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PaperclipPerfector  21d ago (text post)   2389 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 23, 2025

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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Why has the rule enforcement been so lax ever since we moved from /r/themotte? Or is that a false impression?

I want to go with “false impression.” It’s hard to see the BLR-era Motte as a bastion of law and order. People were furious about Floyd, Rittenhouse, COVID, etc. On the other hand, I sampled a random thread and was pleasantly surprised. So I don’t really trust my intuition here.

There is one big source of tension for me. I only want to ban people for flagrant offenses, but I also only want to warn them for rare ones. That kind of ties my hands when a user constantly shits out low-grade violations.

I've only been a mod since the migration to this site, but my personal experience doesn't match yours. My impression is that things are as they were, though I understand better what an uphill task moderation can be by virtue of being one.

As @roystgnr notes, even a small forum like this is too large for a small team of moderators (unpaid! working out of the kindness of their hearts!) to catch violations by reading every single comment. I'm too gainfully-employed to manage these days, and there was a time when I read every single comment posted.

We rely heavily on reports and user sentiment.

We also have rules that need a lot of subjective interpretation at times. This can be taxing, especially when we usually try to give substantive explanations for moderation actions instead of "get rekt". Mostly. Paradoxically, more minor and subtle violations demand more from us than gross ones. The average user isn't seeing the blatant spam.

Whenever I notice a public complaint that a rule isn't being enforced, the conversation goes something like

Complainant: "Why didn't you mod this?"

Mod: "Why didn't you report this?"

Complainant: something in between "Oops!" and "It's not my job to educate you!", depending on whether they're about to improve or just flame out.

Obviously from a normative sense I'm on the side of the mods here, because asking volunteer users to report violations as they see them is less burdensome and more scalable than asking volunteer mods to proactively police every comment posted, but from a positive sense maybe being more isolated now is making the system work less well? Judging by vote scores, even here many people have trouble understanding that the standard is not supposed to be "click the down arrow if you disagree", and I suspect "don't report rule violations if you don't disagree" is a equally popular misunderstanding. Reddit always provided an influx of people of all political persuasions who stumbled onto the subreddit, which was probably a good source of not-all-false-positive reports that's dried up here.

I'm a fairly active reporter, only a small percentage of things I report get acted on, and the exchanges when I complained in the open that no action was taken were maybe about 50/50 between very late responses insinuating that it was unreasonable to expect action to be taken quickly, and dismissals with either no particularly coherent reason given or some form of messenger-shooting ("we get lots of people wanting their outgroup to be moderated more").

What rule do you think is not being enforced enough?

Not OP, but in my view the least enforced ones are "don't wage the culture war" (typical violation: "how do we best organise to end immigration?"), "write like everyone should be included" (typical violation: "$outgroup behaviour is a disgusting perversion and I am tired of pretending otherwise") and the one against "boo outgroup" posting.

I agree with this.

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