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I think the bias I'm talking is more of a structural network effects thing rather than something anyone is doing actively. Like...
Toy model, a board is 90% anti-X, 10% pro-X, and has 100 people who are willing to engage in name-calling (90 anti, 10 pro). Each name-caller makes one post per week. All name-callers have a 10% chance to respond to each name-calling post on the other side with a name-calling reply. Each participant in such an interaction has a 10% chance of getting banned for it.
(I'm going to switch to A and P as name-callers on each side, and 'bad post' for name-calling post)
Week 1 has 10 bad P posts. Each of the 90 A posters responds to an average of 1 bad P post, meaning each A poster gets about 9 bad P replies. From these interactions, every P poster has a 10% chance of getting banned this week, and every A poster has a 90% chance of getting banned this week.
Week 1 has 90 bad A posts. Each of the 10 P posters responds to an average of 9 bad A posts, meaning each P poster gets about 1 bad A reply. From these interactions, again, each P poster has a 10% chance of getting banned this week, and every A poster has a 90% chance of getting banned this week.
Taking those two chances together, next week we expect to have about 81 A posters left, and we have a 10% chance of one A poster surviving.
The end result is the same if you start at 51% vs 49%, and if the reply rates and ban rates are 1% instead of 10%. It just takes longer.
You can try to decrease the rate at which people make bad posts, and the rate at which people reply to bad posts. But again, that just takes longer.
You can try to ban people for bad posts even if no one replies to them. But I'm pretty sure that again just takes longer, as long as you're hitting both sides a proportionally equal amount I don't think it changes the long-term trend.
As long as your policy is to not care who started it and punish both people in the exchange, you will long-term converge towards whichever side has the larger starting population ending up with complete domination.
They will at some point become the only side making any bad posts at all, and you will have an ideological echo chamber at least on the fringes.
And once that's established, new people making bad posts on the dominant side can join and not get punished because there's no one to reply to them and trigger moderation. So the number of bad posters on that side can swell ad infinitum.
And new entrants making bad posts on the non-dominant side are especially screwed. As the numbers are so lop-sided, they're very likely to disappear immediately, so that side can never build up more numbers to challenge the existing dominance.
From a structural perspective, I only see two simple ways out of this.
1 is to ban people for making bad posts before people make bad replies to them, and remove those posts so people can't make replies. I don't think you can/should have to respond that fast, and I think it goes against the ethos here to remove the posts.
2 is to respond initial bad posts more strongly than bad responses. It's galling and may feel like a double-standard from one perspective, given that both did the same behavior in the abstract. But I think it's the only policy that doesn't a priori lead to one side dominating over time.
Or, you can just accept that one side is going to dominate as an inevitable result of your policy, and accept that as better than the other consequences of changing your policy. That may well be the best you can do.
But if you're doing it, then it's kind of disingenuous to claim that you're not an A-leaning board, that your moderation does not favor A posters. If you know that your policies, enforced fairly and regularly, will lead to a board with lots of egregiously bad and antagonistic and aggressive A posts, and few to none on the P side, then own that consequence and talk openly about how it is an outcome you are accepting in your moderation policy and vision for the board, even if only as an unfortunate but necessary evil.
(and of course, it's not really that there are posters who are 100% and others who are 100% bad, it's that each poster has some percentage chance of each post being bad, with wide variance. In the very long run, any A with a non-zero chance of making a bad post ever will be eliminated by the same structural network dynamics above, eventually creating a complete echo chamber across the whole spectrum of post quality)
These are all things we are aware of.
We don't remove posts that have been publicly visible at any point for any reason. (there are extreme exceptions to this rule that have not yet been triggered, such as doxxing, or things that are illegal to share)
We do respond to stuff as soon as we see them, and part of bringing on new mods was to increase response time. We can get through the modqueue every couple of days with just two or three active mods. But with about 5 active mods, someone will get through it every day.
We do have a policy that top level stuff gets judged most harshly on multiple dimensions. Especially on low-effort posting, but also on culture-warring and antagonism.
I think the reason things do not totally devolve in practice is that neither side is monolithic. You have a pet example and the math checks out, but people don't always fit perfectly into the ideological boxes. I disagree with you on woke/progressive topics, but I'm also probably more in favor of open borders than you are. And that topic gets me dogpilled around here. And I certainly get some amount of downvotes that might make me come out net negative in those threads, but the report volume is generally very low or non-existent.
Ymeshkout also manages to make semi-regular posts about the 2020 election, and is consistently defending a minority viewpoint around here. But again, rarely any reports, and their behavior is great despite lots of disagreement and downvotes.
I'm aware enough of being a minority viewpoint that I even tried to write some helpful advice for people that get ratioed on themotte. That was before you created your account, so if you weren't lurking you likely missed it.
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