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PaperclipPerfector  6mo ago (text post)   26777 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 22, 2024

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You guys are making some really terrible decisions lately.

"Stop doing this." "No."

That is always going to get you a ban, and this is not new.

Your first modhat comment was also bad.

You have a history of objecting to mods telling you or other people to stop being antagonistic, so once again telling me that it's bad to tell people to stop doing that does not register with me as meaningful feedback.

Your threshold for antagonism is way too low -- that is the whole deal. The OC was perfectly polite; just that it registers strong disagreement. If you remove the linguistic tools to register strong disagreement, people will just drop off and you will have your forum of (longwinded) witches.

If you stop doing it, I will stop objecting to it.

You can object all you want. Just make sure you don't do so by saying "I don't intend to follow the rules."

Fortunately I am pretty polite, and don't have much use for the 'well bless your heart' style of polite disagreement. I know it when I see it though.

imo there should be a blanket policy that mods have to recuse themselves from moderating direct replies to their own posts (just get a different mod to do it).

Basically what @madeofmeat said. If a mod is in a discussion thread as a participant and someone says something rude/antagonistic to the mod, we generally will recuse ourselves and let another mod adjudicate. (This is not a "blanket policy." If you reply to me by saying "go fuck yourself" - something that has actually happened - I don't feel a need to recuse myself in handing out a ban.) But if a mod modhats you and you reply to the modhat comment with antagonism, you're escalating and that mod is entitled to decide message you're sending is "I will not follow the rules and need more serious consequences."

Note also that no one ever gets banned for responding to a modhat comment by saying "I think your moderation is bad and I didn't deserve to be modded." We probably won't agree with you, but we don't ban people just for arguing or disagreeing with us. What @FarNearEverywhere did was flat-out say "No, I will not follow the rules." If she's just omitted the "No," I'd probably have told her (again) to regulate herself and stop using her feelings as an excuse. If she'd wanted to debate why her post was too condescending but the one she was responding to (which she claims started it) was not, I might or might not have indulged her, but I wouldn't have banned her.

But if a mod says "Stop doing this" and you say "I will not stop doing this," well, what kind of response are you expecting?

It makes sense that if the mod started out as a regular participant in the conversation, they should be hesitant to switch to modhat posting. When the first thing the mod posts in the conversation is a modhat post, it doesn't make sense that they'd need a second mod to make more modhat posts.

There is truly a Hlynka-sized hole in the moderation team. This kind of petty shit is getting worse and worse, and the King's court is really struggling to conceptualize their subjects as agents.

What makes you think Hlynka wouldn't ban her even sooner? He had an extremely short fuse as a moderator, and his decisions always struck me as arbitrary.

Yeah, it was pretty wild on /r/themotte, you would get into it with him on a subject and catch a personal ban haha.

Hlynka-in-theory, as a conceptual perspective, as opposed to Hlynka-in-practice.

Er… what is Hlynka-in-theory?

As @ArjinFerman correctly points out he was very liberal in handing out bans. Maybe his petty squabbles were with a different ideological subset of posters, but they were petty squabbles nonetheless.

Maybe his petty squabbles were with a different ideological subset of posters

As someone who caught a few bans from him, I'd say in that sense he was very fair.

Real Hlynka has been never tried?

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