The Moderators • Page 6

No rush! I jus remembered the Slack conversation when I was using it with a client the other day.

 

How soon? ;P hehe

 

Why are you guys faster to lock harmless threads and giving me warnings for "antagonizing mods" than you are to actually moderate someone explicitly endorsing torture and rape?

 

That user was banned.

 

After hours of getting on my case and pages of discussion about how I was the problem. There were at least two mods in that thread and nothing was done about him until Jason logged on. That's not moderating. That's enabling. Matt Lauer shit.


That's also not an explanation for my question.

 

I mean, I'm generally frustrated by the lack of responsiveness to some of the more toxic elements here. Seems like an either/or proposition in terms of mods not wanting to act upon things, for fear of alienating users, which becomes a basis for that toxicity to grow. I could just be talking out of my ass, but this is what occurs to me when I see some of the things posted.

 

Because it literally IS easier to lock so-called harmless threads. If they were harmless, they would not be spammy, nonsensical, and be complained about by several users. They'd be productive. But they're not. If people want to make those kinds of threads, take it to reddit or something.

I don't even know who some of the mods are, or which forums they're dedicated to moderating. We have a lot of mods and some of them aren't even around that often, let alone doing any actual moderating. We still don't have a real time way of communicating, which makes it incredibly hard for all of us at once to talk about something and agree to a decision. Literally the only way the mods have to communicate now is via the report system (reports are like threads, and they're gone shortly after being resolved).

There were no "hours" of getting on your case, that's an exaggeration. Yes we should have banned him much earlier and we admit that. Still, you didn't help by escalating it with insults and being antagonistic. Don't be condescending then expect us to help and listen. Nobody would want to help if that's how you approach the conversation. Especially when you bring said conversation across several other forums and threads, which is just unfair.

If people really have issues with the way the site is being run feel free to tell Jason, since it's his site and he should know first.

 

Did people REALLY complain about my threads? Cause there was a poll in my other thread that said otherwise.

 

Yes, they really did.

 

Well to anyone who thought that and is reading this, wow.... LAME.

#pswb

@Ken

 

You had multiple people complain about those threads? The thread was posted at 4:29 pm and the last response was 4:31 before it was closed. How fast did people complain about them? Cuz from my perspective it looks like it lasted less than five minutes. pale sulking white boy thread

This is literally irrelevant to my issue with the moderation approach that favored reproaching me for being mean to the shitty person rather than actually doing something about the shitty person. You do not need to communicate with another mod to take action against a user advancing toxic, appalling views. The issues you're mentioning were also the case on AP.net, which I moderated for years. If that user was Dr. Strong, I banned him myself at least five times, each time without consulting with other people. One time I banned him under like six different accounts in one day! I was probably the most active mod besides Jason, and I made pretty much all of my decisions without consulting with anyone else. Moderation by consensus is a poor way of responding in real time to an actually problematic situation.

Also, doesn't this site have a group message system?

Made my initial post at 10:30 am and received my first infraction at around 230 pm and my last infraction for it at midnight. Literally hours, not an exaggeration in the slightest.

If I was being condescending to you, it's because your first action in the conversation was to quote me alongside the guy endorsing the horrible shit as though the two things were equitable. General Politics Discussion

I didn't insult you, or the other mods, or the poster being an actual piece of shit, for that matter. I mentioned it jokingly in exactly one other thread. Come on. That guy should never have been allowed to take a piss all over the thread for as long as he was.

Issues with moderators - including ones people had with me, frequently with good reason - have always been brought directly to the moderator involved.

 

The clear answer is to make me a mod. Re the points brought up: I think it could have been handled better on both sides. He should have been banned from the beginning, but also, and I am guilty of this, by engaging him we provided a means for him to elaborate worse things. That being said, I do think that the lack of presence by other mods needs to be addressed. As for the threads that were closed, I mean, who cares? Most all of the threads in the general forum are effectively chat threads, wherein people can say and do what they please, some of which is terrible.

 

Dom is mod backwards, the path forward is clear

 

Make me a Neb

 

Are you seriously using time stamps to argue? Nate made MULTIPLE threads before that one. I wasn't talking about one in particular. Nice try though.

Also I mention communication because there will be times where I'm unsure or where other mods are unsure. And I can't handle everything at all times, so yes this is relevant. I don't mean every single time something happens, obviously. I have dealt with many troll/spam accounts many times already. But it's definitely easier to be able to talk in real time regardless, that's really my point.

Again, I know I (or any other mod that was actually online) should have acted quicker but my instinct was to thread ban (of which I actually had to figure out) before outright banning. I don't equate your posts to the other user's.

Yes there's a group message system. But, not my fault if many people aren't using it or replying to it.

I specifically said "the way the site is run", not "moderators". But you decided to post in here instead of just PMing me or someone.

 

Honestly I don't see how any of my threads are any different than Is Peanut Butter a Condiment or Wanting everyone to like a picture of a Fox. I made them all because I thought they were fun ideas at the time, my favorite of them being a thread where cute pale sulking white boys could post their selfies.

 

I don't like most of the polls in there. But I thought a polls forum was going to be created by now to at least separate that from General.

 

I don't really care about which threads you're talking about, I'm referencing that one because it obviously took much less time to address than the person being hateful and harmful and happened to occur on the same day. The time stamps evidence that, yes, and also the ridiculousness of the suggestion that you received such an overwhelming number of complaints that you had no choice but to close them. Apologies to Nate, but I don't really care about the threads themselves, it's the reasoning and actions that took place that bother me.

And yeah, when you say I'm exaggerating the response I got from y'all, of course I'm going to prove beyond a doubt that I am not. It's annoying and flat out wrong for you to try to paint my description as an exaggeration; and this isn't even digging into the nonsense that I "berated" mods. Publicly challenging you because I feel like you aren't addressing actual issues is not berating, sorry.

What was there to be unsure about with this guy? He was posting about how prisons already grant people "too many" rights and that he wanted there to be state sanctioned violence of many kinds against them (including, until he had his stupidity pointed out to him, raping, molesting, murder, etc). What was there even to discuss about him?

Thank you for acknowledging what should have been done.

Moderation here is unpaid and voluntary. I don't know what you want or expect from people on that front, the system for you to communicate is clearly available and no one can be forced to utilize it so frankly I'm not sure what this has to do with my complaint that the current moderation system seems more concerned with keeping me from being rude to totalitarian pricks or nate making joke threads than actually handling, y'know, the pricks. It took over four hours to get that idiot banned from the site, that is way too long when you see that a thread the mods decide they don't like because ??? can be handled in a fraction of that time.

The actions (or lack thereof) of the moderators are what I take umbrage with. You tried airing me out in public because I was mean to someone who deserved to be banned, I don't know why you would expect me to do you the favor of PMing you over this when you didn't do the same. I think the discussion of why certain "violations" warranted the responses they did deserves to be public for the forum to see.

 

anyway, it's over, i just thought the disparity in timing and reaction should be questioned and hopefully fixed in the future, if it will be then i really don't want to continue this or know what the point is. i just want the moderation to better address what i think most of us agree are the most severe violations.

 

I got it...... we need a separate polls forum AND a St. Nate forum.

Glad we can work things out!!

 

@Jason Tate , some legit grievances in here.

 

Gotta make and eat dinner, I'll read through.

 

Yes, DoseofTerror should have been banned way earlier than he was. The fact that it took four hours was too long of a wait. One of the harder issues to deal with is the fact that I'm on the west coast, I work very late into the night and often sleep in a little, and then I sometimes don't check the forums before I post news and try and get a few things ready for the day. So I saw the reported post, and the posts themselves, way after I should have. That's on me — first and foremost — not the other moderators. I'm going to try and tweak some of my morning schedule to make sure I don't miss things like that in the future. I've also talked with the mods about being ok with banning a user, temporarily, if things start to escalate and one party is definitely using hateful speech or has a history of doing so. DoseofTerrors would absolutely fit into that category.

I spoke with the mods and let them know in the future what I recommend is if something appears to be escalating in that fashion, and there's clearly one party that's being the instigator of shittiness, to please email/DM/PM me so I can see it as fast as possible, and to give a 1 day ban to the account and let me know about it. That way I can review/evaluate the situation.

I think this specific example was a pretty clear: yeah, this user should be banned, but, I also do recognize that I've been moderating a lot longer and there's usually more of a pressure to not ban quickly, and try and communicate/warn before actually banning. In this specific case, trying to wait caused more problems, and that's on me for not being more upfront with a better course of action when that sort of thing occurs. DoseofTerror's should have had multiple warnings, been thread banned, and probably just perma banned much faster. But, within 3 minutes of me being on the forum, he was. So, I'm not happy with how long it took, and we must get better at that — which is on me — but I am at least happy with the outcome itself.

As for why threads get closed or other actions get done faster — I think that it's because the "clean up" part of moderating is just much easier to do. Killing spam accounts, adding prefixes, merging threads, closing threads, deleting threads, those kinds of things are relatively easy — but making the call to ban is usually more in-depth and a lot of times I'm consulted first. So, I get why other moderating tasks were done fast, while this specific one was done more slowly than I think anyone would have liked.

RE: Gen forum ... I'm going to create a poll forum off of it for polls, that seems to be the most requested feature recently, and that way we can hopefully keep the general forum a little more clean, allow more discussion of random and funny topics, but also try and keep it focused. My personal belief is that if a bunch of those threads aren't really right for the general forum. I've tweaked my daily moderation tasks to include visiting all of the forums more frequently to make sure that's handled better as well. I haven't spent nearly enough time watching some of the forums to avoid that.

 

Okay, but my pale sulking white boy thread didnt need to be cleaned up. It was only 3 minutes old. It didn't even have time to fade into obscurity. Its life was cut short and it was taken way too soon.

 

I think Snapchat's got that demo covered.