Thoughts on handling political content on Tildes
(0) Background
This is coming off a discussion in today's thread on forming new groups around whether or not to add a group for politics. I expressed there that, given my moderator experience on /r/ChangeMyView and /r/NeutralPolitics, I opposed making such a group given how Tildes currently stands.
(1) Political discussion is nearly always garbage.
I don't think anyone needs reminding of this, but political discussion almost uniformly fails to achieve anything positive in almost any social media platform. Your uncle's facebook rants? Garbage. Political sniping on Twitter? Garbage. The endless repetitive point scoring and outrage fest on most political subreddits? Garbage.
So, we have to ask, why is this content garbage?
(2) People want to be heard, but nobody wants to hear.
I do not think political discussion is garbage because of bad faith trolling. That certainly exists and does not help, but usually it's not hard to ID the trolls, and excepting egregious stuff like doxxing or threats, to ignore obvious bad faith absurdity.
The much bigger issue is that what people want to do is to be heard and validated in their political views. This is not merely that they want to proselytize or to win converts, but that they're seeking validation and a sense of rightness or righteousness in their statements.
This desire is toxic to a neutral forum, because invariably on any divisive issue, you will not merely be heard and validated, but will be challenged and denigrated. Indeed, often the challenges and denigrations themselves are the same performance in reverse. Members of each team trying to dunk on the other and earn validation for how hard they owned the other side.
(3) To overcome this, a successful political forum must have a purpose other than mere commentary.
On /r/ChangeMyView and /r/NeutralPolitics, we have been able to build forums which have large amounts of productive and non-hostile political discussion. The key to this is that neither forum allows for being heard, or general discussion, as its reason for being.
On /r/ChangeMyView we limit posts to views people genuinely hold, and are open to changing (CMV rule B). This requires that OPs cannot come to troll or soapbox. It is by far the most frequently used rule of ours in terms of removing submissions, almost always on the soapboxing side.
On /r/NeutralPolitics, we limit posts to neutrally framed questions about political subjects, which can be answered with facts. By doing this, we narrow the scope of discussion away from soliciting feelings (which is an invitation to people posting just to be heard) and towards bringing forth factual information, where people might learn something.
I don't know what purpose a political forum on Tildes might have, but to succeed it must have a clear purpose, and that purpose must be one which excludes people posting merely to be heard.
(4) In addition to a purpose beyond being heard, a political forum must have extreme civility rules.
Both CMV and NP have extremely similar rules in this regard, and they are absolutely crucial to the success of the fora.
In general, any comment or post which in any way denigrates another user should be removed. This is an extremely broad civility rule that is well past what most subreddits do. Calling another user a liar, or accusing them of bad faith posting is banned on both CMV and NP for example, even when such accusations are true.
The prohibition on what even may be seen as justified rudeness is I think the key to a civility rule. It immediately removes from the moderation process any discretion around the substance of the politics, and makes it a neutral rule which can be applied evenly to all parties.
It is also necessary because nothing productive ever happens after bad faith is accused. Almost uniformly, once someone is rude, if there is a response back to them, the response will be rude in kind, usually more severely. People love to try to get the last word in, and a clear, objective rule banning "they started it" spats is also an important component. CMV's wiki has a really good overview of how we enforce this rule there.
(5) Conclusion/TL;DR
I don't know exactly what political content should exist on Tildes. I do know that a general politics group will not work, and that rather a politics channel should be focused on a discrete purpose other than just discussion.
I would almost certainly ban link posts from any politics group, since inherently they're going to act as just headlines for people to pontificate on, without guiding discussion towards a particular goal. I would also obviously enforce civility, and have much stricter moderation of it than I might on a non-politics forum.
Edited for formatting
A quick thought to tag onto this that isn't necessarily deserving of its own post at the moment:
I'm a bit worried about where the "don't be an asshole" line will be drawn. I trust that most users currently involved here are acting in good faith, but I think this can really easily lead to tone-policing rather than just promotion of good content and keeping away hate speech.
For example: I'm trans, and I will naturally have problems with the subset of feminists who are actively anti-trans. Will there be a way to express negativity against these people, or will I be branded an asshole? It's a commonly made point, but over-enforcing neutrality and emotion leads to those who hold opinions further from the status quo being suppressed because they have more at stake than those who benefit from the status quo or who hold opinions closer to it.
Just trying to throw that in, since I'm not entirely in line with everyone here.
To be honest, I think that question may be deserving of its own post at some point since the truth is there is no real lines drawn in the sand just yet other than what was mentioned in the announcement about threats, harassment, and hate speech.
As @deimos has said though, this is not intended to be a "safe space". Criticism/dialogue about difficult topics is going to be encouraged and while civility is the ideal, there is also bound to be the occasional conflict. I don't think anyone is expecting superhero levels of restraint from everyone at all times here and it's understood everyone occasionally gets flustered, angry, lets things get too personal and lashes out in inappropriate ways.
However if that aggressive behavior is habitual, that's a problem. If people are consistently baiting others into those situation, that's a problem. If people constantly seek out others to have conflicts with (e.g. going into ~groups they dislike to start fights), that's a problem. Now whether those behaviors result in a ban (temporary or permanent), losing privileges (temp/perm), having trust reset (or permanently set to 0), the user being blocked from accessing certain ~groups, etc... will probably need to be determined case by case.
The nice thing about ~ is that accounts are actually going to have value with trust being something that is tied to them and built up over time with privileges attached, so the threat of having that reset or temporarily taken away may be enough for people to restrain themselves at least enough to keep things civil. And while ~ is in invite only (which may always be the case) the threat of a ban is a serious one because there may be no way to get back in. And if someone who was banned does manage to sneak back in and continues acting like an asshole, there is a very real possibility the person who reinvited them could face similar consequences for repeatedly inviting people who misbehave or get banned.
I should mention that I agree there is a level of overreach that's possible. Just want to make it clear, since this is a small community and we're all gonna be bumping into each other for a while, that while I am a vocal left-wing user and I think that's been clear by my contributions so far, I don't want others to think I'm ever asking for the site to be a safe space or suggesting that should be the case. I think safe spaces or places that align with my own beliefs are great, but there's plenty of value in spaces that are not geared that way but also keep out hate speech.
Anyway yeah, it's a rough question and I think being willing to wrestle with it at all puts this place leaps and bounds over most everywhere else. I have specific "what ifs" to your mention of habitual aggressive behavior, but at that point I think I'd be overreaching into a scenario that doesn't exist yet. I guess I just wanted to vocalize in some way that going too far for the pure neutrality ideal can be an issue.
Let's be fair - no one in history has ever really solved this problem, and it goes back to the ancient worlds of thousands of years ago.
We can't forget that people have a bad day once in a while, or post drunk sometimes, or occasionally swallow a big fat wad of troll bait and get triggered - so it's obviously not going to be a zero tolerance policy.
It's more likely to be based on history of behavior. If on balance the user is just a pile of constant bad behavior, that's when action is taken. If a chain of bad users comes along (like say Stormfront getting an invite code and invading by the hundreds) we can cut out the entire invite chain, ban it all at once like cutting a dying limb off of a tree. Bans here have consequences - you need another invite code at least, and all the trust you've ever earned is wiped clean. That's real enforcement, and it's something reddit does not have the will to implement.
I get where you're coming from. I am very vocally left, pro-LGBTQ rights and dislike false equivalence and absolutist "Fox News, fair and balanced" style "neutrality" too (e.g. Climate change deniers being given equal time as climate scientists). However one thing the internet desperately really needs right now is a place where productive dialogue can be established between all these currently highly polarized groups and while tone-policing is a tricky subject and can easily go too far, IMO it is also necessary (to a certain degree) if we want to accomplish that aim.
Some random thoughts I had on this subject:
1.) A version of the civility rules you outline could be global to all political ~groups, a baseline set of rules a group can expand on to fit their purpose. This consistency would help better train users, and avoid the situation that often arises on reddit where people from /r/politics flood into other subreddits and simply don't read / don't care about the rules there.
1a.) A corollary, and you've touched on this -- there absolutely cannot be any forum where people can expect not to have civility rules (+ rules tailored to the purpose of the ~group) strictly applied, otherwise you'll see a bleed from people from the less strict forums to the strict ones, which will eventually become overwhelming
UI improvements (just spitballing). You want to subscribe to ~politics? Well, you will be forced to spend five minutes reading a rule / answering a question about it. If you get banned, in addition to whatever the ban-time is, you have to answer five simple questions on the rules of that ~group. The idea is to a) force people to actually read the rules (not just hide them in the sidebar like reddit) and b) give a simple, but annoying penalty to those that violate the rules -- I feel like most people would spend five minutes to get themselves unbanned, and we'll be reinforcing the rules while doing so.
It sounds like a separate mod-queue, specifically for actions moderators have already taken but want consensus on, would be a good idea. E.g., ~groups can set the number of mod-votes for a ban to 3, and once a mod votes ban on a user, the offending comment / comments (maybe a pop-up box of their recent comments you can select relevant ones from?) get sent to this queue for other mods to vote on. This would apply to post / comment removals as well (though a ~group could set the threshold to 1, effectively disabling)
Reputation and it's effect on vote-weight. If you're a brand new user, you shouldn't expect to have an equal voice to someone who has been a valued contributor for some time. Conversely, if you're a long-time user who decides they're not as interested in ~politics, you shouldn't expect your opinion to matter as much to the ~group a year from now. Ways this might be implemented (and I'm pretty sure I'm just giving a hack-y description of the reputation system others have discussed way more, and referred to in this thread) include: differential vote weight by user / small difference in starting votes for a comment / post.
Thanks for posting this, huadpe. There's a lot of great thoughts here (as well as in the comments), and I think the key insight is that you can't have a good discussion when there's no flexibility. Changemyview has definitely figured that out, and I think it applies to a lot of other types of discussions as well.
Trying to figure out a reasonable way to handle civility on Tildes is going to be tough. I think it's very important, but it's also difficult to do in a way that doesn't feel oppressive. People really should be able to have discussions (and arguments) without it always devolving into attacks though, and I think it's essential to find a way to really build that into the site's culture (and maybe even its functionality somehow).
Here's a question for you, what sort of changes could you make to the way the website itself functions, e.g. UI, moderation tools, to foster better discussion?
That's kinda where my head is at as well. This isn't reddit (thank god) - which means the site itself can help take away a lot of the work involved in this kind of moderation. Systems can build reputation and trust, provide easy mechanisms to tag comments, even analyze a comment before it's posted and pop up a 'this seems like a flame, are you sure?' warning.
Rather than worrying about the tech and the method, it's the desired effect that we want to focus on. How do we get tildes to train people as they use it to be better versions of themselves?
Hm, it's hard to say, obviously for mod tools it's largely a question of usability. My workflow on moderating Reddit is pretty crappy, largely around the situations where we want mod consensus before taking action (on CMV that'd be for rule B removals and ban votes). Canned removal reasons from mod toolbox are super helpful also, both in creating consistency among the mod team and just making life easier.
We also use keyword lists to get reports for likely rule breaking words so we see them in modqueue without users needing to report.
I manage a lot of the political discussion in a private community for attorneys. They're amped to argue till they're blue in the face. They'll even pick up points and argue them for fun even if it's something they personally disagree with and pretend like they're going to live and die by it.
We do fine with a general civility rule (no personal insults). Getting too complex with rules right out the gates tends to throttle discussion. There shouldn't be a prohibition against pointing out that something isn't fact or a poster is pushing a transparent agenda for some reason.
One possible consequence of avoiding politics all together is avoiding the structural changes we should have to make a ~politics work. This could be a problem because evvverrrrything is political. You can't talk about SF without talking about housing/gentrification/investment/tax-policy, you can't talk about tech without talking about net neutrality/ai rules/facebook regulation/cultural changes/diversity, you can't talk about video games without running into gamer gate/violence/whatever.
There's always spill over. Politics is just people having different opinions. The problems that political discussions face are not unique to the subject of a government. So we'll face this issue anyway.
This isn't really to say that ~ necessarily needs a ~politics right now, but it might be important to think about and implement structure like @arghdos was suggesting earlier rather than later.
Hi there! I've been a long-term fan and sometimes even a rare occasional user of /r/NeutralPolitics, and sometimes I'd read /r/ChangeMyView. I think it's great to see your insight on what could potentially make a community focused on discussing politics work.
I am going to be both skeptical and disagree in parts, so hopefully this doesn't turn into a full RBG style dissent, but I wanted you to know out the gate that I appreciate where you're coming from here.
In another life, I entertained the gargantuan task of trying to reform /r/politics after years of being flooded with new users as a default and being hilariously under-moderated helped turn it into the illiterate shitpile that we all know and sometimes confuse for all the evils of mob mentality in one small internet forum. So at least as far as that front is concerned, I do think I have some insight into where that community went hardest off the deepend.
And that's pretty much the story of it. Every community where there are passionate community members is going to have passions rolling out of control eventually. It's the nature of every community. But you have to have people in a role (and an active, visible role) teaching people what the expectations are for the community or else the lowest common denominator will take root and the higher quality users will flee for other venues (because they're not going to be rewarded for participating in a yelling match with a brick wall).
What always set CMW and NP apart in my eyes was that the mod teams in both cases were not willing to sit by and be unable to appropriately enforce the standards for community conduct as newcomers flooded the gates looking to participate. Both teams took an active and prominent interest in safeguarding the cultures of their communities, and lo! It worked.
Because what matters most for reinforcing the culture of a community is near-immediate feedback. If a community can't provide negative feedback when a user fucks up, well then that behavior is just going to keep happening. If enough users do that shitty behavior, it'll drive the good users away.
Is it realistic to not have a ~politics group? Wouldn't that just cause it to spread into other groups (namely ~news, also known as ~TrumpDidWhat?!?)? I just don't see how this could work out. The general ideas you mention are inspiring, though, and should definitely be used as a guideline. The main issue probably comes down to how to enable good moderation. Tildes should make it very clear that it's not some "free speech experiment" but rather one in good content filtering.
AFAIK the plan is to eventually have a ~politics but right now we don't have any of the things implemented that we need to keep it from turning into a complete shitfest, like the trust system, moderator tools, action auditing, etc... so that's why there isn't one yet.
Thanks for the incredibly well thought out post. It's a lot to digest and will probably take a while to get any substantial responses (mine included). However, upon first read, my first initial thoughts were:
https://www.reddit.com/r/changemyview/wiki/rules#wiki_rule_2
That link should be particularly handy. Several of the people I have talked to about ~ (mostly people I know in real life who are kind of assholes themselves) were "concerned" about the definition of "asshole" in the "don't be an asshole" statement in the ~ tildes announcement. The CMV guidelines are very good and I will definitely be using that as a reference.
I also agree with pretty much everything you're saying. I don't think ~ is equipped to deal with ~politics yet (outside the scope of ~news). But once it is, I think your suggestions are a good general guideline for how it should be approached.
I'd also suggest having a look at rule B, where we have a long list of indicators of soapboxing which I think are very handy if you're trying to mod for that sort of thing. Copypastaing below (and praying the formatting works):
* Asking few or no genuine questions
* Seeming more interested in arguing or convincing others than in understanding opposing viewpoints
* Writing your explanation or responses like a persuasive essay, "rant"(or linking to external rants by you or someone else), or call to action for other users (such as linking email addresses or social media accounts in an attempt to brigade)
* Reiterating parts of your explanation in responses to comments, especially repetitively
* Ignoring the main points of a comment's argument, especially to pounce on some minor inconsistency
* Refusing to make concessions that an alternative viewpoint has any merit
* Focusing on the weaker arguments, especially when OP participates in a particular thread as long as the arguments are weak, and then drops it as soon as a strong argument is made
* Explicit statements of intent to change peoples' minds
* Posting in advocacy groups related to the view, such as to ask for advice on how best to make their arguments.
* Arbitrarily limiting which lines of argument you will discuss, especially while complaining that most/all respondents have "missed the point".
Information like this is going to save us so much time and help us avoid a great many mistakes. This reads like a recipe for troll inoculation. :D
Do check out the CMV wiki. We have a lot of pages other than just the rules. Obviously a lot of it is CMV specific, but it's a lot of generally useful info. I once got a bit testy with the Reddit admins and pointed out that CMV has more public facing guidance than all of Reddit.
Wait, are you trying to imply that reddiquette isn't sufficient "rules" to keep things civil (even though they don't even bother enforcing any of it)!? How dare you, sir. How dare you.
/s
Shockingly, it is not.
(Also I hate portmanteaus like "reddiquette.")
Pure advice is generally bad guidance, or at least not very useful guidance. Useful guidance is stuff about "these are the things we will look for when making moderation decisions." Even if you end up with balancing tests, you have an idea of what sort of things get weighed.
I think you're right about a lot of this, but without somewhere for political content it will just bleed and infect other groups.
I've found that for reddit what has worked for me in the past is not subscribing to political sub-reddits to keep it out of my feed, but going there specifically when I'm seeking that content.
I do find that politics groups feed on the misinformation spread by static headlines on reddit.
Here's an idea perhaps for political or polarizing discussion groups that may work. Perhaps the idea of a "Topic" post where you don't get to editorialize the header. Instead grouping a selection of simple topics that form the pseudo-heading.
Allowing only a short premise in the topic (with no links) and threaded discussions inside?
I think this kind of idea would be better for fostering discussions on topics and would sort-of auto collate in the scenarios where mega-threads are used to collect 100s of submissions.
Just my 2c
Megathreads are probably marginally better than linkposts, if for no other reason than that they put submissions into exclusively moderator hands, so in that manner it prevents submission rants, though they'd still come up in the comments a lot.
I think though it is appropriate for Tildes to say certain classes of content like political essays just are not welcome here in any forum, and should be removed, even if the lack of a forum for them causes some "bleeding" out into other forums.
For what it's worth, my read of the stupid Reddit userpage thing was about giving people a place to post stuff like political rants which literally no subreddit of any meaningful size wants, because they're garbage.
In the beginning I was somewhat against the idea of megathreads. I get why they have to happen, but it felt like they were selling their topics short. That's changed, however. When you visit a megathread in /r/politics and see close to a hundred links for a news story, it's an entirely new way of consuming the news, and it almost cuts through the bullshit, because you can see the entire media sphere's reaction at a glance. It also tends to put those media outlets into competition with each other for clicks, and the good articles get praise in the comments, just as the bad ones are mocked. I didn't see that coming, and I think there's a real value in the forest-for-the-trees view.
We can make megathreads a hell of a lot easier to manage. Mods can just select all of the submissions and click 'merge' (how about that, using 1997 forum tech reddit can't handle). A simple system for adding links to the megathread can also be created so mods aren't constantly editing the same self.post all the time to add new ones - instead, they just click merge and send it into the megathread, site handles it all.
Personally, I think megathreads are a bandaid solution. On reddit mods are already overworked, under-supported by reddit HQ and with minimal/restricted tools available to help them. Megathreads help mitigate those factors by giving mods far more control over the sources linked to and keeping the conversation contained to that one thread which they can focus on moderating more heavily instead of spread out across dozens of other related ones.
However, hopefully on ~ with the rep concept leading to a lot more "mods" in each group combined with more comprehensive mod tools and better "similar topic" management / thread combining, megathreads may not even be necessary here.
To be fair, I do not visit /r/politics just about ever, or any of the other big news/politics subs, so it might be that their megathreads are something more than I'm giving credit for.
I think something like "this is a thread for posting links to interesting stories about X event or subject" is a perfectly fine way to run a politics group which would meet the criteria I set before of "some purpose which excludes people posting merely to be heard."