There's a pretty big set of changes coming down the pipe. These shouldn't have much impact on users - it's all internal bookkeeping - but there's a lot of it, and if there's bugs, it might cause issues. Let me know if anything weird happens! Weird, in this case, is probably "comments you can see that you think you shouldn't be able to", or "comments you can't see that you think you should be able to", or anything else strange that goes on. As an example, at one point in development reply notifications stopped working. So keep your eyes out for that. I'm probably pushing this in a day or two, I just wanted to warn people first.
EDIT: PUSH COMPLETE, let me know if anything goes wrong
Are you a software developer? Do you want to help? We can pretty much always use people who want to get their hands dirty with our ridiculous list of stuff to work on. The codebase is in Python, and while I'm not gonna claim it's the cleanest thing ever, it's also not the worst and we are absolutely up for refactoring and improvements. Hop over to our discord server and join in. (This is also a good place to report issues, especially if part of the issue is "I can't make comments anymore.")
Are you somewhat experienced in Python but have never worked on a big codebase? Come help anyway! We'll point you at some easy stuff.
Are you not experienced in Python whatsoever? We can always use testers, to be honest, and if you want to learn Python, go do a tutorial, once you know the basics, come join us and work on stuff.
(if you're experienced in, like, any other language, you'll have no trouble)
Alt Accounts: Let's talk about 'em. We are consistently having trouble with people making alt accounts to avoid bans, which is against the rules, or making alt accounts to respond to their own stuff, which isn't technically against the rules, and so forth. I'm considering a general note in the rules that alt accounts are strongly discouraged, but if you feel the need for an alt, contact us; we're probably okay with it if there's a good reason. (Example: We've had a few people ask to make effortposts that aren't associated with their main account for various reasons. We're fine with this.) If you want to avoid talking to us about it, it probably isn't a good reason.
Feedback wanted, though! Let me know what you think - this is not set in stone.
Single-Issue Posting: Similarly, we're having trouble with people who want to post about one specific topic. "But wait, Zorba, why is that a problem" well, check out the Foundation:
The purpose of this community is to be a working discussion ground for people who may hold dramatically different beliefs. It is to be a place for people to examine the beliefs of others as well as their own beliefs; it is to be a place where strange or abnormal opinions and ideas can be generated and discussed fairly, with consideration and insight instead of kneejerk responses.
If someone's posting about one subject, repeatedly, over and over, then it isn't really a discussion that's being had, it's prosletyzing. I acknowledge there's some value lost in removing this kind of behavior, but I think there's a lot of value lost in having it; letting the community be dominated by this behavior seems to lead to Bad Outcomes.
Feedback wanted, though! Let me know what you think - this is also not set in stone.
Private Profiles: When we picked up the codebase, it included functionality for private profiles, which prevents users from seeing your profile. I probably would have removed this if I'd had a lot more development time, but I didn't. So it exists.
I'm thinking of removing it anyway, though. I'm not sure if it provides significant benefit; I think there's a good argument that anything posted on the site is, in some sense, fair game to be looked over.
On the other hand . . . removing it certainly does encourage ad hominem arguments, doesn't it? Ad hominems are kind of useless and crappy and poison discourse. We don't want people to be arguing about the other person's previously-stated beliefs all the time, we want people to be responding to recent comments, in general.
But on the gripping hand . . .
. . . well, I just went to get a list of the ten most prolific users with hidden profiles. One of them has a few quality contributions! (Thanks!) Two of them are neutral. And seven of them have repeated antagonism, with many of those getting banned or permabanned.
If there's a tool mostly used by people who are fucking with the community, maybe that's a good argument for removing the tool.
On the, uh, other gripping hand, keep in mind that private profiles don't even work against the admins. We can see right through them (accompanied by a note that says "this profile is private"). So this feature change isn't for the sake of us, it's for the sake of you. Is that worth it? I dunno.
Feedback wanted! Again!
The Volunteer System is actually working and doing useful stuff at this point. It doesn't yet have write access, so to speak, all it's doing is providing info to the mods. But it's providing useful info. Fun fact: some of our absolute most reliable and trustworthy volunteers don't comment. In some cases "much", in some cases "at all". Keep it up, lurkers! This is useful! I seriously encourage everyone to click that banner once a day and spend a few minutes at it. Or even just bookmark the page and mash the bookmark once in a while - I've personally got it on my bookmark bar.
The big refactor mentioned at the top is actually for the sake of improving the volunteer system, this is part of what will let it turn into write access and let us solve stuff like filtered-comments-in-limbo, while taking a lot of load off the mods' backs and maybe even making our moderation more consistent. As a sort of ironic counterpart to this, it also means that the bar might show up less often.
At some point I want to set up better incentives for long-time volunteers, but that takes a lot of code effort. Asking people to volunteer more often doesn't, so that's what I'm doing.
(Feedback wanted on this also.)
I want your feedback on things, as if that wasn't clear. These threads basically behave like a big metadiscussion thread, so . . . what's your thoughts on this whole adventure? How's it going? Want some tweaks? Found a bug? Let me know! I don't promise to agree but I promise to listen.
Jump in the discussion.
No email address required.
Notes -
Mostly, I agree with moderation decisions recently. But I think the bans on longstanding members like Count and Hkynka are overboard.
Or at least, I think the mods should consider that regulars are afforded the privilege of another option for bans, namely a short time-out ban of a day or two to calm down if the mods think discussion is getting too heated or people are trolling too hard or being too uncharitable or whatever, which can be implemented repeatedly without putting a user on the ‘ban track’.
Do count and hlynka occasionally need to be told to calm down and take a day off? Sure. But threatening them with long-term or permanent bans for this is ridiculous. The forum would be a worse place for their absence.
I wonder if it would help to create a mechanism/policy that did something like:
[Mod comment] This comment is too antagonistic/snarky/uncharitable/whatever. It is now hidden from public view. You may either edit it to be less [whatever] and submit it to be approved to show again, or delete it yourself.
We have considered requesting people to change their comments in the past. The response has been highly negative by some users. Like on the level where they would rather eat permanent bans than be asked to change what they wrote.
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Sort of the inverse of a shadowban? I love it.
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Yeah, this is always a gnarly one.
The core issue is that I don't want people who are malicious/antagonistic/angry and immune from reprisal. Yes, we'd be worse off without Hlynka et al, but at the same time, it doesn't take a lot more antagonism for that to not be the case anymore. Hlynka is on kind of a fine line.
I would like to integrate this all better and provide better stats so we can make more sensible objective judgements about whether someone is a net benefit or a net negative. This all requires a much better sense of what posts people are making that are valuable and what posts aren't. This is sort of what the volunteer system is starting, but it's a long way to get there from here and in the meantime it's all painfully subjective and arbitrary.
tl;dr: I think it is reasonable that bans, in general, Look Bad in a long-term sense, but I also think it would be reasonable if they "wore off"; the problem is that the way they "wear off" should be "by making other good posts" and we don't have a usable metric for that. I think this is currently the least-bad of a lot of admittedly bad options.
I actually agree that ‘post something good’ could be a condition of avoiding or limiting a ban.
This is the back-end function of the AAQCs. One drawback is that some users (notably, yourself) opt out of that in various ways, so we still often have to rely on a vague sense of reputation instead of specific "here are good posts" metrics. But AAQCs are noted on user accounts, and having AAQCs gets you moderated more lightly--for a while. The hardest cases have always been the "lots of AAQCs, but also lots of antagonism" users. Partly because even if we turn a blind eye to the occasional torching of community capital by someone who has accrued a lot of it, their negative behavior emboldens negative behavior from others who have not accrued such capital.
But, partly to keep the AAQC reports to a reasonable length, not every good post gets recognized every time. This is a conversation the mod team has been having for as long as I've been moderating, and I'd guess it goes back even farther than that. The most clearly-functioning tool we have is the banhammer, but especially in communities like this one, we actually want to be using it as little as reasonably possible (e.g., on spambots, link farmers, etc.). The AAQC report is a functional carrot to the banhammer's stick, but I just flat-out can't get it done on better than a monthly basis, it's too selective to include every good post, and ultimately it only adds an account notation that doesn't always capture the larger picture.
(Incidentally, there is a lot of money out there being directed toward finding ways to encourage fruitful discussion between people who disagree. As far as I can tell, most of it is being given to humanities scholars to write essays congratulating themselves on being open-minded while still excusing hatred for all the right targets. I think the Motte has already succeeded far beyond what most of the professionals examining these issues ever manage to achieve. So I'm very interested in @ZorbaTHut's continued development of technological approaches to the problem, on a present budget of about $225 per month.)
I wasn't even aware that The Motte had a Patreon, I thought the link to support the Motte in the sidebar used some other mechanism.
Would it be possible to change the link to "Support The Motte (Patreon)"?
I hardly have the discretionary income to contribute right now, but I commit myself to doing so when I end up abroad and more financially stable. That's a lot coming from me, because I'm a incorrigible cheapskate most of the time.
I'm impressed that you guys can keep it all going on a shoestring budget, even if we're less taxing than most websites!
Might be too wide, but I'll give it a shot :)
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I'm actually going to give a shot at implementing some of the backend behind Twitter's community notes system. I'd come up with similar ideas before, but had never figured out how to implement the juicy part. They figured out how to implement the juicy part, and if it scales well enough to run on the Motte's setup under our budget - which I'm pretty sure it will - then it might turn out to be a great way to handle moderation both in the positive and negative directions.
Annoyingly, it might obsolete a good chunk of the volunteer algorithm that I wrote, but at least the UI for that should still function.
. . . also, man, I should've plugged the Patreon, shouldn't I. I keep forgetting to do that.
still feels weird
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Both of them, and other longstanding members, have received a lot more slack than someone with less history would get. But they can't be effectively immune to consequences no matter how often they're told to chill out.
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