Edit2: the ratio is amazing. I’m exhausted. This has quadrupled my hexbear time for the day and I will be limiting myself for a bit lol. I feel like we got somewhere in a couple of good threads thanks to Hellinkilla and ratboy. Good luck, comrades.
Edit: the rant wasn’t clear enough. In Previous struggles users have expressed frustrations with how mods/admin decisions are made. I would like to discuss how they are made and hear from them. Mods have also stated before that they wish we could be better, I’d like to hear how and know how they think this should be approached.
Rant/effort post coming:
What’s the follow up to the recent problems with how mods/admins have handled recent issues? Did I miss something? Can we get some explanations about how this site is structured and what roles we see for admins/mods generally?
history of struggle session, not necessary but gives context
We had a fairly large and fairly one-sided struggle session a couple weeks ago. Z_Poster was banned (and still is, as far as I know) and the emoji was added. Some users (thinking of @hellinkella, smong others) did some effort to really parse out where the pain points were and who was involved (largely Zionism inherent in some positions, Jewish exceptionalism). Only the emoji and banning occurred with no other promises/ideas from mods/admins.
There then followed a leak of mod logs where opinions were still very different than the userbase. I would encourage people not to open it or ask for it, please, and especially not to share it. But I think a significant amount of us did see messages that, regardless of context, gave an image of admins/mods that think the userbase hates them, disagreed with the userbase in significant ways, and which wants to steer us in a better direction. The mod chat was also absurdly active at the time, but there’s been little talk about what WAS discussed, only discussions about what was missed, where more context is needed, and things that were not done in a timely manner. This was not further discussed. (Personally I’m super appreciative of you all, doing work I don’t want to do on a website I enjoy thoroughly, and don’t hate any of you–including previous ones I’ve argued with, but would like to see some changes which will follow below and hopefully other comrades will add to it/change it for the better).
We had an EM/POC post which was tangential to that, but where there seemed to be large support for the userbase with regards to the ideological differences between mods/admins and the broader userbase. There was also a banning for which apologies followed quickly, but which indicates the structural failure more generally. There were of course other topics covered, which I won’t speak on here. I didn’t see any solutions proposed and accepted, from any of the topics relevant to this post. (Please correct me if I read this thread wrong, don’t want to speak for you, EM/POC comrades.)
Was there a follow up? Is that coming? Is the discussion behind the curtain of the mod chat? I understand you all have lives, so don’t spend all your time working on this, but some knowledge of how you’re working would be good. Otherwise it feels like purposeful pushing back of feedback/decisions so that we will forget the passionate feelings or give up. If that’s the goal, it’s a horrible strategy and should just be explicitly told. “3 months after a struggle session is the earliest we will make changes in processes” is better than nothing.
I would also recommend we have an open discussion about the direction of the site. It seems the mods/admins have indicated to have better ideas for what we can be (I remember this from the “dunk” discussions too), but have not made clear what their position in that is. Enforcers? A vanguard (with our input as leading determinant)? A different vanguard (against our input for but in our interests)? Theoreticians that have the ideas but want the users to take the lead? Knowing this would make clearer how to interact with you, and how to make our experiences better. Maybe we do need growth and improvement, but we haven’t been clear about how, and talking down is how most have experienced that. I already love this place, so when I’m frustrated I don’t think of leaving. But that’s not universal
Correction: Z_poster was rebanned.
The other thread was talking about how there was some “double standard” going on, but IMO, banning BMF for “sectarianism” while letting Z_poster fly was inconsistent at best. BMF was never hostile- in fact, they would never really respond to anyone, even comment replies were once-off.
I don’t think the amount of time I spend on this site has changed much in 4 years, and the issue of arbitrary mod intervention seems to be much better now than it was early on.
I agree that Z_Poster should’ve been banned, but who decides to what extent someone can evade bans before being banned completely? There was talk of algorithms and trends analyses to catch ban-evaders, which I would support, honestly. And enforce it harshly! But let’s be clear about how it works, and what sort of process there is, and maybe discuss if users find it a problem in general!
I only lurked back in the days that people complain about, and ignored most of that. So I’m glad it’s better, and want to see if it can’t be even better!
And again, as I’ve said elsewhere, just vibing it is fine if there’s any way to find out who vibed incorrectly when it happens and having accountability. Otherwise we’re back to why there’s constantly struggles over this. Or, as I would recommend, get rid of the vibe methods as much as possible so that we don’t need some weird accountability.
there basically isn’t and it seems strange to me the mods ever “confirmed” false positives. this is an anonynymous forum right? the sunk cost for having an account zapped in error when theyre trivial to make is completely disproportionate to the amount of free labor and admin more democratic or accountable systems need.
I’m not limiting my discussion only to bans of accounts, and I agree with your point if we are trying to make some robust system! But we don’t need something that robust to achieve what I mean. Just having a vote with users with a certain number of comments/age of account to decide HOW banning happens is enough. Then let loose with low labour banning within that framework, or automate it if we all understand how it works and it’s agreed. Or don’t do any vote, just explain why it works how it does (say it’s a dictatorship and you can be mad but we won’t respond unless a majority of posters in a major thread says we must)! I just have no clue how it works or why that was chosen?
Any robust system for banning alts will either be 1) privacy invading (storing IP addresses, browser fingerprints, etc) or 2) easily circumvented by publicizing it. We aren’t dealing with one off trolls, we’re dealing with people who are aggrieved users of the site or committed wreckers who are more than capable of reading things like “hmm if I upvote my own alts X number of times I’ll get banned, let me not do that”. Even if upvotes isn’t the method, the point stands that for this site to have opsec, there can’t be a 100% (or 99% or whatever) reliable or auditable method to ID alts that wouldn’t be easily circumvented by the exact kinds of users we have the most issues with here, it’s a fundamental problem. We either accept some secrecy, or we make effective moderation of these types of users impossible, IMO.
I agree with you, but if others agreed to mostly automate it (with still mod discretion at some point, which brings me back to my point), I wouldn’t leave or oppose too hard. But my point is only that now it’s entirely opaque. Users can give input to or understand the “spirit of the law” for example.
But, again, I’m genuinely not focussed on banning, because that’s one of the easier, already developed processes to deal with the site. It’s all the other stuff that interests me more. Banning is just a portion of the roles.