Would it be beneficial to ban certain topics of political discourse?
I've noticed that there are certain topics (specifically political ones) that reoccur frequently on this site, which almost never contribute anything of value. These can derail threads, incite hostility between users, push away new users, etc. IMO it is rare that anything new is said, and even rarer that any opinions are changed. Examples include: socialism vs capitalism; should real leftists vote for Biden?; is Biden a rapist?; are Bernie supporters toxic?; etc. I'm not saying these aren't important things to discuss (I've done so myself), but is it really necessary for us to have the exact same arguments basically every day? I personally feel the site would be nicer to use and less toxic overall if these discussions didn't happen. Would there be any downside to simply banning them, at least temporarily? Perhaps until after the US presidential election?
Every forum I've ever participated in has tarpit topics that entrap nearly everyone who plunges into them, whether in politics, programming, tastes in music, or otherwise. People get their fundamentals of identity tangled up in being right or winning, and everything goes to hell from there.
I find myself struggling to remember the human if I even skim them. The escalating tribalism, lack of empathy, wasted energy/intellect, wilful ignorance, dogmatism, pointless bickering, and wanton aggression feel like poisonously sweet, tainted invitations to hate people. Frankly, my reserves of emotional energy have been low enough of late that I've been staying away from Tildes because I just don't want to deal.
The thing is, it can happen with any topic, not just U.S. politics. There's a lot of tinder spread around by disinformation in that area right now, but I'd rather contemplate punishing behavior than banning whole areas of discussion. We're here to build a culture of sane discourse that's robust enough to withstand reasoned disagreement.
The malice tag exists for a reason. There are specific Tildes users who show patterns of bad faith argument, who are deliberately baiting intemperate responses, who are bringing knives to intellectual pillow fights. These nascent trolls need to get spanked in a public way, repeatedly, until we can talk about sensitive topics without yelling past each other.
Generally, the offenders who've established a presence on Tildes are good at avoiding individual posts that obviously trigger moderation. Nonetheless a thread's worth of activity shows who's consistently turning up the temperature. We shouldn't be leaving it to @Deimos to do all the heavy lifting of watching exploding threads and deciding, ex cathedra, to shut down the destructive ones.
I'd really like to see more users with the knowledge, courage, and wisdom to label comments when things are going off the rails.
This is generally how I try to think about it. However, it's very difficult to try to find a balance of when exactly I need to take some kind of action though, and I do think it would be best to try to add some lighter actions than something as "final" as a full lock or removal.
Overall, I try to think of my role as closer to "host" than "babysitter". I shouldn't need to—and don't want to—have to mediate every disagreement on the site. Like you said, there are going to be a lot of those, on a lot of different subjects. I'll intervene if something starts getting really out of hand and people have gotten to the point where they're throwing around attacks and insults and such, but I shouldn't need to get involved whenever people are just having a relatively mild argument.
I think there needs to be a level of personal responsibility from the users' ends too. If you don't like being involved in political arguments, then don't constantly get involved in political arguments. Arguments only continue when two (or more) people keep replying. If there's an argument you don't want to be involved in, you're in control of that. You can disengage from any argument you're involved in whenever you want to, just walk away from it. If someone tries to start an argument in an obvious bad-faith way, you can just ignore it. I think a lot of people feel like whoever replies last "wins", but that's not right, it's perfectly fine to just ignore someone when it's obvious that they're not actually trying to discuss anything.
Just yesterday, I mentioned that there are some resident users here who are almost always toxic in political threads. It got a bunch of votes and three "Exemplary" commendations, but it's sitting at the bottom of the thread. I don't care about taking credit, but it sure does seem like some users of this site were abusing the negative labels, maybe because I was talking about them. Whatever, it's done, and it's not like it was outright buried out of sight.
But, I also got a private message and an explanation for one of my commendations that mentioned two specific problem users. Those two were exactly the users I had in mind making the post. I imagine that right now, even without having said who those two users are, you know exactly who I'm talking about. These aren't isolated incidents where someone just isn't their best self, they're patterns of behavior with, at best, very rare exceptions. I don't expect you to babysit them, but as a host, you keep inviting them over despite the fact that they always make your other guests uncomfortable.
And that's us taking personal responsibility. We don't want to get into fights, so we don't talk, because we know if we did, one of those users would start a fight with zero repercussions. Yeah, we can walk away, but you should know that it means the only people left will be people who start fights and people willing to continue putting up with fights.
Given how far down the page your comment is, AFAIK it would have required far more than just a handful of people to apply a label to accomplish that. And rather than all those users having intent to abuse labels, IMO the far more likely explanation is that, even people who might have agreed with your general sentiment, still labeled your comment "Offtopic" because they thought it was, and so perhaps felt it didn't deserve to be the main focus of the comment section.
...I was literally talking about the kind of issue the article was talking about happening on Tildes, so if it was being labeled as "offtopic," that's also abusing the system.
EDIT: It looks like the "offtopic" label, if active, treats the comment as though it had -1 total votes. I guess the question is, how much does it take to activate that? Is it a single user, or does it require more, maybe in relation to other labels? Because it seems like it would be the best label to exploit someone wants to bury comments even if they're not off topic. You know, hypothetically.
It's debatable whether your comment was offtopic or not, since it's a bit of a grey area, but IMO (and clearly many others) your comment was offtopic... However, what is absolutely, undeniably, and not just "hypothetically" "abusing the system" is you labeling my above comment as noise. WTF? Talk about hypocrisy!
I was wrong to do so, and I apologize. I was frustrated with the labeling system, admittedly because a past comment was drowned out, and I was tempted to futz with the system. That doesn't at all justify it in any way, and I don't intend to do it again. I'm sorry.
Only Deimos can actually check, and unfortunately seems to be misrepresenting my past behavior, but it's not something I "habitually" do. As far as I can remember, I only used the "malice" label when bullying happened in the past. (EDIT: With the eception of the last couple of days, when things really got under my skin.) Obviously you can only take my word for it, but for whatever it's worth, there it is.
Look, I understand the desire to retaliate when you feel wronged, but that doesn't make it alright to actually do so, especially when the person you lash out at has nothing to do with your original complaint (at least I assume I have nothing to do with it, since I generally avoid politics topics on Tildes and elsewhere like the f'n plague and rarely ever comment on political things anymore). And you doing that while you're also publicly decrying that exact sort of behavior also seriously undermines your credibility IMO. But fine, forgiven...
p.s. For the record I didn't even see your original comment until you mentioned it above, which is what caused me to looked for it in your comment history because I was curious if what you said was true about label abuse. And even then I never actually labeled it myself; I was just trying to give you some insight into how Tildes labels work, and why it being labeled as offtopic probably wasn't actually due to some conspiracy to silence you by those you were talking about.
I know, and I'm not saying I was right. If I could take it back, I would, but as far as I know, once a label is clicked, it's just out there. I can't even find how I rated previous comments. Maybe I was curious about what happens, maybe I was in a bad mood, maybe I got defensive and thought you were justifying what happens here, but none of that is a sufficient reason for what I did. It's just the way in which I was being petty and irresponsible. I was wrong, it's not how I usually behave, and it's not how I'll behave in the future, if I even continue using the site.
As for credibility, I stand by what I said. I'm included in that, and I'll take my lumps.
You can undo labels. Just click "Label" then click the name of the label you previously applied that you want to remove. Only Exemplary cannot be undone, AFAIK.
I already clicked on your comment, but I didn't see any particularly markings around any of the labels. I'm afraid to click anything again now, because, well, you know. :( I don't really want to mess with things again. If the label usually sticks, maybe it has already been removed.
I want to say if I did see it, I might have undone it. That may be me being generous to myself, though. A part of what I was doing was really just seeing how the system works, albeit in a childish and angry way.
For future reference, if you want to experiment with things on Tildes, ~test exists for that purpose. And you're even allowed to register multiple accounts on Tildes so long as you don't:
https://docs.tildes.net/policies/code-of-conduct#multiple-accounts
See, that would have been the healthier way of doing what I did. :P
Oof, my feelings exactly. I'd love to have more productive political conversations where I'm able to contribute a leftist perspective, but I don't want to start a whole chain of bad faith arguments so I don't bother.
That's exactly the problem. I got a private message from a user saying they stopped commenting and nearly quit using the site entirely because of those two specific users. One person who commended me said those two users are the reason they don't participate in political threads. Another person who commended me said "it's always the same two users," despite the fact that I never mentioned the number two in my original comment, so they're likely thinking of the same users. Heck, my original comment was about how posting in those threads made me feel anxious and exhausted. And now, you're echoing the same point: it makes you not want to post to begin with.
Those users are actually subtracting from the dialog on Tildes by driving users away. Ironically, they're also the first to bemoan the toxic behavior of others while CONSTANTLY being toxic themselves. They're "punching back" against people who never took a swing at them.
So, our options are to take the high road and act the way we wanted people to act on this site, or give up, stoop to their level, and play into their narrative by taking the bait.
If these people are constant thorns, why not bring the issue up to @Deimos privately? At the very least I imagine they could be talked to, maybe they don't realize what they are doing and the effect they are having.
First, I have labeled their posts as "malice" when they directly attack or are needlessly rude to other users. That seemed to go nowhere, because they're as active and toxic as ever.
Next, I addressed the issue here, in the hopes of getting a response from Deimos. If that doesn't work, I'll send a PM, and if that doesn't work, I don't know. I'll either make a post, or just quit reading political threads or using this site entirely. I wouldn't be the first, as several users have mentioned to me in PMs. :/
I didn't really want to get into this publicly, but you're being awfully disingenuous about it.
You've repeatedly used Malice labels as a way to privately berate and swear at me, for example one of the ones you used yesterday said something like "Why the fuck aren't you doing anything about this, Deimos?". You've habitually misused other labels as well. Yesterday alone you labeled multiple comments as Joke to try to negatively impact them somehow. You even mis-labeled @cfabbro's (correct) answer to your question in here as Noise because... I don't even know, you disagree with it or didn't like the answer?
I'm not denying that Tildes can use work to try to improve discussions or reduce arguments, and I just said as much. But the way you've been behaving absolutely isn't the way to convince me that you're a reasonable person who deserves listening to. You're being toxic too, just where nobody except me can see it. Feeling righteous about it doesn't justify it.
We're getting into it publicly because doing it privately via the report system has done nothing. My labels of the past few days were trying to see if the system did anything. I would say it's "habitual," especially since (to my memory) I've almost exclusively used the "malice" label up until now, and then, please take a look at the context. I regularly report rude behavior, and nothing is done about it. I did label things in the wrong way, I was wrong to do it, and it won't happen again.
And I stand by the fact that it doesn't do anything. Even when you mention me swearing at you, that wasn't an insult at you personally, but my frustration at the situation, which I think is absolutely justified. You let people be bullies. I apologize for the language, but I stand by my point.
And I've received around a half-dozen private messages from users who agree. They stopped visiting political threads because of this behavior, and I can only guess what number stopped using Tildes entirely.
Frankly, I'm disappointed you're taking a harder line with me being exasperated using the reporting system and using rude language in it than you are with users who are toxic time and time again, and have a net negative impact on the communication here.
I mean, come on. The "gotcha" quote from me is saying "what the fuck." What the fuck indeed.
Ugh. This is tremendously disappointing.
Is it OK to ask for a screenshot/proof of this?
Here's my corroboration, for what it's worth:
I will straight-up admit to mislabeling that specific comment. It was after I was upset by this whole thing, and I don't know what headspace I was in, but I did something petty and irresponsible. I take full responsibility, I apologize, and I fully support efforts to prevent this kind of thing from being abused in the future. I shouldn't game the system just because I'm salty, and others shouldn't be able to do it as the most effective way of burying comments they disagree with.
As for the "Why the fuck aren't you doing anything about this, Deimos?" I'll also cop to that. There's also definitely some context missing. I'm fairly positive there was something before that in the same comment, where I was pointing out some user bullying others. If not, then almost certainly another report in the same thread. I don't interpret that as "berat[ing] and swear[ing] at," especially not habitually. It was a "what the fuck," not a "fuck you," and I was asking him to do something about others' behavior, not flaunting what I was doing. I was definitely aggressive, but I think it's disingenuous to say I was "habitually" insulting Deimos, especially if this is the prime example. Still, maybe I got too angry when I felt like I was shouting into the wind, and forgot there's another person at the other end.
If universally enforcing a certain standard of behavior would also affect me, I'm fine with it. I can hem and haw about context and frequency, but if the rules are fair, so be it. It would absolutely be worth it to deal with habitual problem users I had in mind.
By the way, I think it's worth mentioning that I never mentioned those two users by name in a public comment. I don't want to draw their attention, but I also didn't want to out them because they'd get a bunch of negative attention. Kind of ironic, all things considered. :/
People might behave better and not abuse the system and go to private messages and discord to complain about the same two users if it felt like you did anything other than condescendingly tell us that we’re looking for a fight because the same two people constantly say shitty things that aren’t true about progressive and if it felt like you moderated them even remotely the same way you do us.
I think the general idea is not unfair moderation, it's lack thereof. An undercurrent of a lot of disgruntled users on Tildes (myself somewhat included) is that there is an imbalance. The elephant in the room is political divisions. Progressives feel like they are making significant effort to create productive conversations, in good faith, to improve Tildes. Meanwhile progressives also feel that they are being attacked, slighted, or debated with in bad faith by non-progressives. The bait is very real, I've had to bow out of conversations myself and I've seen it elsewhere. I've even had to remind folks that their words have the ability to offend people, but the problem is that said folks either don't realize, don't accept or don't care and the problem continues. It is tiring to try and debate with someone in good faith when they do not return the favor. This leads to our current situation of progressives not wanting to participate, occasionally one of us falls for some bait and they are declared the entirety of the problem, and people get upset.
It's not that you're treating the progressives unfairly, but the community standards have been split between two political groups. In my view you've got a group who are trying very hard to keep the community in good standing who are now frustrated, and you've got a group who won't admit to any problems. Then, there are the onlookers; it's up to them to decide what they want the community to be.
I frequently forget that labels even exist. About the
malicelabel specifically, I don't use it for two reasons: (1) there are not many malicious comments on Tildes (my notion of what constitutes malice is probably narrower than most), (2) I think I'm good at recognizing when a thread starts going downhill, so I end up not reading malicious comments altogether.In that sense, maybe we could experiment with an automated feature that locks down a thread after it has reached a certain number of 'malice' tags - relying less on Demios and other moderators (if there are any with that level of authority) to constantly monitor every thread. In addition, it would give users more incentive to self-police threads and consider the implications of every comment. I'll admit, this idea just came to me after reading your comment. It isn't something I've put a lot of thought into, so feel free to tell me (politely) why it might suck.
Hah, this sounds like something automoderator can do with a certain amount of reports on reddit.
This sounds good in theory, but, at least in my experience, if the users are aware of rules like this, they can and will be abused.
You could, in theory, leverage a well designed "reputation" system to limit the potential for abuse by using reputation score to weight the impact of the labels.
But that could also just kick the abuse can down the road to having people game the reputation system instead of the labeling system.
If there's one thing I've learned from moderating forums and reddit over the past dozen years or so, it's that there will always be a number of users who abuse the system or push it to the edge of just-no-quite-abuse. I see no reason why this community would be any different. It's already abused here, as Deimos has pointed out.
Yep, I was wrong to do it. I'm sorry. It was hypocritical for me to complain about it, then turn around to do it just because I was frustrated about that very thing.
That said, I would still absolutely support some kind of measure to limit that kind of thing. I shouldn't be able to game the system because I'm mad, and it shouldn't be incentivized as the best way of "dealing with" comments in lieu of downvotes.
I don't think that idea sucks at all. The issue I see is that people still aren't using labels as intended and appropriate.
The passionate debaters are engaged with being right, and not noticing when they're being egged on, perhaps. I'm not on Tildes regularly enough these days, so when I peek into the heart of darkness in these threads, I run away screaming rather than taking time to call out the malefactors. Based on the discussion here, there's a lot of avoiding/ignoring rather than policing. This may be an intractable problem, but I thought I'd call attention to it so that we have a basis on which to implement something like your suggestion.
Maybe instead have a cooling-off period for responses, like Hacker News does? I don't know exactly how they trigger it, but it seems useful.
As far as I know, I think it's an opaque tagging system where moderators secretly tag "problem" users and it just sets a hard limit on how many replies they're allowed to make in a single thread over a period of time. When the "problem user" exceeds their limit, it gives them an error that implies they ran afoul of something like a spam filter rather than the "Shut up, now" block it actually is. The minimum karma score before you can vote on stuff also makes enough of a barrier to entry that it discourages those people from making new accounts.
Not sure that's in the spirit of transparency though.
There seem to be multiple systems. Apparently there is rate-limiting where some users have seen "slow down, you're posting too fast". There is also "hellbanning" where certain problem user's posts only show up in grey. But the one I'm thinking of is that sometimes for a heated thread, the last reply temporarily has no reply button, and this is for threads I didn't participate in at all, so I think it applies to everyone.
I feel like I rarely see heated threads where the replies come in that fast. They usually persist over several days from what I've seen. The site just isn't active enough to have that many concurrent users.
Yes, that's usually the case on Tildes. Although I did see one topic get very heated before it mysteriously disappeared, so it seems like some kind of circuit-breaker would occasionally be useful? Particularly for meta-discussions where a lot of people will feel like they have an opinion.
Sorry for dumb question, but how do you add these tags? I followed the thread of pages from the link in your post, and couldn't find on any of the various pages that describe the tags how a user actually adds them to a comment. (i.e. how would I add the exemplary tag to your post? I just see vote, bookmark, reply and view as markdown under more... no tagging option.)
They are only available to users who have been here at least 7 days. Once that happens, the 'Label' option shows up in between 'Vote' and 'Bookmark' on comments. And for more info on them, you can check out the Commenting docs page: https://docs.tildes.net/instructions/commenting-on-tildes#labelling-comments
Thanks
I think this is an excellent idea. Tags remain a seemingly underused feature of the site, and I think you and others have identified some key reasons why. I for one very rarely label comments as malicious even if I feel they were not made in good faith or overly aggressive, mostly because in my mind 'malicious' corresponds to abusive, ad hominem, offensive, etc. If there were some more labels to use, particularly in political threads, I think it would enable the community to be much more proactive with its moderation. A label for 'escalating' behavior could be very good, and could have effects beyond sorting.
Maybe if a series of comments in reply to one another in a thread get labeled as 'escalating' by a threshold of users, replies to that thread can automatically be turned turned off either indefinitely or for a set amount of time. This could help to mitigate the number of threads we see where it's just two users shouting at each other basically, and it would give users an incentive to keep things cool if they want to keep discussing. This tag would only be available in topics that have been labeled
politics, as you suggest.I think an 'Escalation' label would encompass a variety of negative behaviors without necessarily conferring a judgement on their hostility or intention, and more users would be comfortable using it for that reason.
Definitely agreed. I'd use it quite a bit, as I'm often not comfortable saying that the person is being malicious, but can definitely say they're making the situation worse.
I've thought about this a bit and have an idea for a label addition. I welcome people pulling it apart or finding the potential issues with it, as I know we have a lot of people here who are systems-minded and have a lot of experience with internet behavior management.
I think we could incorporate a label for "contentious" or "argumentative" or "hostile" comments (the name is less important than its impact) for when a user is not being outright malicious but is commenting in a way that's escalating tensions or foregoing the principle of charity. Their comment might have some value to it, so removing it entirely isn't great, but it also has a higher likelihood of a more negative impact on individual users or the community at large, which we want to avoid.
As for the label's effects, a single label should do nothing at all (so people can't weaponize it), but a small number on the same comment (say, 3-5) would auto-collapse the comment and drop its weight. To distinguish from noise, I also think we should add a color-stripe to the side as a sort of visible "caution" (or some other way of publicly marking it -- maybe a warning on the collapse or before the comment). People can still expand and view the comment and the ones below it should they choose to, but it makes it visible to everyone, including the commenter, that the comment is a borderline one as well as taking it out of the immediately visible pool of discussion.
The hard part about this is that, upon seeing this happen, a user might go back and edit their comment to be more constructive or less hostile (which is a great thing!). Ideally, this would eliminate the contentious tags from the post and it would be re-expanded and weighted accordingly, but I can't think of a good way for something to get adequately un-tagged like that isn't either convoluted or open to exploitation (plus there's no guarantee that the original parties will even see the edited post in the first place).
We could also experiment with an accumulation of those tags on a user across multiple comments instituting a sort of rate-limiting system whereby they're locked out of certain threads/topics/posting in general as a sort of site-enforced cooldown.
Unfortunately, we've already got labels that aren't being used enough; I'm not sure that adding more, or creating less punitive ones, will change the likelihood of use. "Hostile" should definitely be labeled as malice - there's general agreement that ad hominem or hateful responses don't belong on Tildes.
In U.S. law, there's a recognized legal objection offered at trial - "asked and answered". It's a means to prevent badgering and hectoring witnesses, or otherwise wasting the court's time. We could have a "bickering" label that collapses a string of comments which circle the topic endlessly and don't advance the discussion.
Frankly, there is no worse label than malice and it is red. The UI tells me "this is where I cry to Deimos if I think a comment warrants nothing but removal". I don't wanna use that just because someone is being uncharitable.
It's been discussed before, but a one-click label might not be the best way to respond to a less-severe infraction. Sometimes you can just comment, "I don't know if you intended it that way, but your response sounds uncharitable. Would you like to revise it?"
The best way to find out whether or what to label is to engage with the poster and ask about their intent, with genuine courtesy, curiosity, and empathy. We're stuck with text and have no other cues to judge the poster's emotional state or condition. Yes, it takes work and patience (which I'm notoriously short of) to do this instead of clicking a label.
It's possible to be passionate about a topic without badgering, insulting, or otherwise creating a hostile environment in discussions. malice is a moderation flag that confirms a poster has obviously violated the site's policies or hasn't stopped acting out when asked or warned in the thread.
None of us are perfectly wise and we'll make mistakes in labeling. Right now, there probably isn't enough data on whether people have been using labels appropriately and with good judgment on how they affect the conversation.
That is very creative. I think would be valuable to experiment with this and see how it works in practice.
Agreed. Potential solution: generate a list of known-good users who consistently contribute meaningfully and respectfully to political discussions. This is the seed group - connect them in some way, have them discuss what they want norms and culture with regard to politics to be, and how tilde's values relate.
Restrict commenting on political topics to the seed group for a week, and have them intentionally contribute extra, putting on a show of discussions consistent with the culture they want politics to be. (Maybe come up with a question or two for each day?) Then open up posting to 5% of the site, wait a bit, repeat. During this period, if someone is being uncharitable, destructfully argumentative, etc, talk to them about it in PMs.
I'm not sure the naturally good people are necessarily going to have great insights about how to draw out better behaviors from less good people. This seems a bit like the Catholic Church's problem with having a bunch of (nominally) celibate monks and nuns presuming to tell everyone else about appropriate sexual conduct.
I think inculcate might be closest to what you're trying to say since it's as much about cultivating a certain set of virtues as it is about developing a cultural norm.
To inculcate is to instill or impress an idea on someone, so inculcation is the process of instilling or impressing ideas. A lot of teaching is a form of inculcation: teachers repeat information to students, hoping it will sink in. Parents employ inculcation to instill values like "Don't lie" and "Have courage" in their children. Military groups also use inculcation to impress their ideas upon recruits. Any process of teaching or training is likely a form of inculcation.
I'm not really in favor of banning topics like this on the website. People discuss them because they care about these issues, and TBH I enjoy reading about those here compared to Reddit because people here engage in good faith discussions much more frequently.
I do think these discussions can creep into topics across the website as a whole because we don't have a dedicated space to discuss politics, so users that would prefer to avoid that can't opt to do so.
Honestly I think political discourse is inevitable. Even if you give it a place of its own, it's still going to leak everywhere. One can't really ban something like that without being a gigantic dick to one's users.
If something were going to be done about it, it'd have to come from the mindset of making those discussions more civil and useful somehow. This problem is older than the internet, politics and religion always end up being highly contentious topics in real world conversations.
What if I care about funny cat videos? Does it really matter if people care? If there is no substance to a discussion, or it's just a repeat of a previous one, I don't think it counts as "high quality" just because lots of people care about it. I myself care about all of the issues outlined in the OP.
I don't think there is a meaningful comparison between "funny cat videos" and "politics" as topics. One is far more specific, with a type of medium attached to it, the other is rather broad, somewhat subjective, and everyone from every walk of life is both exposed to it and shaped by it. Banning political content would be more akin to banning all animal content from the site, or religious content/discussion.
And yes, it does matter if people care. This is a forum meant for sharing news, discussion, insight, or just talking about topics. I would expect to be able to discuss any topic I cared about in a general forum such as this.
We did have a recent topic about this about a month ago:
Political discussion here seems to be really bad. Is it even possible for it to be good?
And I would echo my sentiments here:
I am in favor of this.
I am all in for reading and asking questions on topics that are in-depth analysis of things that have already happened. I don't see much value in discussing things that are currently happening because its just hot takes (my comments included). Even when it comes to current events, I think there has to be more rigor in what is valuable to post here versus what isn't. I don't think political opinion pieces are valuable because they sit among other legitimate, factual news that is posted which may give the impression that the opinion is on the same level as real news. And when it comes to real news, the more direct the source, the better. If it can be sourced from the AP, that should be the source. If someone makes a comment on the post, they should be required to put a source if they make a claim. Unless someone has a question, top level comments with a politics tag should contain a source that adds to the posted article's context.
I've seen forums implode just from politics, causing them to try to quarantine them off to a dedicated section of the site or let the toxic communication fester to the point where everything suddenly became political. I don't think this is preferable because it signals a lack of moderation capability and individual decorum that is perceived by me as essentially giving up. I strongly believe in systems that are designed around reinforcement of behaviors, and I think identifying what behaviors are ideal for political topics and then putting controls in place will help drive the effect you intend to have.
A month later, I'm still in favor of getting rid of US Presidential election threads. As we draw closer and closer to November, my opinion is gradually becoming more and more, "I don't really give a rat's ass what your opinion is and you shouldn't care what mine is unless you know me personally. We are all 1 person 1 vote, among 300 million+ other people. Our individual opinions don't really matter in an anonymous online sphere."
And I say that as a highly opinionated person. Nobody here is going to fundamentally change the way that I view the world through a verbose comment. And I have come to understand that there is nothing that I could really say in one verbose comment that is going to rock your world, so to speak. America's problems aren't going to be solved in a Tildes comment thread. But I would wager that it will cause more problems for the site itself to let these topics continue as they are unchecked.
What I see in political comment threads:
Now if someone could do a political science thread on how a political situation has analogues to that of ancient Rome, or something novel and thought-provoking, please post it! If you can see themes of a philosophical school of thought erupt through a politician's actions, please post it! If you have an article that is about a recent Trump twitter post, probably don't post it! My point, is that if it is thought provoking and eye-opening then it should be posted. If the responses a post brings is reminiscent of a Reddit thread, it might not be that valuable/worthwhile in this forum.
I would really be disappointed if there wasn't any discussion on what amounts to be one of the biggest news topics every 4 years on Tildes. If you feel that way, you do not have to engage in the discussion. I am getting a strong "no one is going to change my opinion so the discussion isn't worth having" vibe from your second paragraph, which may very well be true for you, but I think that's unfair to paint that on to everyone else. What isn't insightful to you might be to others, or they might be exposed to that perspective for the first time.
It is the biggest news topic in 4 years, but it is treated as an us vs. them sporting event where the "them" is anyone who disagrees with a commenter, and the us is everyone who votes a low-effort comment to the top of the thread (which has happened repeatedly). Since 2015 I have seen comment threads all over the internet completely devolve into "gotcha" behavior, where users will write back and forth to each other but not once ask the other person a simple question to better understand their point of view or what their actual concerns are. The idea of "winning" is more important than the actual topic at hand, and quite frankly I'm sick of it. This site aims to strive to overcome the common pitfalls of other communities, so I expect far more from its users when it comes to serious topics. However, what I end up seeing is that political threads are by far the worst comment threads on the entire site. I don't have hard stats on this but I would wager they are by far the most locked threads on this site.
Now, I will add that my opinion can be changed. I can give one specific example that clearly resonated with me recently where Jeff Weaver started a Super PAC in favor of Joe Biden. He said:
That changed my mind from being against the idea of the Super PAC to being for it because I could connect to it. It also re-inforced why I should vote for Joe Biden. That kind of personal connection just does not exist in the current political threads here by and large, due to the observations that I outlined in my original comment. I believe political discussion can work, views can be changed, ideas can be discussed, but not in the current state, with the current tools, in the current system. And don't get me wrong, I don't even think this issue lies within all users, but rather those that seem to dominate these same topics over and over again.
Somewhat off-topic, but your story is really interesting to me because I just attended a campaign organizer training yesterday where we received specific instruction in using personal stories to connect with a social media audience. Seasoned online debaters often fall prey to abstraction - we become distant from the people we're trying to connect with when we attempt persuasion via ideology.
One of the worst turnoffs I felt when I've looked at the Biden or leftism vs liberalism threads, was realizing just how little the victims of the Trump agenda seemed to matter to the debaters.
I had a close friend, born in Korea and emigrated here, crying (electronically) on my shoulder because she'd been verbally abused, told to "go back to China", and spat on after Trump's "Wuhan virus" crap. I spoke with another friend this week, naturalized U.S. citizen from Morocco, who got stuck there while visiting with his family. He's not planning to return, because it's safer there. I've mentioned here that a friend died of COVID-19 a couple of weeks ago. That's just the beginning of my litany of personal stories. They're supposed to connect people to action, rather than passively watching the devastation, or clinging to old dogmas about party or ideology. So for those interested, visit https://organizing2020.com/
I don't want to see politics threads banned. Politics matters to the point of life and death right now. What I want to see is more discussion of praxis, policy, and organization-building that can sustain a green/progressive agenda for the 21st Century and beyond.
I think this comment is a great example of what I would prefer to see in political discussion, and what IMO political discussion should be steered towards. I wasn't aware of that Jeff Weaver quote you brought up, and though I am already planning on voting for Biden, it provided some additional insight into why others have come to their conclusions. I really appreciate that!
The discussion shouldn't be "we should ban/heavily restrict politics topics," but it should instead be "how can we make a system that provides users the right incentives to promote positive discussion?" The rest of the internet should be a lesson to try something new, not allow Tildes to fall into the same traps other websites and userbases have.
I understand your point of view, but I have to add that I'm almost the opposite of you.
I very rarely discuss politics with people personally outside of my family and closest friends -- I deleted Facebook because I got very tired of all the political soapboxing and half-baked opinions. I know that it's the same online -- but at least in an anonymous setting I can feel like we can discuss ideas with less emotions and personal baggage involved.
As to whether tildes should participate in that -- it certainly doesn't have to -- there are plenty of places to discuss politics if one is so inclined. However an outright ban is unenforceable -- any topic on society can be distilled into politics and tiptoeing around that seems asinine. What might be good is an opt-in/out filter similar to the COVID one at the top of the page.
To be frank, I can acknowledge my point of view is extreme and over-reaching. I would hope that we could figure out a way to design a system of commenting that promotes positive behaviors and dissuades negative behaviors but its an extremely tough nut to crack. I too deleted Facebook for similar reasons, and I maintain a Twitter account as a sort of ritual of self-hate when I need a check of how truly awful political discussion can be online.
My issue with anonymity in political discussion is that our beliefs and values are defined by our personal experiences, and when there is a general lack of personal understanding with the person you are discussing topics that are meaningful to that person, points are lost or talked over. I think that personal baggage is important to understand so you can connect to a person's point of view, even if you disagree with it. I think more than politics, we should be discussing values and why they are important to us. I believe we can relate values to a vision of how politicians should behave, how policy should be informed, and what is morally acceptable in a society. But I digress, that may be a bit off-topic for this discussion.
To bring it back to the topic at hand, some changes I would like to see that I think could nudge political discussion in the right direction:
I think that's a really good point. People's politics stem from their meta-politics and a political opinion is usually almost an inevitably of their meta-politics. I agree these are deeper philosophical questions and can be a lot more interesting to discuss. Discussing meta-politics also removes a lot of the cheerleader/fanatic aspects of these discussions as they are more removed from contemporary politics.
As per the topic, I agree with your last point -- I like what HN does in that when someone replies to you you have to wait 15 minutes before you can answer.
In a sibling comment thread, a user mentions the problem not being too much political discussion but the lack of other content and I'm inclined to agree. I'm not sure if people just can't not take the bait but the comments on political topics dwarf the other topics. Combining that with above -- what if you earned the right to post in political threads by posting in non-politics threads for that day? Would stop people just drive-by'ing the politics threads and encourage people to disperese more.
I think you have some good ideas, but I strongly disagree with anonymized usernames. Part of the problem with discourse on the internet is the anonymity and separation from other types of communication we use to establish humanity. Further removing that only makes that worse.
No, I'm thinking of anonymized usernames as other users have no way to identify who wrote that post. This community is small enough that we have reputations and everyone knows a bit about other regular posters, in a similar feel to older forums. There's an increased incentive to behave and treat others well if you regularly come in contact with them. By anonymizing posts (in general, not for specific things like suers make throwaways for on reddit) that is removed. There is no way to tell who wrote what post, or which opinions belong to who. That may sound good in theory, but it's just another step into detachment from the human element. If no one can tell I posted something, why should I protect my reputation? That type of system is ripe for abuse with bad actors.
I don't see any benefit to the anonymizing of posts for general discussion (especially political discussion), only specific instances where they have a private problem and want advice, but not tie that to their regular account (which is done to either protect community reputation or avoid identifying someone IRL).
Yeah it gets a bit weird. I'm in a gaming discord that has a hard ban on political conversation, but at some point they were talking about the inanity of states where they have gas station attendants. One side of that conversation is nominally "apolitical" where you just laugh at how inane it is. But you can't explain why such a law exists and whether it's worth having or not without touching on the politics of labor and welfare policy.
That's just one example, but there's lots of stuff where it's hard to have real discussions without getting political. That same discord has some personal/IRL discussions, including places where people get into some "real talk." If that "real talk" involves issues at work, you might be talking labor policy and union organizing. If it involves someone with an unplanned pregnancy, you're tip-toeing around discussion of abortion. For the most part, everyone vocal there seems to be more-or-less on the same page with these hot button issues so it rarely ends up being an issue. But that just suggests there are low-key filter effects that are covertly enforcing a political consensus in spite of the rule.
The main issue with this line of reasoning can be seen in subreddits which have rules against "political content." What inevitably ends up happening is that political content that the moderators agree with stays up, sometimes with half-plausible reasoning about why it's "not political," while political content that the moderators disagree with is branded "political" and removed.
The truth is that politics touches on every topic dealing with humans relating to other humans, which is...damn near everything. It's hard to think of examples of subjects in which there is no political element whatsoever.
I think that discussion of these topics, even regular discussion of these topics, is fine, and any rule that would exclude them merely because they're "political" is too ripe for abuse. Plus, electoral politics is a pillar of discussion with other people, on par with the weather: of course people will want to discuss whatever the current top political headlines are.
What I think Tildes should watch out for is the type of organized agenda-pushing by bad faith actors that characterizes so much of reddit. People spend tons of money on reddit to push agendas. It's not even bad necessarily, imho, to have an agenda in exposing other people to content, above and beyond "This is interesting." What is bad is when that type of content overwhelms a community due to organized brigading, and when their motives and origin is obfuscated.
That's my two cents on this topic! It's not like I enjoy seeing the same topics tread and re-tread on a daily basis, either--though, come to think of it, I almost always read them--but I just don't think there's a cure that is better than the disease.
This is a tough one but censoring topics, especially politics on tildes, isn't solving the problem, just kinda puts a blanket over it. If people aren't arguing in political threads, they'll find somewhere else to bring up Trump or Biden or whatever. I really like the discussions here for the most part but some people get WAY too riled up. From what I've seen on reddit and elsewhere, this site gets a pretty bad name because of how militantly liberal some of our users can be especially with more "inner-leftist controversial" topics you mentioned like Bernie. It is just arguing about shit we all agree 90% on but there is still tons of hostility. Which is ironic because if it weren't for those bombastic political arguments that pop up with 100+ comments every week this site would seem pretty dead unfortunately. I want to say "just ignore them" but it seems to me most of us aren't capable of that. We are all here because we are not casual information consumers, we want more depth, hence most of us being a bit "more intense" than the usual internet browser, whether thats good or bad.
That being said, I don't know if there is tons of overlap in interests here other than tech and politics. And we can't just zap half of the topics people interact on. For example, i am very interested in anything music related but every since I've joined I've seen only less and less interest in the subject on my own posts and others. Really everything recently gears towards politics or tech or some adjacent of them. This place DOES feel like a community most of the time, but it has no culture imo. I think instead of restricting topics, there just needs to be more interactions in other topics unrelated to those big two I've mentioned. It gets fucking tiresome.
So THEN i think the issue is, more users will mean more varied discussions but THEN the issue is how do you get more users? And I know that is the age old question, and it's beyond me. I'm ranting now but moral of the story to me is, we don't need less political discussion, we need more discussion in other topics.
I do not see any solution to this problem that does not involve more human moderation. You cannot automate the moderation of politics, as politics is an inherently human issue that machines do not understand.
I think the only way to make it better is to make it more effort to post on political topics. We could enforce a one week cooling off period, in that you can only post political topics that are a week or older -- this might allow initial emotions on bad news to simmer. We could enforce a minimum character limit on political topics. We could make it so you have to wait a certain amount of time between comments on political posts.
Unfortunately, all of these solutions and just about every one I've seen in this thread so far still have the fundamental issue of defining what counts as politics. Ideally, we'd want a way for people in the topic to indicate if they think the topic is political, sort of between a tag and a label. If enough people think it is political it could be toggled into a high effort mode.
Can I fling in a comment about this? I'm an outsider with no real connection to the US or the upcoming US election.
BUT to me its actually pretty fascinating, I know you and many others must be bored to tears about it - but take the Biden thing: I had absolutely no idea about the allegations until I read it here.
The issue is that all divisive topics cause drama and people to lose their cool and parliamentary politics is designed for division for good reason.
Internet also makes us lose the humanity of the person next to us, we forget that the text on the screen is a real person, so when we lose our cool we become way more toxic than we would have IRL.
Another problem is that we then forget the difference of backgrounds - there was one thread I commented in which taught me "do not comment in US political threads" - as what I said was misunderstood to be something it wasn't. I was talking from my political niche using the wording and expressions that I thought made me sound calm and respectful only to be informed that in fact I was playing in to a loooong national discussion in the US where my arguments where politicized AF and part of a larger narrative of accusations.
So now I avoid commenting, not saying this as a "please fix I dare not comment" - I just avoid it because it makes debates more complex when I do (I think) and it makes my reading of them less valuable.
This is also a problem everywhere and there is no elegant solution to it. One option would be to have like the covid-filter thing but for politics?
I mean the ultimate solution would be to constantly promote good faith and a sense of shared humanity, but that is tricky too (we're all humans) - the second best to promote a tag "I disagree with your statements but I don't think we are getting anywhere - I would like to respectfully end my part in this discussion" a stock thing saying what many of us can have a hard time saying.
Like if a thread is in a subject like "politics" is over four messages in a thread pop up a box saying "have you considered that [name] is a human too? Think about good faith and if you click this link the stock reply "I disagree with your statements but I don't think we are getting anywhere - I would like to respectfully end my part in this discussion" will be posted"?
I use the ignore feature for a lot of these threads.
I don't know that I like the idea of banning them. I think they're important topics for conversation, and I think some people are invigorated by exploring them, even in tense ways, but I also know that type of discourse does nothing for me but raise my hackles, so I simply bow out and move on. I highly encourage anyone else feeling similarly to do the same.
I often wonder in cases like this whether rate-limiting responses in a potentially hot thread would help. A person may be more inclined to be thorough if they know they can only make one statement a day. Or, it may allow time for additional research, or the cooling of emotions.
This is all entirely based on my opinion, though. I don't know of any research or examples to back up this idea.
Very well stated.
I believe that’s excessive. Politics is contradictory by nature and some of your examples pose questions that should be repeatedly discussed.
Do you believe discussion is valuable in itself? If, in an argument, no new points are made, no one's mind is changed, everyone just gets angrier at each other, and it is in fact, a carbon copy of a previous argument, potentially between the same people, was that argument worth having? Or was it just noise?
No, I generally don’t enjoy discussion for the sake of discussion. I just happen to believe that such topics do bring being new points, examples and perspectives, despite of all the ugliness.
I’m not even opposed to banning certain topics, but I think the scope of your proposal is broadly enough to harm the community.
I don't favor a ban on all politics, and I still have some hope that with practice, we could learn to have interesting discussions about economics.
But I think it might be interesting to have a moratorium on topics primarily about the US presidential election until late October or so? Nothing very important is likely to happen until then, and I think the presidential race has a tendency to overshadow what's going on elsewhere, whether it's in Congress, at state or local levels, or in other countries.
Side note: does anyone know Hacker News' current policy on politics? I'm not a regular browser but I don't recall ever seeing anything (overtly) political. I found an article from 2016 saying it was banned temporarily. Can any long time user speak to the efficacy of that experiment in improving the site's culture around political discourse or the state of it's culture today?
The ban failed because politics and technology are so closely intertwined these days. However, articles solely about politics still tend to be downvoted and flagged since there are still a lot people who consider them inappropriate for Hacker News. Also, I'm guessing the moderators figured out other ways to cope?
Based on that logic, why ban any topic of discussion. If you don't want to read arguments about the merits of phrenology or Pizzagate or the Jewish problem, just ignore them! What I take issue with is how these types of discussions may affect the site's culture as a whole, not just that I'm tired of seeing them.
OK, how about "if you don't want to see memes, just ignore them!"? Memes can be thoughtful, insightful, and factual, but discussions on the topics mentioned in the OP are rarely either of these. Instead, they are typically unoriginal, opinionated, and condescending. Yet memes are banned and these discussions remain, and are even repeated. And if we did allow "high quality" memes, would it be valuable to repost the exact same meme every other day? Why is political discourse held to a lower standard than literal memes?
I'm confused, is your analogy that memes and political discourse are equally important and should be treated the same?
My point was that we don't allow memes because no matter how insightful, thoughtful, factual, etc., they are not "high quality content", and I think political discourse that is neither of these should be held to the same standard. And if they could qualify as such, than it would not be valuable to repost the exact same meme every day, just like it's not valuable to post the same arguments every day, even if the arguments themselves are high quality.
Why stop at political discourse?
When someone asks what games we are playing or how everyone's week went is that insightful or high-quality discussion? Memes have a very clear, well-define boundary that may filter out some thought-provoking memes but increases signal-to-noise on the whole.
Trying to apply a "high-quality" discussion filter to discussions is just going to step on a lot of toes and will ultimately be a political decision. And yes, the banning of wild conspiracy theories and other misinformation is also a political decision but one where I think a large majority can agree on where the line should be roughly drawn.
No evidence that any affect on the overall culture occurs is the most easily apparent reason they shouldn't be banned. The entire premise of censorship is to stop the mere possibility, without evidence, that something the censors don't like may occur. Censors wanted to stop violent video games, explicit music, books with "difficult topics", and on and on to save the children.
No evidence? Multiple people have commented on the prevalence of toxicity in political discussions on this site, particularly in those relating to the upcoming presidential election. I am definitely not the first. It's not hard to imagine this getting out of hand and spreading to all political and even some non political content.
The political threads are not the site's culture. Just as the gaming threads are not the site's culture, and so on ad nauseam. Unless the alleged political toxicity bleeds over into other areas of the site any discussion of it impacting the culture are unfounded and goes back to the main point at hand:
If you don't want to see those discussions, then ignore the political threads.
The focus on political toxicity affecting the rest of the site aside, is it wrong to ask for the political discussion itself to have better 'culture'? I dont want to read and partake in low quality political discussion, but I do want to see high quality political discussion. Ignoring every thread tagged politics does mean I am avoiding toxicity, but it also means I am unable to read about politics, which I want to do. Ignoring them doesnt really sound like a solution.
Not at all.
Then don't. No one is forcing you to read or partake.
No, it means you are unable to read the comments of political posts without encountering the possibility of toxicity. Which is a risk in any thread, not just political ones.
And yet a ban is the discussion being had...
Perhaps I should clarify: I certainly dont support the notion of banning politics from Tildes in general. You are right, it wouldnt make much sense for me to want things I want to read banned.
Rather, I was trying to suggest that instead of taking a 'dont read through the comments' approach, having a discussion about how to improve the way people can interact through these discussions is valuable. After all, a major part of the philosophy behind tildes is, if I am understanding it right, that it should try to facilitate healthy and in depth discussion. If I wanted a space where I can discuss something without depth, and with fluff and toxicity then I could just go read through some political sub on reddit. Im not worried about the presence of toxicity as much as I am about the lack of a presence of good discussion that this could result in, as noted in the original post.
While a full ban of political content (which is already pretty vague) is probably excessive, this quote seems decent enough:
This should probably also be applied for anything related to followers of politicians (" 'Bernie Bros?' what does that mean and who are you actually talking about?") Since it's often not too far from talking about 'undertale fangirls' and clearly not substantive.
I didn't say anything about "Bernie Bros"? For the record I don't approve of labeling Bernie supporters as such.
Oh, I should have clarified it was an example of a dumb label, it has nothing to do with you.
It seems to me that the easiest way to accomplish this is to simply make a subbroup of ~news.politics and those that don't wish to see them or the conversations had can simply not subscribe.