8
votes
Banned accounts should have their past comments visible
So, this is, in part, in response to the alibaba ban.
I think it's bad practice not to know why someone got banned. Firstly, it may lead to excessives from your part ("I will ban anyone and everyone I want and no one will know"). Secondly, it fails to show other posters that X behaviour will get you banned.
This topic is locked. New comments can not be posted.
In most cases, this just ends up being more misleading than useful.
A relatively common case for someone getting banned is: they register, post several decent comments, and then they post something totally unacceptable. I remove that comment, and send them a warning about it through a private message. They respond to the message with some clever version of "go fuck yourself". I ban them.
Now, if you were able to look at that user's page, you'd only see those first few decent comments, because the last one is removed (and should stay that way). You can't see anything about the messages. So the page shows you the opposite of what you're aiming for: it has everything they posted that didn't contribute to their ban, and the ban looks unjustified.
I know it's not satisfying, but the reality is that you don't (and shouldn't, and can't) have access to all of the info you'd need to understand why many bans happen. In the end, you're going to need to trust me.
(And now I'm going to lock this thread too because the majority of it is talking about alyaza, which is exactly what I was trying to avoid by locking the ~tildes.official post.)
Oh I liked that user :(
What business is it of anyone's why someone else got banned? Why do people need to see what happened? Why are people unable to follow rules of their own accord without seeing what other people did wrong?
In my experience as a moderator, this demand to see the bad posts and to explain the bans is mostly made by people who want to act as back-seat moderators and second-guess every decision. It's not about learning what other users did wrong, it's about accusing the moderator of doing something wrong. "But I don't find the word 'nigger' offensive, so that means your ban is wrong!" "But they didn't actually say anything transphobic, they just stated a biological fact!" "But they should be allowed to call for the extermination of all X people, because it's just words and we all have a right to freedom of speech!"
They're silly objections, and they just end up wasting moderator time.
I have two points here, though they would probably deserve topics of their own at some time.
Paradox of Public Moderation
It often happens that when moderation is public, then those who complain are usually trolls. However, when it is non-public, then there are many more complaints about the moderation quality.
A very indicative case happened when the so-called Deep State subreddits were banned, and moved to Voat. They created subverse(s) and… resumed Reddit-style moderation. The moderation logs, which are public on Voat, were a good example how not to moderate (though Voat's hands-off approach is another extreme not suitable for Tildes, I accept).
Permissive versus Restrictive Paradigm
I ask a different question:
Why do people need not to see what happened?
For me, the default is “Open, Permitted, Public” and I need reasons why it has to be the other way round.
To semi-quote a certain movie I like, "It's not that I have anything to hide, it's that I don't have anything I want you to know".
How does it waste the moderators time if the default is to leave up anything that isn't illegal or spamming? If anything not leaving them up prompts the questioning which is either a zero sum game (ignore all) or a net negative (respond to some or make a general statement, therefore wasting time).
There is one major argument for hiding banned users' activity: that activity might have been illegal (e.g., hate speech, which is illegal in Canada, where Tildes is hosted). However, illegal activity can be deleted with the rest kept (use the scalpel, not the guillotine).
Thus, I support the OP, especially so in the case when the ban is not meant to be permanent.
In addition, when* Tildes get traction, there will be external sites similar to ceddit that will scan, scrape, and archive publicly visible activity.
*I hope “when,” not “if.”
Another consideration is spammers. Spammers should definitely have their comments removed from the site. Leaving them up wouldn't reflect well on Tildes.
That is true. An admin/mod doesn't owe anything to anyone. Should we all stop making feature requests, raising issues and making suggestions?
I agree, but I think it may also be a good idea to add a reason for why they were banned at the top of their page. For the most recent ban, we have a big post explaining why it happened, but this doesn’t always happen and probably won’t be possible as the site grows more.
Indeed. A reason for the ban and then a link to the specific post that got them banned sounds perfect to me.
What happens when the ban is the result of a pattern of behaviour that has carried on for weeks and weeks, despite repeated requests to change and multiple warnings? (As was the case with alyaza.) There's no specific post to link to.
Then having the user's history available instead of replaced with the ban plaque—as the OP suggests—would really help.
Why? Why do you, or anyone else, need to know why someone was banned? What business is it of yours?
The answer is that ultimately it's the business of the community. When members that have been here for a longer time end up banned I think it's fair for people to want to know the why and the context. It helps reduce confusion and prevent resentment of the moderation team if you can see why and when someone was banned.
SomethingAwful has this done right, where you have separate tiers of punishment (probation/ban/permaban) along with a ban history, moderator note and a link to the context. You can immediately see if someone has a pattern of behavior and the public nature of bans makes it very clear. You still have the occasional troll complaining about shitty posters being banned, but less than you might think considering it costs $10 to post.
Smaller punishments help build up the history of a user and prove that there were attempts made to warn or reach out to a user before bringing down the hammer, which also addresses your other issue.
Replied here.
wait wtf alyaza was banned??
Fuck'd she do?
In case you (or anyone else) missed it: alyaza is banned (maybe permanently, but for at least a week regardless)
That's what prompted this thread by @user2.
As for what she did...
Based on my personal observations, she was continually combative, often to the point of open hostility, in her dealings with people here on Tildes.
Not to discuss “the topic in question” too much, but out of all the of the users on the site, this alayza handle has consistently been the most frustrating to respond to, because any viewpoint they don’t agree with is immediately labelled “ridiculous” and just plastered with random adjectives instead of being responded to in good faith. That and the (in my opinion) annoying constant lowercase writing style.
However, this comment of mine proves another point this thread raises. Ban reasons and unremoved comments do increase the amount of backseat second guessing and what I’d personally label as “unnecessary metadiscussion”. This is why when I helped run the ship at r/spacex, we cut this sort of nonsense out completely. Moderation was strict, silent, and invisible.
To this end I ditto your opinions in this thread. It’s not for me to know, nor do I particularly care about why a user was banned.
Exactly. As I've read elsewhere about moderation: if you're doing your job well, people won't even notice. (Which is as it should be.)
Does getting banned logs the user out automatically? What happens to the banned user's capabilities within the forum (post, comment, delete comments) if they get banned during an open browser session?
I was hoping that's the set-up. Thanks for the demonstration.
One thing I would suggest, though, is notifying the user of their ban somehow. Maybe display a modal on the main page if a certain key is appended to the URL. Just throwing them to the main page could be confused for a failure of the forum.
I haven't worked with user accounts long enough to consider how to handle banning. I just reckon that it should be obvious what happened, given the social power of shunning people of awful behavior. It should be obvious, but not demeaning.
Would be easiest to implement in code. Might be used for trolling down the road though? eg. link an unsuspecting user to the page while pretending it's something else.
There is a contact link at the bottom of the page. Banned users can request that all of their data be deleted which is a requirement of the GDPR.
Huh. Wild. I have never seen alyaza be rude or shitty to people. Not saying it didn't happen, I trust the others who are saying this has been a chronic problem for them. Just surprising because he's one of the few names I recognized around here. Oh well. Hope they can change for the better, they were pretty entertaining in my limited conversations with them.
That's surprising. Maybe you didn't see it because Deimos removed the worst-of-the-worst comments, but she was continually combative, often to the point of open hostility, in her dealings with people here on Tildes. She turned every discussion into an outright argument.
NOTE: According to her now-removed user bio, her preferred pronouns were "she" or "they".
Yeah to be fair, I don't think I had more than a handful of interactions and they were mostly on meta threads so there wasn't much passion.
As Algernon said, that is likely because her seriously shitty comments were removed by Deimos. But I know for a fact that I have used more Malice tags on Alyaza than pretty much any other user on the site. And her new "alt" account, DearDeer, I tagged a bunch of her comments with Malice despite her only being on the site for a few hours. The one chain of "removed by admins" in that recent ~tildes topic were especially bad and she was using both accounts in tandem, replying with both to the same user multiple times.
I just saw Deimos' post. I thought DearDeer was really aggressive and bad, but I didn't realize they were the same person. TIL.
Indeed. And I think it's also worth noting is that she was banned from Tildes unofficial Discord a few days ago as well, for similarly being incredibly aggressive and refusing to stop when told to.
I find this objective site rules violation much more serious than the rather subjective “being aggressive.” I somehow assume that if I get two replies to the same comment from different usernames, then these replies come from different people unless the contrary is explicitly specified (or it is ~test).
Here even keeping the usernames in the admin/mod-removed comments (e.g. Username Comment removed by site admin rather than just Comment removed by site admin) would suffice to prove that the abuse happened.
When Tildes reach 100k users, and there are hundreds of users with group mod privileges, will every group mod be able to alter data in this way?
That can't be true forever. At some point, Deimos will have to delegate banning powers to senior moderators.
Maybe, but on reddit account bans are the sole purview of the admins and that will very likely remain the same here too. And if a user has done something to warrant a ban from a particular group here, it's likely they deserve a ban from the site as a whole too. And ultimately, what's the benefit in allowing someone who deserves to be banned from a group continued access to the rest of the site where they can continue to make trouble? So it may not even be necessary to give mods group ban abilities.
Who knows, though... as with most things I am just theory-crafting at this point. ;)
What reason would I or Deimos have to lie about this? And leaving the usernames exposed opens up a whole 'nother can of worms so I doubt that will ever happen. But if it's "proof" you require, would a redacted screencap from last night where I messaged Deimos to let him know "both replied to <user>" and ask him if I should warn that user not to engage be sufficient?
I do trust Deimos. I do trust you.
When Tildes reach 100k users, and there are hundreds of users with group mod privileges, I will have difficulty trusting everyone.
All mod actions are logged, currently publicly visible and stored for 30 days (so can be investigated by Deimos should any concerns of abuse arise), and mods cannot ban people.
alyaza was passionate. Sometimes, it'd mean she'd write down a strong, emotional comment that made you think. Sometimes, her passion carried her places where it seemed overwhelming.
Her and I butted heads a couple of times. She seemed dismissive and stubborn, but never outright rude.
(And yes, "she". She said so in one of the comments that may or may not have been deleted as part of a thread.)
Yeah, I tried to stick with they/them because it never came up in our chats and it felt easy. That makes sense. Most interactions we were on the same side of the issue so we mostly didn't butt heads. I can see how that passion can have a negative side though. Thanks for your insight!