Mod annotations for removed comments
I just came across this field of 13 admin-removed comments and frankly it left me feeling rather unsettled. That's a lot of content to just nuke all at once. Contextually, the thread up to that point was genial and non-controversial, so it seems especially odd that there's just this black hole there. What struck me mostly was how opaque the moderation was. There is no indication of what kind of content was removed, why it was removed, or specifically who did the removal or when it happened.
Then I scrolled down and at the very bottom I found what I guess is meant to address these concerns, a comment from Deimos:
Sigh, I saw this thread was active and thought it was going to have an actual on-topic discussion in it. Let's (mostly) start this over.
It's not always clear online so I want to say that I'm not rage-posting or bellyaching about censorship or any of the usual drama that tends to crop up on sites like Tildes from time to time. I trust Deimos' moderation and give this the benefit of the doubt. What I'm actually doing, I guess, is making a feature request about better annotation for removed comments.
Would it make sense to show a note (like Deimos' comment) in-thread at the position of the deleted content? Instead of down at the bottom of the page or unattached to anything relevant? In my opinion some kind of "reason" message should always be provided with any moderation activity as a matter of course. Even if it's just boilerplate text chosen from a dropdown menu.
Also, would a single bulk-annotation for all of the related removals make for better UX than 13 separate ones? I think that would be both easier to read, and easier for Deimos to generate on the backend.
I feel like we may have had this conversation previously, but I couldn't find it. Apologies if I'm beating a dead horse.
Yeah, there are a lot of improvements needed to removals overall, and you have some good suggestions, thanks. It's not something I've worried about much yet because removals are still a very rare event—there have only been 19 comments removed in the last week (out of 1939 posted), and 13 of them were in that thread. It's almost always just a single comment here or there too, a big chain like this is even more unusual.
I understand that it seems a little weird, but that should be exactly what you expect. I removed all the stuff where it went downhill into not being genial, that was the whole point.
It looks like a few other trailing comments were pruned as well. That's likely why Deimos posted a top-level comment (as it applied to the whole thread), rather than responding underneath the largest removal chain.
Compressing removal chains seems like a good idea to me.
Good catch, that makes sense. Then maybe as an additional feature request, a special sort of admin-comment could come in handy for situations like these. This would be stickied at the top, and maybe styled a bit differently from regular comments, for visibility. That way the annotation doesn't get lost in the crowd.
This is known as distinguishing comments on reddit. Mods and admins (and admin emeritus) can distinguish their comments to stand out when taking official action like this.
I'd bet the suggestion has come up before, so there may be a feature request for it on the issue tracker already.
Distinguished comments rub me the wrong way. I've seen far, far too many people let that little stupid green tag go to their heads on reddit. Moderation should be a humble activity, not a flashy sherriff's badge. Put the emphasis on the action taken and the reason it was taken, rather than on the name of the user who is taking the action. Leave that off in the topic log somewhere.
It’s also really confusing if you’re the OP of one of the deleted comments. I don’t think I’ve ever had a comment deleted on Tildes, but I have on reddit, and you don’t always get any kind of explanation, leaving you baffled if it wasn’t a rule-breaking comment.
Tildes doesn't give you an explanation right now (though I'll often PM people if I think it needs explaining), but it does put a bold, brightly-colored "This comment has been removed and is not visible to other users" at the top of it.
reddit actively hides the fact that your comments (and submissions) have been removed. If it's one of your own posts, there's no indication at all whether it's removed or not. If you make a comment in a chain that gets all removed, when you view the thread you'll actually see everyone else's comments as "[removed]", but yours will still appear to be there, unremoved. You have to view the thread logged-out (or as a different user) to be able to tell whether something is removed or not.
How do we feel about giving users alerts for when their comments were exemplified, or marked as malicious/joke enough so the system affected them, etc?
One of the moderation principles of r/SpaceX when I ran that ship was that we'd always be super explicit with removed comments/posts, because although it generated vitriol, it sent a super clear message that what that user was doing wasn't acceptable. I wouldn't expect vitriol to this sort of response on Tildes, purely because it is hopefully going to attract a different class of netizen, but it might let some on-the-line users recognize they need to either sharpen up or get out.
I'd like to add things like that (as well as the notifications for title changes and similar suggested a couple of days ago). Right now there's no capability for notifications that aren't a result of a comment though (except new messages), so it's a larger project.
Your second paragraph explains a lot of weird behavior I've seen on reddit in regards to this. In 13 years, I never knew that (I'm not really sure how many comments I've had deleted—it's probably very few).
Really glad to know there's a visible alert, because it was very confusing the few times it happened.
That is shady x1000. I'm grateful Tildes is more transparent about that sort of thing.
I agree with this. Explaining removals is always very important. I always made sure to do it when I was a reddit mod. Leaving the removed comments by themselves just allows people to speculate what happen and spread misinformation. Best to nip that in the bud with a simple explanation.
Not always possible, mind you. When I moderated r/SpaceX, occasionally people would leak either commercially sensitive content, or ITAR-violating—U.S. Arms Law (!)—content. What were we supposed to do then? Provide a reasoning of "prohibited content"? That would've simply encouraged people, based on the inferred context of the conversation, to find it themselves. It turned out to be best to prune entire comment trees so the context was obliterated entirely.
I guess what I'm saying is there's always nuance to these sort of things. Nothing is absolute.
I mean, even in that situation wouldn't something like "Removed comment in violation of rules against objectionable or unlawful content" cover it while being sufficiently vague? We don't need a detailed breakdown here.
In my comment above, the "context" I was referring to was either the thread topic or the parent comments that weren't removed. The "removal reason" would only add fuel to the fire.
Having an "unlawful content" removal message in a thread about Dragon 2 design specifications would only hint at what users would be best to search for to find the content themselves. Our mandate from the company involved limiting such content availability.
In general, I find all these removal messages simply generate more buzz than just letting them silently fade away. In fact, I prefer the opaqueness some sites have wrt moderation. My hope is here we'd silently trust Deimos & in the future, the wider community, to moderate effectively according to good faith rules laid out in the Tildes docs.
I don't care why someone got their comment removed.
This seems like a special case to me. In general, I'd think that for non-sensitive subjects, boring but explanatory removal messages would be a good idea.