Edit: I'm going to lock this thread In one of my other comments in this thread, I mention that there are several factors that are making the site feel heavy on drama lately. One of these is that...
Edit: I'm going to lock this thread
In one of my other comments in this thread, I mention that there are several factors that are making the site feel heavy on drama lately. One of these is that the default activity sort keeps meta-drama threads like this one constantly at the top of the site for days, which makes them feel much more important/prominent than they should be.
As I said, I have some plans to try to improve this over the next couple of weeks, but for now, locking is pretty much the only tool I have to address this. If you have input about something in this thread, please feel free to message me about it.
Original comment below:
I get where you're coming from, and we do need to do some things that will help improve the situation. But on the other hand, do we need a meta thread every time a few people get in an argument? That just draws more attention to it and makes it more significant than it was.
I think perhaps one of the reasons you get all these Meta threads is that people want clarity on cultural norms and they want any such norms to apply evenly to all 'sides' of arguments. But aside...
I think perhaps one of the reasons you get all these Meta threads is that people want clarity on cultural norms and they want any such norms to apply evenly to all 'sides' of arguments.
But aside from the docs:
treat each other in good faith and apply charitable interpretations
There isn't much info, plus many prolific posters do not follow the above. Hell I've certainly often fallen short.
Someone gets into or sees an argument and thinks "That isn't what I wanted this website to be!". But they have no idea if the people they're upset with are just random other users or your close friends (who else has spotted the 18/04 gang? ;). So they go make a meta post and try to appeal to the gallery.
Reminding people on all sides of debates to be charitable seems like something we really need. Perhaps comment flags could come back but without being shown? So after X reputable users have flagged a comment "uncharitable" the poster gets a nice PM?
super_james, your comment has been flagged as uncharitable by several users. Are you having a bad day? Perhaps consider coming back to tildes later.
super_james, you have had several recent comments flagged, you're locked from posting for 24hrs to cool off. Please do come back afterwards, we all have bad days!
Obviously this would be abused by people using it as a disagree button, so I guess we'd need reputation loss. Maybe after a certain level a jury of peers is selected and given final arbitration or else you have to make a determination yourself?
Yeah, I think getting the comment tags back fairly soon is quite important. One of the factors that I think is making things worse right now is that people have no outlet for negative feelings...
Yeah, I think getting the comment tags back fairly soon is quite important. One of the factors that I think is making things worse right now is that people have no outlet for negative feelings toward a comment except posting a reply. This makes people get involved in arguments when having a different outlet (negative tags, report, etc.) might have otherwise been what they chose to use instead.
The idea of not showing the comment tags visibly but only having them cause different effects (depending on which tags) is interesting too, and something I've been thinking about a little as well. Actually, one of the reasons I was working on this collapsing update was because I want to be able to use that when collapsing tagged comments (such as jokes) in cases where we want to give them less visual weight. So hopefully that's something we can start moving towards in the near future now, as well as potentially using some of the more "severe" tags to do other things like cause a cooldown like you suggested.
Guess I shouldn't be surprised you're already on it. Is it's worth having a temporary delete happy dictatorship until there are some user moderation tools? Feels like there's way too much drama...
Guess I shouldn't be surprised you're already on it.
Is it's worth having a temporary delete happy dictatorship until there are some user moderation tools? Feels like there's way too much drama that must waste your time and has to be mentally pretty exhausting. @Algernon_Asimov as dictator for month?
All starting to feel very Civ 2, switch to Dictatorship whilst we research Democracy... :)
Maybe, but that also has the potential to cause different drama around who I choose to give removal powers to, arguments over what or how much they're removing, and so on. I don't know if I want...
Maybe, but that also has the potential to cause different drama around who I choose to give removal powers to, arguments over what or how much they're removing, and so on. I don't know if I want to drag other people into it yet either.
There are a few different factors that I think are contributing a lot to the dramatic feelings, and I've got some plans to try and improve them (which I should post about soon). Anyway, hopefully things should get better over the next couple of weeks as some of those ideas start getting implemented.
I just checked two of them, and they joined on 26/04. But, you're not the only who's aware of the existence of Deimos' group of friends & advisers who have been discussing the concept of Tildes...
who else has spotted the 18/04 gang?
I just checked two of them, and they joined on 26/04. But, you're not the only who's aware of the existence of Deimos' group of friends & advisers who have been discussing the concept of Tildes with him for more than a year - they themselves are quite open about this. It's not a secret!
It's not a secret but it's not obvious. In a way I think it's worse that several people happily say "Tildes will do X" because they've personally been in the discussions and Deimos has agreed. I...
It's not a secret but it's not obvious. In a way I think it's worse that several people happily say "Tildes will do X" because they've personally been in the discussions and Deimos has agreed.
I think this is a problem because it muddies the water on working out who will get to set culture?. I think this is where all the PowerUser nonsense came from.
I believe the so-called "power users" are a different group than Deimos' advisers. As far as I interpret the complaint, the "power users" are those Tildeans who post and comment prolifically on...
I believe the so-called "power users" are a different group than Deimos' advisers. As far as I interpret the complaint, the "power users" are those Tildeans who post and comment prolifically on Tildes. They have no more "power" than the volume of their posting.
Coincidentally, some of these prolific people also happen to be part of Deimos' group of advisers - but that is a different thing. I believe that one or more of the advisers are not prolific posters; there's an overlap between the two groups, but the two groups are not congruent, nor is one group a full subset of the other.
Culture comes from each of these things, being an adviser and being prolific, but I believe it comes more from prolificity. The people who are most present and participate most often will, by their mere presence, have a bigger influence on the culture of a website than the people who don't participate. And, I believe that's who these perceived "power users" are, because the complaints I see about them are always along the lines of "I see them everywhere!"
Yeah, it's kind of funny that none of us who have been helping Deimos for the last year+ have actually been the ones accused of being power users... probably because, as you correctly pointed out,...
Yeah, it's kind of funny that none of us who have been helping Deimos for the last year+ have actually been the ones accused of being power users... probably because, as you correctly pointed out, we're actually not all that prolific. In my case, largely because I have been busy handling invite threads on reddit, writing the new site documentation and monitoring gitlab so haven't been able to actually comment here all that much, especially lately.
And as for determining site culture, I think you're also right that it's mostly the prolific and regular users who are the ones doing that. Us "advisors/friends" helped Deimos theory-craft the potential future site mechanics, have tried to help advise him on mod actions (e.g. whether to ban someone or not, whether to lock threads or not, etc) and we also occasionally point out where his attention may be needed since he can't be expected to monitor everything on the site... but other than that I personally feel we are largely spectators to the culture that is developing here.
I don't think this is knowable at this point. Our medium is Demios' server, he will control the sites culture via choosing the people or the algorithm or hell main force. This is what I'm trying...
Culture comes from each of these things, being an adviser and being prolific, but I believe it comes more from prolificity.
I don't think this is knowable at this point. Our medium is Demios' server, he will control the sites culture via choosing the people or the algorithm or hell main force.
This is what I'm trying to say: I think a lot of the anxious sounding meta posts are from people worried that the eventual culture will be hostile to them. But then this is expressed as "so and so was mean to me" or "do we really want tildes to be X?!?" or whatever.
Edit> SO perhaps this stuff could go away if we had more clarity on intent.
I've observed it in subreddits I moderate. The people who post most actively help to set the culture - especially when there's limited moderation happening.
I don't think this is knowable at this point.
I've observed it in subreddits I moderate. The people who post most actively help to set the culture - especially when there's limited moderation happening.
But Tildes is not Reddit and Tildes is planning a system which should mean no spaces have limited moderation. Could a super prolific poster change the culture in Ask_historians? I doubt it. What...
But Tildes is not Reddit and Tildes is planning a system which should mean no spaces have limited moderation.
Could a super prolific poster change the culture in Ask_historians? I doubt it. What the Tildes eventual system looks like is really going to matter in this.
We seem to have shifted from complaints about "power users" determining Tildes' culture now, in a situation where there's only one active moderator, to how Tildes' culture will be determined in...
We seem to have shifted from complaints about "power users" determining Tildes' culture now, in a situation where there's only one active moderator, to how Tildes' culture will be determined in the future, in a situation where there will be thousands of moderators.
I agree that more moderators means they have more ability to affect the culture. I was misled by your mention of "the 18/04 gang" and "power users" into thinking you were talking about Tildes as it is now. Sorry about the misunderstanding.
Aha, well spotted. Probably my fault, posting whilst jet-lagged. Yes, I was trying to talk about Tildes culture in the future. Seems a bit weird to me if people care about it now outside of how...
Aha, well spotted. Probably my fault, posting whilst jet-lagged.
Yes, I was trying to talk about Tildes culture in the future. Seems a bit weird to me if people care about it now outside of how that might influence the future.
The community is small, and we're all looking to the future. We all want to shape this place as best we can, it's why I think most active users here are active. Better to handle it now than wait...
But on the other hand, do we need a meta thread every time a few people get in an argument?
The community is small, and we're all looking to the future. We all want to shape this place as best we can, it's why I think most active users here are active. Better to handle it now than wait till it gets bigger and harder to fix.
Yeah, and I'd say posting a weekly hot topic thread to get us all to talk about the latest drama is essentially exactly the same thing. I'd expect to see this in ~drama
Yeah, and I'd say posting a weekly hot topic thread to get us all to talk about the latest drama is essentially exactly the same thing. I'd expect to see this in ~drama
You think I should have gotten involved in that Cyberpunk 2077 thread, then? What, specifically? Locked it? Removed posts? Banned someone? I'm not necessarily disagreeing (and I did consider some...
You think I should have gotten involved in that Cyberpunk 2077 thread, then? What, specifically? Locked it? Removed posts? Banned someone?
I'm not necessarily disagreeing (and I did consider some actions in it), but it's not always simple to go from a vague "we need to prevent fights" to finding specific actions to take, so I'm curious what you think should have been done.
So as soon as any controversial subject gets brought up, the thread gets locked? How does that work in practice? "This game seems pretty sexist", locked? The Riot threads you mentioned, locked...
So as soon as any controversial subject gets brought up, the thread gets locked? How does that work in practice? "This game seems pretty sexist", locked? The Riot threads you mentioned, locked preemptively because they're inherently controversial? Thread about the Florida shooting, someone mentions gun control, locked? All threads even vaguely related to politics, just locked immediately?
In fact, this thread seems like it's likely to be pretty controversial, should I just lock it right now?
I don't really know where to ask this, here seems good. What is your personal policy on locking threads? Locking threads and leaving them up is by far the thing I hate most about reddit, not even...
I don't really know where to ask this, here seems good. What is your personal policy on locking threads?
Locking threads and leaving them up is by far the thing I hate most about reddit, not even close. If I ever lock a thread I also remove it because as a user I get pretty tilted when I see locked threads on the front page.
I wouldn't say that I have a particular policy, really. I understand why locked threads annoy people, but I also don't think that completely destroying the ability for people to even see the...
I wouldn't say that I have a particular policy, really. I understand why locked threads annoy people, but I also don't think that completely destroying the ability for people to even see the thread by removing it entirely is necessarily much better. If the post itself or the existing discussion has value, destroying all of that isn't a very good approach either.
Hopefully by being stricter about acceptable behavior, cultivating a better site culture overall (and just by being a smaller site), it won't be necessary to lock things nearly as often as happens on reddit. However, I still think it's a reasonable action to take sometimes, and will probably end up being used occasionally.
I've just always seen locking as a such a lazy option by moderators on reddit, I get that only you are here to remove comments right now so locking is something that will probably occur as you...
I've just always seen locking as a such a lazy option by moderators on reddit, I get that only you are here to remove comments right now so locking is something that will probably occur as you have better things to do than policing threads, but in the future I just hope it is a veryrare occurrence as more moderation is able to police a thread of any size leaving the good discussion open and bad discussion removed without locking.
Right, it's kind of a consequence of having moderation on reddit concentrated on such a tiny group of users. Expecting a handful of (unpaid) people to monitor extremely active controversial...
Right, it's kind of a consequence of having moderation on reddit concentrated on such a tiny group of users. Expecting a handful of (unpaid) people to monitor extremely active controversial threads constantly is completely unrealistic, and deciding to just lock them when they start getting out of hand instead of trying to deal with that is understandable.
That's one of the things that trying to distribute moderation over a far larger group of users should be able to help with. If the thread can just be monitored on an ongoing basis by hundreds or even thousands of users that are already reading and participating in it anyway, it isn't nearly as heavy of a burden.
Locking a thread basically says "we don't have the moderation resources to continue dealing with this thread". There are multiple factors that contribute to reaching that state, and hopefully it shouldn't be nearly as necessary if we can improve those factors. Making it so moderation resources aren't so constrained by spreading out the workload is part of that, and so is just a general improvement of site culture, as I mentioned.
I think you're over-dramatizing it. Nothing's fucked up, I don't think less of you or anything, I'm just trying to understand what you're suggesting actually be implemented. It's very difficult to...
I think you're over-dramatizing it. Nothing's fucked up, I don't think less of you or anything, I'm just trying to understand what you're suggesting actually be implemented. It's very difficult to prevent discussion of controversial subjects entirely, and they're often going to end up getting a little heated. Trying to head them all off before they can ever get started is going to be pretty unrealistic to try to do in practice.
@Deimos asked you direct and specific questions to understand what you want him to do, and you're refusing to answer them. How is he supposed to do his job better (as I've already pointed out...
@Deimos asked you direct and specific questions to understand what you want him to do, and you're refusing to answer them. How is he supposed to do his job better (as I've already pointed out you're asking him to do) if you won't tell him what your definition of "better" is?
You want threads and comments locked and censored. Fine. I personally agree with strong moderation. However, I do not understand what actions you want taken, and in what circumstances. When should a thread be locked? When should a comment be removed? What's the particular red flag to look for? Where are you drawing the line? If you don't explain what you want, how is @Deimos supposed to figure it out? I'm pretty sure he doesn't read minds... (if he did, I doubt he'd be spending his time building a website!)
You're not helping your case by throwing your hands in the air and walking away from a thread that you started. If you want to solve a problem, stay and help. If you don't intend to help, then don't post threads like this in the first place. Don't just point at a problem and shout "That's a problem!" Offer solutions.
Look... I don't agree with your suggestion of locking threads if they show any signs of conflict or are controversial at all... and I was pretty harsh in my criticism but I am not going to crucify...
Look... I don't agree with your suggestion of locking threads if they show any signs of conflict or are controversial at all... and I was pretty harsh in my criticism but I am not going to crucify you for it either. Some good discussion came out of this topic regardless, which I think is a lesson in itself. We all have opinions not everyone agrees with so don't worry about your "standing" here....... it's fine and you're fine. Don't worry about it.
Yes, you are. That's exactly what this whole post of yours is about: "I feel that the admins should try to put a lid on the controversial topics" "what I’m suggesting is pretty much censorship"...
I’m not here to tell you to do your job.
Yes, you are. That's exactly what this whole post of yours is about:
"I feel that the admins should try to put a lid on the controversial topics"
"what I’m suggesting is pretty much censorship"
"hopefully, this gives you enough reason to start taking action"
"this is high time to have subverse moderators personally appointed by the staff"
You're explicitly telling @Deimos to do his job better - whether it's moderate more strongly, or appoint more moderators (or both). Don't pretend you're not.
I think the "one wrong move" you speak of would have been to lock the Cyberpunk 2077 topic over a minor disagreement (which you were a part of, I might add) when the majority of the discussions...
I think the "one wrong move" you speak of would have been to lock the Cyberpunk 2077 topic over a minor disagreement (which you were a part of, I might add) when the majority of the discussions going one were perfectly fine and entirely conflict free. And this topic, which you created seemingly to intentionally stir additional drama ("P.S. Demios, prepare for the shitstorm."), is the real weekly hot topic that should be locked and/or removed, IMO.
Yeah, I went back and reread the thread and removed "major" because, while you did participate, you didn't act inappropriately or instigate anything. I still think this meta-post is a ridiculous...
Yeah, I went back and reread the thread and removed "major" because, while you did participate, you didn't act inappropriately or instigate anything. I still think this meta-post is a ridiculous overreaction to a minor disagreement though.
You are very blunt about things others tend to skirt around. I don't think you should do anything differently, it's refreshing to see good opinions not just hivemind opinions.
You are very blunt about things others tend to skirt around. I don't think you should do anything differently, it's refreshing to see good opinions not just hivemind opinions.
How do we build threads and moderation (comment tagging, etc) so the community reading the thread can self-regulate this sort of nonsense? That seems like the real prize to me... designing for...
How do we build threads and moderation (comment tagging, etc) so the community reading the thread can self-regulate this sort of nonsense? That seems like the real prize to me... designing for this sort of activity and harnessing it somehow to improve the discussions. I mean, we can't just go banning every two people who get into a heated argument, even if the rest of us are rolling eyes at the level of nonsense sometimes.
Eh. That's just pushing the problem off to some nebulous 'group' to solve, without coming up with a real solution. 'Let the mods handle it' was reddit's mantra for years. I want to let the people...
Eh. That's just pushing the problem off to some nebulous 'group' to solve, without coming up with a real solution. 'Let the mods handle it' was reddit's mantra for years.
I want to let the people reading any given thread handle it somehow. Whatever the topic/thread, if you're there, you're reading it, congrats, that makes modding it your responsibility. What tools need inventing to make that work?
What about trusting everyone with power, and taking it away from them if they abuse it or opt out of being involved in 'governance' related activity? Then we make sure they've earned some...
What about trusting everyone with power, and taking it away from them if they abuse it or opt out of being involved in 'governance' related activity?
Then we make sure they've earned some reputation so we're not giving it to newbies right out of the gate. Basically, the kind of thing anyone who has been on Tildes for a month or so should have by now.
Consider the 'who to trust' problem solved. That brings us back to the question we're always avoiding - what tools do we build? Imagine you could moderate this thread right now. What would you want to see in the sidebar, under each comment, under the topic link above? What's missing to make thread flare ups into a non-issue?
Reporting system? Comment tags that all execute actions at specific vote thresholds but are otherwise invisible to avoid bandwagoning? Some sort of agree-disagree metric? Something you liked on another platform perhaps?
For now. Imagine it at scale, with 10x or 100x the number of subscribers it currently has, along with a commensurate increase in number of groups and sub-groups, and higher traffic.
This site is pretty straightforward, it does not take 6 months
For now. Imagine it at scale, with 10x or 100x the number of subscribers it currently has, along with a commensurate increase in number of groups and sub-groups, and higher traffic.
A 6-month waiting period would also serve to weed out trolls and trouble-makers, who might want to game the system but wouldn't have the patience to pretend to be good users for that long. That...
A 6-month waiting period would also serve to weed out trolls and trouble-makers, who might want to game the system but wouldn't have the patience to pretend to be good users for that long.
That said, I would probably advocate for a 3-month waiting period before Tildeans get the ability to start removing other Tildeans' comments and locking threads. Of course, they'd get the ability to edit topic tags and move topics before that. The plan is for people to progressively acquire more powerful moderation tools over time, as they demonstrate they can use the low-powered moderation tools well.
I disagree pretty wholeheartedly on this one. I think controversial topics should be allowed here because this is one of the only places online where I can have a discussion and safely assume...
the admins should try to put a lid on the controversial topics
I disagree pretty wholeheartedly on this one. I think controversial topics should be allowed here because this is one of the only places online where I can have a discussion and safely assume (mostly at least) that the people I'm engaging with are arguing in good faith. Being able to have authentic and good-faith arguments about touchy subjects is exactly what should set this place apart from other online communities. And yes, I think if someone is being an asshole someone should tell them they are being an asshole. It's something you would do for a friend.
ain’t that the reason why we try not to talk about politics on the dinner table?
I mean, isn't that rule primarily for wardrooms, coworkers and family? If we talk politics, it's not like we have to maintain some sort of polite hierarchy after. I can think someone is a dick and just go on using this site.
Also, drama is inevitable. I think that the key is how we as a community handle it. What we need to do is be respectful adults and learn to take a minute when we get too heated. Maybe like a 5min timeout from Deimos. A good 'ol "sit in the corner and think about what you've done" break.
Sure last week was a bit drama packed, but I have to admit, I don't really see it for sexism in games this week... This week honestly doesn't feel very heated in anything to me. I would also not...
Sure last week was a bit drama packed, but I have to admit, I don't really see it for sexism in games this week...
This week honestly doesn't feel very heated in anything to me.
I would also not count discussions about sexism in a known industry with issues as particularly controversial. Bar is a bit too low for me. If we started censoring this, I don't believe we'll have much to discuss.
Yeah I thought some comments in the CP2077 thread could have been phrased better, but overall things were alright for the most part IMO. Certainly better than some other threads we've had.
Yeah I thought some comments in the CP2077 thread could have been phrased better, but overall things were alright for the most part IMO. Certainly better than some other threads we've had.
As long as things don't devolve into personal attacks, I don't see what the problem is with discussing most controversial topics. Sure, some should probably be blanket banned, like 'race realism'...
As long as things don't devolve into personal attacks, I don't see what the problem is with discussing most controversial topics. Sure, some should probably be blanket banned, like 'race realism' or other topics that are only brought up by nazis, but most should be fine so long as they're moderated and repeat offenders banned. It's both possible and desirable for two people to disagree on a topic in good faith, and have a productive discussion on it, so long as bad actors are taken out of the equation. I mean one of the big ideas behind tildes was to not let the assholes ruin it for the rest of us.
Side note: I am curious what the current ratio of users to moderators is. Is there somewhere where the set of users with admin powers is listed?
Oh, no problem, it's not really clear at all. I think I'd like the removal decisions to be a bit more "distributed" if possible (so it isn't relying on one person to choose whether to remove...
Oh, no problem, it's not really clear at all. I think I'd like the removal decisions to be a bit more "distributed" if possible (so it isn't relying on one person to choose whether to remove things), but it will be tricky to do well.
Kind of a strange tangent. But this porn site (NSFW) has sort of a community driven curation/moderation setup. Maybe creating a place that allows the community to moderate reported posts/comments...
Kind of a strange tangent. But this porn site (NSFW) has sort of a community driven curation/moderation setup. Maybe creating a place that allows the community to moderate reported posts/comments could be a first step to building trust with a user.
Yeah, hopefully with the scale of the site it'll be a while before the moderation work load gets high enough for development of that system to become a priority. I think your idea on the docs page...
Yeah, hopefully with the scale of the site it'll be a while before the moderation work load gets high enough for development of that system to become a priority. I think your idea on the docs page sounds pretty solid, so long as there's a moderation log like the topic log to ensure transparency, and a system to report potential abuse. But I imagine developing the trust system it's based on is going to be quite an undertaking.
I think Deimos is the only actual moderator at the moment. Some of the rest of us can edit tags on submissions and move posts from one group to another but that's it.
I think Deimos is the only actual moderator at the moment. Some of the rest of us can edit tags on submissions and move posts from one group to another but that's it.
Oh, hey, I guess you mean me. I feel I was justified in calling it out there, as per the site's "don't be an asshole" policy. Someone was being an asshole to someone else. That's the kind of...
Hell, I’ve already seen one guy calling another an asshole this week.
Oh, hey, I guess you mean me. I feel I was justified in calling it out there, as per the site's "don't be an asshole" policy. Someone was being an asshole to someone else.
That's the kind of commenting that gives gaming forums and gamers the reputation they have. It's the kind of commenting that's brought r/games quality all the way down. There is no call for that kind of response in any community that is even pretending to aim for civility.
And this is one of the things that's tricky too—if you hadn't left that comment, I think I would have removed the chain that you replied to. As I was reading through it, I was planning to remove...
And this is one of the things that's tricky too—if you hadn't left that comment, I think I would have removed the chain that you replied to. As I was reading through it, I was planning to remove it, but once I read your comment I changed my mind and decided to leave it.
Having a bad back-and-forth like that followed up by an explanation of why it's bad has some value for readers, certainly more than a string of "removed by site admin" markers. So it's hard. Just responding to every incident and never taking action isn't good either, but I think it's important to have some of both or it's more difficult for people to learn what's expected and why.
There's a few responses I can think of. Lockdown. Heavy handed moderation, as soon as things get in to arguing territory warn, ban, delete, lock, etc. Laissez-faire. Let it all happen. Line in the...
There's a few responses I can think of.
Lockdown. Heavy handed moderation, as soon as things get in to arguing territory warn, ban, delete, lock, etc.
Laissez-faire. Let it all happen.
Line in the sand. Allow anything and everything up until some arbitrary point, when the reaction turns to #1 for those comments/people that cross the line.
Bubble. Use #1 over most of the site. Have 'angry bubbles' where #2 applies, either on a per-thread basis, a separate section of an existing thread, or a per-tilde basis. Probably would want #3 involved for things like death threats and such.
I pretty obviously prefer #4 - have a second section of commenting on a post to send arguments. There's actually a really smart way of designing that if you think about it and tagging. Commenters can self-tag their comments as 'argument' or something (and if they don't the consensus of mods could force apply it) and now everything in it and below counts as an argument. People can choose whether they want to see arguments on posts or not, hidden through a setting or auto-collapsed or w/e. The smart part is this doesn't need to just apply to arguments, you could have it for 'off-topic' or other comments on a post where commenters might want less strict rules applied than the general commenting on a tilde might need. Example: /r/photoshopbattles requires a pre-deleted automod post chain for talking about the source image - this could be set up with 'source discussion' tags which then get autocollapsed/hidden/etc. You could do a similar thing for AMAs, poll posts, [Serious] AskTildes (tag as a joke and you can leave it up).
Edit: I'm going to lock this thread
In one of my other comments in this thread, I mention that there are several factors that are making the site feel heavy on drama lately. One of these is that the default activity sort keeps meta-drama threads like this one constantly at the top of the site for days, which makes them feel much more important/prominent than they should be.
As I said, I have some plans to try to improve this over the next couple of weeks, but for now, locking is pretty much the only tool I have to address this. If you have input about something in this thread, please feel free to message me about it.
Original comment below:
I get where you're coming from, and we do need to do some things that will help improve the situation. But on the other hand, do we need a meta thread every time a few people get in an argument? That just draws more attention to it and makes it more significant than it was.
I think perhaps one of the reasons you get all these Meta threads is that people want clarity on cultural norms and they want any such norms to apply evenly to all 'sides' of arguments.
But aside from the docs:
There isn't much info, plus many prolific posters do not follow the above. Hell I've certainly often fallen short.
Someone gets into or sees an argument and thinks "That isn't what I wanted this website to be!". But they have no idea if the people they're upset with are just random other users or your close friends (who else has spotted the 18/04 gang? ;). So they go make a meta post and try to appeal to the gallery.
Reminding people on all sides of debates to be charitable seems like something we really need. Perhaps comment flags could come back but without being shown? So after X reputable users have flagged a comment "uncharitable" the poster gets a nice PM?
Obviously this would be abused by people using it as a disagree button, so I guess we'd need reputation loss. Maybe after a certain level a jury of peers is selected and given final arbitration or else you have to make a determination yourself?
Yeah, I think getting the comment tags back fairly soon is quite important. One of the factors that I think is making things worse right now is that people have no outlet for negative feelings toward a comment except posting a reply. This makes people get involved in arguments when having a different outlet (negative tags, report, etc.) might have otherwise been what they chose to use instead.
The idea of not showing the comment tags visibly but only having them cause different effects (depending on which tags) is interesting too, and something I've been thinking about a little as well. Actually, one of the reasons I was working on this collapsing update was because I want to be able to use that when collapsing tagged comments (such as jokes) in cases where we want to give them less visual weight. So hopefully that's something we can start moving towards in the near future now, as well as potentially using some of the more "severe" tags to do other things like cause a cooldown like you suggested.
Guess I shouldn't be surprised you're already on it.
Is it's worth having a temporary delete happy dictatorship until there are some user moderation tools? Feels like there's way too much drama that must waste your time and has to be mentally pretty exhausting. @Algernon_Asimov as dictator for month?
All starting to feel very Civ 2, switch to Dictatorship whilst we research Democracy... :)
All hail Me! :)
Maybe, but that also has the potential to cause different drama around who I choose to give removal powers to, arguments over what or how much they're removing, and so on. I don't know if I want to drag other people into it yet either.
There are a few different factors that I think are contributing a lot to the dramatic feelings, and I've got some plans to try and improve them (which I should post about soon). Anyway, hopefully things should get better over the next couple of weeks as some of those ideas start getting implemented.
I just checked two of them, and they joined on 26/04. But, you're not the only who's aware of the existence of Deimos' group of friends & advisers who have been discussing the concept of Tildes with him for more than a year - they themselves are quite open about this. It's not a secret!
It's not a secret but it's not obvious. In a way I think it's worse that several people happily say "Tildes will do X" because they've personally been in the discussions and Deimos has agreed.
I think this is a problem because it muddies the water on working out who will get to set culture?. I think this is where all the PowerUser nonsense came from.
I believe the so-called "power users" are a different group than Deimos' advisers. As far as I interpret the complaint, the "power users" are those Tildeans who post and comment prolifically on Tildes. They have no more "power" than the volume of their posting.
Coincidentally, some of these prolific people also happen to be part of Deimos' group of advisers - but that is a different thing. I believe that one or more of the advisers are not prolific posters; there's an overlap between the two groups, but the two groups are not congruent, nor is one group a full subset of the other.
Culture comes from each of these things, being an adviser and being prolific, but I believe it comes more from prolificity. The people who are most present and participate most often will, by their mere presence, have a bigger influence on the culture of a website than the people who don't participate. And, I believe that's who these perceived "power users" are, because the complaints I see about them are always along the lines of "I see them everywhere!"
Yeah, it's kind of funny that none of us who have been helping Deimos for the last year+ have actually been the ones accused of being power users... probably because, as you correctly pointed out, we're actually not all that prolific. In my case, largely because I have been busy handling invite threads on reddit, writing the new site documentation and monitoring gitlab so haven't been able to actually comment here all that much, especially lately.
And as for determining site culture, I think you're also right that it's mostly the prolific and regular users who are the ones doing that. Us "advisors/friends" helped Deimos theory-craft the potential future site mechanics, have tried to help advise him on mod actions (e.g. whether to ban someone or not, whether to lock threads or not, etc) and we also occasionally point out where his attention may be needed since he can't be expected to monitor everything on the site... but other than that I personally feel we are largely spectators to the culture that is developing here.
I don't think this is knowable at this point. Our medium is Demios' server, he will control the sites culture via choosing the people or the algorithm or hell main force.
This is what I'm trying to say: I think a lot of the anxious sounding meta posts are from people worried that the eventual culture will be hostile to them. But then this is expressed as "so and so was mean to me" or "do we really want tildes to be X?!?" or whatever.
Edit> SO perhaps this stuff could go away if we had more clarity on intent.
I've observed it in subreddits I moderate. The people who post most actively help to set the culture - especially when there's limited moderation happening.
But Tildes is not Reddit and Tildes is planning a system which should mean no spaces have limited moderation.
Could a super prolific poster change the culture in Ask_historians? I doubt it. What the Tildes eventual system looks like is really going to matter in this.
We seem to have shifted from complaints about "power users" determining Tildes' culture now, in a situation where there's only one active moderator, to how Tildes' culture will be determined in the future, in a situation where there will be thousands of moderators.
I agree that more moderators means they have more ability to affect the culture. I was misled by your mention of "the 18/04 gang" and "power users" into thinking you were talking about Tildes as it is now. Sorry about the misunderstanding.
Aha, well spotted. Probably my fault, posting whilst jet-lagged.
Yes, I was trying to talk about Tildes culture in the future. Seems a bit weird to me if people care about it now outside of how that might influence the future.
The community is small, and we're all looking to the future. We all want to shape this place as best we can, it's why I think most active users here are active. Better to handle it now than wait till it gets bigger and harder to fix.
Hmmmm...
Yeah, and I'd say posting a weekly hot topic thread to get us all to talk about the latest drama is essentially exactly the same thing. I'd expect to see this in ~drama
You think I should have gotten involved in that Cyberpunk 2077 thread, then? What, specifically? Locked it? Removed posts? Banned someone?
I'm not necessarily disagreeing (and I did consider some actions in it), but it's not always simple to go from a vague "we need to prevent fights" to finding specific actions to take, so I'm curious what you think should have been done.
So as soon as any controversial subject gets brought up, the thread gets locked? How does that work in practice? "This game seems pretty sexist", locked? The Riot threads you mentioned, locked preemptively because they're inherently controversial? Thread about the Florida shooting, someone mentions gun control, locked? All threads even vaguely related to politics, just locked immediately?
In fact, this thread seems like it's likely to be pretty controversial, should I just lock it right now?
I don't really know where to ask this, here seems good. What is your personal policy on locking threads?
Locking threads and leaving them up is by far the thing I hate most about reddit, not even close. If I ever lock a thread I also remove it because as a user I get pretty tilted when I see locked threads on the front page.
I wouldn't say that I have a particular policy, really. I understand why locked threads annoy people, but I also don't think that completely destroying the ability for people to even see the thread by removing it entirely is necessarily much better. If the post itself or the existing discussion has value, destroying all of that isn't a very good approach either.
Hopefully by being stricter about acceptable behavior, cultivating a better site culture overall (and just by being a smaller site), it won't be necessary to lock things nearly as often as happens on reddit. However, I still think it's a reasonable action to take sometimes, and will probably end up being used occasionally.
I've just always seen locking as a such a lazy option by moderators on reddit, I get that only you are here to remove comments right now so locking is something that will probably occur as you have better things to do than policing threads, but in the future I just hope it is a very rare occurrence as more moderation is able to police a thread of any size leaving the good discussion open and bad discussion removed without locking.
Right, it's kind of a consequence of having moderation on reddit concentrated on such a tiny group of users. Expecting a handful of (unpaid) people to monitor extremely active controversial threads constantly is completely unrealistic, and deciding to just lock them when they start getting out of hand instead of trying to deal with that is understandable.
That's one of the things that trying to distribute moderation over a far larger group of users should be able to help with. If the thread can just be monitored on an ongoing basis by hundreds or even thousands of users that are already reading and participating in it anyway, it isn't nearly as heavy of a burden.
Locking a thread basically says "we don't have the moderation resources to continue dealing with this thread". There are multiple factors that contribute to reaching that state, and hopefully it shouldn't be nearly as necessary if we can improve those factors. Making it so moderation resources aren't so constrained by spreading out the workload is part of that, and so is just a general improvement of site culture, as I mentioned.
I think you're over-dramatizing it. Nothing's fucked up, I don't think less of you or anything, I'm just trying to understand what you're suggesting actually be implemented. It's very difficult to prevent discussion of controversial subjects entirely, and they're often going to end up getting a little heated. Trying to head them all off before they can ever get started is going to be pretty unrealistic to try to do in practice.
@Deimos asked you direct and specific questions to understand what you want him to do, and you're refusing to answer them. How is he supposed to do his job better (as I've already pointed out you're asking him to do) if you won't tell him what your definition of "better" is?
You want threads and comments locked and censored. Fine. I personally agree with strong moderation. However, I do not understand what actions you want taken, and in what circumstances. When should a thread be locked? When should a comment be removed? What's the particular red flag to look for? Where are you drawing the line? If you don't explain what you want, how is @Deimos supposed to figure it out? I'm pretty sure he doesn't read minds... (if he did, I doubt he'd be spending his time building a website!)
You're not helping your case by throwing your hands in the air and walking away from a thread that you started. If you want to solve a problem, stay and help. If you don't intend to help, then don't post threads like this in the first place. Don't just point at a problem and shout "That's a problem!" Offer solutions.
Thank you.
Look... I don't agree with your suggestion of locking threads if they show any signs of conflict or are controversial at all... and I was pretty harsh in my criticism but I am not going to crucify you for it either. Some good discussion came out of this topic regardless, which I think is a lesson in itself. We all have opinions not everyone agrees with so don't worry about your "standing" here....... it's fine and you're fine. Don't worry about it.
Yes, you are. That's exactly what this whole post of yours is about:
"I feel that the admins should try to put a lid on the controversial topics"
"what I’m suggesting is pretty much censorship"
"hopefully, this gives you enough reason to start taking action"
"this is high time to have subverse moderators personally appointed by the staff"
You're explicitly telling @Deimos to do his job better - whether it's moderate more strongly, or appoint more moderators (or both). Don't pretend you're not.
I think the "one wrong move" you speak of would have been to lock the Cyberpunk 2077 topic over a minor disagreement (which you were a part of, I might add) when the majority of the discussions going one were perfectly fine and entirely conflict free. And this topic, which you created seemingly to intentionally stir additional drama ("P.S. Demios, prepare for the shitstorm."), is the real weekly hot topic that should be locked and/or removed, IMO.
Yeah, I went back and reread the thread and removed "major" because, while you did participate, you didn't act inappropriately or instigate anything. I still think this meta-post is a ridiculous overreaction to a minor disagreement though.
You are very blunt about things others tend to skirt around. I don't think you should do anything differently, it's refreshing to see good opinions not just hivemind opinions.
Because you're omnipresent - which makes you goddess-like. ;)
Locked? Really? You were directly contributing to that post. Why not just not participate, and maybe send a message directly to Deimos?
Lol we haven't had anything spicy enough for /r/drama yet. Maybe the go1ldfish thing but only because of his reputation.
How do we build threads and moderation (comment tagging, etc) so the community reading the thread can self-regulate this sort of nonsense? That seems like the real prize to me... designing for this sort of activity and harnessing it somehow to improve the discussions. I mean, we can't just go banning every two people who get into a heated argument, even if the rest of us are rolling eyes at the level of nonsense sometimes.
Eh. That's just pushing the problem off to some nebulous 'group' to solve, without coming up with a real solution. 'Let the mods handle it' was reddit's mantra for years.
I want to let the people reading any given thread handle it somehow. Whatever the topic/thread, if you're there, you're reading it, congrats, that makes modding it your responsibility. What tools need inventing to make that work?
What about trusting everyone with power, and taking it away from them if they abuse it or opt out of being involved in 'governance' related activity?
Then we make sure they've earned some reputation so we're not giving it to newbies right out of the gate. Basically, the kind of thing anyone who has been on Tildes for a month or so should have by now.
Consider the 'who to trust' problem solved. That brings us back to the question we're always avoiding - what tools do we build? Imagine you could moderate this thread right now. What would you want to see in the sidebar, under each comment, under the topic link above? What's missing to make thread flare ups into a non-issue?
Reporting system? Comment tags that all execute actions at specific vote thresholds but are otherwise invisible to avoid bandwagoning? Some sort of agree-disagree metric? Something you liked on another platform perhaps?
Well, since nobody's been here six months yet we'll have to make due with a lower bar for now. :P
For now. Imagine it at scale, with 10x or 100x the number of subscribers it currently has, along with a commensurate increase in number of groups and sub-groups, and higher traffic.
A 6-month waiting period would also serve to weed out trolls and trouble-makers, who might want to game the system but wouldn't have the patience to pretend to be good users for that long.
That said, I would probably advocate for a 3-month waiting period before Tildeans get the ability to start removing other Tildeans' comments and locking threads. Of course, they'd get the ability to edit topic tags and move topics before that. The plan is for people to progressively acquire more powerful moderation tools over time, as they demonstrate they can use the low-powered moderation tools well.
I disagree pretty wholeheartedly on this one. I think controversial topics should be allowed here because this is one of the only places online where I can have a discussion and safely assume (mostly at least) that the people I'm engaging with are arguing in good faith. Being able to have authentic and good-faith arguments about touchy subjects is exactly what should set this place apart from other online communities. And yes, I think if someone is being an asshole someone should tell them they are being an asshole. It's something you would do for a friend.
I mean, isn't that rule primarily for wardrooms, coworkers and family? If we talk politics, it's not like we have to maintain some sort of polite hierarchy after. I can think someone is a dick and just go on using this site.
Also, drama is inevitable. I think that the key is how we as a community handle it. What we need to do is be respectful adults and learn to take a minute when we get too heated. Maybe like a 5min timeout from Deimos. A good 'ol "sit in the corner and think about what you've done" break.
Sure last week was a bit drama packed, but I have to admit, I don't really see it for sexism in games this week...
This week honestly doesn't feel very heated in anything to me.
I would also not count discussions about sexism in a known industry with issues as particularly controversial. Bar is a bit too low for me. If we started censoring this, I don't believe we'll have much to discuss.
Yeah I thought some comments in the CP2077 thread could have been phrased better, but overall things were alright for the most part IMO. Certainly better than some other threads we've had.
Agreed. A few comments could have been reworded, but that's just the nature of discussing anything worth discussing.
As long as things don't devolve into personal attacks, I don't see what the problem is with discussing most controversial topics. Sure, some should probably be blanket banned, like 'race realism' or other topics that are only brought up by nazis, but most should be fine so long as they're moderated and repeat offenders banned. It's both possible and desirable for two people to disagree on a topic in good faith, and have a productive discussion on it, so long as bad actors are taken out of the equation. I mean one of the big ideas behind tildes was to not let the assholes ruin it for the rest of us.
Side note: I am curious what the current ratio of users to moderators is. Is there somewhere where the set of users with admin powers is listed?
The list is: me.
Ah, I didn't realize the only mod powers you'd given out were title tagging, moving, and editing. My mistake.
Oh, no problem, it's not really clear at all. I think I'd like the removal decisions to be a bit more "distributed" if possible (so it isn't relying on one person to choose whether to remove things), but it will be tricky to do well.
Kind of a strange tangent. But this porn site (NSFW) has sort of a community driven curation/moderation setup. Maybe creating a place that allows the community to moderate reported posts/comments could be a first step to building trust with a user.
Yeah, hopefully with the scale of the site it'll be a while before the moderation work load gets high enough for development of that system to become a priority. I think your idea on the docs page sounds pretty solid, so long as there's a moderation log like the topic log to ensure transparency, and a system to report potential abuse. But I imagine developing the trust system it's based on is going to be quite an undertaking.
I think Deimos is the only actual moderator at the moment. Some of the rest of us can edit tags on submissions and move posts from one group to another but that's it.
You're right, I misunderstood the announcement.
Oh, hey, I guess you mean me. I feel I was justified in calling it out there, as per the site's "don't be an asshole" policy. Someone was being an asshole to someone else.
That's the kind of commenting that gives gaming forums and gamers the reputation they have. It's the kind of commenting that's brought r/games quality all the way down. There is no call for that kind of response in any community that is even pretending to aim for civility.
And this is one of the things that's tricky too—if you hadn't left that comment, I think I would have removed the chain that you replied to. As I was reading through it, I was planning to remove it, but once I read your comment I changed my mind and decided to leave it.
Having a bad back-and-forth like that followed up by an explanation of why it's bad has some value for readers, certainly more than a string of "removed by site admin" markers. So it's hard. Just responding to every incident and never taking action isn't good either, but I think it's important to have some of both or it's more difficult for people to learn what's expected and why.
There's a few responses I can think of.
I pretty obviously prefer #4 - have a second section of commenting on a post to send arguments. There's actually a really smart way of designing that if you think about it and tagging. Commenters can self-tag their comments as 'argument' or something (and if they don't the consensus of mods could force apply it) and now everything in it and below counts as an argument. People can choose whether they want to see arguments on posts or not, hidden through a setting or auto-collapsed or w/e. The smart part is this doesn't need to just apply to arguments, you could have it for 'off-topic' or other comments on a post where commenters might want less strict rules applied than the general commenting on a tilde might need. Example: /r/photoshopbattles requires a pre-deleted automod post chain for talking about the source image - this could be set up with 'source discussion' tags which then get autocollapsed/hidden/etc. You could do a similar thing for AMAs, poll posts, [Serious] AskTildes (tag as a joke and you can leave it up).