New label suggestion: a removable "One-sided" label that gradually reduces the comment's visibility
I'm posting this as a new topic because it's long. This idea came out of thinking of a response to @TaylorSwiftsPickles ' suggestion to have a "Misinformation" label. I agree that misinformation is a problem on Tildes and that the playing field is often unfairly set for the ones trying to rectify it, due to how the site works.
On the other hand, like some already said in the comments, such a label could be easily abused because it would be a frictionless way to make someone else do a lot of work. Showing the validity of some piece of information requires digging up sources and those sources can usually be endlessly contested, no matter how good they are.
sidenote
Personally I've sometimes chosen to let things slide rather than give sources because the source would have been in my own language and I've made a decision long ago to not disclose my nationality - this is because it's a small group of people and my job is almost unique among that group.Another issue is that most people who spread misinformation, just like @TaylorSwiftsPickles said, are in fact not aware of doing so. They believe they're just teaching others the correct information. If it would be a lot of work on their part to ingest opposing material and then a lot of emotional work to allow their worldview to change (a process that for some people will cause physical pain), there isn't much hope to make real difference, save for some exceptionally adept people who've grown used to this process - but those people are usually not the ones spreding misinformation because they've already checked themselves before hitting "post topic".
tangent
Most of the people I know who are able to do this kind of shifting quickly are underprivileged one way or another. I had to learn to do it because if I hadn't learned to see the world from the oppressors' perspective and adapt my behaviour to it when necessary, my chances of surviving (let alone thriving) would have been considerably weaker.Most people who represent the majority and haven't fully grasped their own privilege haven't had to learn to think outside of their own perspective. It's not an easy thing to learn and it's not realistic to expect them to learn it simply because someone pointed out their misinformed idea online. Most will simply say "No, you're wrong because the majority opinion is on my side". That's easy and efficient and doesn't lead to negative payoff for them, so that's what tends to happen (in most cases, not all).
When a misinformed view happens to be the majority view on Tildes, a label like this will more likely burden the people trying to rectify it than those holding the view. That's unless we expect the admin and moderators to evaulate every case individually and be diligent and objective enough to accurately gauge all or at least most of them. Being that we are all humans, it's a big ask.
Which brings me to ask what kind of label would enable the misinformed person to proactively perform a sanity check on their own post/comment, without introducing hostility. I believe that failing to consider alternative perspectives is a major factor in adopting and spreading misinformation. I am assuming that most people here on Tildes would agree with the principle that an idea that takes into account diverse opinions and experiences is better considered than one speaking from a single perspective only.
Therefore I propose a label that could be used to point out when someone's comment is clearly overlooking information that would be readily available if only they cared to consider other people and different points of view. It would then fall on the person who made a one-sided comment to further educate themselves if they so wish. They could perform an online search or ask for more information on Tildes (but no one would be obligated to give it). I think it would be ideal if the label could be later removed, in case sufficient edits were made to the labelled comment.
Evaluating whether a text is one-sided is usually easier than deciding whether or not it is misinformation, so this label wouldn't be as easy to abuse. People can detect its misuse simply by looking at the text itself, without having to read a bunch of additional material. It's also easier for the person who made the comment to try to broaden their perspective. Not everyone will want to do so, of course, but at least those who are unintentionally appearing obtuse will have a chance to do better.
Finally, in terms of design, I wouldn't want the label to be eye-catching like the "Exemplary" label. Rather, it could appear as normal text with a normal background, perhaps a tad smaller size and in brackets. If more than one such label was given to the same comment, it could affect the text colour of the whole comment, making it gradually more and more faint. In other words the label would reduce the visual weight of the comment while still keeping it readable.
IMO all these propositions fall into the category of "downvotes with extra steps", and downvotes are terrible and 100% misused. I'm not even a fan of the "exemplary" label, because that also can be misused, as it implicitly gives legitimacy to any comment.
Either the misinformed comment is written in bad faith, and the tag won't do anything for its poster, or it's written in good faith and the tag might feel like a passive-aggressive attack like "heh you don't deserve my time so I'll just click on this button to say you're wrong". I don't think you can solve these kinds of complex social issues with simple tech solutions like tags. If you think a user needs to be corrected, I'd say the most efficient is just to write a comment. Or just ignore and move on. If that's a recurring problem with a user, mods are there to solve that. Tildes is a small site that can be intelligently managed by humans.
Edit: well, and basically everything skybrian said here
Edit2: case in point. I got an exemplary tag "just to make a point" (literally the comment), and upvotes
I don’t actually know what user or users people are talking about, but the way these discussions have unfolded definitely makes it sound like a lot of users have a specific person or person(s) in mind with these feature requests. I guess I just don’t participate in those threads so I’m oblivious to who, but I get the feeling that in a lot of cases the user isn’t recurrently doing anything that’s actionable for moderation. It seems a group of users simply doesn’t like them and doesn’t want to have to endure their perspective “polluting” their space.
This is why, when giving feedback on design or features, the guidance is often to explicitly specify what the perceived problem you’re trying to solve for is rather than focusing on the feature or proposed solution. We’re often proposing features/solutions to address a problem, but if we don’t do real thinking about what the problem actually is then we end up designing systems and features that don’t really solve it and also add a bunch of new problems. If we’re pretty clear that the problem being solved for is “I don’t like seeing these people here and wish I could banish them” then we don’t have to play coy with all these workarounds to do banning or downvotes with extra steps.
There does seem to be some kind of XY problem that causes square peg into round hole issue. For example, if you taken OP’s proposal as written, and use a purely objective metric for “one sided”, someone who writes a post about, say, a Supreme Court judgement who doesn’t take into consideration the Republican/conservative side of things would have written one sided opinion, and should be labeled as such. Yet I don’t think this is what most people would want. But trying to fit an objective criteria over what is ultimately a subjective end goal will have the effect of both including and excluding things they don’t actually want.
There’s that, but I also think a lot of the inability to ignore and move-on comes from a tendency to “catastrophize” and think “If I don’t correct the record on this right now then the next thing I know this space will be OVERRRUN with people who think like this.” There’s certainly tipping points where that can happen, but in the vast majority of situations that lone crank or group of disagreeable dudes just ends up being part of the “local color” and known as the lone cranks rather than an incipient movement.
The times when there actually is something brewing is usually pretty clearly evident if you’ve been around online spaces long enough. They do this sort of thing where they probe the environment by posting from certain sources or proposing certain “just asking questions” style arguments while having this affected faux-courteous rhetorical style. They want you to think they were merely curious and don’t understand why people are being so RUDE to them. It’s usually very easy to identify those sorts of people in contrast to the people arguing in good faith/ignorance or mild disagreements.
If this were a venue like Reddit or Twitter where there actually are a bunch of media illiterate naïfs who fall for that shtick the posture of being on high-alert at all times would make more sense. But the selection criteria for this place, and the slow rate of growth, make sure that the vast majority of people here have been around the block more than a few times.
I think the site, despite still being small, is getting to a point where it can’t be easily managed by one person. Tildes never got big enough/brought in enough donations such that Deimos could quit their day job, and so it’s difficult for new ideas to be tried out or intervention down outside of bans or topic removals when malice labels start getting applied.
I think you could design a “contested” label that avoids becoming a super-downvote (I talk about it in the other thread). But I think on a more fundamental level, a lot of the ideas proposed initially for the site (degrees of moderation, tagging, advanced labeling) haven’t really developed, and eventually you need more than one person to do moderating.
Has Tildes grown past its peak of activity? It doesn’t seem that much larger today than it was 10 years ago? There was a lull for a while and then a surge right after the Reddit API change and it seems to have been in a steady state ever since to me.
I have no metrics to back this up, that’s just been my subjective experience.
That's been my experience, too. I largely see the same usernames over and over. When I look at people's profiles, if their username isn't one I recognize, I still often see they've been a community member for 2-3yrs at least. Now I'm not checking out everyone's profiles. But I look at enough and it's rare they're brand new. Which makes me think we're in a steady state.
@Bauke actually has a Tildes Statistics site. Though it only goes back 30 days.
Can at least see historic versions of that page using wayback machine. 12k users in 2020 to 25k today.
So the user count doubled in mid 2023 as a result of Reddit's API changes, and has been stable since then.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reddit_API_controversy
Past, no. But I think with the surge especially (and some users would argue long before), that there’s enough users and interactions (also remember that we’ve had several prominent long-timers leave or be banned) that justify a second person (preferably in Europe or Asia) who could respond quicker to issues and possibly contribute to the codebase.
I’m on board with your tag idea, it reminds me of the community notes in Twitter. As much as I despise that website and its community and its owner, Community Notes is one of the few good ideas that came from it.
But it’s like you said, tags by themselves aren’t a solution.
One of the best communities I’ve been part of was on Discord some years ago. The community was small and most users policed themselves. Bad actors were “shamed” and shunned, which led to them leaving the community by themselves. If someone went too far, the mods were immediately called and said user was banned.
But then the community grew too much and that self-policing stopped. Not anyone’s fault, I guess it’s just how it is when a group gets large enough.
I don’t know what the best solution for this is. Maybe it’s more mods, maybe it’s less tolerance for bad behaviors from new users, maybe it’s banning users that prove to be problematic too many times, etc.
I think that what destroys a lot of communities is the misconception that forums are democracies with free speech. They aren’t. So mods let bad users infiltrate and poison the community until ultimately the good users quit and only the bad remain.
Not saying this is what’s happening to Tildes to be clear, just saying what I saw several times with subreddits. I consider Tildes a healthy community overall.
Same here. The best community I am in right now is a Discord server with a few mods, clear rules, self-policing, people that de-escalate, and just a safe and reasonable atmosphere that doesn't tolerate any BS but has curated itself in a way that keeps out bad actors almost automatically because they aren't legitimized. It isn't overly exhausting or legalistic or micromanaged so people don't feel smothered (and mods remain unburdened) but anyone that shows up and has an off vibe or starts to try and cause a problem often leaves on their own or gets booted on rare occasions. And when it is good faith the mods and community are reasonable in conversation not immediately quick-to-ban, and when there is a concern and it gets settled, however that needs to be done.
I like, and agree, with the part about forums/communities being destroyed by the idea that they need to be "democracies of free speech" which just legitimizes enough bad actors that nothing good is left, in short order
Sorry for stupid question, but why?
Deimos is one person. He’s the only one who can lock threads, ban users (even temporarily), and take stronger actions in general. The “problem threads” are able to grow until they flood the kitchen because he can’t be monitoring Tildes 24/7 and working, eating, sleeping, and having a life. A second person with the authority to do that (with Deimos having the final say) could really help stop arguments before they get out of hand. It might also enable the ideas that haven’t been implemented to be tried out.
I have feeling that this thread slowly become "problem thread"...
Apart from that, can you point me to threads that should be removed but alive and well and ignored by moderation?
I do not try to undermine you comment, I just trying to understand.
I don't know of any specific thread that person is talking about, and I'm not trying to supplant their response if they plan on responding, but my perspective on this is that I think some people that are aware that it's moderated by one person are more reluctant to utilize methods that call to his attention. There's this threshold of how bad it needs to be. In other communities, calling attention to something to an outside party isn't necessarily that big of an ask, hell in old school forums it was quite common that the moderators were active users/browsers of the forums and you didn't even have to call attention to anything they would just come across potential problems when browsing. I think there a flip-side to that alternative where you get over-moderation, so I'm not even arguing one outcome is superior to another.
I don't think the only response for moderation is that threads "should be removed", there's other responses that could happen, but not if you have only 1 moderator with limited time. So you can actually go back and look at any number of threads that were locked over the years and probably find at least a few examples of ones where they could have been resolved with a different moderation strategy if there were different moderation resources available to the site. I actually don't even know if you can find all the locked threads as I think their visibility is removed without the direct link, so it wasn't a specific call to action there, just more of an example.
When I was a forum mod the most common and impactful mod actions I took was simply making a normal post using the “mod voice” (a special font and color) to tell people to settle down.
More often than not discussions needed no further intervention, and explicit mod actions only needed to follow if someone tried to argue or continued to disregard the injunction to be nice.
But that does take pretty active moderation. You generally have to dive in as soon as stuff starts to go off the rails. Also the culture of online forums seems to have shifted to where people react to mutes or temp-bans as if you’ve committed a GRAVE offense to their honor as a poster and you can pretty much count on them bearing a grudge for the next half decade, so you’re all but guaranteed to have to ban them eventually once you go down that road. I don’t know why people are like this now, temporary mutes used to be extremely normal things to dish out to encourage people to cool off. I’m pretty sure Deimos has muted me at least once in the past.
I am sure there are a myriad of reasons, but thinking about your initial remark about using the mod voice and how that might apply to a site designed like Tildes made me wonder if it's not just the people, but the site designs that may lean into people reacting differently.
For example, if Deimos came into this thread and responded to a chain of comments telling a certain chain of comments to calm it down, the site design necessitates that it be a response directly to one comment. In old school forum threads, which may not be the same across all the different forum types, most of them were only designated as replies to specific comments when you quoted someone else's post. Otherwise the post in the thread is just a continuation of the thread, not a direct reply to anyone in particular. I could see someone taking more offense to that if they just happen to be the last comment in the chain and it was directed at them. Again, this is just an example to illustrate how people's behaviors might change over the years as a response to different site designs and I haven't ever seen Deimos reply that way, I think more likely I've just seen a top-level comment that maybe he can just pin to the top. I can't remember if that's a feature on this site or not since even if it is, it is rarely used.
I also think vote counts and other stuff may contribute to that as well, but I do remember some forums I used back in the day had reputation points so maybe that's not all that different. My initial thought was maybe just that people put more stock into some online reputation and votes are one aspect to that, but getting muted/banned etc. are another.
It would be nice, in my opinion, if this community decided how to moderate and run itself as a community. Moderation action hasn't had to happen that often (relative to a lot of other communities), but when it does, from my (a normal user) perspective it shows up as: a thread disappearing, I look through my history, find it, it's been locked, a few posts have been deleted, maybe a user has been banned (hard to tell, not really sure what to look for either), and I have no idea why. Generally I think I know the reason why it happened, but it's just a guess, as far as I can tell it's opaque to the community what actually happened.
SomethingAwful, for all of its faults, has the Leper's Colony, where every probation, ban, and permaban is recorded, with the reason why, a link to the post, and who did it, visible for all to see. There's subforums for raising issues with moderators and admins, out in the open, it's all openly part of the community. I don't get that here as much, on Tildes its, as best I can tell, a community of posters, and an invisible substrate of moderation that may be happening.
I agree that Tildes lacks transparency in moderation, I think in some ways it's intended but even if it isn't, it's also just a matter of how it is because there's no ongoing development. Even if everyone agreed it was the best idea ever, even if Deimos himself agreed, it still wouldn't exist because it requires someone to spend time, skill and energy to develop those features.
I think over the past year or so there has been some glimmer of hope that may be changing because talklittle and Bauke have/had gotten involved in some aspects of the codebase of the open-source part of what is the basis of this site, but it's also not like it's their primary job and then there's an additional element of those things that they may work on being incorporated into the codebase that actually makes it into the live Tildes site. Since I believe Deimos owns the entity that owns tildes.net, it's always been solely up to him how this particular site is or is not updated, is or is not moderated etc. I have not kept up with the details of this process of talklittle and Bauke helping with development, if it is still ongoing or not, but it was originally stated to be a very slow moving process even if it were to still be in progress so I wouldn't have any expectations for radical changes anytime soon.
Also some of the foundational rules of the site are somewhat predicated on Deimos being the sole moderator, not saying that they can't work otherwise but it would necessitate some kind of changes most likely. There has been numerous conversations about the 'rules' on this site and one of the ones I've seen numerous times is that a lot of people seem to favor rules that aren't super specific and clear cut, and the 'Don't be a jerk' type of motto is a better rule because there are certain types of bad actors who will play to a certain type of audience with actions that they know antagonizes people but aren't ones that explicitly cross the boundary of the very specific rules laid out. So having less specific rules and 'Don't be a jerk' type of attitude is a method for reducing that type of antagonism, and I think it works well when you have a single moderator who has no accountability to anyone but themselves. Their perspective of who is being a jerk is likely to be consistent, and they don't have to care what anyone thinks about it. This is why a lot of people refer to moderation on Tildes as more like a 'benevolent dictatorship'.
The moment you start changing those dynamics, like more moderators, each person has their own idea of what being a jerk looks like. Now what was already somewhat of a vague boundary set upon an intentionally vague rule is even more vague and inconsistent. Again, I'm sure there are ways to deal with that that are a compromise between setting very specific rules and relying on a benevolent dictator, so I'm not saying there's no other alternative, I'm just saying that personally I believe that probably plays a role in why Deimos hasn't opted to hand over the site to the community or anything like that. It's not like there's some simple straightforward process where it's obviously better and it will require lots of development work on the site and design changes etc. to allow for any changes to happen beyond how the site functions now. I'm pretty sure Deimos has mentioned in the past that there are not clean moderation roles or permission structures etc. and that giving out the moderator permissions that he has would require giving people more access and authority than he would be comfortable with in the current capabilities of the site.
This remark really does come from a really privileged position and many people really do not realize that. I already explained this in length in the other thread.
If anything it’s underprivileged groups who are adept at ignoring and moving on. It’s the privileged position to think we can meaningfully alter the circumstances to suit our preferences rather than thriving in spite of them. That more or less describes what it is to have privilege, the assumption that the world ought to be shaped to suit you.
Yes, they are because they are forced to do so. Which is not something we should accept here. I am not asking for circumstances to suit my preferences. Other than, obviously, my preference to keep attempting to have Tildes be a inclusive community for a diverse group of people.
I think you have this backwards here. The privilege of demanding things change to conform to expectations is an entitlement that comes downstream of the repressive hierarchy imposed by a society that privileges straight White men. That they can walk around with an implicit assumption that society is structured to ease their path, that any and all spaces should be open to them, and that everyone else is just sort of there to provide them with easily consumable products and experiences rather than having different and equally valid beliefs and value systems is the privilege. It can only work if you have an exclusionary system in place to decide who is favored or disfavored by the system.
The default mode is what everyone else who doesn’t fit into the privileged class has to do, because they lack the coercive powers to make others conform to their values and beliefs. Living in a plural society, with a broad range of lifestyles and perspectives represented, necessarily requires you to be able to ignore and move on. There’s no other way to do it. The main group can have the world suit their preferences because it’s a single group with a singular set of preferences. With multiple groups where deeply held values often conflict the best you can do is have a baseline set of ground rules that every agrees to. These are to be conducive to everyone being able to coexist alongside each other, but then we also all have to agree that some stuff we’re just not gonna get into.
When someone has this privilege, they don't need to explicitly ask to be considered though. Letting something go and moving on can happen because the issue is of very little significance to the person and they are generally in a privileged enough position to not care about some single issue, or it can happen because despite it being immensely significant, the person realises they can't win against their oppressor and they have no other choice but to give up. We shouldn't be conflating the two.
Yes? I am fully aware that this is the case. For example, demanding that we don't change anything as you don't see anything wrong with that is going on. That would be a prototypical example of privilege at play. I can't help to be born a white cis male, but I can try to be aware of those privileges at the very least and try to make others in my position also aware.
Yes that I certainly seems like a good baseline. But, misinformation isn't necessarily a value a conflict though. There is a difference about "we disagree about how to live" and "you stated something false about a group of people".
And it is also worth nothing that this baseline set of ground rules everyone agrees happens to be the exact thing what is under discussion. I am personally trying to ask if that set of ground rules possibly should include something else, not demanding the world reshape itself around me.
I feel like you’re talking past what I said here. You dismissed the “ignore it and move on” comment by claiming that it’s advice that comes from a place of privilege. I contended that it’s actually the opposite, it’s advice that comes from a place of not being on top of the status hierarchy and, as a result, should be taken seriously as a discussion norm if we care about equity. You’re still just kind of gliding over that. I’d invite you to consider that maybe non-cis/white/male individuals are not all smol beans in need of active protection in a discussion forum. On the streets with ICE agents running around sure, but here among the wordcels they (we) can handle ourselves.
Is that something that can be determined by crowdsourcing though? In the legal system it’s juries who are responsible for establishing facts, but juries are subjected to all kinds of guard rails to make sure their decisions are impartial and fair. They’re shepherded by judges and attorneys for both sides to not factor in things they aren’t supposed to, and despite that the outputs of their decisions are still rife with bias.
Like I mentioned in another comment, the problem being solved for here seems to be “one or more users keep saying things I think are false and I wish I could banish those posts without needing to have an argument about it.” That’s pretty explicitly “I want a way to shape the content that shows up on here” type stuff.
What makes you draw that conclusion? Not in general, here specifically on tildes? In several cases where I have seen this advice being given it very much does not come from those on "the bottom" of society. I can't speak in certain terms about all instances, but for various users I am fairly certain they fall in my demographic where it most definitely is coming from a position of privilege.
I do not as a matter of fact. What I am saying is that maybe we should listen better because I see several signals that at least one group of people is asking for better means to deal with things themselves and in this and the previous threat what I have attempted to do is ask others to at least consider why things being asked for.
I am not claiming to speak for anyone specifically here. Honestly, it is why I have not gone for specific examples. What I have seen is that people are ready to leave Tildes. People I care about and people in general who I think bring value to the community.
Clearly you feel that is not you, which is absolutely okay.
I would reply to the latter part of your comment as well. But I honestly have to ask you to go to the initial comment from me you replied to, follow the link and read that conversation. As I am not saying that we should adopt these features wholesale as suggested.
As a matter of fact my last response was about trying to understand the various issues people perceive better. I might have posted a survey today if this post had not shown up, I thought that a third one would have been a bit much.
How would you be able to tell though? On the Internet nobody knows you’re a dog. You don’t actually know the demographic details of anyone you're reading from unless they volunteer that information. In my experience people tend to assume everyone they’re talking to is a generic American white man unless otherwise specified, and I’ve seen several instances right here of people I know to be not being spoken to as if they were because they're taking the side in a discussion associated with generic American White guy.
Moreover, many minority members, victims of violence, or racism don’t necessarily want detail their bona fides as designated victim classes before saying anything. This is a cultural norm is specific to a particular activist tradition that somehow got taught as THE correct way to be sensitive to social justice topics in the that 2015-2025 decade, but nobody was actually checking if it was conducive to productive discussions or social change.
“Listening” doesn’t mean “agreeing” or even accepting the premise. It just means acknowledging the sense of that someone dislikes what’s happening. I think pretty much everyone agrees as to why it's being asked and the disagreements are around whether what's being asked is workable, reasonable, and can preserve the spirit of having a diverse forum for deeper discussion. Fundamentally I don't think the spirit of some of these requests are really conducive to having a discussion space. They're definitely appropriate for a more social forum, but there's trade-offs in design and norms between those things. One place can't be all things to all people in all cases.
I recognize people might leave the site, but frankly it’s almost a decade old and almost everyone here is from either its early days or one of its few growth surges due to exogenous factors. I’m surprised ANYONE is still around to be honest! It’s normal, possibly even healthy, for a community to have people come and go over time. Personality quirks that used to be kind of annoying, or even charming, in small doses can become super grating after a while (just ask my wife hyuk hyuk). Minor grievances and slights build up until they boil over into major arguments that are seemingly over nothing to an onlooker but have a bunch of invisible baggage behind them for the participants. This is normal community dynamics when there’s never fresh blood cycling in. If people don't step back now and then the culture of any place will become rancid.
People change. Their personal circumstances change. Society changes in ways that makes some things more or less salient than they used to be. In the old forum days most forums or IRC communities had a lifespan of maybe 3-6 years before forum drama led to some kind of meltdown or schism. I’ve not really been on this site myself as much as I used to be. I think I only really started getting more active again over the past year, before that I was popping in maybe once in a couple of months or so. It wasn't due to anything dramatic, I just started to find a lot of comments to be glib or annoying and it wasn't doing anything for me. Fortunately it’s a big Internet and I can go find somewhere else. Eventually I drifted back as some of my other online haunts started to quiet down or the culture started to turn nasty. That seems healthy and natural to me. Trying to hold onto something as it was in a prior state, when you and everyone you hung out with was a different person in a different world, that's just a recipe for disappointment that I don't think has a technical fix. And when communities do turn toxic it tends to be because people are hanging around long after the point where the place stopped bringing them joy out of some sense of obligation or a fixed habit.
Exactly because they have volunteered that information. I have been part of this community for a while. When interacting with people on this community I remember names, I remember details they share, just like I would when interacting with people irl. If I had just assumed I would have set so in much more definitive terms rather than framing it the way I did.
And fundamentally I still think there is a difference between having the quiet ability to move on and and be in the comfortable position of telling other people to move on with the implication that you don't.
I agree.
Here I disagree. To be frank, many people in this thread have not given it a single thought more than "I don't like the idea" without even stopping to wonder why. Others have assumed they know why based on their own experience. Only a few have asked OP for clarification. The same happened in the other thread. Many people assume they know the why. Personally I have a somewhat abstract understanding of the overall issue and a more concrete understanding for at least OP of the previous thread.
Again, if you haven't I also invite you to follow the link to the other conversation in my initial comment. I have clarified a lot there already that keeps coming back in this conversation as well.
Look, you keep throwing in these sorts of lines. I can't help but read them to be extremely dismissive. To be honest, this entire chain of comments has been fairly dismissive to the notion that anything is changed. Which stands in sharp contrast to what you say about finding common baselines and what follows about societies changing.
Maybe that truly is due to different experience. But I have been part of longer lasting communities. Communities with a much longer lifespan than the 3-6 years you mention. Generally that was because people cared about the community and each other and were open to change. Those communities had regular conversations about rules, rule adjustments, etc. I have no illusions that any community sticks around forever, but some do stick around for longer than others while being healthy.
This again feels very dismissive towards what was actually said. At least to what I am saying and have been saying. It also, I might point out, is effectively arguing for the status quo to stay exactly the same. In fact, before arriving at this sentence I was thinking that so far a lot of what you have said comes down to "don't change a thing, don't even bother".
And if you really think that communities don't hold out long term anyway, then I am not even sure what brings you here anyway. As it doesn't really seem to matter anyway.
Either way I do think we have both shared our views. I find that I am starting to repeat what I said. I imagine you might find the same. Which might come down to just a fundamental different outlook on some things. Which is okay and in this instance doesn't seem to matter either way, so for me that means that I am bowing out of this conversation now.
Honestly I don’t actually think you really heard what I said and responded mostly from being defensive, including the “oh so nothing should ever change huh?” There’s been basically no acknowledgment of the concept of there being design trade offs, and you’re still largely just leaning on deciding who is and isn’t qualified to weigh in to decide what goals to prioritize rather than what actually makes for a useful community or forum.
But it’s whatever. I’m able to ignore and move on!
You mentioned "minorities", "privileged position", "tone deaf" in your comment.
Are you really sure that you want to help community and not a "super downvote" label?
Without concrete examples (any examples) it's really hard to understand what problem should be resolved.
In another comment when concrete examples were used it resulted in disagreement with the individual examples instead. There's no real "winning". Creesch very much does mean well for the community.
Yeah. Thats why I made a comment.
We all different people and can have different opinions and different views.
I really really curious why "leave a comment with correction and move to another topic" is not a good strategy. What the end game here? Punish people with different view?
But make punishment anonymous?
I don't think anyone has advocated for any type of punishment. My point was that providing examples wasn't productive in the other comment, that's all.
Honestly I'm just happy when cis straight folks speak up on behalf of queer folks so queer folks don't have to do all the educating. But I also choose to educate more than not most times.
Some folks have a desire to get the last word in. Others feel defensive (justifiably or not) when they are corrected. Sometimes a degree of top-down enforcement is needed.
My guess is public shame. That's the purpose behind a super downvote button. The idea is to somehow influence the public's opinion of a comment or view point you disagree with. As many many people have said, the more obvious and fair way to do that is just to write a reply comment nicely saying you disagree and lay out the argument. Then if you feel like it, do some back and forth but if it seems like its imposible for you and the person you disagree to vibe, just leave it or say alright we gotta agree to disagree.
It constantly surprises me why that's so hard. Humans disagree. If I walked up to a person in a coffee shop and lightning striked him/her with 10 random opinions of mine, most likely they'll probably disagree with at least a few. I think the internet has a way to bring people's ego out.
No one has suggested "Public shame" as a reasoning. There have been a lot of explanations and ignoring that and asserting a far less charitable one is just kind of rude.
I'm just responding to this. That's all. Not really attacking anyone. I think there's probably enough comment on this topic so let's not hash it out again here mate.
I am not sure how to respond to this. I am trying my best to write out a complete view which results in something rather long comments. How should I then respond to you picking specific words without their context? I have clarified minorities at some point with a more specific example, I have explained what I mean in this case by calling it a privileged position and I also explained why I called it a bit tone deaf all things considered.
Would it have been different if I had basically copied in the comment instead of linking to it? Or would you still have taken issue with those specific words used? In a similar sense, further down you reply with
This is also something I went into in length. You clearly have read my comments to some degree, so what about them doesn't satisfy your curiosity?
All things considered I don't think I have been that unclear. If anything I might have repeated myself too much in the process. But I don't think it is me in this case who is not providing the information if I am being honest.
Yes I am sure, no I don't want such a label. As I, again, I have explained in detail. I am assuming good faith and that you sort of rushed over what I wrote and replied from there. So from that position I would like to invite you to go back and read what I said with intend.
You win. Hope you feeling better ;)
Okay, I guess you are not here in good faith then. To be frank, I don't get the impression you are trying very hard to understand and are more looking to post quick "gotcha" type comments.
The previous comment you just deleted was also of a similar tone. Since I had that reply ready anyway, here is a relevant bit.
For the record, in my conversation with SkyBrian your question was addressed. I acknowledge I don't have hyper specific examples, as ultimately this is not about me. From the last comment in that chain
Since I have been more than clear enough and you clearly are not here in good faith I'll be bowing out of this "conversation".
FWIW, based on that user’s grammar I don’t think they have native English fluency.
That might have shaped the conversation somewhat differently. But I don't think I misread the attempt at understanding overall.
Yep. English my third language. Sorry. I suspect I'm minority here.
Your comment's tone comes off as snide and unconstructive. Is that how you intended it?
Yes. Because without examples all what we are talking about is personal feeling.
Misinformation and One-sided I think can be weaponized, not everyone on Tildes may use it in bad faith or abuse it, but I can see how badly it can go in places like ~society or political topics, but I think just marking something as noise is probably good enough, instead of outright calling it misinformation or one-sided. I take issues with labeling something as “misinformation” especially since the last couple of years, labeling things as “misinformation” is just “We don’t want people to see this, only our own narrative” in disguise, and I think it isn’t up to the op or the person who replies to play both sides @ “one-sided” tag, reply to them, make another reply/topic, or don’t engage.
At least exemplary’s case I sort of see it as a sticky or potentially a marker for more important replies, it can be abused, but it is functional and I don’t think it can’t be weaponized like misinformation or one-sided.
I believe the tiresome commentary on Tildes is almost never done in bad faith. (Those few that are, the mods can and should handle.) Yet we're seeing so much of it that people are reacting and some even considering jumping ship.
Seeing a comment go from black text to light grey, to lighter still, while not instantly solving the issue, will do two things:
Some comments, even good faith ones, can be so hurtful and uninformed that we can't expect the hurt party to go to excessive lengths to help the person get rid of their blind spots. Many blind spots are so large that there isn't any single conversation that can be had to take them away (like you also pointed out). It's a long process, and the problem with online forums is that they don't usually support running that process because they alienate people from each other too efficiently, which ends the process.
Blocking and ignoring may take away the pain but it creates silos that stop talking to each other, which then leads to more one-sidedness than we started out with. Reporting is only fair when someone is clearly being malicious, not just uninformed. Teaching a pig to sing is fruitless and unrealistic. We need some sort of middle ground between these extremes.
Letting someone know their comment falls into the category of "I'm offended you haven't educated yourself better when the information is easily attainable" can prompt many people to use their brain in order to discover why someone would say that of their comment. If not, it's not the end of the world - just an opinion someone gave.
I'm looking for something that would incentivise the ignorant party to do at least half of the work in ridding themself of their own ignorance because at the moment the entire responsibility seems to fall on the ones whose perspective is being ignored, which is entirely unfair and only teaches the ignorant to remain intellectually lazy. Obviously some people will never be willing to do such work but even those people would become more aware that others consider them ignorant, which is likely to curb some of their worst behaviour at least.
"I'm offended you haven't educated yourself better when the information is easily attainable" is so absolutely insanely judgmental I don't think it could ever not be condescending and actively toxic to any community.
It is definitely judgmental and condescending, but its toxicity would have to be evaluated in comparison to the types of sentiments it’s being used to dismiss.
If you’re trying to have a somewhat informed discussion on a topic that presupposes a baseline familiarity with the subject, but people keep chiming in with common folk-misconceptions then you’re going to spend all your time debunking the same folk beliefs over and over again. You will never quite get to discussions that go beyond that. Is that helpful to a community to have it structurally forced to stay stuck at a high school level of understanding?
There’s a lot of thought-terminating cliches that happen all over the internet in the family of “everyone else’s job is easy except mine or I’m the only one who does any work around here and everyone else is just scamming/lying/coasting.” It’s almost always a result of people who have a limited perspective on the world and lack the empathy or curiosity to understand why other groups exist or what they do. You genuinely can’t have a conversation with someone who has that posture because they’re fundamentally uninterested in learning from you about the thing. No matter how polite or courteous and common their affect is, they’re not capable of having a productive discussion if they feel that way, so it wouldn’t necessarily be out of line to simply tell them “You should familiarize yourself with the existing literature on this subject before commenting further.”
I don't think there is any value in trying to debunk the misinformed, they aren't the target audience then for the informed discussion. There's no reason you can't focus on having the discussion you want with the people that have a similar or better level of understanding on a topic, that is the conversation you want to have, so that's the conversation to focus on. Why expend any effort at all on the comments that aren't materially adding to the actual real discussion? I understand it can be disheartening if it's a flood of them, but I don't think it takes anything away necessarily, it's not zero sum. I would say if someone isn't interested in learning telling them so isn't going to change their mind, right? Just engage with the people who are already willing, in my opinion. I don't think tagging or any of the suggestions are helpful or instrumental in increasing the overall quality of conversation.
We might want to do that, but people being as they are people keep jumping in, the discussion gets drowned out, and then the thread gets locked because it goes toxic.
That’s the thing, with online communities it’s not just on the people involved, the design and interface encourages and discourages certain types of participation. Absent some sort of intervention discussions always tend to discussing the bike shed in front of the facility because more people can participate in that conversation than the sophisticated one that needs specialized expertise.
If you happen to write a comment that makes someone feel that way, even though you believe to be expressing a perfectly normal and for the most part correct idea in a constructive manner, what's your reaction? Some options below (but I'm not expecting you to choose from just these).
I don't think it would be helpful for me to simply have some flag that said "someone disagreed with you or someone was offended by what you said" because it doesn't convey enough information. I much prefer someone engaging with what I said, and telling me themselves, that's productive conversation to me. If someone doesn't want to engage, I don't think there's any benefit in giving them an out to label something. Either give me the information necessary to improve or give me nothing. I'm not saying anyone has an obligation to educate me or anything of the sort, but I am saying that just being tagged wouldn't mean anything if I didn't know why.
As a resident lesbian (with a trans partner) I definitely understand your suspicion. I don’t think “unbiased” means “superior” and moreover I do not think it is an ideal we can attain even if we were to accept that it was something worth striving for in all situations. What we consider “unbiased” is itself highly context dependent and informed by what we consider to be the “default”, which itself already admits an assumption that something being towards the mean is more honest, true, or fair. But the mean is not always fair.
I think often the problem is just how conversations are framed and approached altogether. Do we really need a set of formalized rules to determine who the winner of any particular conversation is? Do we need to red-letter folks who are conversing “wrong”? If people become preoccupied with the idea of one-upping each other, of treating all conversations with the rigour of a debate club, then something holistic and personal gets consumed by meta.
Not to mention that emotional detachment from a topic is a quality that is going to be most often possessed by people whom the topic does not affect directly, so a system that rewards formal detachment and the ability to “both sides” means that the people who are most incentivized to talk about a topic are actually going to be the people with the least direct experience, with the most middling opinions, and with the least emotional stake. Is that really appealing? Would that make for an interesting community where one might actually expand their views, you think?
And besides, I’m just one person. Why would it be a problem for me to just express only my view, from my own perspective, informed by my own experiences? That’s all anyone can do.
For what it's worth, when I said "one-sided" I didn't necessarily mean biased (I don't think we can ever really be unbiased - rather we should strive to become aware of our bias and convey this awareness in the way we communicate).
The opposite of what I mean would be something like "fostering diversity". Maybe someone can try to come up with a better term that isn't as misleading as "one-sided"?
This really does highlight an important part of this I think. What I would like to add to it is that if you do fall under the group "being called out" and don't understand what the deal is and why it is important that people might leave the website over this. I tried to explain why anyone should care in the other thread. For convenience I have also quoted that comment specifically.
tl;dr Even without bad faith involved it is possible to chase away people who don't really have other good places to go to. A more diverse community is a healthier community.
I think you’ve hit the nail on the head here, and it hints at where the actual solution would lie. We’d need to grow the user base to encompass people who aren’t like this.
Early on I tried to suggest the site put more effort towards attracting people outside the techie crowd with topics like design or fashion or photography. Even if it’s more wrong opinions about stuff it’ll at least be different people being wrong in different ways from each other and that can at least be interesting. But there’s a chicken-and-egg problem and also features that might be needed to attract designers or artists might pull away from the “wordcel” focus of the site.
It's definitely true that a more diverse user base would help a ton.
I'm an artist / designer and would potentially have things to write about but I haven't gotten around to it. There are other reasons besides the inconsiderate attitude towards the likes of me that I occasionally witness on here but it certainly does not help.
Overall my peer group doesn't tend to spend much time on online forums. I've mentioned Tildes to some friends who've been active online before. These are mostly economics/tech/business people but would still be a welcome addition to the forum because they are multi-faceted thinkers and habitually considerate of different points of view, including mine. Their response is always the same: I quit online forums long ago and I suggest you consider it too.
I just dislike the idea of losing touch with people whose lives and realities are different from my own - folks whom I likely wouldn't spend much time around IRL but whose thoughts and opinions help me understand what's going on in a different way. Of course, if the cost becomes too steep, I will protect myself and reduce my online activity. I just don't want to give up without trying to do something first.
Yeah I’ve had a decent number of people who were interested but couldn’t bring themselves to join or who did join and got banned because they simply were unwilling to suffer fools gladly, specifically the tendency you’ve mentioned. Mostly it’s been policy and business people who get really annoyed by the reductive “everything I don’t like is capitalism” memes that dominate online, as well as design and style people who just see nothing worth engaging with.
You can label this as noise or off topic or exemplary or whatever because the theme this week is that labels have lost all meaning if they ever had any.
I am finding tildes to be more frustrating to be on lately but it is not super clear to me why that is or what exactly happened in the last few months.
In the last week or so this will be the third meta post about the workings of the site (one of which was my post that got far more discussion than I believe was warranted). This tells me that I am far from the only one that has noticed this.
I think this comment exemplifies why Tildes has been so exhausting for so many people, actually. I would qualify at least 2/3 of your descriptions as highly uncharitable, at best. I think there is a subset of users on this site who are all doom and gloom about basically everything and they get upset at anyone who doesn't share that perspective.
I suspect #1 was about a chain that may have even started with a comment that I made, and I'm going to ignore that one because honestly I'm fucking pissed off to see such a bullshit fucking read of what I believe. Like I'm honestly shaking a bit as I type this because I'm so fucking mad to see that my position has been flipped and twisted so far from what I believe and I will honestly label any responses that try to discuss that issue as malice (something I've never done before) because I will take it as an attempt to bait me or start an argument after I've made it so clear how I feel about that.
I guess I could make an exception if someone were documenting that it's not about anything I said, but honestly, there's just no need to discuss that right now, so at the very least, it would be tactless because this would not be the time or place for it.
So I'll respond to the jars thing because I avoided that one as I knew no good would come of it (other than to point out that nothing in the docs make Tildes groups seem like they were intended to be echo chambers like subreddits).
I was disappointed to see the discussion characterized the way you did when, as far as I can tell, no one dismissed women's experiences or said things were okay for them. The most extreme position seems to be "this is what sells best" or "that's just physics," with other users using sourced rebuttals to those claims. But no one said it doesn't suck for women or we shouldn't try to make things better.
When people on this site (or anywhere) equate the views of those who agree in principle but not in granular details with their enemies, obviously things get really exhausting and stressful for everyone.
Everyone keeps saying that they believe everyone else is acting in good faith but these discussions keep getting very heated. So is it good faith or do you think that saying "maybe jars are tight because of physics" is giving the fascists an equal seat?
Maybe that's not what you meant, but it certainly reads as if it's supposed to be the logical follow-on to those three posts.
I don't think this is a fair characterization of their stance.
You perhaps aren't aware that someone was literally banned from the jars thread after calling out the "constant victimization narrative" or some such (paraphrasing since the comment is gone.) this was after being previously temporarily banned for comments made to, and about, me personally. And yes they were banned but there were more comments made than physics.
But even without knowing that or disagreeing with the take about that thread, I think you know this is a false dichotomy and an unfair question. It's uncharacteristic of you, and I really do say this with the hope that you take time and space for you if you're truly this upset and exhausted. /gen
I definitely was not aware. When I click "Expand all", I don't see any removed comments and only three deleted comments, none of which seem to have been controversial at all, based on the responses. I did triple check that post but I was unable to find anything actually along those lines. Still, I would say one comment hardly qualifies the whole post as "'Women should be able to open jars' vs. 'What?! Everything is fine for women!'" All that I recall beyond physics were stairs (safety) and phones (the market demands it!) and I was actually going to call you out as someone provided a sourced counterfactual, but I decided to just not include any names.
Honestly, I want my take on that comment to be a false dichotomy, but I really don't see another way to read the comment (other than maybe it's poorly-worded?). You'll also notice that this comment was written the next day and I didn't even open the site again yesterday, so I had already pre-planned time/space. I often do that when I write things that I expect might precipitate a more heated discussion (and based on the removed comments, it seems that might be the case).
I am not attempting to debate or what have you, my experience in that thread differed from yours, even excepting that comment and what it replied to.
I'm glad you took some space for you.
(interjecting into this conversation; I'm not 286437714)
Agreed that the jars thread was bad. If it helps this discussion, I could go through and highlight a few cases where a person expressed a lived experience, and then another diminished it. For example, when a commenter responds (effectively) "it's just physics" to another person's negative experience, that can be perceived as dismissing their pain without acknowledgment, whereas to the commenter it's a simple explanation of reality. It was likely made more egregious by the fact that the post was in a topic category about discussing women's lives, and that the lead premise -- that jars lids are necessarily difficult to open because of physics -- is flawed.
I'm sure that, were we all sitting at a table sharing beers and light snacks, our conversations would not devolve into ... that. But being able to prepare a two thousand word thesis in response to another person's stray thought is both an advantage and disadvantage of this format: no one can interrupt midway through and correct a misunderstanding, or show agreement before tensions run high. And thus, snowballs.
(sidebar: I think at least one longtime user got banned due to that thread, since iirc they went a little wild and started saying some rather hurtful things. Can't tell now though since the messages are gone)
Mmhm, agreed. Personally, anecdotally, I got dogpiled on in another thread and had to set the site down for a week. I expect that it's because people are primed to see threats coming at them from everywhere these days, which imo is justified and accurate. Things aren't great.
My takeaway is that people (and also, like, me) want for marginalized voices to be centred in conversations here. In practice, that'd mean that when someone who traditionally is not granted a voice or platform shares an experience, they aren't met with corrections (e.g. explaining how their perception is objectively wrong because of 'X') or diminished (e.g. a woman saying that they have trouble using power tools is not an opportunity for a man to talk about airplane seats; it's a conversation about their experiences, not said hypothetical commenter's). Ultimately that doesn't feel antithetical to the function of a discussion site, but it isn't free speech absolutism (and necessarily favours some speech over others), so I expect that the notion raises hackles.
Hey, I just want to comment on your small text -- I've been there with how frustrating that is. Like, I'm having visceral empathy right now with a discussion I had a while back. Just wanted to send some good vibes in your direction and I hope the emotions fade a little bit with some time.
I have noticed it too, and for me it's a sort of dire / negative tone to what's being posted. I have attributed it (from my American perspective) to the Tildes zeitgeist matching the general way that it feels like the world is going to shit, the way my family is overwhelmed and overloaded, the way work is demanding, but jibs that aren't demanding seem like a fever dream of the past, and the way there's not much I can do about any of it but keep swimming and not give up.
I've responded by not engaging with the more contentious posts because I just don't have the energy for it.
I've decided to just give it time. Tildes has been a great place for me for years now, so I plan to let that track record stand and give the Tildesians as a community the grace and patience I would afford my wife when we don't see eye to eye on something. It's a marathon, not a sprint.
There are actually very few people on this site I will even allow myself to get into a protracted conversation with, because there is far too much reading into people's "motivations" from what I think is probably accumulated internet PTSD. Which is fine, I don't let it bother me. I get scroll and move on sounds dismissive, but it really is the key for a healthy relationship with the internet.
If someone is being malicious, go ahead and report. But if someone does not share your opinion, believe it or not you are in fact not obligated to bludgeon them with your facts.
I'm with you. This thread, the other label thread, and so many more discussions on this website boil down to who can be the most pretentious in the comments and it's exhausting. I rarely read the comments here and often used tildes as a simple link aggregator because of it.
This is a response to various things written here and in the other thread. Let me try to summarize how I feel about these proposals (and this is not an indictment of the character of the people making them, who I have a good opinion of):
I'm a firm believer in communication and dialogue. The proposals that have been made mean to provide users with a method for communicating with other users that is more restricted, one-sided and lower bandwidth than writing a response. I have a feeling that, all other things being equal, such systems are always much more easily abused by a majority than used by a minority.
I don't think we can substitute open communication with cold, unfeeling technology. I understand and acknowledge the arguments being made about the difficulty to educate people and how exhausting it can be for the victims of bad takes, and I don't mean to come off as privileged when reiterating that you have the option not to engage. But as a baseline I think it behooves all of us to be aware that we have that binary choice, for the sake of our own mental health: Either we are up for a conversation or we are not, and if we are not, that's OK. I am often not, myself. I try to gauge the amount of good faith in a response that was given to me and if I think the risk is too high when weighed against my own state of mind, I just don't. But I'm aware that that was the choice I made myself, for myself, and which I am responsible for.
Beyond that, I think it would be wonderful if we could all work together to become more educated. But if we are all equals participating in this platform, we can't simultaneously have a system for crowdsourcing education call-outs while presuming that the uneducated are the majority (consider any specific topic). I don't think that will trend toward usefulness in the long run, as the uninformed majority will - possibly innocently - use this tool in the defence of their own misguided perspective. Since it's a tool that can be used for lowering comment visibility, this will enable a form of distributed bullying that, at least for me, would put a much greater toll on my mental health.
So getting back to the point, if Tildes is meant to be a welcoming community that is unwelcoming of certain (bad - hopefully!) perspectives, visibility algorithms aren't going to solve the problem - people are. At the end of the day, I know there are a lot of great people in this community who know how to be kind and empathetic. We have to acknowledge that what is being said is that there are some of us who are further along that path than others. I'd like to propose some kind of human solution - a solution that, rather than treating every person as an opaque, replaceable node in the social graph, introduces tools to help some of the best among us guide the others (and let me say right now I'm not one of these people).
I think that helps solve the problem by letting respected community members who are feeling more mentally resilient volunteer to help guide conversations and keep an eye out for such things as one-sided perspectives or insufficiently-founded arguments. People in the minority don't have to feel like they have to defend themselves alone and misinformed people aren't given tools they can use to do harm.
This was a good comment in many ways. I'm pressed for time so I'll just respond to this one bit for now:
I agree and largely operate the way you described. Recently this logic got me a result that I'm not entirely okay with though.
There was a very negative, dismissive post about my line of work and the people who do it. I found it too triggering to engage with (for example, people who do my work were called scammers) so I chose not to. But as a representative of the people in my profession, I also couldn't not do anything about it. I'm a part of this place and I wanted people to realise what I felt when reading that post. I made the same post (copy-pasting the exact same title and sentences) about a different group of people. The group was not an oppressed group and I clarified in the comments that the post was satire. Someone got so butthurt that they had it removed. The original post is still up and I'm not going to report it because I don't believe in taking things down. It's a discussion forum, people can't take anything away from a removed post.
The experience left me feeling that this community is okay with people speaking of my peer group with language so hostile that it got taken down in just a few hours when directed at another group. Sure, I can simply stop engaging with the forum, but again: there's nothing there for anyone to take away.
It's probably bad that I immediately suspect a very specific post.
I'm sorry you had that experience. I think if we had something like the solution I'm envisioning, multiple people could come along who were marked as trusted guides and who could append information to the original post (not regular comments, but blurbs that would show below the original text), clarifying the narrowness of its perspective and presenting a different one.
EDIT: How about a "call" button for calling the volunteer guides to a specific comment or post without showing anything publicly? A bit like a "report to the volunteers" I suppose, but just for getting their attention.
I'm trying to think of ways we can keep this strictly constructive and educational, with no user-initiated (abusable) removals or demotions of any kind.
This sounds like a lot of (thankless) work to those volunteers, especially if they aren't experts in every topic that potentially gets discussed on Tildes.
I get the point you made earlier about using the label for bullying. I think there should be consequences anyway for using any label wrongfully, such as taking away the ability to use them. There are probably just a few people who do this repeatedly so hopefully it wouldn't be too hard for the mods to manage. We'd just need a way to report the behaviour.
Many old forums had bots where you could invoke a command and the bot would pop in with some copypasta to explain something. Often it’s to explain some idiosyncratic thing about that forum/discord/whatever, but other times it’s also used to just nip certain types of arguments in the bud by summarizing the different sides of the argument without having to rehash it again and again.
The theory being, if you’re not saying anything new or saying something old in an interesting way, there’s really no point in saying it and everyone might as well get on with their lives. Your disagreements can be noted and ignored.
Sure, but, from what you're saying:
If you think this system can be adapted for Tildes in such a way that people feel welcome and heard here, then let's talk about it. Perhaps the volunteer team would be tasked with creating these templates and a consensus of two or more could get them attached to a comment without further human intervention?
I understand the type of person that posts on here are, generally, going to be more rigid and less lax. But, there's really no need for this minutiae. Not every little thing has to be labeled, or put into it's own little corner. You can just ignore it or engage with it, but there's really no need to have all these additions.
When you say "there's really no need", it sounds like you see yourself as an authority who has the right to determine what everyone on the forum needs or doesn't need. But maybe you just meant that you personally have no need for changes.
Do you care about the feelings of those who are unhappy here?
Having what are presumably good faith comments tagged as misinformation or 'one-sided' won't reform anyone's posting, it will just deter people from posting at all and accelerate the degree of the echo chamber. Is that the desired outcome? I would probably come to Tildes less if that were the case.
Put another way: for every user A who would be more happy with feature X, there is a user B who would be less happy. Why are we only considering user A in this scenario?
I'm looking for a desired outcome that the majority on this forum would agree with. My suggestion is probably not worded well enough so I invite others to brainstorm better ideas.
To reiterate, the attitude I find valuable and what the harmful comments lack is something like "inviting diversity" or "fostering diversity" or even just "preserving diversity". Comments that very strongly go against this principle should be called out. What would be a better wording than calling them one-sided?
What is an example of a post that you think does not “foster diversity”?
Here's a comment I made in good faith that might have received that label, and if it had, I would have gone back to read what I wrote and the comment I was responding to. It's quite likely I would have realised my mistake without others having to point it out. In this case I got called out and a kind person generously explained to me where I went off the rails. Using the label would have freed up their time for something more productive and probably the overall quality of the conversations here would be a smidge higher.
The important part of the pushback was that it was nuanced, though. With a label, the objection could just be “anything related to palantir is inherently evil and that’s that”, which I don’t think is very useful. And therefore I don’t really see people challenging their views when there’s no way to gauge what the objection even is.
A reply seems like the correct interaction?
That could be the word I'm looking for! What's the opposite of nuanced?
That would be a misuse of the label. I'd like for us to have a way to report misusing labels because it degrades their meaning.
In most cases yes, but there are cases (discussed in other comments) where it would be a fool's errand because the offending party is so clearly and deeply uninformed and uninterested in receiving new information. A label would indicate that someone feels this way about their comment. Would it make a difference every time? Of course not. Would it make a difference in some cases? I believe so. It would also help the slighted people feel that they're not alone, even if the commenter doesn't realise or care.
How would you know it was a misuse? It could have been a low effort tag, it could have been a high effort tag. That entirely depends on what the reason someone adds the tag there is. But the whole point of the tag is that people don’t have to explain why.
That is what it is. It’s actually a commonly recognized element of human psychology that arguments rarely ever change people’s minds. Reply and move on. It’s for the peanut gallery, not to change anyone’s mind.
It also adds a new way to harass people. Someone can feel even more alone when they write something heartfelt and get a “one-sided” label thrown on without even a reason why.
By looking at the comment. If it clearly lacks nuance, then the label is correctly placed. If not, it is not. Reporting it probably also wouldn't do anything on its own. If someone is misusing labels habitually, Deimos could make the call to take away that ability.
My problem is not that I can't change someone's mind. It's that there's no middle ground between doing nothing and spending effort to write a reply to someone who clearly isn't equipped or interested to process it, but who can easily produce multiple more rounds of the same offending material as many times as they receive responses.
Is it better, or more fair, that the people whose feelings/experience/existence they ignore by making uncouth comments are feeling alone? The label won't prevent others (or even the label-giver) from going in and helping the person understand why it was given.
I don’t think this is obvious at all, though. Take your reply, for instance. I don’t think it’s obviously un nuanced. If someone put a “one sided” label I would lean towards them misusing it. I think other people would make different calls.
It’s also ultimately impossible to consider literally every side. Rather than protect minorities, this would actually have a chilling effect, where majority opinions know that they have the greater ability to throw this tag on people.
I think it is better and more fair, yes.
You are correct that my example comment isn't a clear case, but it's probably also not something that many people would defend by reporting a misplaced label. (And it doesn't even matter because Deimos would likely only take action when someone is clearly misusing labels as a habit.)
And that isn't the idea either. Maybe I should have given a clearer example. A while back there was a conversation about a video essay by Shaun, regarding the Palestine situation. Someone took the position that it shouldn't be called a genocide because there wasn't a verdict that says so from the ICJ yet. The comments were long, detailed and constructive on the surface but they completely omitted the perspective of the victims of the genocide. I felt awful about that despite not being personally involved in the situation in any way. I did end up trying to express my opinion but it would have been nice to know that others see the one-sidedness/myopia/whatever we want to call it, even when that one particular person didn't.
The whole point is that nobody could throw this tag on anyone who writes nuanced comments, regardless of whether the opinion itself is popular or not.
Let's double check. A makes a crude comment that dismisses B's existence, which results in B feeling alone. Are you saying that this is fair? In my opinion the person whose behaviour is uncouth should be the one left feeling alone (in case it's impossible to make everyone feel welcome). Actions and consequences should be aligned.
Yes, because A has to put their name on it. They have to say the crude thing with their own (metaphorical) mouth. They have to own it.
That’s better and more fair than the situation where B makes a genuine comment and A labels them and B has no idea who it is and why they did it.
The downsides are greater than the upsides.
And does that not illustrate a problem? Someone who labels all posts with the word “palantir” and a positive sentiment is, I would argue, misusing the tag. However, in that circumstance, as you said, it’s impossible to detect that it was a misuse.
Israel/Palestine is a good example. A heated thread about Israel/Palestine will have all of its posts marked as one-sided. And everyone will believe that they’re correct for doing so. And no one is “wrong”, at least in an objective sense.
Even someone trying to be in neither side will be marked as one-sided because being a both-sides guy is making the issue too trivial to invested people in both sides.
Nor is burying Deimos in having to review 100 tags in said thread a good use of his moderation bandwidth.
For some reason I believe the opposite: that it would be easy to agree that something lacks nuance (or doesn't) even between people who disagree on the opinion itself. Maybe I'm wrong and on Tildes this wouldn't be feasible? Maybe it would. At least that's what my preferred environments are like and I hope that Tildes is one of them.
"Own it", by getting patted on the back by the likeminded majority? And the minority person who is being slighted and who will get dogpiled by that same majority for trying to advocate for themself is just getting what they deserve if they decide against exposing themself to that? Without the label, they are by default more alone than person A and the label is an attempt to level the playing field somewhat.
In other words, the consequences of "owning it" can be completely different for different people, depending on their privilege.
At least I believe you are wrong and this will just end up making people in heated threads extra miserable and extra heated.
I don’t think it would be easy at all, and many people do not agree on anything on the site, which is normal and expected.
Hell, this entire thread is people strongly disagreeing with other people.
Do you have an example? You offered your own post but it’s like the opposite: you have the minority opinion, as it is vogue to hate on palantir, and were, perhaps not dogpiled, but certainly received many replies noting as much.
Unfortunately I just don't think this is a realistic task. gestures wildly
No.
'One-sided' to me a lot of the time automatically implies matters of opinion or perceived opinion. Some 'sides' of some issues consider certain things non-negotiable facts (and sometimes they're right, sometimes not). Not all matters of fact (think round vs flat earth as example) have 'sides' unless people refuse to accept facts. I would hope actual factual information, with little interpretive wiggle room would not be labeled one-sided but given the post-truth era who knows. It's very easy to disagree with facts. As i said elsewhere, people don't even agree on what are facts vs opinions.
Or simply put, when it comes to non-negotiable positions on LGBTQ+ issues and so on, the last thing i want is for a pro-LGBTQ+ stance to be considered 'one-sided' (to me such a position only has one valid 'side', same with a number of things). I really hope we don't become a "both-sides-ism" environment. Though as others have pointed out we're sometimes already slipping in that direction unfortunately
I guess I'm always thinking of the worst case scenario of how some new tag or feature is just going to add to the noise (or moderation burden) rather than make things clearer or better, and given the breadth of peoples' experiences and different views even amongst those whose views have massive overlap, it just seems like a can of worms.
For highly contested conversations where there isn't even maybe a major consensus among Tildes, about things like fitness or nutrition, is every comment in every thread going to get a one-sided label from someone because we're split enough on these particular topics? There are a lot of studies and 'facts' on these topics that absolutely no one agrees on
Feel free to ignore my excessive cynicism and I empathize with the desire for there to be something to address these concerns people are raising- I just have the cynically opposite worry of whatever said feature would be backfiring
And if these labels are hidden and are nudges for someone to quietly reassess their view and what they have posted, how long is it before one of us is asked to "consider the other side" of something we consider factual or morally necessary or whatever. If it's not hidden it seems like its potential wide application could be used to legitimize views or 'sides' we wouldn't want to. Or it becomes meaningless because of overuse, or any number of other considerations
This is all just me thinking out loud- i want to be clear that I am not opposed to at least us having this conversation and actually trying to figure out something useful! I just don't know what said thing is, or if there always even is a real solid solution to complex/difficult social and community moderation problems. I truly think some complex social issues don't have easy moderation answers or can't be solved by tacking on a new feature. Sometimes these problems transcend whatever structures we try to build around them. Also sometimes it's less of a feature that is needed and more of a way a community operates that just deincentivizes bad faith engagement or participation from types of individuals we wouldn't want around. Sometimes a feature just becomes a "new vector for bad faith behavior"
I think one always has to consider how a particular system might be used in the opposite direction than one wants it to be (aka in what ways does a particular feature actually make the problem worse or legitimize the views people want contested, etc)
Thanks for being considerate and sharing your thought process openly (this is the kind of multi-faceted conversation I appreciate and why I love Tildes).
I'm not American and I totally forgot that you guys have the "both sides" thing that also gets abused to oblivion.. My implicit assumption tends to be that all conversations have many sides, not just two (let alone just one), and the more angles someone manages to include in their commentary, the more I tend to respect their conversation (even if I disagree with them). Maybe some wording without the word "side" would be more appropriate for this label. "Lacks angles"? "Lacks perspective"?
You make a good point that even scientific truths can be questioned. I haven't seen that happen on Tildes and if it did start happening, a lot of people would likely call it out.
Overuse and misuse of labels is annoying and I'd like to have a way to report such behaviour. I would be okay with Deimos taking away the ability to label things from people who have misunderstood their purpose. I would prefer that to taking away the labels entirely - they do make the site a lot more useful for me when applied correctly.
People can try to avoid getting the label by stating they acknowledge study X that says Y but that the study didn't take into account thing Z, for example, and using language that conveys a friendly attitude towards people with a differing view. Even if many comments do get the label and get slightly greyed out, that's still useful when someone actually manages to write in a way that encompasses the differing views and isn't offensive to most readers. We would have a black font comment in a sea of grey, which is a lot more commendable an achievement than the "Exemplary" label.
Fair point- yeah I was reading it all through a very US-based lens so I am primed to see some of those terms as very loaded in certain ways. So I was myopic in my own commentary and that's my fault for operating with some unnecessary assumptions (and although you didn't say this, I am sure Americans behaving as if they're the "default" perspective can be incredibly annoying)
It's only annoying when calling it out leads to doubling down or rationalising (= "Let me explain to you why the American perspective is actually the most important here") rather than self-examination.
We all see things from our own perspective, it's impossible not to. You recognised and admitted to yours and that is enough. Many conversations on here would be so much nicer if everyone learned to do the same! Not only nicer but higher quality as well. People who know a lot about a topic that others express negative and uninformed ideas about are not inclined to make a comment if the expected outcome is getting dismissed by an overly confident, hostile layperson.
If one-sided is "clearly overlooking information that would be readily available if only they cared to consider other people and different points of view", I find it kind of meaningless standard because I could apply it to anything. There's plenty of ink spilled in misogynistic incel and MAGA communities. But that doesn't mean I'm going to steep myself in that because someone labeled my opinion about gay rights one-sided.
I see an implied value judgement in the label: "there are sources of information I consider valuable that you seem to have failed to consider". Even my example above has this.
One of the things I value most about Tildes is that it has been a place where a range of ideas and perspectives can coexist, and people can have civil, thoughtful discussion about them. This is one of the only online places I've seen that happen, and I don't want to lose it
In the end, we are all one-sided, and I'm not sure that's a bad thing. I don't want a place where everyone thinks exactly like me because there would be nothing to write, no discussion to be had. Just endless back patting and agreeing.
I want a place where we can see and hear other sides, connect with other human beings, give support and help and encouragement. I want it to be safe. But what people need to feel safe is highly variable. I want it to be free of assholes, but the opinion that makes someone an asshole is highly variable.
I think a more valuable tool here is not a label, but a mindset. The idea is: kenosis(1). It sort of means "gentle space making". The idea that I can voluntarily limit myself in order to make space for other wills. But, like most human endeavors, doing it, and making it a norm, takes effort. But that effort is worth it because is a way to show that we value this community and the people in it.
(1) It's something from the Christian religious tradition, but you don't need any of the rest of it for it to be useful on its own.
Huh, I'm curious how many of my comments would get mislabeled as misinformation. A large chunk of what I comment is refuting something that I am sure is incorrect. Frequently, through the number of votes, I gauge that what I write is not very popular. Would that mean that what I write is likely to be labeled misinformation? These labels are a proxy for popularity, sad as it is to say.
I'm sure I'm not always right, but from reading this thread I get the sense that the people most likely to use this feature are the people I see frequently holding absolutist views that are based on feels.
The label I'm suggesting attempts to be something that isn't influenced by popularity. Most people should be able to detect when a comment is nuanced and takes into account differing perspectives, regardless of whether they like the comment or not (at least I think/hope this goes for most people on Tildes).
(I took a quick glance at your comment history and didn't find anything on the first page that I would consider lacking nuance to the point of deserving a label.)
This topic seems to be devolving into bickering at this point, and it has no chance of being implemented anyway, so I'm going to lock it.
Maybe moderation teams similar to Bluesky could be a solve for the underlying issues surrounding these requests?
Everyone gets the baseline moderation provided today, but volunteer moderator teams can be opted into as a layer overtop of that?
Oh, you posted this while I wrote my long-winded ramble leading to the same conclusion.
I'll only add that I would prefer if this role did not have "strict" moderation powers. It would be for guiding and informing. Attempting to lead things in a positive direction.
I actually really like this idea a lot more than labels! I trust a number of users on here much more than I do the broader crowd to always label in the same way. If I had a team of people I could opt into moderating on my behalf I'd love it.
I might be reading your take wrong, but I don't think you'd be able to opt in your own specific team. That would defeat the purpose entirely anyway and be a just an odd form of nepotism.
I do favor a modteam people can easily opt into. Or simply something along the lines of wikipedia talk pages but then for items that need attention for being flagged. Something along those lines anyway. In the thread yesterday I pitched several ideas like that and others did as well. Might be worthwhile checking out.
No not your own specific team that varies per user, I just mean that I think volunteer moderators that I know to label things well is a much better idea than giving everyone more labelling powers IMO.
This is such a bad idea, and so steeped in the style of other similarly bad ideas, that all I can do is cast a vote against it, and advise others to ignore and discourage this type of behavior wherever it shows up.