where he says religion is good and communism is bad. It would be even better if you could add option to see unedited post version (like StackExchange - you can see edits and what was edited).
Being able to see edits leads to a huge can of worms though. Accidental Copy-Pastes, typos, too much information. By having this system in place that'll give the admins the power to see the pre-edited information. Something I'd think a site that speaks about user privacy to want to avoid.
That's still an issue of privacy. Edit history shouldn't be available to anyone period. Who's to say a high trust user won't get hacked? Or maybe have a turn for the worst and post the history? Allowing anyone to see edit history period is a huge risk and one I do not want to see happen.
The fact that the edit history exists at all would be a problem. It's one of the things Reddit does right - when a comment is edited, the previous version is gone forever.
It's worth noting that this isn't true any more, and reddit removed that statement from their privacy policy quite a while ago.
Really? I must have missed that, but damn. Sad to see privacy being thrown to the wayside, though that's business as usual in 2018 I guess.
I think it's perfectly fine for a service to keep edited and deleted comments.
First, admins need to be able to see the complete picture, not just what a user wants to show publicly.
Second, if you use the internet today, you should know that privacy is dead. If you post anything to social media, you have pretty much given up keeping it private.
Third, kids should be educated that anything they post to the internet could come back to haunt them at any time.
I'm quite certain that they're not GDPR compliant in multiple ways. As just one example, their registration process still just does something like "by signing up, you agree to the terms and privacy policy". That's in direct opposition to statements in the GDPR—you're not even allowed to have a pre-checked checkbox, and they don't have an interface element related to it at all. There's absolutely no way it qualifies as "consent".
You're giving the same argument the U.S has been given. "It's just giving up X for the sake of national security!".
Or only allowing edits to be seen if they we're part of why the user was banned. That seems like something the community should have access to, whereas there are good arguments for not allowing all edits to be seen
That means they are stored after the edit from the start. Something that I believe for the sake of privacy should be avoided from the start.
The result of that is deception and flame baiting like we've seen here. It might be worth that trade-off but we should explicitly decide that rather than not acknowledge the trade off
We've only had a single instance of it happening here and nothing is worth trading privacy for. A big reason why I joined this site was because of
Talking about "trading" privacy this early in would be a pretty big red flag for me. Edits should be gone period.
Yea after I read some more comments here I realized the privacy implications, and meeting GDPR compliance. The edits should probably be kept on a short time frame for admins, say a week or two, to adjucate these sorts of issues. As long as those are deleted on a set basis and users are made aware of it, it should meet GPDR compliance
I think this could be avoided by recording edit history only when the edit is large enough (not just typo) and it's longer than, let's say, 5 minutes, from last edit.
Typos woldn't be recorded, as well as any big edits (like removing the accidental copy-paste), if user edited it within 5 minutes, which is more than enough time for this kind of edits.
There can be times where you do a quick post and leave the computer only to check the thread and see what you posted. If someone really posted something nasty and edited it, the other users will make that very clear. It happened with Toad didn't it?
Certainly the edits were pointed out and screenshots could have been taken. As I mentioned in a previous post, though, screenshots can be faked and there a multitude of reasons why people edit posts. If a user falsely claimed an edited post was edited due to inflammatory content, how can the community or moderation tell if the edit function was really being abused in the absence of a log?
If the user themselves deletes the comments and that user is European then I believe sharing it with the community after the user has deleted it would break GDPR.
As there is likely very little way to tell whether the user is or is not European the site has to operate on the assumption that all users might be unless explicitly otherwise stated.
I would prefer to have people quote the verbiage in their response to said verbiage. After all, the editing can't scrap my responding post. Just theirs. And the discrepancy would make the trolling even more obvious.
I think this would clutter comments page - and regardless if the cotation would be autocollapsed or not, people won't read it anyway.
Btw do you talk about the system automatically including quotes in replies, or users using the ">" markdown tag? In case of the latter, I agree with you, but I don't think most users would use it. We probably have only a few people on Tildes that are doing it.
I do mean the second, and I use it judiciously. And I most definitely would use it when responding to a person who I noticed was editing their posts after the fact.
I think that is actually against the code of conduct, quoting stuff that the user has edited/deleted to prevent them being able to effectively delete stuff.
I guess the metric is whether the quoting is done with malice or not.
Hm. I wasn't talking about reposting something already deleted or edited. I was thinking about quoting a part of an existing post that I was responding to. So if they tried to change it (I never said that flamey thing, nuh uh!) There would be a record...
But I see what you're saying. Trouble is, some people post long things and sometimes I quote the part I'm replying to. Because it's less confusing for me, and it helps the op remember. Should I stop doing that, in case they want to erase it later?
I especially quote things that I have high feelings about, to remind myself to discuss only that point calmly. It helps me not rampage about and pinpoints the item for the poster. But those are precisely the sort of items that people might regret later. If someone asked me to delete the post because they were deleting theirs, I would comply. Unless they were trying to bully me into it.
I'll definitely be mindful in the future. But I'd like to put this out there: If I stick my foot in my mouth up to my arse in public, erasing it doesn't mean it didn't happen. I'd rather think before posting, and apologize for any mistake I make in the same public place. If I'm not going to respect the people I'm interacting with at least that much, why am I even posting?
Yeah it's a bit of an interesting puzzle. I would say if you're quoting things to respond to them bit-by-bit in a comment, that doesn't imply intent to preserve the quoted expressions against deletion by the user.
But if you see someone saying something inflammatory and are thinking "ahh this guy might delete this to try to pretend he never said it" and then quote it specifically to preserve it, while that might be a good thing in the grand scope of things, it does fit the criteria from the line in the code of conduct, except the malicious clause. At that point, the question is purely "did you do this out of malice for this user who posted things you didn't like? or did you do this for a non-malicious purpose?"
Given that nobody has the ability to mind-read, I'm not sure the question can ever be satisfactorily answered with perfect confidence.
Does it have to be? If people waited to answer, or make laws or judge situations for perfect confidence, would we have any laws or answers? I thought that the whole history of discussion was to help people personally decide where on the scale is "reason enough." That the history of politics was to compromise and find a way to balance everyone's "reason enough" to make laws...
I've already gone on record in this thread with my opinion of Hypno's behavior meeting my "reason enough" threshold. Is my reasoning potentially flawed? Of course! What will this community eventually decide is its "law?" No idea! I'm excited to see it being worked out. :)
Regardless of what Toad said that is what some users did. The defense I had for him was he did delete/edit his previous comments. As for him not engaging I don't think that's a big deal personally. The large sub I moderate has a few users like that and it's the content they post that starts the discussion. Them not answering doesn't take anything away from that.
Indeed.
I've been trying to imagine two filters on the evidence at the same time - that he's a troll and this was all malicious and intended to make people upset, versus this was a series of misunderstandings, and some mixture of the two...
And regardless of which is objectively true, it seems like there is a policy here that must be made explicit. With the first ban it was "don't flame a user, and then go through and mis-tag their comments", the second ban was "don't say you're transphobic", and this ban it seems to be "don't post unpopular opinions without making comments, and don't remove unpopular opinions without some kind of comment about removing them"
This is the correct move. If you don't get a handle on it now, you sure as hell won't have one on it a year from now.
dont ban them, lock them into a subset of the community.