I'm currently traveling and won't be able to participate at any length in this thread. Very briefly: I don't think of Tildes as a "public square", and it's not intended to be one. I want it to be...
I'm currently traveling and won't be able to participate at any length in this thread. Very briefly:
I don't think of Tildes as a "public square", and it's not intended to be one. I want it to be a community, and eventually a network of communities. Moderated, higher-quality communities.
With that in mind, I have very little patience for people whose intentions are to disrupt the community instead of contribute to it. I gave go1dfish a chance, but he quickly started behaving exactly as he does on reddit.
If you think Tildes's systems are fundamentally broken, then you're probably expecting it to be a different type of site than it's going to be. And that's fine, every site doesn't need to be for everyone. You have plenty of other options.
The idea of the moderation system around here is based on the notion of the pareto principle. The social forum variant of that principle is called the 1% rule. In a nutshell, given 1000 users, 10...
Exemplary
The idea of the moderation system around here is based on the notion of the pareto principle. The social forum variant of that principle is called the 1% rule. In a nutshell, given 1000 users, 10 of them will post content, 90 of them will comment on that content, and the other 900 won't participate at all except by passively reading.
I'm also willing to bet that just like 10% of users do all the posting/commenting, only 1% of that 10% are troublemakers. So far, Deimos has banned 38 accounts total out of 10,000 so we're doing very well on that bet. If one percent of the users cause over ninety percent of the problems, do we really need to stick up for these people? When an asshole walks into a supermarket and pisses on the floor, what does the staff at that supermarket do? Try to explain to him why that's a bad action, or kick him out, and if necessary call the cops? Why should an internet forum's etiquette be any different than a brick and mortar store? Will there be that many people sticking up for that guy's rights to piss in everyone else's corn flakes? I doubt it.
In a way, these complaints seem rather divorced from reality. If we'd had three hundred banned users by now I still would have been fine with those numbers. A mere 38 (with some of them the same person)? That's an excellent number and all it tells me is that this is the right approach.
The challenge is to get that silent 900 people involved in moderation somehow. That's what the comment labels do, for example. Any user who has been here for seven days gets to use them. Vote weighting is another concept we've talked about, so that longer-term lurkers have stronger voting power to balance out the whims of new arrivals washing away the forum culture. There may come a time where the majority of certain types of moderation work comes from people who never comment or submit at all.
Once we have enough people giving that moderation system data/actions, we can start using thresholds as triggers. X number of malice tags does nothing, Y number of malice tags flags a comment for review. Once we get those thresholds high enough (which has to be preceded by gaining a large user base) it should be able to filter out the noise in the moderation system from that 1% who aren't using it properly.
A system like this can't be built before launch, because it's impossible to know what your moderation needs actually are, or how well the tools work, until you do the work of building them and testing them in the real world with your actual users directly involved in the discussions. The system has to grow slowly along with the site itself. The first pass at comment tagging here was a colorful disaster. Test, learn, refactor and now it's labels and working quite well.
That's why Tildes is using the classic benevolent dictator moderation system of just Deimos right now. He and a small number of other volunteers can keep up with the level of work, as long as bans actually matter, which means as long as the site remains invite-only. It's possible to scale up to 100k users without needing much moderation on a reddit. I expect that'll go much further here since unlike reddit, bans matter.
It's also why Deimos has very little patience on these issues. He's modded on reddit for over a decade (the default of /r/games) and he's dealt with every kind of troll you can imagine firsthand. He's worked at reddit, he created automoderator which is the only thing keeping reddit remotely sane and has been for a very long time. I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt based on that.
Edit: One other point that I think bears endless repetition is something Deimos mentioned in an older thread. @Vivaria linked it below, but I want to quote that blurb Deimos linked in it again.
There are some nice people in the world. I mean nice people, the sort I couldn’t describe myself as. People who are friends with everyone, who are somehow never involved in any argument, who seem content to spend their time drawing pictures of bumblebees on flowers that make everyone happy.
Those people are great to have around. You want to hold onto them as much as you can.
But people only have so much tolerance for jerkiness, and really nice people often have less tolerance than the rest of us.
The trouble with not ejecting a jerk — whether their shenanigans are deliberate or incidental — is that you allow the average jerkiness of the community to rise slightly. The higher it goes, the more likely it is that those really nice people will come around less often, or stop coming around at all. That, in turn, makes the average jerkiness rise even more, which teaches the original jerk that their behavior is acceptable and makes your community more appealing to other jerks. Meanwhile, more people at the nice end of the scale are drifting away.
Perhaps there's a reason we don't get that much commenting from that silent 900. Ever wonder what a forum would look like if we could wake them up and get them submitting and commenting? ;)
This is an excellent analogy. I tend to use a similar argument. Though less pissing, more screaming at passersby ; ) I've never quite understood this notion that a website, specifically reddit, is...
When an asshole walks into a supermarket and pisses on the floor, what does the staff at that supermarket do? Try to explain to him why that's a bad action, or kick him out, and if necessary call the cops? Why should an internet forum's etiquette be any different than a brick and mortar store? Will there be that many people sticking up for that guy's rights to piss in everyone else's corn flakes? I doubt it.
This is an excellent analogy. I tend to use a similar argument. Though less pissing, more screaming at passersby ; )
I've never quite understood this notion that a website, specifically reddit, is somehow a public square. And even in a public square, I don't think you'd get to scream at the top of your lungs, castigating and harassing anyone that happens to walk by, even if they did engage with you. I'm sure most places, even in the US, have laws and ordinances against that kind of behavior.
Before reddit, and even after reddit, I've never seen such a massive community think they have 100% free speech on a publicly-accessible, privately-owned website (AKA any regular website). Maybe 4chan is the outlier. Even the creator of Voat had to start enforcing some things.
I've been on forums and other types of social media since the mid 90s. There are always rules. And there are always mods/admins ready to enforce those rules. Only on reddit do people kick and scream at the smallest of enforcement action that's often necessary.
Don't get me wrong; mods and admins are never super popular. But I feel like people elsewhere have tended to understand why they exist; why they have to exist.
I enjoy reddit. I still use it daily. Far more than tildes at the moment. But reddit's dumbest decision was always their approach to "free speech" on the site. Look how many times they've had to walk that back in the face of various self-inflicted crises. Not only that, but their perceived selective application of it, as well.
The worst part -- and perhaps this is a result all of social media, though reddit plays a big part -- is the spreading of the belief that somehow everyone gets to have a say AND people MUST listen. No. You can have your say, but I don't have to listen. And, as a mod, I don't have to make other people listen to you, either. I don't need people pissing in my community's aisles or in their corn flakes. Take that to Walmart or Voat.
I'm glad to see many tildes users, and its creator, take this position. After years of taking a beating on the issue elsewhere, especially when moderating, it's a breath of fresh air.
There's another side to that coin though. While I'm not arguing against what you're saying here, what youtube is doing wrt. copyright issues isn't cool either, and while it isn't a free speech...
There's another side to that coin though. While I'm not arguing against what you're saying here, what youtube is doing wrt. copyright issues isn't cool either, and while it isn't a free speech violation per se to kick you off of a website, it certainly impacts your ability to be heard, and I feel we've as a society not gotten to where we should be there. The power of the relevant corporations is too great in my book. The big 4 (twitter, FB, Google, reddit) can shut a topic or a person down pretty damn hard if they so please, and at that point I'm kind of raising the bar of what I expect of these corporations. Stuff like "they have to have a good reason for any admin action" and "they can't lie in official statements beyond a certain importance" come to mind. Just to get a grip of things like youtube copyright-striking stuff for bullshit reasons. Of course, this doesn't impact their moderation rights. "You're annoying and an ass and no one wants to be exposed to what you say" is a very good reason imo, esp. if you throw in whatever laws apply regarding slander, indecency, inciting violence etc. might apply. "We don't want the liability in case this is a copyright infringement" if there legally can't be that liability, just for example, would be a shitty reason.
We should probably just break them all up. For youtube, there's no reason comments, video hosting, subscriptions and recommendations all need to be handled by the same entity. In fact, each and every one of these could be done by a distinct entity. That would remove a lot of conflicts of interest and would make competition more viable, ridding us of a lot of shitty business practices.
I just realized not only am I thinking about ISPs like I'm thinking about my utility companies (they tend towards monopolies, break them up and regulate them) but I'm doing the same about internet platforms. Utility companies within utility companies. Given that we have fair (mostly) access to the internet, it's a shame that we consumers have let the situation regarding platforms degrade to this.
Hypothetical: The general opinion seems to be that the more people who participate in a forum or social platform, the worse it gets. Would getting the "silent 900" to be more active accelerate the...
Ever wonder what a forum would look like if we could wake them up and get them submitting and commenting?
Hypothetical: The general opinion seems to be that the more people who participate in a forum or social platform, the worse it gets. Would getting the "silent 900" to be more active accelerate the (perceived) degeneration of a given social platform?
I'm honestly not sure. I suspect all it would really mean is that the level of activity would be higher than we usually see in a forum with a given number of users. I'd like to think that the...
I'm honestly not sure. I suspect all it would really mean is that the level of activity would be higher than we usually see in a forum with a given number of users. I'd like to think that the lurkers would actually be better positioned as contributors than a brand new account would be, since they have been lurking and have had the time to absorb the forum culture and get to know people.
I think if you were to double your activity level from new users, you'd see a culture shift/quality slide, but if you were to double your activity by activating lurkers instead, that culture shift would be much smaller, maybe even nonexistent. I haven't got any hard data to base this on, though. Far as I know, nobody's really even tried to activate their lurkers. I'd be surprised if efforts in that direction resulted in even a few percent of an activity gain... but given that only 1% of the people actually submit content, that few percent could have a rather massive impact on the amount of content.
I think it comes down to a simple question - how does one make a forum seem more inviting to post? For Tildes itself, once we have the anon commenting feature active so that lurkers can leave anonymized comments, that may lead to an increase in activity from the more privacy-conscious lurkers.
You mentioned go1dfish was being civil, but racists can be civil most of the time while still being racist. It's not all clan marches and lynchings. He was defending either the concept of, or the...
You mentioned go1dfish was being civil, but racists can be civil most of the time while still being racist. It's not all clan marches and lynchings. He was defending either the concept of, or the discussion of, racial IQ and 'race realism' on this site. I can't remember which.
I realize that this site is not a haven of complete free-speech, but merely discussing how one should be able to post scientific studies should not warrant a ban.
When you're calling an entire group of marginalized people inherently inferior, you've moved past a simple discussion, regardless of how 'civil' your tone is. Most users here do not want tildes to give 'race realists' a platform. You might enjoy this video by Natale Wynn on how to spot a fascist.
I was here for all of that and I'm not sure this is the ban I'd go to bat for. It's really hard to for me to interpret go1dfish's many arguments and rants on this site as being made in good faith....
I was here for all of that and I'm not sure this is the ban I'd go to bat for.
It's really hard to for me to interpret go1dfish's many arguments and rants on this site as being made in good faith. He employed a number of tactics I see used by trolls and alt-right agitators when pushing his opinions.
This is one of the few sites online where I actually see healthy discourse where people change their view and admit they're wrong. go1dfish wasn't furthering that.
Not OP, but I was around for that ban and actually read most (if not all) his comments before they were removed. It was extremely tedious and he was, whether intentionally or not, escalating every...
Not OP, but I was around for that ban and actually read most (if not all) his comments before they were removed. It was extremely tedious and he was, whether intentionally or not, escalating every "argument". And I say "intentionally or not", but a person can only give so many benefit of a doubt's. He was asked to reflect on his comments multiple times, by multiple people, just to see how negatively it could be read, and basically did a "I have a right to free speech!!!". And after the original post was locked, he essentially immediately "reopened" it by posting a new post.
I personally agree with his ban because 1) he was clearly not having a discussion (basically a only shouting, not listening), 2) he was respectfully asked to just cool it, and couldn't leave it at all, not for a single moment, and 3) he was, again intentionally or not, supporting racists.
A little context that may be missing is that before the climax that got him banned, there were several racist posts shallowly hidden as scientific studies proving race and IQ and such.
My two cents, you can be as polite and "civil" as you want, but if you're saying racist things, you're a racist. And for Tildes to be a welcoming site that promotes healthy engagement, we cannot have a front page of racist "studies" and a community defending their right to post them.
You are open to people discussing the point your post does not have, by your own admission, but not anything else about it. Off to a great start The how and why of this has been laid out since day...
I really have no big point to this post, other than to expose some flaws in this site.
I am open for any of you to state your views on the issues I addressed, and instead of criticizing the way I presented my arguments, I hope that you criticize the argument itself.
You are open to people discussing the point your post does not have, by your own admission, but not anything else about it. Off to a great start
The how and why of this has been laid out since day one, and everything I've seen so far against it is essentially a protracted semantics argument mixed with an appeal to inaction until such a time when the perfect immutable ruleset can be found. Neither of which I nor I suppose a lot of other people who use this site are deeply interested in. Tildes is not, and never was, a repudiation of every single thing anyone ever disliked about Reddit, it has a clear mission statement and the people who have stuck around largely agree with it.
go1dfish was banned because he refused to comply with this, refused to back down from that position, and refused to not be a pest about. And now he eagerly twists the truth to paint himself as the victim of an emotional tyrant whilst absolving his own bad conduct (presumably because he did not use swears or some other asinine technicality).
If one's presence is a net negative on the site and all that's found to argue in favor of it is an appeal to an absolutist ideology that's explicitly repudiated by the founding principles of said site then their removal from the community is justified as far as I'm concerned.
It's not going to be possible to engage with a coherent thesis if it's not being given. Before asking people to be charitable and open you should start by clearly and unambiguously stating your...
It's not going to be possible to engage with a coherent thesis if it's not being given.
Before asking people to be charitable and open you should start by clearly and unambiguously stating your big point instead of circling around it and trying to catch out small bits or people's replies to attack.
That user's whole "thing" was a rejection of one of the core principles the site runs on. It's not just that they voiced their disagreement with it, but that the core of their presence on Tildes...
If they were banned for other content they posted, then they should have been banned at the time of posting, not when they address something in a civil way.
That user's whole "thing" was a rejection of one of the core principles the site runs on. It's not just that they voiced their disagreement with it, but that the core of their presence on Tildes was to be a free speech warrior and rally against and push the limits of how this community is meant to function (and a lot of the time, that conversation would conveniently go to their own reddit alternative...). They were a nuisance and a thorn in the side of the site operating as it's supposed to, and that poisoning of threads across the board should be bannable enough. But that's not something you can do right away. Most of us have expressed disagreement with some aspect of Tildes, as is natural, but it's not until your entire Tildes persona is "that person who drags threads into free speech arguments" that it's something you can determine from one post. But when you make a big stink (while also being a "civil" racist) after doing that your whole time here, you should expect to be banned.
You can present that in an authoritarian way if you'd like, but sometimes maintaining a high quality community does mean just getting rid of someone who is little more than a pest who doesn't act in good faith.
The current form of moderation is not sustainable for the long term, and leaves reason for doubts.
For one, you have to be small before you can be big. Other than that, if you look at the planned trust system, what we have now is not meant to be sustainable for the long term. It will be something else, entirely built from the principle that having a lot of humans with some degree of moderation ability can handle the job with much more nuance and care than a few overworked moderators.
For what it's worth, I agree that we would be better served to move away from what we have right now and see the beginning of that planned system. But understand that not using ultra-specific rules is part of the point of this system and why many of us see potential in it. This may be a system that solves the problems that both lead to and come out of those specific and hardline rules. From this perspective, what you want is a step backwards into how most of Reddit functions that we want to avoid.
We need more variety of opinions on the site, and people like (not necessarily exactly like) go1dfish provided that.
Without getting bogged down in what "variety of opinions" means and what it's actually worth, go1dfish provided little in the way of genuine discussion from their perspective. Their differing ideas were not so valuable so as to override their other actions.
A point that gets overlooked in discussions of moderation all too often. Build tools, not rules. We all know that nobody reads the rules anyway - the best you can possibly do with that is a...
But understand that not using ultra-specific rules is part of the point of this system and why many of us see potential in it.
A point that gets overlooked in discussions of moderation all too often. Build tools, not rules.
We all know that nobody reads the rules anyway - the best you can possibly do with that is a customizable form-based submission page with a little rules blurb which should be short, sweet, to the point, so anyone submitting content can't miss them.
This has come up before, but honestly Tildes' identity as "not Voat" is a feature to me and many other long term Reddit users. I'll add that while I am also against arbitrary authority, go1dfish's...
Exemplary
Also, I would like to say that this site, quite like Voat, has become extreme in the viewpoints held.
This has come up before, but honestly Tildes' identity as "not Voat" is a feature to me and many other long term Reddit users.
I'll add that while I am also against arbitrary authority, go1dfish's style of "free speech" is populism and thus actually antagonistic to the interests of real democracy (which operates on the basis of common interest and not loudest/most obnoxious voices nor numerical tallies).
Ah. That's the thread I was looking for! Thank you, @vivaria! You want to know why @go1dfish was banned? That thread was a big part of it. Not only did go1dfish run rampant across Tildes promoting...
Ah. That's the thread I was looking for! Thank you, @vivaria!
You want to know why @go1dfish was banned? That thread was a big part of it. Not only did go1dfish run rampant across Tildes promoting his pro-free speech agenda in blatant disregard of Deimos' explicitly stated intentions that Tildes "will also never be described as anything like 'an absolute free speech site'", but he also used that so-called free speech to promote a racist agenda. Some of the "Comment deleted by author" stubs in that thread were originally comments where @go1dfish posted racist theories about IQ. In my years online, I have found that a lot of free-speech advocates advocate for freedom of speech in order to say things that noone should be allowed to say. @go1dfish was, sadly, no different. He was a racist.
But he didn't mention that in his defence to you, did he? No. According to him, he was just a poor innocent victim who didn't do anything wrong. Except that he wasn't, and he did.
I almost agree with this sentiment. I do think that people should be allowed to say whatever they want. I don't think that anyone should be required to provide a platform that facilitates it. To...
I have found that a lot of free-speech advocates advocate for freedom of speech in order to say things that noone should be allowed to say
I almost agree with this sentiment. I do think that people should be allowed to say whatever they want. I don't think that anyone should be required to provide a platform that facilitates it. To me, "free speech" only extends as far as the government not being allowed to dictate what you can or cannot physically say or write. It doesn't mean you have a right to not get kicked out of a public space for being a jerk. A bookstore doesn't have to sell your racist literature, a newspaper doesn't have to print your racist op-ed, and Tildes doesn't have to host your racist comments.
I have a feeling you probably agree with me, but using concise language here helps avoid giving ammunition to so-called "free speech" advocates.
My understanding is that it was challenged via the Flag Protection Act, but ultimately upheld via United States v. Eichman. Multiple attempts have been made since then to allow the prohibition of...
My understanding is that it was challenged via the Flag Protection Act, but ultimately upheld via United States v. Eichman. Multiple attempts have been made since then to allow the prohibition of flag desecration, but to my knowledge none have been passed.
We know. Oh my god, do we know! He does nothing else but push his pro-free speech agenda everywhere he goes, and we got plenty of it here. That stuff about Deimos' anniversary is a distraction....
go1dfish did not appear to violate the guidelines/rules of Tildes, yet they were banned anyways. They were civil and did not necessarily agree with the other banned user, they just hate censorship of any kind.
We know. Oh my god, do we know! He does nothing else but push his pro-free speech agenda everywhere he goes, and we got plenty of it here.
"Also, I had no fucking clue it was the guy's anniversary."
That stuff about Deimos' anniversary is a distraction. Deimos didn't ban go1dfish because it was his anniversary. @Deimos happened to write a comment in which he expressed anger and disappointment that he had to be dealing with this sort of issue when he should have been having dinner with his wife - but that's not why he banned go1dfish. He was angry that he had to be on Tildes banning anyone when he should have been doing something happier instead. If he'd had his druthers, he'd have been toasting his wife instead of banning a racist.
The current moderation system is fundamentally broken.
The current moderation system is a temporary work-around until a real moderation system is built - as everyone except you seems to know.
If titles and tags of topics can be changed by the moderator, then there is clearly something wrong.
They can't just be changed by "the moderator", they can be changed by dozens of people! Well... tags can be changed by dozens of people, but I know of only 4 people, including Deimos, who can change titles. Tildes works via community-based moderation. That's the plan. There will be hundreds, possibly thousands, of "moderators" on Tildes after the proposed moderation system is finally built and the community has grown.
It happens that, in this early-alpha version of the website, there's only one person with the power to remove comments and ban users. But that power, too, will also expand to other people.
So, it's a bit rich of you to say that "The current moderation system is fundamentally broken." when the current system is temporary, and is already moving towards a future which is significantly different.
I will remain on this site for as long as possible, in order to provide some dissenting opinions,
How very noble of you. We appreciate your great sacrifice. Thank you so much for your service to Tildes.
While I understand and respect your concerns I don't think you'll ever fully get the context around go1dfish and why so many people think his ban was deserved. I'd recommend sticking around as I'd...
While I understand and respect your concerns I don't think you'll ever fully get the context around go1dfish and why so many people think his ban was deserved. I'd recommend sticking around as I'd be glad to see some reasonable dissent if you've got it. Then when another ban happens and you're apart of this little community we can discuss any concerns you have if they still exist.
Also I think people here can be a little harsh on new users who are asking questions they feel are settled. Sort of like someone who just moved into your house and is criticizing the way you do things. But I hope you're not too put off by anyone (:
I'd like you describe what exactly you mean by this, because this is so disingenuous that it makes me question the rest of your argument. Are you aware of what Voat is like? Can you explain how...
Also, I would like to say that this site, quite like Voat, has become extreme in the viewpoints held. The variety in the vocal users has ebbed away slowly, leaving one main political viewpoint, which all of you can probably guess.
I'd like you describe what exactly you mean by this, because this is so disingenuous that it makes me question the rest of your argument. Are you aware of what Voat is like? Can you explain how Tildes is anywhere near extreme like Voat?
And as an aside, I'm really exhausted of the 'Free Speech' argument. It's turned into a weapon in attempt to attack sites where people disagree with any sort of moderation at all, rather than making a reasoned argument for how to adjust the moderation behavior. There is no such thing as objective moderation because all decisions are going to come down to a person subjectively considering each post and user to determine if they violate the core community principles. Two people may violate the rules in the same way, but the context may be entirely different (eg a new user starting a huge flamewar vs an old user starting a flamewar after a history of otherwise quality posts) and evaluating the context is just as important.
All of the sites as an example of absolute free speech end up turning into complete garbage and I haven't seen a single example yet where that isn't a case as the platform scales. I've often found people making that argument aren't interested in the quality of a platform as a whole, but rather that they have a right to make any number of bad posts or arguments. If anyone here used to be an avid Garry's Mod player, it reminds me of the days where people would scream about admin abuse whenever they got banned, kicked or what not.
Despite the fact that they were griefing the other players on the server.
I don't see how this is a problem on Tildes. Changes to the topic tags, title, or submitted link are recorded in the sidebar log for 30 days. As far as I can tell they're only edited if they're...
The current moderation system is fundamentally broken. If titles and tags of topics can be changed by the moderator, then there is clearly something wrong. This is why many people left Reddit. Spez edited others' comments and posts, and created a massive uproar.
I don't see how this is a problem on Tildes. Changes to the topic tags, title, or submitted link are recorded in the sidebar log for 30 days. As far as I can tell they're only edited if they're inaccurate, editorialized, or if there's a better source available. Part of the reason that link topics had the submitting username hidden was to get people away from the idea that they "owned" a link topic. The current solution of "one admin plus some handpicked mods" will not scale but that's a different problem entirely and not a great concern with the invite system.
Additionally, what spez did was on an entirely different level with zero transparency (editing post CONTENT directly in the reddit database to remove mean statements directed at him). While Deimos certainly has the ability to do the same thing, that's kind of inherent with any website on the internet and I haven't seen any documented cases of it on Tildes. There is literally no solution to this short of using some cryptographic guarantee of message integrity since there will always be somebody with access to production data.
Assuming that all users act with the heart of the group in mind and that bad posts or ideas won’t be upvoted is kind of naive and imo part of why much of reddit is surface-level fluff or...
Assuming that all users act with the heart of the group in mind and that bad posts or ideas won’t be upvoted is kind of naive and imo part of why much of reddit is surface-level fluff or reactionary poison.
I wrote something in-depth about the context of goldf1sh's ban elsewhere recently. There's a lot of detail that's glossed over in re-tellings of the situation (especially from someone as incapable...
There's a lot of detail that's glossed over in re-tellings of the situation (especially from someone as incapable of considering other viewpoints as goldf1sh) and I tried to capture it:
Also, something not relayed here is how insistent he was about being able to say anything he wanted, to the point of making Tildes a worse place for everyone with his crusade. The above stories make it sound like he took the wrong approach to a certain subject but that's not quite true. There are people here who have some controversial opinions but it's mostly fine because they engage respectfully. It was the lengths goldf1sh went to to insist that free speech should be the end-all, be-all of a site, and those lengths meant making the site worse for others. It was also the last time he did it, there were many occasions of this behaviour before that final incident.
What made that last occasion particularly memorable is that he decided to play devil's advocate by taking on a very far right position to make his point. He did not give one iota of a shit what his devil's advocacy was doing to those around when he decided to commit to (apparently) emulating a froth-mouthed right wing ideology when arguing with others. All to make a point that nobody disputed regarding free speech. Again: that nobody disputed. His behaviour was completely unprovoked, he actively chose to make everyone uncomfortable and upset for his own edification.
People only talk about the subject of conversations, or the opinions held in them, as if those are the only criteria with which one would have a problem. But the issue here with goldf1sh wasn't the content, it was the method. He was always such an asshole about his free speech crusade, and purposefully bringing up far-right ideology out of the blue to force everyone to talk about free speech is an asshole move.
It's not like he would wait for an opportunity, give a great and easy explanation, and then engage respectfully with others by considering their position and then sharing his. His comments were always some combination of aggressive, unprovoked, unrelenting, and overwrought. But you'll never hear him admit that maybe it was the way he engaged with people that got him banned, only that it must be over the subjects.
So, speaking of bringing up topics with bad methods:
Also, I would like to say that this site, quite like Voat, has become extreme in the viewpoints held. The variety in the vocal users has ebbed away slowly, leaving one main political viewpoint, which all of you can probably guess.
This is just ridiculous and really makes me question your motivation.
If there’s one thing I really enjoy about HackerNews, it’s that bans & metadiscussion around moderation are relatively obscured by the site and its admins. As a site, it stays on topic and is...
If there’s one thing I really enjoy about HackerNews, it’s that bans & metadiscussion around moderation are relatively obscured by the site and its admins. As a site, it stays on topic and is faithful to its intentions.
We should copy this modus operandi, in my opinion. I didn’t come to Tildes for transparency, I came here to escape the constant meta-bullshit that pervades Reddit.
This is not the sort of content I want to see on Tildes. It should stick to its principles of high quality discussion about worldly topics. Not be constantly navel gazing about rules & banned users. I place implicit trust in @Deimos to do the right thing, and eventually for the community-scale trust system to do the same.
If someone managed to get banned from Tildes, they probably deserved it, and it doesn’t need to be revisited, because frankly I, nor probably the rest of this community, really care.
These are the sorts of posts I want to see less of.
I still want to see metadiscussion for improving the site. I don’t want to see metadiscussion around why X was banned. Those are two complementary, if slightly overlapping distinct sets of...
I still want to see metadiscussion for improving the site. I don’t want to see metadiscussion around why X was banned. Those are two complementary, if slightly overlapping distinct sets of discussion. The former is nearly completely constructive. The latter is just revisiting completely pointless topics that won’t change anything about how this site is operated. This post could easily have been framed in a completely different manner, but instead it had been explicitly constructed as a he said-she said post that will do nothing but beat dead horses.
It’s been noted that Tildes isn’t Reddit. Having constant discussions about banning/censorship (just look at those tags) shouldn’t be what this site is for.
Maybe try filtering out some of the tags on this post? Seems like they fit your description well. Future posts may not be tagged properly, but it is better than nothing. I really do think that at...
Maybe try filtering out some of the tags on this post? Seems like they fit your description well. Future posts may not be tagged properly, but it is better than nothing. I really do think that at least one of the ones on this post would show up on similar posts.
The way it's set up here, yeah. Rehashing a 6 month old situation without any evidence either which way is pointless. As someone somewhat afraid of being ousted for wrongthink though (I'm not a...
The way it's set up here, yeah. Rehashing a 6 month old situation without any evidence either which way is pointless.
As someone somewhat afraid of being ousted for wrongthink though (I'm not a native speaker though I am sometimes mistaken for one. I am all too capable of not reading my own subtext and putting my foot into my mouth - all while people think I actually know what I'm doing.) I think it's valuable to have transparency. In that vein: I observed the whole goldfish debacle waybackwhen, and I mostly agree with how deimos handled it - for now. If bans are completely obscured even to the interested, and just "happen", that's an environment in which I'll more or less constantly (though subliminally) fear being banned.
What I'm saying is I suppose I disagree with emdash about transparency.
Are you aware that Deimos has banned 38 accounts - most of which we don't know about? He announced the first ban (because it was the first), we knew about the second ban, he discussed the third...
If bans are completely obscured even to the interested, and just "happen",
Are you aware that Deimos has banned 38 accounts - most of which we don't know about? He announced the first ban (because it was the first), we knew about the second ban, he discussed the third ban, we knew go1dfish got banned... but, apart from that... nothing. There are over 30 bans we know nothing about. This is already an environment where bans are completely obscured and just "happen".
And that's exactly how it should be. Bans should not be like public executions, where all the townspeople get to watch and throw rotten fruit at the poor banned person - or heckle the moderator while he does the banning. That's undignified. It's better to handle these matters discreetly and without making a big fuss. As they say to moderators: if you're doing your job properly, noone will ever notice. Deimos is doing his job properly.
that's an environment in which I'll more or less constantly (though subliminally) fear being banned.
But why? They might be arbitrary bans, but they're not random. It's not like being hit by lightning, where you have no warning. Deimos will tell you when your behaviour crosses the line and, if you don't change, then he'll ban you. It won't come without warning. I have crossed the line once or twice, and I'm still here. So, until Deimos starts telling you you're doing something wrong, you have nothing to fear.
It's worth pointing out that the ban/not ban system isn't ideal and will itself evolve. It's likely there will be warnings, strikes, and muting at some point as it scales up for a much larger user...
It's worth pointing out that the ban/not ban system isn't ideal and will itself evolve. It's likely there will be warnings, strikes, and muting at some point as it scales up for a much larger user base. I think it's also likely we'll maintain some kind of separation of powers model, so that the bans aren't handed out by the same people who do the regular moderation work in most groups. That'll help cut down on biases and powertripping mods.
The system already includes warnings. It's already not as binary or simplistic as ban/not ban. I'm not so sure about that. I think the powers will be cumulative, so that people who have done a lot...
It's worth pointing out that the ban/not ban system isn't ideal and will itself evolve. It's likely there will be warnings, strikes, and muting at some point
The system already includes warnings. It's already not as binary or simplistic as ban/not ban.
I think it's also likely we'll maintain some kind of separation of powers model, so that the bans aren't handed out by the same people who do the regular moderation work in most groups.
I'm not so sure about that. I think the powers will be cumulative, so that people who have done a lot of regular moderation work will gain experience and trust, and eventually gain the power to ban in addition to their existing regular moderation powers.
I meant something more formal and automated than a PM from someone. :P Moderation isn't going to be just one tall tree you work your way up from the bottom. There's going to be different kinds...
I meant something more formal and automated than a PM from someone. :P
Moderation isn't going to be just one tall tree you work your way up from the bottom. There's going to be different kinds that use different systems. Baliff-types concerned with removals, locks, and bans (of which deimos is the only one now), curator-types who do editing like the tags and titles and links, and for lack of a better term, a baseline hum of regular user activity that's currently represented by votes and labels. It's already going in three different directions. When hierarchies are a thing here and actually large enough to need it, some class of mod will be tasked with whatever jobs arise from that as well.
It'll be unlikely that people have all these powers at once. Bailiffs are likely to be a site-wide class, while curation activity is likely to be more group-specific, and others will be hierarchy specific if/when hierarchies begin acquiring different mechanics from each other.
I like sticking to the approach of not building a tool until there is a reason to build that tool, though. I think as long as we take it all piece by piece, case by case, test by test, tool by tool, like archaeologists taking their time to unearth a fragile fossil, we'll come out the other side with solid gold. Most forums launch with the tools already built, and they usually end up being pretty bad at their jobs because of that. Co-development with the users is definitely the better way to get there.
It's rather obvious if you think about it. Just look at reddit. They gave moderators there the power to ban people from their groups. The result of that was an army of ban-bots that watched users...
It's rather obvious if you think about it. Just look at reddit. They gave moderators there the power to ban people from their groups. The result of that was an army of ban-bots that watched users like hawks and banned them in some communities just because they posted in other communities. That's facepalm-level total failure of a moderation system in my book.
The simplest solution, one that's proven itself in major world governments for centuries, is the separation of powers. Most of the powermod cliques I've had to deal with wouldn't be able to maintain their death grip over their community without access to banning. That's the big one - locks, removals, and bans.
Referring those activities to another group that doesn't have the same biases as the mods doing the reporting makes sense. I imagine @cfabbro can weigh in on this, he's dealt with some serious mod abuse on reddit before and we talk about this stuff all the time.
Ideally I'd like the users to do the noticing and reporting. That gets escalated up to mods who can't ban people. If they choose, they escalate it again to another class of mods who do ban people. A racist rant would fly up that chain in a big damn hurry around here. Someone having a bad day, not so much. There's also no way for a group moderator to start banning people based on his own biases.
I can't say that'll be the solution, but I do expect to see some flavor of this separation of powers present by the time we've finished. It's the only way to solve certain problems.
I would not use such definitive terms as you have, since everything is subject to change, much we have all talked about may not actually work in practice, and Deimos is the ultimate arbiter of...
I would not use such definitive terms as you have, since everything is subject to change, much we have all talked about may not actually work in practice, and Deimos is the ultimate arbiter of what gets implemented and how, etc... but yeah, overall I generally agree with most of what you have said as far as what I see as the ultimate ideal regarding moderation.
And yes, I am exceptionally wary of moderator abuse from having seen and dealt with way too much of it over the years on reddit. However, IMO the majority of that abuse comes from only a few bad apples and is only possible because of the way the mod hierarchy works there, enabling power mod squatters to hoard subreddits and eventually take them over if they simply wait long enough... which hopefully won't be an issue here since trust will likely have decay and each group will not just have a handful of mods.
That mod problem is probably in its fourth iteration on reddit at the moment, with a few of the first and second generation "power mods" clinging on in steadfast stubbornness. It's really quite...
That mod problem is probably in its fourth iteration on reddit at the moment, with a few of the first and second generation "power mods" clinging on in steadfast stubbornness. It's really quite frustrating watching the same thing play out time and time again, but with a new cast each time.
I can't really talk too much shit about most of those first/second gen power mods since I was one and consider a bunch of them friends. However, yeah... quite a few of them have undeniably gotten...
I can't really talk too much shit about most of those first/second gen power mods since I was one and consider a bunch of them friends. However, yeah... quite a few of them have undeniably gotten themselves in hot water and made asses of themselves for stepping in and interfering in a community years after they stopped being active there. IMO they really should "let it go" and unmod themselves from all the subreddits they aren't really active in like I did when I 'retired'... but ideally they shouldn't even have to do that; It should be automatic.
I'm kind of envisaging an almost evolutionary process, where people gather up "mod" responsibilities depending on how they use the site. A frequent/prolific commenter may better in tune to to keep...
I'm kind of envisaging an almost evolutionary process, where people gather up "mod" responsibilities depending on how they use the site. A frequent/prolific commenter may better in tune to to keep an eye on tone and manner of threads, someone else may be more concerned with correct tagging or titling etc etc and as the system matures different roles/focuses develop so that responsibility can be given for those "specialist" areas.
This may be very far from what eventually happens, but I'm very hopeful we won't end up with an overly hierarchical system, however things pan out.
That's exactly how I think of it. Your user activity determines where your powers lie on its own, by gradually granting you access to more features in that tree (or in several at once if we end up...
That's exactly how I think of it. Your user activity determines where your powers lie on its own, by gradually granting you access to more features in that tree (or in several at once if we end up having several).
I am indeed. That number didn't concern me. Probably because I trust Deimos enough that most of these were rather simple cases. Obvious spammers, trolls, etc.; let me clarify my original...
Are you aware that Deimos has banned 38 accounts - most of which we don't know about?
I am indeed. That number didn't concern me. Probably because I trust Deimos enough that most of these were rather simple cases. Obvious spammers, trolls, etc.; let me clarify my original statement: such cases don't need discussion. Goldfish maintained some amount of plausible deniability, so that's where I'd like to see a discussion.
They might be arbitrary bans, but they're not random.
Yes, but that's functionally identical from a certain point of view. Now, tildes should be a good deal less vulnerable to this than other communities, but as I said above regarding language: I'm capable of putting my foot in my mouth to the point of mandating mod action without knowing I'm doing that. I believe that I've gotten better about that, but that still means that -to me- warnings are just a band-aid. Inspecting my previous behavior in order to change isn't very effective, or at least historically hasn't been, so the warning only serves as a "you're 1/4th of the way banned", at least in the more nuanced cases.
As I said; in that sense, transparency helps. It gives me a instance of mod action I can try to learn from without getting closer to a ban - even though I wrote all of this in present tense.
As I said, I believe I changed. Maybe this is more me arguing the case not because I think I need it today, but because I think I would've found it useful years ago.
Ditto for me too, and I agree; Deimos doesn't just ban people for putting their foot in their mouth on occasion or I wouldn't still be here either... unless that foot-in-mouth is a serious step...
Ditto for me too, and I agree; Deimos doesn't just ban people for putting their foot in their mouth on occasion or I wouldn't still be here either... unless that foot-in-mouth is a serious step over the line (e.g. one remarkably transphobic comment got a user banned after their very first comment on the site).
I get a peak behind the curtain a bit more than most, and even though I am not privy to everything (or even the majority of stuff), there is not a single ban so far I feel was completely unwarranted. I have also known Deimos a very long time now and have complete faith in him. He's honestly one of the most measured and rational people I know. And I have also seen a number of banned Tildes users on reddit professing innocence, completely misrepresenting their own words/actions, and/or lying by omission to make their bans seem unfair and "completely out of the blue", when I know for a fact it was not either of those things... so take all that for what you will, @vektor.
Honestly, the fact that some of the banned users feel compelled to whine about it, publicly, on other websites, for several months after their ban, should tell anyone all they need to know about...
Honestly, the fact that some of the banned users feel compelled to whine about it, publicly, on other websites, for several months after their ban, should tell anyone all they need to know about that person. When I see that kind of behavior, all it does to me is justify that ban even more.
Yeah, it's kinda funny too since one of the more prolific of those complainers on /r/redditalts (not goldfish, who despite disagreeing with I actually respect) have their own social media project...
Yeah, it's kinda funny too since one of the more prolific of those complainers on /r/redditalts (not goldfish, who despite disagreeing with I actually respect) have their own social media project they are using the "controversy" over being banned here to flog and recruits devs for. How anyone falls for such an obvious ploy, I don't know.
I have been tempted soooo many times now to call those people out on their total bullshit whenever I see them going at it again, month after month... but Deimos has convinced me its just not worth the effort or headache, even though it makes me pretty mad to see go unchallenged.
I just want to comment that there's really no fear of that. A lot of banned users actually got warnings in the form of a private message from Deimos (including go1dfish). You won't accidentally...
If bans are completely obscured even to the interested, and just "happen", that's an environment in which I'll more or less constantly (though subliminally) fear being banned.
I just want to comment that there's really no fear of that. A lot of banned users actually got warnings in the form of a private message from Deimos (including go1dfish). You won't accidentally get yourself banned.
"There was a user on here last summer that was banned as a result of a post about a study between a correlation between race and iq." Correlation doesn't imply causation and without proper...
"There was a user on here last summer that was banned as a result of a post about a study between a correlation between race and iq."
Correlation doesn't imply causation and without proper academic analysis (not by the average internet armchair philosopher, but by people with degrees in the related fields like sociology). I only know intro level sociology, but I know there's intersectionality and effects of privilege at play.
If this intersectionality is not described, I wouldn't think the post is of any quality(Tildes wants high quality posts). The poster may have biases/racism that compels them to post this kind of content.
Discussion this kind of content without proper backgrounds will only produce division in our community, and personally I don't think this topics have any place here unless the full academic analysis is provided.
There are "Free speech" websites (Voat, Gab) that let you make these biased posts, and I don't think Tildes should mimic what those communities look like. Voat and Gab is littered with low quality racist posts, and it would be a shame if Tildes took that path so that it could have "Free Speech".
Free speech is a hallmark of democratic systems, however free speech on the internet has shown to be a form of cancer that allows bad ideas to reach a wider audience.
You mean like, that the holocaust didn't happen or that Barrack Obama did 9/11? People always bring up the "diversity of ideas" angle in these conversations and I don't buy it. People with ideas...
helps me get a perspective I might not have considered.
You mean like, that the holocaust didn't happen or that Barrack Obama did 9/11? People always bring up the "diversity of ideas" angle in these conversations and I don't buy it. People with ideas shitty enough to get banned for them don't have anything meaningful to contribute - except maybe in a sociological "wow-I-didn't-know-people-like-that-were-real" sort of way. The other side of that with the doxing and outrage is also pretty unappealing. But in general I agree with the philosophy of de-platforming those who would use it to spread violent ideas and hatred.
I feel the opposite way as a 5 year forum moderator. Maybe not with conspiracy theories tho. But in most cases when someone is being (((controversial))) they are either trolling or an angry bigot....
to offer sharp criticism with reason and evidence that no reasonable person would disagree with.
I feel the opposite way as a 5 year forum moderator. Maybe not with conspiracy theories tho. But in most cases when someone is being (((controversial))) they are either trolling or an angry bigot. I have never had success trying to talk someone out of this. Mostly because they are doing these things for unreasonable reasons.
If I may ask, why are you afraid of this? I can understand if you give away personal information (which I strongly advise against, for what I think are obvious reasons), but as long as you are...
people archiving old posts so they can use it against me in the future
If I may ask, why are you afraid of this? I can understand if you give away personal information (which I strongly advise against, for what I think are obvious reasons), but as long as you are operating in good faith I don't understand how someone could turn your own words against you.
I think I can at least speak for most of us when I say that we welcome your dissenting opinions. Without people like you, our site would be excruciatingly boring.
Sure, saying things like "Trump is the best president we've ever had" won't make you many friends here, but one of the things that make this place great is the strong moderation, so at the very least you shouldn't be harassed.
And from a personal perspective, I don't really want this to be a leftist utopia. I want voices from the right as well. The only thing I don't want to see here is people blindly following an ideological line without having some kind of justification for it. I want a community of independent thinkers, not a hive of followers. You might just be the beacon that shows we aren't just a left wing vortex.
I've written stuff that could metaphorically hang me, but I'm not worried that people will weaponise those words because they are my words and I own them fully. I don't dodge responsibility for...
I've written stuff that could metaphorically hang me, but I'm not worried that people will weaponise those words because they are my words and I own them fully. I don't dodge responsibility for them. I don't try to pretend they're not real. I said those things, and I meant them. If someone quotes them back at me, that doesn't bother me because they're just telling me what I said. My own reflection doesn't scare me.
Someone might misinterpret my words, or twist them to mean something else, but that's not my problem because the misinterpreted or twisted meaning isn't what I wrote. That other person came up with those other meanings, so they're not my responsibility. The only thing I'm responsible for is what I wrote and what I meant, and I'm totally comfortable with those things.
As I've written elsewhere, I think it's inevitable that any forum which does not practise active moderation will become host to alt-right talking points. FYI: @NeonHippy & @aestetix.
As I've written elsewhere, I think it's inevitable that any forum which does not practise active moderation will become host to alt-right talking points.
We can't just throw our hands in the air and say that there's a possibility that having a code of conduct might go badly, so we shouldn't even bother trying. There has to be a better option than...
We can't just throw our hands in the air and say that there's a possibility that having a code of conduct might go badly, so we shouldn't even bother trying. There has to be a better option than doing nothing. We have to try.
If we apply the principle of charity to the groups you refer to, do you think it's possible that: There's a conference or forum they've heard stories of abuse or misbehavior happening at They...
activist groups searching for conferences and fora who do not [yet] have one, publicly shaming them into adopting one of the activity group's choice, and then continuing to cause drama when they deem an offense has taken place.
If we apply the principle of charity to the groups you refer to, do you think it's possible that:
There's a conference or forum they've heard stories of abuse or misbehavior happening at
They lobby that conference or forum to adopt an explicit code of conduct, to make it clear what is and isn't acceptable
After that code of conduct is adopted, if the misbehavior continues, they call it out as violating those community standards of behavior?
Is it more free though? Is it a free space for women? Trans-gendered people? Immigrants? My big gripe about go1dy that go back to my days modding SubRedditCancer (the which i am no longer...
more free
Is it more free though? Is it a free space for women? Trans-gendered people? Immigrants?
My big gripe about go1dy that go back to my days modding SubRedditCancer (the which i am no longer ideologically affiliated) is their version of "freedom." I radically don't like censorship, social control, coercive authority etc. either. But, the way go1dfish applies these ideas, by sticking up for people who demand the right to be nasty and make dehumanizing jokes and comments.
To be quite honest I don't think the line of reasoning in the OP uses a valid, nuanced sense of the word censorship or freedom for that matter.
it often leaves someone like me with no place to go.
Thanks for posting this, I've been hesitant about posting in certain threads my different and controversial opinions after getting blasted by another user in another thread once. I would hate to...
Thanks for posting this, I've been hesitant about posting in certain threads my different and controversial opinions after getting blasted by another user in another thread once. I would hate to spend a lot of time typing up a huge paragraph to explain my point of view and back up my points to only get attacked by ad hominem and/or get banned.
I'm currently traveling and won't be able to participate at any length in this thread. Very briefly:
I don't think of Tildes as a "public square", and it's not intended to be one. I want it to be a community, and eventually a network of communities. Moderated, higher-quality communities.
With that in mind, I have very little patience for people whose intentions are to disrupt the community instead of contribute to it. I gave go1dfish a chance, but he quickly started behaving exactly as he does on reddit.
If you think Tildes's systems are fundamentally broken, then you're probably expecting it to be a different type of site than it's going to be. And that's fine, every site doesn't need to be for everyone. You have plenty of other options.
The idea of the moderation system around here is based on the notion of the pareto principle. The social forum variant of that principle is called the 1% rule. In a nutshell, given 1000 users, 10 of them will post content, 90 of them will comment on that content, and the other 900 won't participate at all except by passively reading.
I'm also willing to bet that just like 10% of users do all the posting/commenting, only 1% of that 10% are troublemakers. So far, Deimos has banned 38 accounts total out of 10,000 so we're doing very well on that bet. If one percent of the users cause over ninety percent of the problems, do we really need to stick up for these people? When an asshole walks into a supermarket and pisses on the floor, what does the staff at that supermarket do? Try to explain to him why that's a bad action, or kick him out, and if necessary call the cops? Why should an internet forum's etiquette be any different than a brick and mortar store? Will there be that many people sticking up for that guy's rights to piss in everyone else's corn flakes? I doubt it.
In a way, these complaints seem rather divorced from reality. If we'd had three hundred banned users by now I still would have been fine with those numbers. A mere 38 (with some of them the same person)? That's an excellent number and all it tells me is that this is the right approach.
The challenge is to get that silent 900 people involved in moderation somehow. That's what the comment labels do, for example. Any user who has been here for seven days gets to use them. Vote weighting is another concept we've talked about, so that longer-term lurkers have stronger voting power to balance out the whims of new arrivals washing away the forum culture. There may come a time where the majority of certain types of moderation work comes from people who never comment or submit at all.
Once we have enough people giving that moderation system data/actions, we can start using thresholds as triggers. X number of malice tags does nothing, Y number of malice tags flags a comment for review. Once we get those thresholds high enough (which has to be preceded by gaining a large user base) it should be able to filter out the noise in the moderation system from that 1% who aren't using it properly.
A system like this can't be built before launch, because it's impossible to know what your moderation needs actually are, or how well the tools work, until you do the work of building them and testing them in the real world with your actual users directly involved in the discussions. The system has to grow slowly along with the site itself. The first pass at comment tagging here was a colorful disaster. Test, learn, refactor and now it's labels and working quite well.
That's why Tildes is using the classic benevolent dictator moderation system of just Deimos right now. He and a small number of other volunteers can keep up with the level of work, as long as bans actually matter, which means as long as the site remains invite-only. It's possible to scale up to 100k users without needing much moderation on a reddit. I expect that'll go much further here since unlike reddit, bans matter.
It's also why Deimos has very little patience on these issues. He's modded on reddit for over a decade (the default of /r/games) and he's dealt with every kind of troll you can imagine firsthand. He's worked at reddit, he created automoderator which is the only thing keeping reddit remotely sane and has been for a very long time. I'm willing to give him the benefit of the doubt based on that.
Edit: One other point that I think bears endless repetition is something Deimos mentioned in an older thread. @Vivaria linked it below, but I want to quote that blurb Deimos linked in it again.
From: https://eev.ee/blog/2016/07/22/on-a-technicality/
Perhaps there's a reason we don't get that much commenting from that silent 900. Ever wonder what a forum would look like if we could wake them up and get them submitting and commenting? ;)
This is an excellent analogy. I tend to use a similar argument. Though less pissing, more screaming at passersby ; )
I've never quite understood this notion that a website, specifically reddit, is somehow a public square. And even in a public square, I don't think you'd get to scream at the top of your lungs, castigating and harassing anyone that happens to walk by, even if they did engage with you. I'm sure most places, even in the US, have laws and ordinances against that kind of behavior.
Before reddit, and even after reddit, I've never seen such a massive community think they have 100% free speech on a publicly-accessible, privately-owned website (AKA any regular website). Maybe 4chan is the outlier. Even the creator of Voat had to start enforcing some things.
I've been on forums and other types of social media since the mid 90s. There are always rules. And there are always mods/admins ready to enforce those rules. Only on reddit do people kick and scream at the smallest of enforcement action that's often necessary.
Don't get me wrong; mods and admins are never super popular. But I feel like people elsewhere have tended to understand why they exist; why they have to exist.
I enjoy reddit. I still use it daily. Far more than tildes at the moment. But reddit's dumbest decision was always their approach to "free speech" on the site. Look how many times they've had to walk that back in the face of various self-inflicted crises. Not only that, but their perceived selective application of it, as well.
The worst part -- and perhaps this is a result all of social media, though reddit plays a big part -- is the spreading of the belief that somehow everyone gets to have a say AND people MUST listen. No. You can have your say, but I don't have to listen. And, as a mod, I don't have to make other people listen to you, either. I don't need people pissing in my community's aisles or in their corn flakes. Take that to Walmart or Voat.
I'm glad to see many tildes users, and its creator, take this position. After years of taking a beating on the issue elsewhere, especially when moderating, it's a breath of fresh air.
There's another side to that coin though. While I'm not arguing against what you're saying here, what youtube is doing wrt. copyright issues isn't cool either, and while it isn't a free speech violation per se to kick you off of a website, it certainly impacts your ability to be heard, and I feel we've as a society not gotten to where we should be there. The power of the relevant corporations is too great in my book. The big 4 (twitter, FB, Google, reddit) can shut a topic or a person down pretty damn hard if they so please, and at that point I'm kind of raising the bar of what I expect of these corporations. Stuff like "they have to have a good reason for any admin action" and "they can't lie in official statements beyond a certain importance" come to mind. Just to get a grip of things like youtube copyright-striking stuff for bullshit reasons. Of course, this doesn't impact their moderation rights. "You're annoying and an ass and no one wants to be exposed to what you say" is a very good reason imo, esp. if you throw in whatever laws apply regarding slander, indecency, inciting violence etc. might apply. "We don't want the liability in case this is a copyright infringement" if there legally can't be that liability, just for example, would be a shitty reason.
We should probably just break them all up. For youtube, there's no reason comments, video hosting, subscriptions and recommendations all need to be handled by the same entity. In fact, each and every one of these could be done by a distinct entity. That would remove a lot of conflicts of interest and would make competition more viable, ridding us of a lot of shitty business practices.
I just realized not only am I thinking about ISPs like I'm thinking about my utility companies (they tend towards monopolies, break them up and regulate them) but I'm doing the same about internet platforms. Utility companies within utility companies. Given that we have fair (mostly) access to the internet, it's a shame that we consumers have let the situation regarding platforms degrade to this.
Hypothetical: The general opinion seems to be that the more people who participate in a forum or social platform, the worse it gets. Would getting the "silent 900" to be more active accelerate the (perceived) degeneration of a given social platform?
I'm honestly not sure. I suspect all it would really mean is that the level of activity would be higher than we usually see in a forum with a given number of users. I'd like to think that the lurkers would actually be better positioned as contributors than a brand new account would be, since they have been lurking and have had the time to absorb the forum culture and get to know people.
I think if you were to double your activity level from new users, you'd see a culture shift/quality slide, but if you were to double your activity by activating lurkers instead, that culture shift would be much smaller, maybe even nonexistent. I haven't got any hard data to base this on, though. Far as I know, nobody's really even tried to activate their lurkers. I'd be surprised if efforts in that direction resulted in even a few percent of an activity gain... but given that only 1% of the people actually submit content, that few percent could have a rather massive impact on the amount of content.
I think it comes down to a simple question - how does one make a forum seem more inviting to post? For Tildes itself, once we have the anon commenting feature active so that lurkers can leave anonymized comments, that may lead to an increase in activity from the more privacy-conscious lurkers.
You mentioned go1dfish was being civil, but racists can be civil most of the time while still being racist. It's not all clan marches and lynchings. He was defending either the concept of, or the discussion of, racial IQ and 'race realism' on this site. I can't remember which.
When you're calling an entire group of marginalized people inherently inferior, you've moved past a simple discussion, regardless of how 'civil' your tone is. Most users here do not want tildes to give 'race realists' a platform. You might enjoy this video by Natale Wynn on how to spot a fascist.
I was here for all of that and I'm not sure this is the ban I'd go to bat for.
It's really hard to for me to interpret go1dfish's many arguments and rants on this site as being made in good faith. He employed a number of tactics I see used by trolls and alt-right agitators when pushing his opinions.
This is one of the few sites online where I actually see healthy discourse where people change their view and admit they're wrong. go1dfish wasn't furthering that.
Not OP, but I was around for that ban and actually read most (if not all) his comments before they were removed. It was extremely tedious and he was, whether intentionally or not, escalating every "argument". And I say "intentionally or not", but a person can only give so many benefit of a doubt's. He was asked to reflect on his comments multiple times, by multiple people, just to see how negatively it could be read, and basically did a "I have a right to free speech!!!". And after the original post was locked, he essentially immediately "reopened" it by posting a new post.
I personally agree with his ban because 1) he was clearly not having a discussion (basically a only shouting, not listening), 2) he was respectfully asked to just cool it, and couldn't leave it at all, not for a single moment, and 3) he was, again intentionally or not, supporting racists.
A little context that may be missing is that before the climax that got him banned, there were several racist posts shallowly hidden as scientific studies proving race and IQ and such.
My two cents, you can be as polite and "civil" as you want, but if you're saying racist things, you're a racist. And for Tildes to be a welcoming site that promotes healthy engagement, we cannot have a front page of racist "studies" and a community defending their right to post them.
You are open to people discussing the point your post does not have, by your own admission, but not anything else about it. Off to a great start
The how and why of this has been laid out since day one, and everything I've seen so far against it is essentially a protracted semantics argument mixed with an appeal to inaction until such a time when the perfect immutable ruleset can be found. Neither of which I nor I suppose a lot of other people who use this site are deeply interested in. Tildes is not, and never was, a repudiation of every single thing anyone ever disliked about Reddit, it has a clear mission statement and the people who have stuck around largely agree with it.
go1dfish was banned because he refused to comply with this, refused to back down from that position, and refused to not be a pest about. And now he eagerly twists the truth to paint himself as the victim of an emotional tyrant whilst absolving his own bad conduct (presumably because he did not use swears or some other asinine technicality).
If one's presence is a net negative on the site and all that's found to argue in favor of it is an appeal to an absolutist ideology that's explicitly repudiated by the founding principles of said site then their removal from the community is justified as far as I'm concerned.
It's not going to be possible to engage with a coherent thesis if it's not being given.
Before asking people to be charitable and open you should start by clearly and unambiguously stating your big point instead of circling around it and trying to catch out small bits or people's replies to attack.
That user's whole "thing" was a rejection of one of the core principles the site runs on. It's not just that they voiced their disagreement with it, but that the core of their presence on Tildes was to be a free speech warrior and rally against and push the limits of how this community is meant to function (and a lot of the time, that conversation would conveniently go to their own reddit alternative...). They were a nuisance and a thorn in the side of the site operating as it's supposed to, and that poisoning of threads across the board should be bannable enough. But that's not something you can do right away. Most of us have expressed disagreement with some aspect of Tildes, as is natural, but it's not until your entire Tildes persona is "that person who drags threads into free speech arguments" that it's something you can determine from one post. But when you make a big stink (while also being a "civil" racist) after doing that your whole time here, you should expect to be banned.
You can present that in an authoritarian way if you'd like, but sometimes maintaining a high quality community does mean just getting rid of someone who is little more than a pest who doesn't act in good faith.
For one, you have to be small before you can be big. Other than that, if you look at the planned trust system, what we have now is not meant to be sustainable for the long term. It will be something else, entirely built from the principle that having a lot of humans with some degree of moderation ability can handle the job with much more nuance and care than a few overworked moderators.
For what it's worth, I agree that we would be better served to move away from what we have right now and see the beginning of that planned system. But understand that not using ultra-specific rules is part of the point of this system and why many of us see potential in it. This may be a system that solves the problems that both lead to and come out of those specific and hardline rules. From this perspective, what you want is a step backwards into how most of Reddit functions that we want to avoid.
Without getting bogged down in what "variety of opinions" means and what it's actually worth, go1dfish provided little in the way of genuine discussion from their perspective. Their differing ideas were not so valuable so as to override their other actions.
A point that gets overlooked in discussions of moderation all too often. Build tools, not rules.
We all know that nobody reads the rules anyway - the best you can possibly do with that is a customizable form-based submission page with a little rules blurb which should be short, sweet, to the point, so anyone submitting content can't miss them.
This has come up before, but honestly Tildes' identity as "not Voat" is a feature to me and many other long term Reddit users.
I'll add that while I am also against arbitrary authority, go1dfish's style of "free speech" is populism and thus actually antagonistic to the interests of real democracy (which operates on the basis of common interest and not loudest/most obnoxious voices nor numerical tallies).
Ah. That's the thread I was looking for! Thank you, @vivaria!
You want to know why @go1dfish was banned? That thread was a big part of it. Not only did go1dfish run rampant across Tildes promoting his pro-free speech agenda in blatant disregard of Deimos' explicitly stated intentions that Tildes "will also never be described as anything like 'an absolute free speech site'", but he also used that so-called free speech to promote a racist agenda. Some of the "Comment deleted by author" stubs in that thread were originally comments where @go1dfish posted racist theories about IQ. In my years online, I have found that a lot of free-speech advocates advocate for freedom of speech in order to say things that noone should be allowed to say. @go1dfish was, sadly, no different. He was a racist.
But he didn't mention that in his defence to you, did he? No. According to him, he was just a poor innocent victim who didn't do anything wrong. Except that he wasn't, and he did.
I almost agree with this sentiment. I do think that people should be allowed to say whatever they want. I don't think that anyone should be required to provide a platform that facilitates it. To me, "free speech" only extends as far as the government not being allowed to dictate what you can or cannot physically say or write. It doesn't mean you have a right to not get kicked out of a public space for being a jerk. A bookstore doesn't have to sell your racist literature, a newspaper doesn't have to print your racist op-ed, and Tildes doesn't have to host your racist comments.
I have a feeling you probably agree with me, but using concise language here helps avoid giving ammunition to so-called "free speech" advocates.
Uh... I could be wrong about this, but I'm pretty sure it's protected speech via Texas v. Johnson.
My understanding is that it was challenged via the Flag Protection Act, but ultimately upheld via United States v. Eichman. Multiple attempts have been made since then to allow the prohibition of flag desecration, but to my knowledge none have been passed.
No problem!
We know. Oh my god, do we know! He does nothing else but push his pro-free speech agenda everywhere he goes, and we got plenty of it here.
That stuff about Deimos' anniversary is a distraction. Deimos didn't ban go1dfish because it was his anniversary. @Deimos happened to write a comment in which he expressed anger and disappointment that he had to be dealing with this sort of issue when he should have been having dinner with his wife - but that's not why he banned go1dfish. He was angry that he had to be on Tildes banning anyone when he should have been doing something happier instead. If he'd had his druthers, he'd have been toasting his wife instead of banning a racist.
The current moderation system is a temporary work-around until a real moderation system is built - as everyone except you seems to know.
They can't just be changed by "the moderator", they can be changed by dozens of people! Well... tags can be changed by dozens of people, but I know of only 4 people, including Deimos, who can change titles. Tildes works via community-based moderation. That's the plan. There will be hundreds, possibly thousands, of "moderators" on Tildes after the proposed moderation system is finally built and the community has grown.
It happens that, in this early-alpha version of the website, there's only one person with the power to remove comments and ban users. But that power, too, will also expand to other people.
So, it's a bit rich of you to say that "The current moderation system is fundamentally broken." when the current system is temporary, and is already moving towards a future which is significantly different.
How very noble of you. We appreciate your great sacrifice. Thank you so much for your service to Tildes.
While I understand and respect your concerns I don't think you'll ever fully get the context around go1dfish and why so many people think his ban was deserved. I'd recommend sticking around as I'd be glad to see some reasonable dissent if you've got it. Then when another ban happens and you're apart of this little community we can discuss any concerns you have if they still exist.
Also I think people here can be a little harsh on new users who are asking questions they feel are settled. Sort of like someone who just moved into your house and is criticizing the way you do things. But I hope you're not too put off by anyone (:
I'd like you describe what exactly you mean by this, because this is so disingenuous that it makes me question the rest of your argument. Are you aware of what Voat is like? Can you explain how Tildes is anywhere near extreme like Voat?
And as an aside, I'm really exhausted of the 'Free Speech' argument. It's turned into a weapon in attempt to attack sites where people disagree with any sort of moderation at all, rather than making a reasoned argument for how to adjust the moderation behavior. There is no such thing as objective moderation because all decisions are going to come down to a person subjectively considering each post and user to determine if they violate the core community principles. Two people may violate the rules in the same way, but the context may be entirely different (eg a new user starting a huge flamewar vs an old user starting a flamewar after a history of otherwise quality posts) and evaluating the context is just as important.
All of the sites as an example of absolute free speech end up turning into complete garbage and I haven't seen a single example yet where that isn't a case as the platform scales. I've often found people making that argument aren't interested in the quality of a platform as a whole, but rather that they have a right to make any number of bad posts or arguments. If anyone here used to be an avid Garry's Mod player, it reminds me of the days where people would scream about admin abuse whenever they got banned, kicked or what not.
Despite the fact that they were griefing the other players on the server.
There was also that one time he started posting racist theories about IQ. ;)
I don't see how this is a problem on Tildes. Changes to the topic tags, title, or submitted link are recorded in the sidebar log for 30 days. As far as I can tell they're only edited if they're inaccurate, editorialized, or if there's a better source available. Part of the reason that link topics had the submitting username hidden was to get people away from the idea that they "owned" a link topic. The current solution of "one admin plus some handpicked mods" will not scale but that's a different problem entirely and not a great concern with the invite system.
Additionally, what spez did was on an entirely different level with zero transparency (editing post CONTENT directly in the reddit database to remove mean statements directed at him). While Deimos certainly has the ability to do the same thing, that's kind of inherent with any website on the internet and I haven't seen any documented cases of it on Tildes. There is literally no solution to this short of using some cryptographic guarantee of message integrity since there will always be somebody with access to production data.
Assuming that all users act with the heart of the group in mind and that bad posts or ideas won’t be upvoted is kind of naive and imo part of why much of reddit is surface-level fluff or reactionary poison.
sorry I meant not upvoted
I wrote something in-depth about the context of goldf1sh's ban elsewhere recently.
There's a lot of detail that's glossed over in re-tellings of the situation (especially from someone as incapable of considering other viewpoints as goldf1sh) and I tried to capture it:
People only talk about the subject of conversations, or the opinions held in them, as if those are the only criteria with which one would have a problem. But the issue here with goldf1sh wasn't the content, it was the method. He was always such an asshole about his free speech crusade, and purposefully bringing up far-right ideology out of the blue to force everyone to talk about free speech is an asshole move.
It's not like he would wait for an opportunity, give a great and easy explanation, and then engage respectfully with others by considering their position and then sharing his. His comments were always some combination of aggressive, unprovoked, unrelenting, and overwrought. But you'll never hear him admit that maybe it was the way he engaged with people that got him banned, only that it must be over the subjects.
So, speaking of bringing up topics with bad methods:
This is just ridiculous and really makes me question your motivation.
If there’s one thing I really enjoy about HackerNews, it’s that bans & metadiscussion around moderation are relatively obscured by the site and its admins. As a site, it stays on topic and is faithful to its intentions.
We should copy this modus operandi, in my opinion. I didn’t come to Tildes for transparency, I came here to escape the constant meta-bullshit that pervades Reddit.
This is not the sort of content I want to see on Tildes. It should stick to its principles of high quality discussion about worldly topics. Not be constantly navel gazing about rules & banned users. I place implicit trust in @Deimos to do the right thing, and eventually for the community-scale trust system to do the same.
If someone managed to get banned from Tildes, they probably deserved it, and it doesn’t need to be revisited, because frankly I, nor probably the rest of this community, really care.
These are the sorts of posts I want to see less of.
I still want to see metadiscussion for improving the site. I don’t want to see metadiscussion around why X was banned. Those are two complementary, if slightly overlapping distinct sets of discussion. The former is nearly completely constructive. The latter is just revisiting completely pointless topics that won’t change anything about how this site is operated. This post could easily have been framed in a completely different manner, but instead it had been explicitly constructed as a he said-she said post that will do nothing but beat dead horses.
It’s been noted that Tildes isn’t Reddit. Having constant discussions about banning/censorship (just look at those tags) shouldn’t be what this site is for.
Maybe try filtering out some of the tags on this post? Seems like they fit your description well. Future posts may not be tagged properly, but it is better than nothing. I really do think that at least one of the ones on this post would show up on similar posts.
The way it's set up here, yeah. Rehashing a 6 month old situation without any evidence either which way is pointless.
As someone somewhat afraid of being ousted for wrongthink though (I'm not a native speaker though I am sometimes mistaken for one. I am all too capable of not reading my own subtext and putting my foot into my mouth - all while people think I actually know what I'm doing.) I think it's valuable to have transparency. In that vein: I observed the whole goldfish debacle waybackwhen, and I mostly agree with how deimos handled it - for now. If bans are completely obscured even to the interested, and just "happen", that's an environment in which I'll more or less constantly (though subliminally) fear being banned.
What I'm saying is I suppose I disagree with emdash about transparency.
Are you aware that Deimos has banned 38 accounts - most of which we don't know about? He announced the first ban (because it was the first), we knew about the second ban, he discussed the third ban, we knew go1dfish got banned... but, apart from that... nothing. There are over 30 bans we know nothing about. This is already an environment where bans are completely obscured and just "happen".
And that's exactly how it should be. Bans should not be like public executions, where all the townspeople get to watch and throw rotten fruit at the poor banned person - or heckle the moderator while he does the banning. That's undignified. It's better to handle these matters discreetly and without making a big fuss. As they say to moderators: if you're doing your job properly, noone will ever notice. Deimos is doing his job properly.
But why? They might be arbitrary bans, but they're not random. It's not like being hit by lightning, where you have no warning. Deimos will tell you when your behaviour crosses the line and, if you don't change, then he'll ban you. It won't come without warning. I have crossed the line once or twice, and I'm still here. So, until Deimos starts telling you you're doing something wrong, you have nothing to fear.
It's worth pointing out that the ban/not ban system isn't ideal and will itself evolve. It's likely there will be warnings, strikes, and muting at some point as it scales up for a much larger user base. I think it's also likely we'll maintain some kind of separation of powers model, so that the bans aren't handed out by the same people who do the regular moderation work in most groups. That'll help cut down on biases and powertripping mods.
The system already includes warnings. It's already not as binary or simplistic as ban/not ban.
I'm not so sure about that. I think the powers will be cumulative, so that people who have done a lot of regular moderation work will gain experience and trust, and eventually gain the power to ban in addition to their existing regular moderation powers.
But we're both just speculating.
I'm not disagreeing with that. I'm just pointing out that even the current system is not as simple as "ban / not ban".
I meant something more formal and automated than a PM from someone. :P
Moderation isn't going to be just one tall tree you work your way up from the bottom. There's going to be different kinds that use different systems. Baliff-types concerned with removals, locks, and bans (of which deimos is the only one now), curator-types who do editing like the tags and titles and links, and for lack of a better term, a baseline hum of regular user activity that's currently represented by votes and labels. It's already going in three different directions. When hierarchies are a thing here and actually large enough to need it, some class of mod will be tasked with whatever jobs arise from that as well.
It'll be unlikely that people have all these powers at once. Bailiffs are likely to be a site-wide class, while curation activity is likely to be more group-specific, and others will be hierarchy specific if/when hierarchies begin acquiring different mechanics from each other.
I like sticking to the approach of not building a tool until there is a reason to build that tool, though. I think as long as we take it all piece by piece, case by case, test by test, tool by tool, like archaeologists taking their time to unearth a fragile fossil, we'll come out the other side with solid gold. Most forums launch with the tools already built, and they usually end up being pretty bad at their jobs because of that. Co-development with the users is definitely the better way to get there.
You're obviously privy to inside knowledge that I'm not. Thank you for sharing.
It's rather obvious if you think about it. Just look at reddit. They gave moderators there the power to ban people from their groups. The result of that was an army of ban-bots that watched users like hawks and banned them in some communities just because they posted in other communities. That's facepalm-level total failure of a moderation system in my book.
The simplest solution, one that's proven itself in major world governments for centuries, is the separation of powers. Most of the powermod cliques I've had to deal with wouldn't be able to maintain their death grip over their community without access to banning. That's the big one - locks, removals, and bans.
Referring those activities to another group that doesn't have the same biases as the mods doing the reporting makes sense. I imagine @cfabbro can weigh in on this, he's dealt with some serious mod abuse on reddit before and we talk about this stuff all the time.
Ideally I'd like the users to do the noticing and reporting. That gets escalated up to mods who can't ban people. If they choose, they escalate it again to another class of mods who do ban people. A racist rant would fly up that chain in a big damn hurry around here. Someone having a bad day, not so much. There's also no way for a group moderator to start banning people based on his own biases.
I can't say that'll be the solution, but I do expect to see some flavor of this separation of powers present by the time we've finished. It's the only way to solve certain problems.
I would not use such definitive terms as you have, since everything is subject to change, much we have all talked about may not actually work in practice, and Deimos is the ultimate arbiter of what gets implemented and how, etc... but yeah, overall I generally agree with most of what you have said as far as what I see as the ultimate ideal regarding moderation.
And yes, I am exceptionally wary of moderator abuse from having seen and dealt with way too much of it over the years on reddit. However, IMO the majority of that abuse comes from only a few bad apples and is only possible because of the way the mod hierarchy works there, enabling power mod squatters to hoard subreddits and eventually take them over if they simply wait long enough... which hopefully won't be an issue here since trust will likely have decay and each group will not just have a handful of mods.
That mod problem is probably in its fourth iteration on reddit at the moment, with a few of the first and second generation "power mods" clinging on in steadfast stubbornness. It's really quite frustrating watching the same thing play out time and time again, but with a new cast each time.
I can't really talk too much shit about most of those first/second gen power mods since I was one and consider a bunch of them friends. However, yeah... quite a few of them have undeniably gotten themselves in hot water and made asses of themselves for stepping in and interfering in a community years after they stopped being active there. IMO they really should "let it go" and unmod themselves from all the subreddits they aren't really active in like I did when I 'retired'... but ideally they shouldn't even have to do that; It should be automatic.
I'm kind of envisaging an almost evolutionary process, where people gather up "mod" responsibilities depending on how they use the site. A frequent/prolific commenter may better in tune to to keep an eye on tone and manner of threads, someone else may be more concerned with correct tagging or titling etc etc and as the system matures different roles/focuses develop so that responsibility can be given for those "specialist" areas.
This may be very far from what eventually happens, but I'm very hopeful we won't end up with an overly hierarchical system, however things pan out.
That's exactly how I think of it. Your user activity determines where your powers lie on its own, by gradually granting you access to more features in that tree (or in several at once if we end up having several).
I am indeed. That number didn't concern me. Probably because I trust Deimos enough that most of these were rather simple cases. Obvious spammers, trolls, etc.; let me clarify my original statement: such cases don't need discussion. Goldfish maintained some amount of plausible deniability, so that's where I'd like to see a discussion.
Yes, but that's functionally identical from a certain point of view. Now, tildes should be a good deal less vulnerable to this than other communities, but as I said above regarding language: I'm capable of putting my foot in my mouth to the point of mandating mod action without knowing I'm doing that. I believe that I've gotten better about that, but that still means that -to me- warnings are just a band-aid. Inspecting my previous behavior in order to change isn't very effective, or at least historically hasn't been, so the warning only serves as a "you're 1/4th of the way banned", at least in the more nuanced cases.
As I said; in that sense, transparency helps. It gives me a instance of mod action I can try to learn from without getting closer to a ban - even though I wrote all of this in present tense.
As I said, I believe I changed. Maybe this is more me arguing the case not because I think I need it today, but because I think I would've found it useful years ago.
Ditto! But, as you can see, I'm still here. Deimos doesn't ban people unreasonably. I think you're safe.
Ditto for me too, and I agree; Deimos doesn't just ban people for putting their foot in their mouth on occasion or I wouldn't still be here either... unless that foot-in-mouth is a serious step over the line (e.g. one remarkably transphobic comment got a user banned after their very first comment on the site).
I get a peak behind the curtain a bit more than most, and even though I am not privy to everything (or even the majority of stuff), there is not a single ban so far I feel was completely unwarranted. I have also known Deimos a very long time now and have complete faith in him. He's honestly one of the most measured and rational people I know. And I have also seen a number of banned Tildes users on reddit professing innocence, completely misrepresenting their own words/actions, and/or lying by omission to make their bans seem unfair and "completely out of the blue", when I know for a fact it was not either of those things... so take all that for what you will, @vektor.
Honestly, the fact that some of the banned users feel compelled to whine about it, publicly, on other websites, for several months after their ban, should tell anyone all they need to know about that person. When I see that kind of behavior, all it does to me is justify that ban even more.
Yeah, it's kinda funny too since one of the more prolific of those complainers on /r/redditalts (not goldfish, who despite disagreeing with I actually respect) have their own social media project they are using the "controversy" over being banned here to flog and recruits devs for. How anyone falls for such an obvious ploy, I don't know.
I have been tempted soooo many times now to call those people out on their total bullshit whenever I see them going at it again, month after month... but Deimos has convinced me its just not worth the effort or headache, even though it makes me pretty mad to see go unchallenged.
I just want to comment that there's really no fear of that. A lot of banned users actually got warnings in the form of a private message from Deimos (including go1dfish). You won't accidentally get yourself banned.
"There was a user on here last summer that was banned as a result of a post about a study between a correlation between race and iq."
Correlation doesn't imply causation and without proper academic analysis (not by the average internet armchair philosopher, but by people with degrees in the related fields like sociology). I only know intro level sociology, but I know there's intersectionality and effects of privilege at play.
If this intersectionality is not described, I wouldn't think the post is of any quality(Tildes wants high quality posts). The poster may have biases/racism that compels them to post this kind of content.
Discussion this kind of content without proper backgrounds will only produce division in our community, and personally I don't think this topics have any place here unless the full academic analysis is provided.
There are "Free speech" websites (Voat, Gab) that let you make these biased posts, and I don't think Tildes should mimic what those communities look like. Voat and Gab is littered with low quality racist posts, and it would be a shame if Tildes took that path so that it could have "Free Speech".
Free speech is a hallmark of democratic systems, however free speech on the internet has shown to be a form of cancer that allows bad ideas to reach a wider audience.
You mean like, that the holocaust didn't happen or that Barrack Obama did 9/11? People always bring up the "diversity of ideas" angle in these conversations and I don't buy it. People with ideas shitty enough to get banned for them don't have anything meaningful to contribute - except maybe in a sociological "wow-I-didn't-know-people-like-that-were-real" sort of way. The other side of that with the doxing and outrage is also pretty unappealing. But in general I agree with the philosophy of de-platforming those who would use it to spread violent ideas and hatred.
I feel the opposite way as a 5 year forum moderator. Maybe not with conspiracy theories tho. But in most cases when someone is being (((controversial))) they are either trolling or an angry bigot. I have never had success trying to talk someone out of this. Mostly because they are doing these things for unreasonable reasons.
You'd be surprised how much shit still goes down despite these features.
If I may ask, why are you afraid of this? I can understand if you give away personal information (which I strongly advise against, for what I think are obvious reasons), but as long as you are operating in good faith I don't understand how someone could turn your own words against you.
I think I can at least speak for most of us when I say that we welcome your dissenting opinions. Without people like you, our site would be excruciatingly boring.
Sure, saying things like "Trump is the best president we've ever had" won't make you many friends here, but one of the things that make this place great is the strong moderation, so at the very least you shouldn't be harassed.
And from a personal perspective, I don't really want this to be a leftist utopia. I want voices from the right as well. The only thing I don't want to see here is people blindly following an ideological line without having some kind of justification for it. I want a community of independent thinkers, not a hive of followers. You might just be the beacon that shows we aren't just a left wing vortex.
I've written stuff that could metaphorically hang me, but I'm not worried that people will weaponise those words because they are my words and I own them fully. I don't dodge responsibility for them. I don't try to pretend they're not real. I said those things, and I meant them. If someone quotes them back at me, that doesn't bother me because they're just telling me what I said. My own reflection doesn't scare me.
Someone might misinterpret my words, or twist them to mean something else, but that's not my problem because the misinterpreted or twisted meaning isn't what I wrote. That other person came up with those other meanings, so they're not my responsibility. The only thing I'm responsible for is what I wrote and what I meant, and I'm totally comfortable with those things.
Join Saidit. It's censorship-free, so far as I can tell.
As I've written elsewhere, I think it's inevitable that any forum which does not practise active moderation will become host to alt-right talking points.
FYI: @NeonHippy & @aestetix.
We can't just throw our hands in the air and say that there's a possibility that having a code of conduct might go badly, so we shouldn't even bother trying. There has to be a better option than doing nothing. We have to try.
Otherwise the bigots win.
If we apply the principle of charity to the groups you refer to, do you think it's possible that:
There's a conference or forum they've heard stories of abuse or misbehavior happening at
They lobby that conference or forum to adopt an explicit code of conduct, to make it clear what is and isn't acceptable
After that code of conduct is adopted, if the misbehavior continues, they call it out as violating those community standards of behavior?
Is it more free though? Is it a free space for women? Trans-gendered people? Immigrants?
My big gripe about go1dy that go back to my days modding SubRedditCancer (the which i am no longer ideologically affiliated) is their version of "freedom." I radically don't like censorship, social control, coercive authority etc. either. But, the way go1dfish applies these ideas, by sticking up for people who demand the right to be nasty and make dehumanizing jokes and comments.
To be quite honest I don't think the line of reasoning in the OP uses a valid, nuanced sense of the word censorship or freedom for that matter.
What makes you say this?
ohhh this was the part that was unclear to me.
Thanks for posting this, I've been hesitant about posting in certain threads my different and controversial opinions after getting blasted by another user in another thread once. I would hate to spend a lot of time typing up a huge paragraph to explain my point of view and back up my points to only get attacked by ad hominem and/or get banned.