I've got a new feature almost ready to go. I'm pretty stoked about this one because I've been wanting it for quite literally years, but it was never possible on Reddit.
Hey, guess what? We're not on Reddit!
But before I continue, I want to temper expectations. This is a prototype of a first revision of an experimental feature. It is not going to look impressive; it is not going to be impressive. There's a lot of work left to do.
The feature is currently live on our perpetually-running dev site. Log in, click any thread, and go look below the Comment Preview. You'll see a quokka in a suit asking you for help. (His name is Quincy.) Click the cute li'l guy and you'll be asked to rate three comments. Do so, and click Submit. Thank you! Your reward is another picture of Quincy and a sense of satisfaction.
So, uh . . . . what?
Okay, lemme explain.
This is the first part of a feature that I'm calling Volunteering. Once in a while, the site is going to prompt you to help out, and if you volunteer, it'll give you a few minutes of work to do. Right now this is going to be "read some comments and say if they're good or not". Later this might include stuff like "compare two comments and tell me if one of them is better", or "read a comment, then try to come up with a catchy headline for it".
These are intentionally small, and they're entirely optional. You can ignore it altogether if you like.
I'm hoping these can end up being the backbone of a new improved moderation system.
Isn't this just voting, but fancy?
You'd think so! But there are critical differences.
First, you do not choose the things to judge. The system chooses the things it wants you to judge. You are not presented with thousands of comments and asked to vote on the ones you think are important, no, you are given (at the moment) three specific comments and information is requested of you.
This means that I don't need to worry about disproportionate votecount on popular comments. Nor do I need to worry about any kind of vote-brigading, or people deciding to downvote everything that a user has posted. The system gets only the feedback it asks for. This is a pull system; the system pulls information from the userbase in exactly the quantities it wants instead of the userbase shoving possibly-unwanted information at the scoring systems.
Second, you can be only as influential as the system lets you. On the dev site you can volunteer as often as you want for testing purposes, but on the live site, you're going to - for now - be limited to once every 20 hours. I'll probably change this a lot, but nevertheless, if the system decides you've contributed enough, it'll thank you kindly and then cut you off. Do you want to spend all day volunteering in order to influence the community deeply? Too bad! Not allowed.
But this goes deeper than it sounds. Part of having the system prompt you is that not all prompts will be the system attempting to get actionable info from you. Some of the prompts will be the system trying to compare your choices against a reference, and the system will then use this comparison to figure out how much to trust your decisions.
That reference, of course, is the mods.
I've previously referred to this as the Megaphone system or the Amplifier system. One of our devs called it a "force multiplier". I think this gets across the core of what I'm aiming for. The goal here is not majority-rules, it's not fully decentralized moderation. It's finding people who generally agree with the mods and then quietly harnessing them to handle the easy moderation cases.
(We have a lot of easy moderation cases.)
There's another important point here. The mods are only human and we make mistakes. My hope is that we can get enough volunteer help to provide significantly more individual decisions than the mods can, and my hope is that the combined efforts of several people who don't quite agree with the mods in all cases is still going to be more reliable than any single mod. In fact, it wouldn't surprise me if there's people out there who are better at judging posts than our mods are! It's just hard to find you; some of you may not even comment, and you're pretty undiscoverable right now, but you will certainly get a chance to volunteer!
Also, this will hopefully improve turnaround time a lot. I'm tired of filtered comments taking hours to get approved! I'm tired of really bad comments sticking around for half a day! There are many people constantly commenting and voting, and if I can get a few minutes of help from people now and then, we can handle those rapidly instead of having to wait for a mod to be around.
Wow! You get all of this, with absolutely no downsides or concerns!
Well, hold on.
The big concern here is that virtually nobody has ever done this before. The closest model I have is Slashdot's metamoderation system. Besides that, I'm flying blind.
I also have to make sure this isn't exploitable. The worst-case scenario is people being able to use this to let specific bad comments through. I really want to avoid that, and I've got ideas on how to avoid it, but it's going to take work on my part to sort out the details.
And there's probably issues that I'm not even thinking of. Again: flying blind. If you think of issues, bring 'em up; if you see issues, definitely bring 'em up.
Oh man! So, all this stuff is going to be running real soon, right?
Nope.
First I need some data to work off. Full disclosure: all the current system does is collect data, then ignore it.
But it is collecting data, and as soon as I've got some data, I'll be working on the next segment.
This is the first step towards having a platform that's actually better-moderated than the current brand of highly-centralized sites. I don't know if it'll work, but I think it will.
Please go test it out on the dev site, report issues, and when it shows up here (probably in a few days) click the button roughly daily and spend a few minutes on it. Your time will not be wasted.
Blocking
Right now this site's block feature works much the same as Reddit's. But I want to change that, because it sucks.
My current proposal is:
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If you block someone, you will no longer see their comments, receive PMs from them, or be notified if they reply to your comments.
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This does not stop them from seeing your comments, nor does it stop them from replying to your comments.
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If they attempt to reply to your comment, it will include the note "This user has blocked you. You are still welcome to reply, but your replies will be held to a stricter standard of civility."
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This note is accurate and we will do so.
That's the entire proposed feature. Feedback welcome!
User Flair and Usernames
We're going to start cracking down a bit on hyperpartisan or antagonistic user flair. Basically, if we'd hit you with a warning for putting it in a comment, we'll hit you with a warning for putting it in your flair. If anyone has a really good reason for us to not do this, now's the time to mention it!
Same goes for usernames. On this site, you can actually change your display username, and we're just leaving that in place. So we'll tell you to change your name if we have to. Extra for usernames: don't use a misleading or easily-confused username, okay? If it looks like you're masquerading as an existing well-known user, just stop it.
I'm currently assuming that both of these fall under our existing ruleset and don't need new rules applied. If you disagree strongly, let me know.
The Usual Stuff
Give feedback! Tell me how you're doing? Do you have questions? Do you have comments? This is the place for them!
Are you a coder and want to help out? We have a lot of work to do - come join the dev discord.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Can you explain more what burden or inconvenience is being put upon anyone here? How is it a burden if they can't see it? If I type up something and don't post it, have I burdened everyone here with... not seeing it?
They're restricted from joining the conversation. With the Reddit implementation, it also let people get the last word in, by replying and then blocking.
You shouldn't be able to unilaterally exclude people from the community unless you're one of the people who has that specific power.
Let's not conflate blocking during a conversation with blocking against future conversations. There are ways to de-weaponize the former without affecting the latter; I suggested elsewhere that if someone has a reply to a post or comment, they can be effectively unblocked for that branch, which eliminates this last word effect.
I think this overstates what is happening, and substitutes "my comments" for "the community." A block doesn't restrict any conversations but one branch of a tree, one that is ultimately always going to be small in relation to the total community (I don't think anyone dominates conversations enough to subvert that). I see blocking as analogous to walking away from someone at a party. I haven't restricted their conversations with anyone else. Having them reply to me, extra scrutiny or not, undermines my opt out. A conversation should be snipped at my comment, or theirs, when blocked.
I think that's a good analogy, and I disagree with your conclusion. If you walk away from me at a party after a discussion got heated, I still get to look at everyone else and say "PR's parting comment was wrong though, right?" If you walk away, you don't get to enforce having the last word - the people left still get to discuss what you said, you just won't hear it anymore.
Blocking should mirror that, so people don't get to make a flawed argument and prevent counterarguments by blocking interlocutors.
I will bring up my proposed solution of having a reply override the block feature to prevent any sort of last-word effect. This neatly solves that issue.
As for blocking any counterarguments, I can just point to my arguments elsewhere. Let's see the evidence of actual effect and some cost-benefit analysis.
That helps, but it's still blocking people from participating in the discussion if the blocker posts something else that needs counterspeech (or worse, repeats their arguments in an another branch without acknowledging the counterarguments.
This is just a natural consequence of human behavior. People will get pissed at interlocutors and want to stop them from interlocuting, people will want to get the last word, and people will repeat arguments when they didn't find counterarguments convincing. Bad faith isn't even necessary, but using tools at your disposal to get an unfair advantage is, sadly, also human nature.
The cost is negligible: People who leave the discussion don't get to demand other people stop discussing, so preventing them isn't very valuable.
I think the cost will come in who participates on the site. I really don't have the inclination to go into discussions with xXpuppykickerXx, and blocking supports that. They can post anything they want anywhere else on the site. But this change seems like a troll's dream, they can always (civilly) harass someone and blocking them just cedes all discussions to them entirely and in perpetuity. Bad actors will weaponize anything.
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Why are you putting the onus on others? You have as much ability as the users you have said that to to get the evidence you require. I'm sure this isn't what you mean, but it feels a bit like you are trying to use the lack of provided evidence to positively weight your argument, instead of as an opportunity to discover facts.
Generally the onus is on people who present an argument to present their reasoning and evidence for it, right? If I make an argument it's not your job to convince yourself that I'm right, but my job to present the evidence for my position. I can't link to future posts or the future state of the site, but it would be nice to see some existing set of posts pointed out that shows there is a serious problem. We know that there are flaws with the current blocking system, but there doesn't seem to be a perfect solution, and the current one has not led to any catastrophe, plus there are ways to fix some of the worst problems with it. But I'm under no illusion that Zorba or the other mods have to convince me, personally, of anything; I hold no veto power here.
Oh, were you asking the mods? I thought you were asking those other users. They have as much access to the data as you, so it seemed like a request that you knew they couldn't fulfil. That would be nice data to see from the mods though, I agree - although given our relative youth there probably hasn't been enough generated to draw any meaningful conclusions from yet.
I should be more clear here, I am talking in informal and broad terms; I don't expect to find a group-written multi-page analysis of the effects of blocks on users, even if it would be neat to see. I'm just looking for some set of posts that anyone can link that show e.g. someone really shut down any dissent with blocks. Since the feature here is basically the same as Reddit, I would be happy to see it from there as well.
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You are restricting their conversations with anyone else. Here's a pattern I've seen quite frequently:
Party A: "schools with poor kids are underfunded that's why NAMs do badly in school."
Party B: "False <link to data on funding levels by family income/percentage NAM>"
Party A then blocks B, possibly after making some argument why they are right.
In the reddit implementation it prevents me - party C - from engaging with B in the current conversation. Perhaps I want to know more about his data source or reasoning, but I can't do that except by starting a new thread.
But the real weaponization comes from repeat interactions. A few days later in a different thread:
Party A: "schools with poor kids are underfunded that's why NAMs do badly in school."
Me: "that sounds reasonable and no one is refuting it."
I suspect this is a pattern that at least one person was using this on reddit, though I have no way to prove it.
As I have brought up in the quoted post, a logically straightforward workaround is to have blocking only prevent new replies in the future; the existence of a reply can override the blocking feature, so there is no possibility of getting in the last word. I agree that the Reddit implementation has flaws, but there are better ways to correct those flaws, IMO.
As for this weaponization, I will first say that although several people have brought it up I have yet to see any evidence that it has occurred, or that it has had a deleterious effect on the forum. And then, trollish behavior should be treated accordingly, no matter what form it takes, and someone blocking anyone who disagrees with them is surely leaving evidence in e.g. the number of blocked users. And even if this weaponization occurs, I don't see it worthwhile to bring in a new, worse block feature; a little intellectual hygiene goes a long way here. There are numerous ways for bad actors to influence conversation. Should we implement a ID verification system to prevent using alt accounts to prop up a bad argument? No, even if that is a failure mode the cost is not worth it. Let's see the cost-benefit analysis here.
This really doesn't solve the problem I described at all. The conversation I'd like to have:
Party A: "blah blah lies"
Party B: "A is lying "
Party C: "B, can you clarify that a bit? I'm uncertain about X."
Party B: "Clarifying statement"
You've now prevented this from happening.
This is only accessible to someone with programmatic access to the DB and the time to run a statistical analysis to identify such things.
The only cost I see is that when you bail on a conversation, others are allowed to continue it which might make you feel (self-)excluded. That seems like a negligible cost in my view.
I think there's a misunderstanding, that would absolutely work fine with the workaround I described. If B makes a reply to A, B would be unblocked for that entire thread from A. C replies to B, B can reply to C, or A, or D, anywhere in that thread.
I'm not much of a programmer, and I don't know how the site is built. I assume that the mods can get access to who has blocked whom, as they would need that anyway to know to apply the extra-civility rule. And I doubt if someone is seriously abusing the blocking that they would need a whole "statistical analysis" to find out, someone blocking everyone will show up with many more blocks than a normal user right?
The workaround just solves that completely. Everyone can continue the conversation. They can post about it too elsewhere.
Nope. A blocked B, and C replied to B. A did not reply to B, so B does not get unblocked for this conversation.
And you've still not solved the issue of "A few days later in a different thread" from my comment upthread.
When you try to actually implement "many more blocks than a normal user" in code, you'll quickly discover you are doing a statistical analysis. And you'll almost certainly discover that detecting patterns like this is far more complex than you think.
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Hasn't happened on here. Did happen over at the old place, in the last days of the dying republic when the old institutions were crumbling and chaos and anarchy threatened with the prescriptions of the Second Triumvirate - hang on a sec, got my declines and falls mixed up there. But yeah, blocking was being used as a weapon.
I don't doubt that it was used as a weapon, I do remember some posts and discussion about it, this is not the first time Zorba has mentioned that they would like to change the blocking system. But the new system can be weaponized too, as an example, harassing someone (within the bounds of the rules) with the intent to drive them off or get blocked, which would cede any and all future discussions to them, a permanent "last word."
It is my belief that the rules of this site, as they exist, do not allow harassing people. Can you provide concrete examples of replies you consider to be "harassing" that are also within the bounds of the rules?
(I am of course aware that some leftists consider citing statistics that invalidate their arguments to be "harassment". But I think this is something we very much want to have happen here, and if someone chooses to block the people who prove them wrong, that speaks volumes about the quality of their comments.)
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