Daily Tildes discussion - on civility, political content, and over-extrapolating
Geez, I said I was hoping to keep these daily discussions a little "lighter" on the weekend, but that's definitely not working out this weekend.
Yesterday's thread is getting awfully large, so I think it will be good to use this one to continue with some specific topics from that one, instead of trying to keep it in there where it's pretty unwieldy (I definitely need to do some work on handling large threads better).
There are 3 things I want to try to clarify and start discussion on:
- Whether someone is civil or not is absolutely not the only factor in whether they're going to be welcome. Multiple people in the other thread seem to be jumping to the conclusion of "this means that as long as someone says it politely, they've got free rein, and we have to treat all their statements as valid!" That's not true at all. So how can we try to make this more clear? Are there particular rules or guidelines that we could put in place to help separate reasonable conversations from "just asking questions"? Are there existing communities that you think handle this well that we can try to emulate?
- To be completely honest, I probably haven't been paying enough attention to the political threads that have been posted so far. I'll spend some time today looking through some of the existing ones to see if issues are already coming up. We've talked previously about why political content is difficult—should we consider something like just banning "overly political" threads (at least for now) to prevent the site's culture from getting too adversarial initially? Again, is there anything else specific you think we can do or emulate to help the situation?
- Please try not to extrapolate too much immediately. Tildes has "really" been going for a week, I've taken one moderator/admin-like action, and there are people acting like that's already defined the site's entire future. I know everyone here is pretty passionate and excited, but try to relax a bit—the site's brand new, still very tiny, and a lot of things still need to be figured out (both for mechanics and policy). Things like "one user might be getting away with being a troll" doesn't mean that it's doomed to turn into "polite Voat". I'm not going to let that happen, but if you don't believe me that's fine—the only way I can prove it is through what actually happens, and that takes time.
So... that's pretty scattered, but hopefully it's a decent starting point to talk about some of these topics. Let me know what you think, I definitely appreciate everyone's input so far, and it's going to be important to keep getting it regularly to make sure Tildes can stay on the right track.
I don't like the idea of banning any sort of political talk, but on the other hand I really don't want to see political opinions. Looking in the big politics thread and the ban thread, it's apparent Tilde users are just as wrapped up in otherism as your average redditor. Otherism and tribalism are antiquated concepts that have no place in civil discourse. It infects it like a cancer, eliminating the possibility of coming to any sort of amicable resolution to a discussion. You see the same thing on both sides of the political divide.
So while I like to lean on the side of free and open speech, I also think this would be a better place without any opinionated politics.
I think it is possible to have civil political discourse on ~ without issues. /r/neutralpolitics and /r/politicaldiscussion are great examples of this on Reddit. Fostering/maintaining a culture of respect requires clear guidelines and competent, even-handed moderation, but it can be done.
Perhaps we should refrain from political threads until a clear framework has been established. The difficulty of establishing such a framework should not be a deterrent, however. We have a great community that I believe is capable of getting it right.
I'm not saying civil pololitical discussion can't exist. I'm saying otherism and tribalism prevent it from being possible and that we've already seen examples of that here. It leads to dehumanization of anyone you disagree with.
The key is moderation. I would suggest not allowing groups dedicated entirely to one side of politics or supporting individual candidates. Everyone talks about TD, but r/sandersforpresident was also completely stifling of outside opinions
The problem is moderation has, with good reason, become a four letter word. What use is having a balanced mix of opinions on the mod team if all that does is create fighting within the ranks of the people who are assigned to moderate.
A good example is r/science. They have thousands of moderators from all walks. I've seen threads where mods were removing comments that broke no rules and other mods we're restoring them just as fast as they were pointed out. Meanwhile the top mods like Nate are outright lying when insisting that no good-faith comments are being removed while proof of the contrary is being posted.
I understand the concept of good moderation in heavily curated groups like neutralpolitics, but can the political discourse on an entire site be run the same way? Is that sustainable or even desirable?
I like the idea of tagging good faith political discourse that is outside a specific community. Then allowing users to filter out those comments on a per thread or sitewide basis.
Filtered comments mean fewer people to look at, and flag, potentially problematic comments. There's a risk of creating a meaner more agressive sub-culture.
I like that idea. Though it would be difficult to police good use of tags. A tag like that would basically be a caegorized upvote and we all know how poor votes are at promoting quality content over content the majority just agrees with no matter how awful it is.
I think this is a good idea. It prevents people from entering echo chambers and becoming polarized without even considering the other side while allowing for political discourse. If people want to talk politics, they would have to (hopefully in a civil manner) disagree with people on the other side. If people have something to say, but aren't willing to have someone disagree with them, it is probably best they say nothing at all.
However, prevention of groups overwhelmingly leaning one way may be a problem. I've heard many people say that r/news and r/worldnews are hostile to a particular side. I don't know how true those claims are, but I would be in what other people think about this.
This should probably be a site-wide rule.
However, I doubt people would actually heed that advice. I don't think it's easy to recognize you're not actually open to disagreement and discussion...
It will be interesting to see how Tildes handles the 2018 midterms and (if Tildes lasts 'til then) the 2020 election cycle.
As of right now, there have been five overtly political discussion threads to my knowledge. They are as follows:
Are you saying that all of these threads have been failures in your eyes? They are each asking for overtly opinionated responses from people, and but for a couple important exceptions everyone responded civilly and, in my view, a mostly healthy way in each of them.
I only saw the Trump thread (A). I visited it early and did not return so I can't speak to what it looks like now. However, my comment was in the context of the reaction to it in the ban thread.
The ban thread has a lot of very blatant otherism talk on the side of the banned user. There were an uncomfortable amount of comments talking about "repugnant" political views and how reactions to them should be handled. It's also concerning when people start framing a political opinion as a troll post just because of the side it's on. Whether it's true or not is irrelevant, it opens the door for dismissing any political opinion that goes against the grain of the majority as baiting. This is what plauges the popular subreddits and promotes the image of a one-sided political agenda as an institution.
I have so many questions now.
I definitely agree, and when that happens, that is a problem. The "Troll" tag is not a button for expressing disagreement. That's a problem with this structure, though, not with political content. You might notice, if you check those links out, that this behavior is extremely rare in all of the other four threads I linked (in fact, it only happens again in the abortion thread).
I don't want you to think I'm dodging tough questions but I'm drinking and smoking ribs and I don't think I can give this the attention it deserves from my phone outside from my.phone. I'll post a real reapinse to this in the morning when I can sit down and type with a clear head.
No worries and no rush. Have a good night.
I think this is the first time I saw someone wish someone else a good night on an internet forum. It's the little things like this that makes me appreciate ~
Comment like this is why we need a "snooze" button in the website. Sort of like the !remindMe bot in reddit.
Sometimes I just cannot deal with a thread but want to be back to it, maybe in the weekend.
Pardon my off-topic-ness, but this made me think of something: if we really want ~ to become a place for civil discourse, would it also be the place for some kind of preventive moderation / education? What I'm thinking of would be comments dedicated to improving other comments / topics ( something quite similar to a Wikipedia / MediaWiki "Talk" page? )
It's already happened a few times around here where someone rephrased a parent to be less "angry" for instance but they are drown in the rest of the topic ( One could even argue those "educational" comments are off-topic )
You mean like a mod message thread behind a specific comment or thread?
yes, though ideally something public ( so that it benefits everyone, and not just the poster ) and not limited in participation to "moderators" ( in the sense moderator = abuse handlers ), it's definitely another kind of "moderation", and not necessarily on things that would have been worthy of a warning. It could be simply: "this could have been phrased better this way", or "there is this logical fallacy" without discussing the content at all.
The only thing I disagree with here is the inclusion of logical fallacies. That's been a huge problem on Reddit ever since it became a well know concept. An argument being a logical fallacy doesn't make it incorrect. It's created a culture of people who think just pointing out a logical fallacy is an argument, which it is not. Every time a list of logical fallacies hits the front page of Reddit there's a few weeks of people just shouting them out as a response to every comment they disagree with. It's important to emphasize that you must respond to the actual content of the fallacy and why it is flawed as an argument.
You're right, and it's also why I don't think comments that only point out a logical fallacy ( or only rephrase a comment in a more civil way ) are worth having on the "main" thread: those are educational material for the poster and the wider community ( for future threads ) but shouldn't be used to derail the "main" thread. If someone respond to the actual content of the fallacy and why it is flawed in the topic context, it is "main" thread material.
I like that, though I think I would go so far as to say that a logical fallacy shouldn't even be mentioned in the context of an argument. You can explain the problem with an argument without reducing it to a logical fallacy. For example if someone makes a strawman argument it's easy to explain that you never made the argument in question without even using the word strawman.
I believe logical fallacies should be used for introspection in one's own arguments. Not used as a tool for winning a debate.
I've already suggested "whisper comments" elsewhere here, auto-collapsed comments meant for feedback and meta conversation. Visually out of the way and don't steal attention, yet public as any other comment.
that sounds like a great way of implementing it and keeping the whole thing contained within a thread without derailing too much the flow of comments :)
I suggested that trusted users might be able to self-tag a comment as a kind of "warning" and point out that a conversation is starting to get out of hand, so that the participants may try and go back to a civil tone or proceed more cautiously forward. Might be a good way to tell people to calm a bit or take it down a notch, and might also attract other trusted users to the issue so that more eyes are on it.
It might be a start point for a "talk" thread, like you mentioned, and could be "whispered" as @Natanael suggested.
Perhaps if we limit political threads to a certain time (once or twice a week/only weekends/ only after 5 pm) we can have them be heavily moderated. That way people can still have their political discussions, but we can keep it civil and moderated, sort of like the debate club. Obviously this has it's faults. Simply food for thought.
I think my off-the-cuff solution would be to heavily segregate and isolate opinion from news. Want to talk about the factual content of a bill? Make that comment in the news thread. Want to discuss your feelings on a law? Take that over to the opinion playground where the people who care what you think are hanging out.
This isn't very well thought out so I don't know how I'd choose to implement it yet. All I know is watching two sides be assholes to one another because they disagree is bad for the collective mental health of a community and I don't want it in front of my eyes. I don't even want to have to steer clear of it. I just want it not in my proximity or in my radar at all.
I'd say this idea makes the most sense to me (so far). I stand with you when you say you don't even want to see the content (I feel the same way), but to outright ban people from sharing opinions based on the assumption that it may upset some folks is a slippery slope.
At first glance that sounds like a reasonable idea. Maybe a group for political discussion and a group for political debate? Discussion being opinion based and debate being fact and law based.
I would put debate an another third category.
I admit this is a very hard line to draw. What constitutes an unnecessary opinion and what constitutes factual commentary? Is there even any non-opinionated commentary to make on a political article? I don't know. All I know is it isn't healthy to discuss politics on social media the way that we do and if there's a way to stop that without completely shutting down discussion, I'd like to see it done. I wish I had a good solution but it's a really tough place to draw an objective line.
I agree. I want to allow as much as possible, but I also don't want it to devolve into mud-slinging, and parroting arguments they've heard and read on fact-less facebook posts. I suppose we can implement some of these ideas on a trial basis, and if it isn't working out with the intended consequences, you can always revert or try something else.
This is a possible solution, but what about other controversial topics? There are a ton of them.
Which controversial topics are you thinking? I only suggested what I did because it seemed like the political thread is the first and most immediate and prominent to get "out of hand" in regards to the aggression and name calling and everything like that. If there are people available, I don't see why we wouldn't heavily moderate all the more controversial topics. We wouldn't need to if we could maintain civility in all the threads, but I understand sometimes people are fueled by their emotions. Regardless, I think we should focus on the one topic that is actively controversial before spreading it to other, potentially controversial ones.
Anything can be controversial. Here are some examples on https://libguides.umflint.edu/topics/current
And some may think that a few items on this list aren't controversial, but to others, they may be. Who decides that?
Nobody can decide, really. I think the only difference is people actively enjoy talking politics, or engage in it often, whereas not many people are bringing up daily factory farming threads as much. So we see more people becoming aggressive and angry in political threads. I think other controversial topics wouldn't need something like this, unless we start seeing a lot of them pop up with very heated and perhaps hostile and belligerent discussion. Maybe at that point we have to trust in moderators or ownership to step in and crack down on the rules? I'm not entirely sure.
You make some good points, and even though I may not think a scheduled topic on controversial subjects can happen without fleshing that idea out more, I appreciate the discussion we've had about this. You've given me some things to think about.
Same to you. Thanks for taking the time to chat.
MetaFilter limits discussion of US politics by having just one active, heavily moderated "megathread". New threads are periodically created as the old ones get too large. They seem to work reasonably well, though the moderators also seem to spend a lot of time in them…
I don't enjoy political discussions. But I don't want politics banned. It strikes me as a coward's way out. Imma big girl. I would love to have people model decent political posting behaviour for me so I can learn.
What I would really like is for there to be a thread where people describe bad faith behaviours with specific examples and everyone votes on which are the worst. Since I haven't spent much time on forums, it would help me understand a lot of what people are concerned about.
Not a bad idea. The link to the rational wiki in OP (Just asking questions) is a good starting point, I think.
A "worst of forums" thread for these examples could be good.
I'd like such a thread to be anonymized so that one bad post doesn't turn into a scarlet letter, but this sounds like a decent idea
I've written before about this topic, but I suppose it's worth hashing things out again with the newer contexts we see before us.
I am not one to enjoy talking in abstraction. I think to do so is extremely sloppy and leaves us prone for all sorts of leaps to get to what is ultimately just our own like or dislike for confrontational content. To that end, let me just go ahead and link all of the topics I'm aware of that have had overtly political content driving the starting point for discussion:
In the Discussion Thread category, we have:
In the Political News category, we have (in reverse activity order because I'm just manually searching through):
6. Fiji Times found 'Not Guilty' of sedition charges
7. Mariachi Band and Taco Truck Arrive at Viral, Xenophobic Lawyer's Office
8. Donald Trump Calls Off Meeting with North Korean Leader
I only went about 250 results in, but I think this is enough for us to get an idea of the sort of political content we're talking about.
It is my contention that the political content is not the reason for adversarial atmospheres. It is instead the processes available for conflict resolution. If you exist in an environment where conflict is encouraged and relished, then you will get overtaken by the types of personalities that encourage and relish conflict. The content itself matters little, it's the people and the culture they promote that matters.
There are two big reasons I would be opposed to cutting off overtly political content. First, I have a long list of potential even-handed discussion topics that I'm interested in seeing people explore (selfish, I know, but there you have it). The second and more approachable reason is that having successful political exchanges helps build trust and a culture of constructive discussion.
Let me go into that second bit some more because it's worth remembering how that generally applies here. We're all about building trust here, but that isn't something that's going to be easily quantifiable and put into a level-like format. I think we all know that there are serious challenges that wait for us in getting there. In the meantime, however, we have the old-school trust system that all communities are built on. Trust that I won't be eaten alive for saying what I think is right is inherent in that sort of system and structure. The way you get there is just good old fashioned norms. Reinforcing good norms, teaching newcomers our norms, and kicking out bad actors.
These discussions have been about contentious issues. I think I scared @cfabbro to his core that I was about to blow this baby up with that abortion thread, and yet we proved to be more patient and curious about the ideas of our fellow ~ites than a lot of the comments in this thread seem to argue we are. In simple terms: I trust us, and the only way you build trust is slowly, through trial, error, and mea culpa-ing when the error happens.
"But wait," I hear someone in the ether cry, "that sounds like you're saying we should just be a community, with old-timers and moderators and the like." Yes. That's because I am.
The thing about political content that makes it an interesting stress test for a place like tildes isn't that it can't be done without strict moderation. We are at the size right now where just regular users have enormous control over the tone and strictness of our community's culture. Each and every one of us has control over how we engage one another, and in turn that spills over and influences how others engage us. The thing about political discussion that makes it a good stress test is just how many sites we're trying to be better than get the culture for resolving conflicts wrong. You can't overly rely on moderation if your culture is ass, /r/politics proves that. You have to build that healthy culture from the ground up. That means us. That means practice. That means messing up sometimes, but most of all that means trying to do good and giving people the benefit of the doubt so long as there is one to give (and no more). At this size, we can read the genuine attempt.
There are some things that apply more to good discussion practices for politics than other topics. Good political discussion needs to have a good starting point. There needs to be a good faith, (emotionally/structurally/manipulatively--but not necessarily politically) neutrally phrased question that drives discussion, or else there can be no good faith interaction with that question. That question shouldn't (in the long run) be so broad that it touches on nearly everything about a noun. When you're making a statement of fact, you should generally try to back that statement up with a source, or at least explain why you can't provide one right this instant. We can make these standards explicit. That is fine. Banning political content because it's too much of a moderating burden leaves a horrible taste in my mouth.
I have two small contributions here.
The first is an addition to a comment I made previously about telling trolls from devil's advocates. A devil's advocate will stay civil, while a troll is not as inclined to stay civil. In addition, a good devil's advocate should avoid logical fallacies or techniques like the "Just Asking Questions" page linked in the OP. Perhaps a logical fallacy tag could be helpful on some subs, as well as including something about logical fallacies and maybe a "How to be a good Devil's Advocate" bit in the site rules. A user who is tagged or called out repeatedly on logical fallacies or bad-faith debate techniques should be at the very least warned, and perhaps lose trust.
The second is that a lot of people seem to be getting tied up in what tags would be associated with a political tagging system. I think the simpler the better here, just use a "Political" tag. Encourage users to use the tag on their own comments, so that they can find the type of conversation they are interested in without disturbing others on the thread. I think that in combination with the proposed filtering system should work pretty well, at least well enough that there shouldn't be a need to quarantine political discussion. Oh, and for the filtering, I think it would be good if the comment chain was still there, but minimized, with the tag that is the reason for hiding it prominently displayed.
I think it can be hard to correctly identify a logical fallacy sometimes, which includes falsely doing so because of a general disgust for the conclusion or focusing on a small part of the argument to discredit a wider point that’s valid. Accusations of “logical fallacies” can be logical fallacies themselves, and just a glimpse at the pages upon pages of different types of fallacies you can find online should be a hint that it’s not a simple thing to handle. I probably committed some sort of logical fallacy in just this post and, ironically, that’s my point.
Hmmm, you make some good points, this is a tricky subject. Maybe it would work better as a report reason, something like "Bad-Faith Discussion." That could include both disingenuous rhetorical tactics as well as breaking the rules of the discussion set down by the sub or the OP.
I still think having a guide or cheat sheet for logical fallacies would be a helpful addition to the site rules. It could help new users avoid getting beaten down by poorly constructed arguments.
I don't know how to best put this but most "logical fallacy" accusations I have seen were either over-analyzing blatant bad-will trolling or so technical and ultimately flawed, they were hurting discussion more than they were helping. Like, anyone who would genuinely, respectfully respond to "logical fallacy" claims probably isn't the problem in the first place, while people doing it in bad faith will just drag you into an "ACKCHYUALLY" spiral.
Don't get me wrong, I believe this is absolutely how ideals for good discussion are defined but it takes very dedicated individuals to judge this properly, to a point where on a mass-scale, automated level I do not see this ever working out. Maybe reddit just made me too pessimistic, though.
If there is a logical fallacies tag, there must be a field to input what sort of fallacy we're talking about. I would not suffer a system that lets that accusation remain vague.
While I agree that if that kind of tag exists there should be a way to specify, i don't know that adding a fallacy tag is desirable, tbh.
I mean, it could be great for people to be alert when reading, but it could be used as a weapon by "the other side". It's been mentioned that tags will be weighted, but I'm not completely sure that a high number of "fallacy" tags (with accompanying explanations) won't be the go to weapon for the other side of the argument, especially if the other side is the majority's.
To give an example: if there's a majority of anti-Trump tilders on a thread they might be much more willing to dissect the lonely pro-Trump comment than their own. That could result in pro-Trump fallacies being pointed out and anti-Trump ones being given a pass.
What I mean is that it's easier to find flaws in views opposing your own, so that majorities will more easily disregard their own logical issues and overstate the opposite side's.
Can the tagging system be our savior for political content? Banning politics from the site is not reasonably possible as others have explained, but at least giving users the option to block out things tagged as political even in groups that aren't explicitly political could be better on the user's end.
I think in the absence of a downvote button (which, while not ideal, at least lets you be like "oh fuck off" without going in and slinging shit) or filtering functionality, I'm gonna have a hard time not jumping into political conversations, especially those which personally impact me. This seems like a much more practical way of handling it than shoving everything into a "politics" group to me, but obviously it doesn't really address anything about the culture you want to create.
Also, only related because I ran into the problem while getting into a political conversation...is an equivalent to "disable inbox replies" planned to come here? I realized it's even more of a problem here given how things can be bumped indefinitely.
If you can't have a political discussion without being able to downvote or just personally get rid of it, that kinda shows how politics can damage a site.
Well, there are certain kinds of political discussions that lead to that for me. I'd feel similarly about a post on ~music claiming that some music is objectively better than other music. There's always gonna be some things that an individual doesn't want to or can't meaningfully contribute to. That doesn't mean you purge them from the site. Plus, as discussed, that's REALLY hard to do. A piece of gaming news can very easily lead to a political discussion that could even be quite productive, and I'm not sure it's worth putting in the effort to quell it or if we'd even want it gone in the first place. Plus you can get into weird spaces where someone says something that requires a political conversation to explain why that doesn't work or whatever, and if you just don't allow things that get too political, that comment will just stay up without being able to be responded to in the proper way.
But if you want to have a space where you can't give low effort responses like downvotes or attacks out of the blue, then giving people who naturally want to do those things a way out is the way to go, and I see the tagging system as being the only way to really do this.
If someone cant meaningfully contribute, then they shouldn't contribute at all. That's what the comment tagging system is for (which incidentally @deimos should bring back). There is this assumption that low effort content is inevitable, and the tags should discourage that heavily.
I think you're missing what I'm saying. I'm suggesting they give users the tools to force themselves not to contribute when they know they won't be useful. As it is, we can't filter out posts tagged "politics" nor can we hide a post.
I know I've already seen threads that I knew I didn't want to enter because I knew I would inevitably start shit since I disagree with the very premise of the thread, scrolled past it a few times, and because stuff can stay at the top for days, I eventually went in and said something. Obviously you can encourage people to not contribute but they're a lot more likely to do so if you give them the tools to get things out of their face.
A hide button is generally not a terrible idea, but doesn't that create a culture where all you here is what you want to hear?
Well, yeah, in the same way that unsubscribing from ~sports means I won't hear anything on that front. It's much like the problem that I think @deimos mentioned elsewhere with default subreddits, where people entirely uninterested, uninformed, or actively against a certain topic would end up being encouraged to participate, turning them into dumpster fires. At the very least, you want to have people in a topic who want to be there. It helps ensure that everyone is participating in good faith.
As far as I know, that kind of filtering by tag is on the way anyway. I'm less making a suggestion than I am bringing up how a planned feature may help with the problem.
I'm not against being able to hide entire categories, but you should either be able to see all politics or none. Because the alternative is seeing only what you want, which is just a terrible idea. And I feel that low effort participation is neatly solved by the tag system.
I think we're talking past each other? All I was saying is that once the the tag system for posts is fully in place, we'll be able to filter out political content without having to give it a "containment group."
Though it could happen that way if people decide to tag their posts "right wing" or something. Just kinda a natural outgrowth of being able to tag things what you want. If there's a problem, it'll at least be user-created for themselves.
Is the problem that we're confusing the comment tagging and the post tagging systems? All I mean for posts is like if you have a post on gaming about some political shit with EA, one of the tags could be "politics" and people could decide "I don't want to see things tagged politics."
Yeah, but if you filter 'right wing' but leave everything else, all you see is what you agree with, which leads to an echo chamber situation, with posts tagged 'right wing' dominated by right wing users and vice versa
Yes? I'm sorry I don't know what you're trying to get at. I brought that up specifically to note that that could happen. If that's something that they decide is worth avoiding, they could have post tagging guidelines or something. There's plenty of solutions that let you filter out politics but still avoid an ""echo chamber"" if that's something that's considered desirable.
I'll be honest, I've lost your point. Are you for or against being able to filter specific political tags?
I'm neutral on that, to be honest. I don't care either way. I see value in avoiding "echo chambers" and I see value in having spaces that can get in-depth in political theory or strategy or something and explicitly being tagged a certain way could help that. I wasn't really trying to say anything on that front, just recognizing that it's a thing which could happen.
See, I'm confused because all I was trying to say in the first place is that being able to filter out things tagged political is a much more effective and realistic alternative to a "containment board," at least for the individual who wants to avoid them, AND it's something that'll naturally happen once tags are more robust.
It wasn't a point so much as a "hey, this gonna be a thing."
I don't disagree on the second point, but if you can filter 'right wing' how does that not create echo chambers, which is my main concern with online political discussion.
I just find the impact of "echo chambers" to be over-exaggerated in general. If anything, the internet is weird because it's essentially impossible to find a place where you don't run into a bunch of different viewpoints. I find that people who set up /pol/ and tumblr as these opposing echo chambers where no opposing viewpoints shine through haven't really extensively used either. You run into plenty "sjw" far-left people on /pol/ and you run into tons of the far-right on tumblr (that isn't to say that these places aren't toxic or don't have their own problems). I couldn't create an echo-chamber on large sites on the internet if I wanted to. ...but I wasn't trying to say anything because of that belief, and I'm still not. Just answering because you brought it up, but I'm not really interested in talking about that here.
But if this site doesn't want that kind of thing, that's cool. I'm not really arguing against you, I'm fine if they make the decision that you can't tag / filter stuff in that way. Like I'm serious, I'm not arguing a point. I just brought up a thing and with all due respect I'm not entirely sure why this is still going.
No, its an interesting perspective. I just don't agree with your view on the behavior of most typical users, and I worry about the impact a bad decision in this sphere can cause. Just look at what Voat turned into.
Maybe a tag for "someone is on the other side of the fence with you on this", but thats not exactly concise.
The "Polite disagreement" tag.
I think things have been pretty clear as far as what content will be allowed here. "Don't be an asshole" is very broad, but makes a lot of sense, and I think this is what we should stick with. People are going to get upset at things other say. It's a way of life. What we can watch out for are things like hate speech, racism, flaming, etc. Tildes cannot be a place where everyone feels comfortable all of the time. We can strive for that, but it just won't happen. I could be offending someone just by sharing my opinion about this. There is no way to tell until someone replies to me. There are too many ways to get offended, and if we got rid of all posts that offended someone, this site would be pretty empty.
Posts/comments/users that are clearly offensive to the majority of users here should be looked at, and handled accordingly. Other than that, someone sharing a political belief, religious preference, or even their stance on abortion should only have action taken if the post/reply/whatever is a direct attack on someone else personally, or not relevant to the topic at hand. This includes things like racism, even if it wasn't said about anyone in the thread. We would become an echo chamber otherwise, and be no better than alternative content aggregators.
While the community is still growing I definitely support not allowing political posts. Eventually, however, I think the problem could be solved with tags. Reddit lacks and sitewide classification system other than subreddits. So political posts might show up in r/Android for example when it's relevant. When that happened to us, we allowed the thread since it was relevant, but locked the comments because we didn't want the discussion that came with it.
With tags however, posts in any group can be labeled accordingly and an option can be made to filter them sitewide
I really like this idea. Maybe there should be options to filter them sitewide and by individual threads. Sometimes I want to know the politics related to a specific issue and some issues I don't.
I mentioned this in the other thread, but I don't think political discussion is at fault here. You can have political discussion without it becoming a waste of time, plus how are you going to have a news ~, a tech ~, a science ~ without politics? Even the gaming ~ might get into that.
The main problem is when politics becomes something abstract outside of policies. When it becomes my team vs your team, similar to a sports game. That thread from a couple of days ago was clearly not about politics, but rather about their "team".
I feel this is a very important point. Maybe political questions should be as focused as possible to be admitted here? A "What do you think of Trump?" or a "What do you think of abortion?" thread is probably just asking for controversy. I think an approach similar to r/changemyview would work better. As in: "I think X-thing Trump did was positive because of Y, am I wrong?".
That's a fair point. I posted without intending it to be about policies or whatever, i saw deimos' post about invitations and promoting tildes, and was thinking about how it would impact the site if it was promoted in the kinds of places the existing userbase already frequents - how that invitation process and process of suggesting places to promote it would just feed into the filter bubble problem. I wondered if it would be sane to suggest promoting it someplace where people who for example support donald trump might find it appealing. I noted in the post that i sensed the community here strongly was averse to people like me, despite us being roughly half the american populace. I think that a place for civil dialogue would be immensely beneficial for healing the divide that exists in my country, so i hope that kind of paints where my mind was when i posted.
So I thought "well before i jump in there suggesting promoting the place in a pro-trump location, maybe I'll just see if there's anyone already here from that demographic". The resulting dialogue (mostly civil) was kind of an afterthought for me.
I thoroughly enjoy politics and public policy discussions. I'd be bummed if it was banned as a topic here.
LawyerSmack has a no personal attacks rule and a pretty strong culture centered around being funny, snarky, a little dark, but all 200 active users in the political discussion forum make a concerted effort not to bullshit.
I think if there's an effort to avoid bullshit, or tag it as such, or otherwise discourage it—political discussion can be pretty fruitful. Maybe this means only certain users get tossed the keys to commenting in political discussion, or votes are weighted differently, or something. I'm confident there's a creative solution here.
Totally would be bummed with you there. A lot of the reason why I've been making an intentional effort myself to make good starting points for political discussion this past week is to prove it is possible to have good discussions even in this low moderation environment (because some people rankled me by saying that the political content itself was the problem).
I also agree that there should be an effort to avoid bullshitting, as defined in that link. I think that there will still be instances where passions can boil over, but that's a problem that I think is going to be true generally of this place as it expands, and may only be slightly more frequently the case for political content.
As someone who made a comment in the ban thread that maybe falls under item one, I guess I should comment on this aspect, haha.
Maybe more elaboration in the Code of Conduct? For example, it currently says: "In general, as long as you treat others with basic civility and try to contribute in good faith, you will be welcome on Tildes." It isn't super clear what contributing in good faith looks like (or what it looks like when you don't). The "just asking questions" link in this post helps a bit in this regard.
The announcement talks about the paradox of tolerance, which also helps someone get an feel for the direction of ~, but that page isn't as prominent as the Code of Conduct is once you're signed in. (No sidebar link or individual bullet point on the docs landing page.) Maybe some of it could be incorporated into the Code of Conduct?
Conversation is never the problem. Conversation in bad faith is the problem.
True, but political discussion has a tendency to encourage conversing in bad faith. Heck, the way politics is conducted in the U.S. is a case study in wilful misunderstanding and misrepresentation. I by no means think politics should be banned here. If this site has to ban political discussion it's failed in what it set out to do. It's just a question of how to deal with a topic that, without strict and enforced guidelines, lends itself to bad behaviour.
If it encourages discussion in bad faith, then it can only mean something about the way it is framed is in need of attention. That, in my opinion, is where rules can come in to address such a thing before it starts.
Usually when I want to see a decent starting point for moderating communities I start with metafilter and they have some pretty decent expectations regarding political discussion.
I think a good way to allow political talk is to focus it on policy discussion rather than political news discussion.
This way people have to talk about a policy and back up why it'd be good/bad/neutral, and why. Political news forums tend to get spicy because people are talking about news, rather than political science.
Anyone up for a solution like this?
I think this policy policy would be a good policy for the following reasons
Anyone up for a cons list?
The only cons I could think of would be people not sourcing their answers or putting forward policies that are known to not work as solutions.
Other than that, the entire point of a thread would be to debate a policy rather than how potential policies are being covered in the media.
Political discussion has always, and will always, bring out the worst in people. I don't believe there is a single community that has done it correctly, because there is an inevitable shift to one side (see also /pol/, tumblr, any political subreddit etc.). So here's a proposal: any overly sided discussion should not be allowed. This demands clarification. Any political discussion should force both sides to discuss the issue between them, and any echo chambers should be stopped. The problem with internet discussion about politics is that it is too easy to only hear one side. Therefore, any discussion that strays too far to one side should be stopped. This is the only way to prevent the situation reddit is in, where mainstream political discussion is literally only echo chambers.
The problem with this is then you stray into Reddit's territory where subs like /r/The_Donald blatantly violate the site's rules, but the admins are too afraid to do anything about it because of not wanting to appear overtly sided. Similarly, while aiming to have a calm and two sided conversation is good, it's only going to work if both people are actually trying to do so. Once this site becomes public and somewhat more well known, I have no doubt we're going to see people troll and flamebait on purpose, and by forcing everyone to accommodate or tolerate them, you're encouraging and legitimizing their actions. Insisting on hardline neutrality in every conversation isn't sustainable or productive imo, if we want to keep this site civil, because there comes a point where you have to be firm and put your foot down.
You may have missed my point. Low effort flaming should absolutely be prevented, but T_D was not created because its users had a platform for debate with the opposing side
Maybe so. Perhaps there's another way to explain it; I understood from your comment, that every discussion should feature a "both sides" component, right? The rest of the site might say it's because they attempt to abuse the rules more then other subs, but /r/T_D would then counter with something like that the admins are biased against them because they're the only sub that ever sees this action applied to them. The problem with your rules is, you can't dismiss their claims, because now you're not respecting the both sides clause, even if almost everybody agrees it's a farce, it lends them legitimacy and impassions the people who believe in it. If there's a rule that insists there has to be multiple sides to every debate, that's giving them a license to generate an alternative reality to any event they'll encounter, which you aren't allowed to dismiss because it's the other side. Maybe that's a little clearer of my reasoning?
Ah yes, I see your point. The only way to solve that would be to build the community in a way that that doesn't happen. TD already felt they were attacked, but if a perspective is presented, and argued down by others, and the site doesn't allow an echo chamber to develop, then where is the problem. They presented their views, and others disagreed. Maybe that will only work with a small community, but its worth thinking about.
T_D are professional victims, there's nothing you can do that will make them happy other than giving them the only voice. They're malicious maximalists that want to exclude everything they don't like.
You can't take somebody seriously unless they agree to take you seriously too. Otherwise you're just arguing with kindergarteners. All you can do to those people is to be polite and stick to the facts.
Or prevent their existence in the first place.
This is simply untrue. /r/neutralpolitics and /r/politicaldiscussion manage to curate quality good-faith discussions free of the usual vitriol.
As for the proposal, how does one determine what is overly sided? The issues with certain comments by the OP of the long politics thread were the "fake news" angle and false equivalences, not his political stance.
To quote Asimov:
We may have to create refined criteria to avoid bad faith participation, but reverting to the mean should not be one of them.
I concede the point that there are some places with okay discussion, but how do they manage it? Strict rules and moderation. The idea would not be to force people to discuss, but to prevent one-sided discussion and attacks on 'them'
I'm a fan of the moderation on /r/science. The removal of jokes and low-effort comments would help to foster a more civil exchange of views.
I agree, but that requires very strict moderation, and does not promote a varied discussion (in my experience).
The problem is how do you deal with overrepresentation? What if a side has fewer followers (on the specific site or in society in general)? There will be natural imbalances that will prevent to reach an equilibrium whatever the policies are, I think.
Or alternatively, ban political discussion altogether.
or alternatively alternatively, restrict political discussion to news threads, so we avoid the issue of political threads being created to cater to a specific side.
Another alternative. Have folks avoid entering a thread where they might become upset at the topics being discussed. I really hate political threads, and tend to avoid them. I avoid them because I know that it won't bring me any joy to read them. People have to take responsibility for themselves and make a choice as to whether or not they want to participate in a discussion that has the potential to upset them.
We don't have to allow everyone to say anything they want, but people shouldn't be afraid to share an opinion about something they believe because it will upset someone. Someone will always be upset. It's up to us to draw the line on what is acceptable.
The problem their is that the content you want to avoid inevitably spreads to other areas and topics. I don't object to political discussion on principal, I enjoy discussing politics with friends, but on a general purpose website, it just doesn't work, so for the good of the everyone else's experience, I think it should be heavily restricted.
The way I see it is like this. If I make a ~gaming thread about my favorite game, and people are having a discussion about it, then all of a sudden someone starts posting about their favorite bread recipe in my thread, that content would be removed, and the user warned.
The same logic would apply to other topics/discussions.
Unfortunately, that is not what I (anecdotally) have experienced. Politics overlaps often with discussion of other things, these days video games are often politicized. What if you posted about BFV on ~gaming , and someone started a conversation about the recent controversy? Is that worth removing? If not to be talked about in ~gaming , then where? And thus, politics spreads everywhere.
You make a good point. I think that is something that needs to be evaluated on a case by case basis. If it's contributing to the thread in a way that is civil and not causing mass upset, and is also relevant, I don't see an issue with it. Otherwise, remove content, warn user.
The only way to do that ,unfortunately, is heavy moderation , which as I gather is kinda against the ideals of the project. If the goal is trust based moderation, then any meaningful discussion will be lost in the face of mods varied opinions.
Another possible solution. Tildes backend sees that a topic/reply has been mass reported by users. Automatic flag for review, and even hide the content until it has been reviewed by moderators. At that point, a majority vote would be taken to either remove the content/warn the user, or allow the content.
Just throwing out ideas. This could obviously be fleshed out more. And before anyone brings up brigading, that is an entirely separate issue.
So maybe some sort of voting system, where a vote too low means you cant see a comment? Ive worked with communities, and voting systems always fall victim to community issues. There is literally no website where low moderation promotes healthy discussion.
No, not a voting system. A reporting system.
Let's say I make a comment saying that someones fan fiction (or whatever creative project) was complete shit and they should stop writing all together. Now, other users see this and say, "wow, that's really inappropriate", and I get mass reported (via a Report button). I've added nothing to the conversation except an insult.
I've gotten 15 reports on my comment, and now it's hidden (essentially deleted until review). Moderators look over this, and can vote on whether or not this comment needs to be deleted, reinstated, or some other option.
That depends both on a lack of brigading and good moderation. Its not impossible, but would depend on good leadership from the senior team.
To reduce brigading, you could always come back to the trust system. Reports from high trust users in that sub will push the review sooner, while it would take more reports from low trust users. Report something that didn't really deserve it, you lose trust, report something that should be taken down, gain a bit of trust.
I'd forgotten that was a planned feature, but wont that create similar problems to reddit's karma system?
I'm not sure I know what you are trying to say. Are reports from high karma users valued more on reddit? It was my impression that most of the problem with karma was that it was a publicly visible number that people (often erroneously) use to judge accounts, along with people posting whatever they think will get them the most points. I don't think trust would be a public thing for the most part. It would be obvious that moderators or anyone else with an explicit position of power would have high trust, but I don't know if having the number or factors associated with it on the persons profile would be good.
The problem with that is you create echo-chambers where blatant falsehoods go unchecked.
I despised going into that Trump thread, but the only thing worse than the thread is the idea that someone could present the notion that the Mueller investigation is somehow a "hoax", or the Charlottesville situation was somehow down to "fake news", and having nobody challenge those stances and let them to be normalized. (those statements are blatant oversimplifications, but you get the idea).
Next thing you know users know they can go further and further into controversial areas and steer the narrative where they want, which ends up being a one-sided and misleading soapbox under the guise of "discussion".
So the only alternative is to go into a thread and be miserable, and pray I don't get bitter enough to get the banhammer for being "uncivilized". See the problem?
I'm not sure what the solution is, but "just don't go in there" is definitely not the answer.
Honestly, I think what would be good for this site is to make it as free and open as possible. Now don't get me wrong, I don't think this place should be like /b/ where everything is completely anonymous and people post disgusting shit all the time, but moreso it would be good if we allowed the kinds of things you've said here - I don't think there is such a thing as "overly political". It's like reddit - if you don't want to see stuff you don't want to see, then just don't visit those subreddits / those threads.
Action should really only be taken against users in a discussion when they're being outright offensive or threatening. But that's just my two cents as a reddit mod
That doesn't work. Like you said, that's basically what reddit's doing, and it's a major factor in why the entire site is gradually turning to garbage. There's no such thing as a "containment board" and "just don't visit if you don't want to see it" doesn't work either—the existence of that type of content attracts people that do want it, and then those people impact the culture of the rest of the site.
Yeah, I think anyone who's used 4chan for any length of time should be familiar with this, too. While it always had its edgelords, the different boards weren't always "/pol/ users talk about x." Once the site got the reputation /pol/ gave it, it infected all the other boards and you're exposed to their garbage even if you never go near the board.
I'm really disappointed that Reddit decided to double down on that.
How does that not become voat?
As soon as you promote free speech, all of the unsavory people flock to the website as a safe haven from where they've been exiled. That's what happened to voat and you just have to visit the front page to see how that's set the tone for the entire site
Can't say I've ever used voat, so I wouldn't know.
I think I disagree. The problem is when olitics is discussed as religion or philosophy, that is to say, when the scope is too large. If discussion is centered around a specific issue without overarching in general ideologies (and given some amount of good faith), I believe civil discussion is actually possible (see r/changemyview or r/neutralpolitics, for example).
Ok, since you define politics as forcing people I can understand you saying that they cannot be civil (I don't agree, though). But not honest? Why not? I'm not sure if you're implying that in discussing politics people are always pushing an agenda and thus they have hidden motives making them insincere. I do not believe that's a given. Sure, it happens, but I don't think it is bound to happen with everyone, so the generalization seems too broad to me.
But can't politics be portrayed as reaching an agreement instead of forcing your will? I mean, people get angry for a number of reasons and prevalence of opinion happens in many fields, not only in politics. Isn't somebody's or some thing's "will" always forced on people anyway? I mean, is this restricted to politics?
I feel the most common problem with these matters is not being clear on what the rules of the game are (usually because people didn't have a chance to participate in their establishment and as such they didn't even think about why the rules are like they are).
I don't want to sound defiant, but I just don't understand this point. I think maybe our definitions of "honesty" are different? I don't see how being honest is incompatible with being civil. If being civil includes accepting the rules of the game, then you can accept a majority vote for example, even when being honest and expressing your disagreement. Total consensus would be necessary only if the end result is the only thing that counts. For example, if we accept the rules of democracy, we agree on them, so the end result might make you angry, but the rules are accepted, there is an agreement.
Of course, not everyone agrees on the democratic system, for example. But that doesn't mean two people who believe in it cannot accept the rules and thus be civil (and honest).
Or am I missing something?
I have several friends who are fairly libertarian and think similarly to how you do.
It always seems that by making that argument, which to me is reductionist to the absurd, about what government is and/or does, you preclude any possible civil discussion after a certain point.
Most people do not see politics or government that way. I'm not sure how people can have in-depth, detailed discussions, and remain civil when one side is defacto accusing the other side of coercive violence underlying every possible topic.
Can you point to any point in time in history where we've had what could be considered "civilization" where we didn't have some form of government?
I agree that government has a de facto monopoly on violence because generally every single society has decided that violence is mostly unacceptable and not under the purview of any single individual. I believe that is reality. Government is no more or less violent than any other human enterprise.
Like I said before, simplifying the concept of government to coercive violence seems absurd to me, especially since no one can point out any country where lack of government works out in favor of the people. In the absence of government, seemingly violence and coercion still happens, but are wielded by groups and people far removed from accountability.
Why would we try this experiment out when there has been no solution to the underlying problems?
Problems such as the fact that people are not rational actors, people are not all inherently good, the first thing any market actor attempts to do is distort the market in their favor, people are not omnipotent, etc.
Any non-governmental societal setup is doomed to failure if you don't address those problems. It's basically the reason why government exists. I certainly don't have the expertise to evaluate road design, develop economic policy, or determine if a drug is safe to use or not.
What is your functional solution to these problems? What is your compelling reason beyond we should attempt to do so because you think that the government is too coercive?
I specifically stated that I do not know what is optimum for society as a whole. I defer to working groups to make decisions in their field of expertise. I also empower the government to (ideally) empower experts on my behalf on these things. At some point things must be defined and that is one of the reasons why governments exist.
As for the Hayek quote, isn't that exactly what you're trying to do? Advocate that the rest of us give up our government to live in a way prescribed by you?
I don't think any current government is a singular solution. You can vote in any kind of government you want. You can move to many different ones.
I just want to know what you would like to see in it's absence, so I can determine if your point is at least logical or not. What kind of framework would there be, if any? You haven't offered any constructive solutions in the line of "government is a coercive violent means to control people", only criticism which frames the conversation in an extremely confrontational way.
I would argue that most decisions people make have significant impacts on others whether they want to acknowledge it or not.
Interesting concepts presented at that video, but for all of the talk about rebutting the obvious criticism, I never once saw a rebuttal of the most obvious. If you're essentially paying for your own laws, won't the amount of money you have impact what kind of law you are able to get? You're trading governmental oversight, of which everyone supposedly has an equal say (dat messed up campaign finance law, doe), in for free market oversight where the amount of wealth you have directly impacts the legal framework that you live under. Instead of indirectly purchasing control of the coercive parts of the law by bribing, ahem, donating to politicians, you're directly purchasing control over the coercive parts of the law.
I would never want to live under such a system, and most people being poor, I assume would be with me.
I would support a blanket ban on any and all politics. There has never been an online forum to successfully manage that topic, ever. It infects all other communities, to the point where any time anyone disagrees with anyone else everybody starts rummaging through post histories to find a comment they can drag out to start calling people libtards or nazies and it's downhill from there.
Well, that shouldn't be a problem here since most probably a "temporary username" system allowing you to post pseudo-anonymously on a per-thread basis will be implemented. And also user history won't probably be public (at least not all of it, just a few days max).
Temporary usernames will make it worse - anonymity breeds incivility. And if the post histories are visible at all someone will make an uneditreddit style archive and it may as well be a 10 year history.
No, that's not how the system works. I suggest you take a look at the thread on anonymity, where it is discussed in more detail.
It's not pure anonymity because temporary usernames are still (privately) tied to the main account, and reputation is counted across usernames. Also, mods and maybe some high tier trusted users will be able to see the main account username for a while in case corrective action is needed.
Unreddit style archives should not be a problem as long as posts are published with the temporary username, since the tie with the main account is not publicly disclosed.
It's anonymous enough that all you ever do is train users to ride the banline, which is usually set with some degree of leniency. So basically the discourse inevitably spirals down to that space between where you want people to avoid and where you become motivated to take action against them and lives there forever.
I don't think I follow, tbh. As I said, reputation, warnings and punishment are still directed to the main account.
In any case, even if such system was not implemented, people would just resort to use throwaway accounts and delete past submissions. So it's in the interest of the site to implement a tool that can help users preserve anonymity and don't delete submissions.
Not always.
https://qz.com/741933/internet-trolls-are-even-more-hostile-when-theyre-using-their-real-names-a-study-finds/
I've seen that linked before - openpetition.de asks for your real name and address, but does not make you prove it. So you can put in Bob McBob who lives at 123 Fake St and get through without a problem.
It is bad science and worse reporting.
Anecdotal, but have you seen Facebook groups?
Yep - I love to browse /r/drama (and they also turn up on /r/insanepeoplefacebook quite a bit for some reason).
There's always going to be nasty shit going down, we're talking about increased or decreased rates. And those groups are also candidates for groupthink - you get a critical mass of arseholes and suddenly the group fills up with them.
Some topics are poison because the subject is poisonous.
For example, anything about Tommy Robinson / Stephen Yaxley-Lennon is going to be poison because most of the information available is from far right sources who distort the facts. This destroys the discussion before it's started, allowing people to "just ask questions" about why this "reporter" is jailed for "reporting facts", when the truth is he was on a suspended sentence for contempt of court (and anyone doing what he did would face the same), and he did the same thing again.
This is a deliberate tactic of the far right, and we need to guard against it here.
I'm going to go ahead and say that you have an ideology problem here Deimos.
On the one hand you have told reddit (though not directly) that they are responsible for making the world a worse place by allowing the hatred and vitriol that exists on their site for the sake of growth. This effectively says "these things are bad and shouldn't be here". You said this in your announcement blog, that you do not like the hate and vitriol on reddit. This ostensibly means you MUST disagree with the existence of TD, you know exactly what it used to be before they purged all the jew-hate and pretend they've always been nice with them.
On the other hand, you have banned a person saying "you're a bad and disgusting person for your activities, which hurt people".
I think that ban was an ideological mistake. You are willing to tell the community leaders of another service that they are responsible for hate on their site that hurts people, but you are not willing to allow a user to tell voters of a person that has promoted hate, defended nazis at Charlottesville and hurt people.
The manner in which this user was acting was unfriendly, aggressive and personal. But what they were doing is telling people that they are responsible, and that they think that they're bad people for being responsible for that.
I feel like you need to be very careful here. As a trans person I read Redacted's first comment as a person triggered by a TD user saying they're scared of being beaten up, this provokes an incredibly strong response in me because he has absolutely NO IDEA what being actually scared of that truly is. I am viscerally scared of every single person in that subreddit and firmly believe that the people still supporting him must either be completely blind/stupid or completely support the hate he supports.
I'm on the side of "this submission was a bad faith post intended on garnering the reaction that you saw from Redacted". The user literally recommended that people visit TD with an open-mind in another comment, a community that I believe you, Deimos, would ban in a heartbeat if the decision were up to you. For being a hateful community. For spreading misinformation. For spreading lies. For Pizzagate. For organising Charlottesville which ended in a death and countless injuries. For many things.
You're going to see a lot of very strong reactions to people that say they support TD. And if all those strong reactions result in a ban then the brand-image that people discuss online is that Tildes bans people that say bad things about TD. This won't be an entirely truthful thing that they go elsewhere and say. But it will be a negative impact on the brand image.
I would err on the side of temporary punishments for emotional outburst incidents like this if they aren't indicative of all activity of a user. A sitewide timeout of a user for a week and an underlying reduction of their trust score would be more effective.
Either way, it's ideologically wrong for you to ban a user that has an emotional outburst at a person that supports hate subreddits while being against hate subreddits yourself as per your blog post.
I don't think you would ban me for telling someone that they are a disgusting abhorrent human being if I see someone say they like or support former subreddits like /r/jailbait or /r/coontown. I do not see how this user's emotional reaction differs much given what I have seen many times in TD and this user telling people they should visit it with an open mind. If we compare that to, for example, a user saying that you should visit /r/coontown with an open mind, it makes the bad faith posting incredibly obvious.
You know, why not just make the political subtildes and fluff subtildes and make them opt-in and sequestered like the adult section we have back there?
As the person who seems to be the cause of the ruckus, I'm not really sure what to do. I can proclaim until I'm red in the face that I'm acting in good faith - i even posted a list of stuff I've done to demonstrate just how fricken good my intentions are to someone who has been going around this site calling me names. I doubt it will make a difference in their mind though - the movie they're watching has this as just further evidence to confirm their beliefs about me.
All I did was post asking if there were other people who like the guy i like, and if not then expressing the hope that interactions on political topics could still happen without flaming etc., and then I just responded as honestly as I could to the questions people asked me because it seemed the civil thing to do.
I did get flustered by that one noise tag in the abortion thread, but that's all. I haven't been trying to play the victim or any such nonsense. I know that there are people here who hate my guts simply for not being like them, or for believing in things they think are stupid or wrong, or for not avidly collecting links to back up every single fucking thing i might have to defend in an disagreement as one of the only people on the site who thinks differently from the mob on a variety of subjects. I've been trying not to argue with people if possible, maybe i haven't been trying hard enough.
I'm sorry that this has been stressful for you admins (and to any users similarly affected). I suppose it was inevitable that something like this would happen, and I am optimistic that you will find a clever and credible method of moving forward. Being that I'm the source of the drama, I suspect nothing i propose will be seen as credible by the majority (even if it is smart) so i won't try too hard to offer anything at this time.
I haven't really read your Trump thread, so I don't really know what went down in there except for the comments Deimos referenced in his ban thread. Also, I don't have much to say about American politics.
However, if you don't mind my saying so and to use this case as an example, I think the title question of your thread could have been phrased in a more neutral way so as to minimize confrontation (not that I think you were actively looking for it). Especially if your intention was to just know how many Trump supporters were there in ~ already and whether it'd be wise to promote the site in other Trump-leaning spaces. The fact that the discussion that ensued was an afterthought for you as you mentioned above, I think means a different prompt would've been better.
Umm, I don't think so. I think people can distinguish between general ideology and practical issues and solutions. At least I don't feel influenced by knowing you support Trump, though I can't talk for everyone. And anyway, you can't know that's what will happen until you try.
I didn't make my post anticipating that I'd need to walk on eggshells to that extreme. There are probably hundreds of superior titles I could have used, and probably many far more persuasive things i could have said in my responses to people's questions that would have been less likely to generate some of the more heated responses. I'm not a master persuader - i was just trying to be myself.
Fair enough. What I'm saying though, is that for sensitive topics (and current politics, you will probably agree, is one of them), maybe you should anticipate it and thus be as careful as possible.
Being yourself (I guess you mean "being spontaneous) is fine... in a game thread, in a music thread, in a coding thread. But probably not in a controversial thread. Since you must know views will be polarized, you have to sacrifice spontaneity for caution and measure. At least thats how I see it...
If you place yourself in my shoes, what would you have chosen as a title with the benefit of hindsight (it's sort of inescapable now)? Despite the small handful of disgruntled people, most of the interactions on the post were quite civil, with one of the admins even commenting on how well it was going and wondering how we could replicate it in the future. It will likely be impossible to please everyone in all circumstances, but if there are strategies that one can employ to provide such people with less cause for distress - especially if they can be employed with integrity - I'd enjoy learning them.
I think it would be best if you tried to come up with different formulations yourself, to be honest.
If you still haven't, take a look at the r/neutralpolitics wiki, it's very worth reading.
Just to give you an idea about what could be avoided (I don't want to start a conversation about style at this moment, but since you ask...) and focusing only on the title, not the selftext.
First, notice that your general topic, per se, most probably wouldn't have been accepted in NP based on the premise, since they don't accept questions about demographics of the group or breakdown of affiliation (end of the wiki). This is not a good starting point, since you are asking people to identify themselves and their general perspectives. There are no possible arguments here to be made, just feelings. Besides, if people would answer directly and sincerely, the answers would just be "Yes" and "No". I don't think that would've been interesting as a thread, so the starting point is problematic, and people start talking about general politics and ideologies. Also, you are creating a divide from the get-go: who is with me and who isn't, this could be interpreted as confrontational. Instead, politics are better discussed on facts and deeds.
Second, regarding phrasing: "if I am alone as a MAGA/Trump voter/supporter in a sea of reddit mods". I think you are already making two assumptions with this sentence:
For (a), since as you said the site had been politically averse so far, you cannot possibly know if you are or not, because people haven't been talking about it. Also, framing it as "being alone in a sea of X" can be read as portraying yourself as a victim, which in turn might start making people mad if, for example, they are the ones feeling aggravated by the politics you defend. Etc.
For (b), again you are assuming someone's ideology without sources, even if it were true, you're not providing facts and you are not acknowledging diversity in a big and varied group. These are not facts, this is hearsay, and you should understand people don't like to be lumped together in a box (again this is an example of the "me" and "the rest" and increases the vicrimism perspective mentioned above).
To summarize: the starting point is not conductive of a constructive conversation and you are making assumptions that are not granted (remember the NP rules: the is no common knowledge and do not make assumptions) and thus will probably irritate people who in turn cannot really discuss fairly because there are no facts to discuss, just feelings and rumors. So if they want to discuss it they should first untangle all of this which is a burden that's not onto them, but onto OP, I think.
Hope I made myself clear enough and gave you some actionable thinking points for your future posts, and notice I'm just analyzing your starting point and phrasing, not criticizing you. Also, as I said, I don't want this to become an endless discussion about style, spontaneity or sincerity, please.
Political discussion is one thing, but how about political analysis? For example the discussions on yesterday's Ontario election's debate at r/CanadaPolitics, or the poll discussions? At the end of the day, I feel political discussion can work if everyone comes in with an open mind and stays civil. The vibe I get at r/CanadaPolitics for example is much different than the more polarizing US-centric r/politics.
The problem with political discussion so far as I see it is that it always centers around american politics. While this isn't a problem for the majority of the site it is something that always annoys me as I am from the UK. On reddit I have every single mention of trump filtered using RES.
On reddit r/unitedkingdom is just as bad, at some point it transitioned into constant moaning about brexit. Politics has a habit of completely dominating discussion everywhere on a site. In an ideal world I would just ban political discussion outright, because it becomes one sided and fostering equal political discussion seems almost impossible, because it becomes two separate one sided arguments, where everyone shouts their opinion at each other and nothing good comes from it.
It boils down to the reddit hive mind, and it can leave people feeling left out, or in my case complete apathy to the whole thing. Sorry I don't have a better solution to politics, but my opinion is ban it out right, at least until a good solution can be reached.