Should moderation be more transparent?
Before starting this topic, I thought I'd start a discussion that wasn't held before. @cfabbro and other commenters who have better memories than I pointed out that this isn't the case. They've also laid out it's been tried and was unsuccessful. I stand corrected.
I do not want to contribute any noise to the website, so I'd appreciate it if @Deimos can lock or remove the topic all together, if he deems it appropriate. I'd also appreciate it if no further comments are made so as to not put any further burden on moderation. I apologize for wasting everyone's time.
My original post
Frankly, I'm not sure if I should even be writing this as it will likely end up consuming more of my time than I intend to spend on it, but as someone who's relatively a veteran member of this community1 which I'm happy to be a part of, I want to voice my only disappointment with it to see what the rest of the community think and try to explore if there might be better way to do things.
Let me preface my post with some baseline opinions that I do hold.
Tildes is a private platform, in that it's owned by a single person and managed by a few select moderators. These people have, I assume, shared opinions on how to run a community based on their priors. This is well within their right. This post is not about some misguided criticism of Tildes because it lacks free speech or whatever. It's a private community that we're a part of because we're allowed to be in it. It'd be disappointing, but people who have the power to do so can show me the door today and I'd not hold it against them.
I have no doubt moderating the website as well as moderators have is a time consuming, thankless job and they do it not for any gain but to contribute back to the community they too are happy to be a part of. My post does not intend to criticize the moderators themselves.
What prompted me to write this post was the apparent removal of Macklemore's Hind's Hall topic. It was a topic of personal interest and I had followed the discussion as well as I can without contributing to it myself, other than some voting and a couple of labeling that I thought was justified. I understand and somewhat agree that the last time I read the comments the conversation had veered off topic to the election and voter preferences2 but, despite the conversation getting circular, it seemed civil. It had valuable contributions from opposing views and I learned from it but now it's gone. Maybe something happened and people started to attack each other in the comments when I was asleep but as of late last night my time (I'm currently in a GMT+3 zone), that was objectively not the case.
Regardless, this post is not about why that specific topic was removed3. It's just the most recent example of a trend, or rather the general pattern with which the moderation decide on how to handle topics that can sometimes be controversial. I'm not a native speaker and it can be hard for me to turn a phrase sometimes, so let me be clear: there are topics that should be removed without seeing first how the community will respond to it. For example, I personally don't take kindly the posts that seem to think someone's existence or dignity as a human being can be a matter of discussion. I think these topics should and rightly do so get nuked out of existence. But in the case of the most recent example, I don't think that was the case.
What I'd suggest, or rather like to put forward is the idea of some kind of a moderation log that show the rest of the members of the community how and why a moderation decision was made. We already do have this system as "Topic log" in each thread, but its scope seems narrow. I, as someone who enjoyed following the aforementioned topic, would've liked to know why moderation decided to take the action that it did, instead of, say, a seemingly more agreeable action to lock the topic down to new comments. It would've helped preserve the discussion and frankly, be more respectable toward people who put their time into contributing to it as it had long, thoughtful posts in it.
I guess that's the crux of the issue for me. The moderation is so opaque that I don't even know who the moderators are, even as a long time member of this community. They're not listed anywhere that I can find. I know that @cfabbro and @mycketforvirrad often add tags and @cfabbro has in their bio that they're a moderator, but I also seem to recall, maybe wrongly, that there's a hierarchy between the mods themselves with regards to what they can and cannot do. I do believe that who ever they are, they are acting in good faith but I also think there's a great information asymmetry between moderators and the rest of the members of the community. Deimos and the moderators shoulder the thankless burden of maintaining the health of the community, but I don't think it'd be far fetched to say that the rest of the members play a part, too. So why not give us the benefit of the doubt sometimes, trust us to have respectful disagreements without getting involved too much, but when you do, let us know why you did4?
I'm sorry if this reads as disjointed mumbo jumbo. I'd appreciate it if my post is taken in good faith that it is written and if you want me to clarify something, you can ask me directly to do so. My intention with this thread was to start a conversation to see what the community's opinion on how the website is being moderated, so while I'll read every single comment, I will not be contributing to it further unless it's necessary.
1: I had a different account from early 2019 that needed to be removed due to privacy reasons. Since name change was not possible, I created this new account with the advice and help of @Deimos.
2: Though it could be argued that it was a relevant discussion, given the spirit of the video and the part where the artist reveal their own voting preference.
3: I will refer to it to help me make my point but please do not assume I'm obsessed about that particular topic.
4: I do realize this would inevitably increase the workload of moderators. My suggestion isn't that moderation should justify every action they take but there are some actions that are irreversible, which happen few and far in between, that I think should be justified. (Keep in mind what I mentioned in my preface.)
A bunch of users (myself included) have an assortment of elevated privileges so they can edit topic titles/tags/links, move topics between groups, and/or create/edit wiki pages. But only @Deimos can remove or lock topics, remove comments, and ban people. He is the only admin and also effectively the only "moderator" on Tildes, so the only person that can really address this topic with any authority...
However, this same sort of suggestion has been made several times before in the past, and it has always been rejected. IMO, it's a lot of extra work for little benefit, and total moderation transparency would also likely have serious drawbacks like encouraging rule lawyering and needless meta drama/debate.
p.s. Related, I would highly recommend reading Eevee's On a technicality, the blog post that Tildes' rules and moderation policies were directly inspired by. Seriously, if you haven't read it yet, do so. It does a great job of explaining the reasoning behind the simple, subjective rules (like "don't be an asshole") and the lack of total transparency.
p.p.s. "@cfabbro has in their bio that they're a moderator"... I'm only a moderator on /r/tildes, and reporter on Tildes' Gitlab, but I am not a moderator on Tildes itself. So I cannot remove topics/comments or ban people on this site (nor would I want to be able to, TBH... my judgement isn't nearly as sound as Deimos' ;).
I hope my post wouldn't be considered as needless meta drama/debate. I do agree with your comments but as I said in my post, wouldn't it be better to have some faith in the community, too? I think most of us can figure out a bad faith actor whose sole intention is to stir the pot. We're a relatively small community. I don't know you personally, but I do know your username. I'm sure my name is familiar to you. We're anonymous, but with time we accrue a degree of reputation within the community that no one in their right mind would be willing to throw away just to stir something up. Maybe I'm being naive, I don't know.
I believe I have read that blog post before, but I'll read it again. For the record, I am generally happy with how Tildes is being run. If I wasn't, I wouldn't be here. There's just one thing that doesn't sit right with me.
I mentioned this briefly but perhaps I should've elaborated it further in my post. Commenting takes time for all of us. We want to make sure we're heard and understood correctly by those who don't really know us and come across as decent and open minded, so we try to choose our words carefully. If I engage in a conversation with a person or a group of mutual interest about a disagreement that we have and that post gets removed without a warning or explanation, I feel like that's not mindful of the time people spend contributing and it further disincentives people into not doing so anymore.
If I were to give a concrete example of how transparent moderation can be, I'd point people to look at MetaFilter1, which is a somewhat similar community to Tildes (of which I'm also a part of). I honestly do not know how they handle removing topics themselves, but for comments, they have a reasonable solution.
1: I get that we're talking about different scales of operation, but from the outside looking in, that also seems like a choice.
My concerns about rule lawyering and meta drama aren't based entirely on speculation... we've experienced those exact issues already in the past.
Not all meta discussion or debate is needless or unwarranted. Your topic is totally fair and your questions/concerns are understandable, but when nearly every decision is logged and has reasoning attached to it, that will inevitably cause way more meta discussions, which is a problem even without it causing drama. E.g. A huge complaint in the early days of Tildes, back when Deimos was way more transparent about every decision, was there was way too many meta discussions, as well as way too much meta debate/drama, which caused a lot of people to leave the site.
Frankly, I don't think that's true, especially since the vast majority of "pot stirring" gets removed before most people even see it. E.g. I really don't want to go into the alyaza ban drama again but it is a good example. She was a genuinely valued contributor, and by all appearances she seems to have mellowed out a lot on Beehaw. However, she also did and said some remarkably assholish things while here that the vast majority of users weren't aware of because it got removed (or took place behind the scenes), but which still caused quite a few other valued contributors to leave the site due to repeatedly being on the receiving end of such behavior. So when she was finally permanently banned a bunch of other users came to her defense without knowing the whole picture. And Deimos couldn't exactly reveal the whole picture due to privacy issues, deleted comments being deleted server-side after 30 days so not able to be referenced, as well as it largely being a "last straw" sort of situation at that point too... Which is much harder to explain without putting in way more effort than its worth.
Thank you for your insight. I mean, look, since you're speaking from experience not just as a long standing member of the community but someone as an insider, at least compared to a regular member like me, I'll take your word for it. If I had remember the things you'd mentioned, I wouldn't have started this topic but I only had vague memories of the past and I didn't make the connection that they're in any way related to what I intended to talk about.
No prob, and no worries. Glad I could try to help you better understand the reasoning behind why things are the way they are here. I know it's probably pretty annoying having me essentially just say "trust me" in response to your concerns and suggestions. But unfortunately that's about all that I really can say at this point, since most of this was learned through a decade+ of experience moderating on reddit, and even most of the drama I mentioned happening here on Tildes can't be pointed to directly.
Not at all. Despite not having been engaged with anyone here privately, I have a baseline of trust with established members such as yourself and that extends to moderation, too. We can have disagreements here and there and that's natural, but I don't have the slightest inclination that anyone's acting in bad faith.
I wasn't going to make an extra comment to point this out, but since I'm replying to you, I may as well mention that I hid my post with a note.
I'm a bit ambivalent. Mod transparency gives room for "lawful evil" styles of malice, but hiding the rules shifts towards potential malice of the moderator.
I can use the very article linked as an example on why there may at least be some sort of transparency:
This is an argument set to use how the minority can spoil the barrel for the majority, which makes sense (and I've seen dozens of times on other platforms). Sometimes you simply need to moderate based on a vibe, one respectful of the community.
But when otherwise active posts are removed and there's no obvious malicious actor (after all, if its a few bad actors, you simply ban those users), we start to horseshoe back over to the same result; a lot of interesting discourse was deleted due to the opinion of one moderator, and many honest actors suffer.
This in some ways can be considered worse, because the community can somewhat keep a bad peer in check (ignore/block, report, etc.). A disagreeable moderator simply leaves you SOL. That's usually how the other worst case happens where users migrate off a site, their own recourse when they cannot enact change but want a certain behavior. And that's something I've done several times, sometimes out of personal disagreement, sometimes because the site itself did indeed drastically change and cause an exodus.
This is all theoretical and this isn't the first time this topic came up, so I don't think much will change this time. I just wanted to make a proper rebuttal to the ideas of that article. It does a good job helping to empathize with a benevolent moderator who may feel opaque otherwise. And I appreciate that they don't pretend to have a good idea, because there isn't one. (fwiw, I was always privy to the Victorian Sufi Buddha Lite policy, as SSC calls it)
But like all malice, the practice leads lots of room for corruption to seep in. Road to hell and all that.
okay but like... this site has exactly one moderator, and that person is also the site's creator and the guy who (presumably) pays its server costs. If you don't trust Deimos to run the site more or less fairly (with some allowance for human error, as he's only human), the entire Tildes project is kinda dead on arrival.
Like I said, it's only in theory. I just don't want that article to be a universal defense for vague rulings in internet community. I'm fairly neutral towards Deimos, personally.
And yes, that's the dangers of a benevolent dictator for life (BDFL). If they cease to be benevolent, the community more or less collapses. It wouldn't be the first time.
It may not even be that Deimos "corrupts". People move on in life, retire, get sick, and die. If there's no proper successor, then a BDFL ends with that life. Some people out there should remember that as a general sentiment when revering a certain brand or company.
EDIT: and we're locked, wonderful. This is pretty much what I'm talking about, but I guess if the OP wanted it there's some weight here. Real shame though: this also has the issue on how much control a poster has of a public post once it goes public. Who truly controls when a topic goes dormant?
That's exactly what rules do and the other half of my point of why transparency is important. We can't read Deimos' mind, but if we get a decent enough ruleset and especially psychology on how to approach rules, you can create a group or more of proteges who can in fact take up that mantle, be it here or on future sites. A properly written ruleset can keep a legacy alive and make a transition from a BDFL feel natural, instead of this end/beginning of an era.
The internet is still relatively young, but these are issues faced all the time by other physical communities. Forums are dying as is, but I'd want to try and preserve what integrity is left if possible.
I just don't think there's any possible way to prevent the community from collapsing should Deimos cease to be benevolent. No amount of checks and balances are actually going to be effective in that sense -- certainly not the type of increased scrutiny on moderation decisions being discussed in this topic. So what's the point of discussing it in theory when even theoretically it's largely something that no changes in site design could possibly change or avoid what would happen if Deimos (or someone else in his place, should the worst happen) started behaving maliciously?
The only moderator who can remove posts or comments (or lock posts afaik) is Deimos himself. The other "mods" aren't really such -- they just edit titles and tags or move posts between groups.
As a result I think only Deimos can really answer your questions here, and it's worth remembering that it's only the one guy making those decisions.
Right. Tildes doesn't really have the concept of a mod. It has separate permissions which can be given out to users, but not a large number of users have them, and the big perms (removal, locking) aren't currently given out to anyone else, I believe.
Deimos has mentioned that he has less time to spend on the site these days, and probably finds removing a thread a lot easier than babysitting it all day. I understand the desire for more overall transparency, but I think that's really all that's going on. Just a lack of resources.
I do think a lot of old users now have a pretty strong understanding of what kind of sites Deim wants this place to be, and it might make sense to grant some more powerful permissions to others to help him with the heavier moderation duties. But ultimately that's his decision, and for one reason or another he's not chosen to take it yet. I would harbor a guess that managing others introduces another layer of complexity that he might not might feel is required yet at the site's currently popularity level.
I hadn't known that, thank you for the information. I think the general point of my post still stands, but had I known the information you've given me, I would've advocated for the mods to have the ability to remove topics and posts as well without compromising on my desire to have more transparency.
The idea of a moderation log has merit.
That said, in my experience it's really easy for meta conversations about moderation to use an increasing amount of bandwidth and thereby shift the vibe in the wrong direction.
People start to get precious about comments or threads or users that they were attached to. They carry their disagreements forward into other threads. They start to feel like they need to crusade for what's "right". In short they start to feel like what's happening (or not happening) on the forum is far more important than it actually is... and it goes south from there.
Of course I have no idea if that would happen on Tildes, only that I've seen it happen before more than once.
Personally I'm quite content with everyone (me included) not knowing the details about moderation. Tildes is a nice place to hang out on the internet, it's hard to imagine moderation politics making it better.
If a thread or a comment I like disappears and it bothers me, it's a reminder not to take the site too seriously.
Very well put. These sort of things have ruined many subreddits where people get unhealthy invested in the meta of things, which just drains energy from mods and other users.
I can understand the frustration of being on the receiving end of having a discussion locked down, but as you say it can also be a good reason to take a breather. Many times a discussion has simply run its course and will benefit from being locked preemptively. Not necessarily because of any malice but simply an assessment of everyone has had their say and it will likely not benefit of running any longer.
I do agree with your comments, but I'd like to clarify that I'm not advocating for users to police the moderators or their decisions. If there was transparency over irreversible moderation decisions, I think there should also be a firm rule against members of the community debating said decisions for the reasons you've outlined well.
I do disagree with you that deleting an entire topic or a comment thread is a useful tool against against people carrying their disagreements further into other threads, though. I don't think I've ever had a heated discussion with anyone in this community, let alone a long standing one, but if I did I'm sure I'd remember their name and just wouldn't engage with them anymore. I wouldn't follow them into other threads and take jabs at them for some vain gratification. Would everyone act the same way? I doubt it but that's why there's moderation, which is doing a great job except for this one thing.
My understanding is that the type of moderation you're talking about is only done by Deimos. The elevated privileges that some users have stops short of being able to lock/delete posts or take action against users, and that means Deimos is the only person taking those actions. On occasion I've seen him post a reason, but on more occasions I think I've not seen a reason posted and generally he has stated this is due to being busy. Given that some moderation events are more time-sensitive and he can't necessarily just check the site every 24 hours when he's on a lunch break or something, I think that means he ends up doing some moderation when he has less time or focus that should (in my opinion) be afforded for the moderation task since he's the only one that can do it.
I've not been here as long as you have been but from everything I've seen, this site isn't changing for better and for worse because it lacks the funds to sustain itself and Deimos supports it financially and thus has his reasons to maintain control of its operation and of course he started it so if I were in his shoes I'd probably be less inclined to just freely hand it over to anyone else hoping that they would somehow be able to grow it and hope to not have it fall into even worse of a state than having some moderation challenges as it is now.
I also don't think Deimos is browsing regularly like you might think an active mod on Reddit or some other forum might do, so when he takes action on something it isn't as though he just personally took it upon himself to take action, most likely there were "malice" labels applied which basically notifies Deimos to take a look. There's no transparency on this either and probably for good reason but I suspect there are some users here who semi abuse malice labels knowing that Deimos is the only moderator and doesn't always have time to take a more active hand in moderation and is potentially more likely to lock a topic that might appear troublesome than to try to more actively keep up with moderation on the topic. Of course that isn't always the case, there's some where he has just deleted threads within a topic and not locked the whole topic, but it's not hard from an observation standpoint to recognize that it's easy to shut down conversations by using malice labels at anything that can be considered remotely insensitive. But that's purely speculation on my part because again, it's not like there's any real data for us to go on.
In the end, I think the site is in a bit of a feedback loop because without it being something that could sustain itself in terms of financially supporting those working for it, then it has less reason to have that work done, and without that work done there's less chance of there ever being any way for consistent financial support. I mean realistically we've seen many sites struggle to find ways to bring in money, advertising has its flaws, subscriptions have their flaws (substantial loss of users being a big one), donations are unreliable and often inconsequential to the amount that is needed.
For some of us that may have a Plex server or the like where we share this with family/friends etc. I think we might also recognize the burden in providing a service that doesn't pay for itself and in some cases can be a burden in terms of support. I personally established that tone with people I set up where it's a take it or leave it type of situation, you get what you get, if something is wrong let me know and I'll try to fix it when I can but no guarantees. I intentionally never requested money from anyone because I don't want the obligation. I of course can't speak for Deimos or how he feels about the site but it's easy for me to imagine how someone could view the site in terms of the amount of effort you can put into something that isn't a job you're paid to deal with.