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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   3860 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for May 19, 2024

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

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When we're doing janitorial triage, and come across a comment that's so good that, in addition to sorting it as "high-quality", we have a strong urge to report it as "high-quality" ourselves, should we do that? Would it only add noise, or would it somehow help the process?

Go for it. Nothing wrong with having the extra data, and I believe it’s actually more important than the (directional) volunteer sorting.

Will do, thanks!

I don't. The janny classifying it as high-quality is a stronger signal, anyways.

How themotte subverts internet norms: jannies are treated as valued curators of harmony, not power tripping egoists. May this state of affairs continue.

jannies pls gib good boy points for my unrestrained slobbering, thank

jannies are treated as valued curators of harmony, not power tripping egoists.

That applies to almost all jannies here. Alas, there is always that one or two who end up power tripping and should be forbidden from any janny duties that aren't just obvious spam removal. This has been the case since almost the beginning back on reddit.

Yeah, fuck that guy in particular.

Well, the last-last one did just get banned...

Along these lines, I believe at the start of this experiment, @ZorbaTHut mentioned something about calculating correlations between plebian jannies and known-quantity moderators to figure out if any of the jannies could be trusted more, or if some should be trusted less. It's been a year(?) since then, but haven't heard what's become of that idea.

(whoops sorry this took a while to see)

So, the janitor system is actually working, mostly as hints to existing mods - I've never rigged it up to actually take actions, but it does give ratings on whether a comment is good or bad. It's pretty dang accurate! If it's uncertain, the comment is usually borderline, but there's a lot of comments that have extreme "this is good" or "this is bad" ratings and it's quite rare to disagree with them.

It will surprise nobody to learn that there are random janitor assistants who are actually more consistent than the mods. I did use this as a tiebreaker during the Doge process.

I've wanted to rig this up to be more automatic - and also to do quality contributions - but life is unfortunately pretty packed right now for various reasons and haven't had time :/

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