Alliteration wrote:This seems like a red herring to me. While it's true that this seems like an unfavorable situation, apply it to someone breaking a different rule - say, posting child pornography. If this post is deleted, they may feel oppressed as well.
You're correct that the fact a rule can be circumvented says nothing about the morality of the issue in question. But remember that we're not arguing the morality. I'm totally agree that people shouldn't make personal attacks. I'm merely disputing that it's a good idea for us as moderators to get involved.
To that end this point is very much relevant. Of course a child pornographer might also feel oppressed however there are much stronger arguments in play there that outweigh these types of concerns. The child pornographer does real and serious harm. The person who does personal attacks doesn't do any harm. The closest you can argue in terms of harm is that he might ruin somebody's mood. Remember that we are only talking about basic personal attacks, such as insults. Many more serious attack like blackmail, harassment, etc. are prohibited by various laws, which we have to abide by as moderators.
Personally, I feel that adults on the Internet can be expected to deal with any kind of verbal attack. I mean, people say mean things, that's a fact and it's impossible to protect you all the time and everywhere, so anybody wanting to use the Internet should have some kind of emotional defense against insults. In addition, our forum offers a "Friends and Foes" feature that allows them to block any individual whose posts they no longer wish to see.
Alliteration wrote:Of course, there are legal reasons to delete such a post, but there may or may not be reasons to delete some personal attack posts as well - slander and libel are illegal in many areas.
Yes, we'd delete posts containing defamation as well as "true threats" as they're illegal in the US.
All my arguments about the disadvantages of deleting insults apply to deleting defamation as well, however, since we're required to do it, we gotta bite the bullet on that one. However that does not mean, we should use the in my opinion inferior strategy in the areas where we do have a choice.
Alliteration wrote:I don't see this as a reason not to delete a personal attack - if you make a rule against personal attacks, and someone circumvents it, take further action! Any rule may be circumvented in the same way.
Again, for many more serious offenses I would agree. But for personal attacks, the benefits are so minimal vs. simply letting the community deal with troublemakers that the costs of intervention (risk of unfair bans, arbitrariness, hassle of counterinig countermeasures, drama and greater prominence of the troll, complaints by the troll or his supporters) are simply greater than the benefits.
Alliteration wrote:True, not every insult is unjustified, but some are, and this is where the personal judgment of the team members comes in. Maybe an instant deletion isn't a good idea, but what if the policy was to give a warning first if things started to get out of hand, and delete posts only if the warning was ignored? I've seen such a policy implemented elsewhere, and in most cases, one side backed off and started posting in a more polite manner, while the other side was revealed as a troublemaker when the personal attacks continued.
I agree. Often it's enough to point out that we don't approve of personal attacks for somebody to reconsider their approach. I'm definitely ok with moderators - or indeed regular members - calling people out if they are stepping out of line. Where I disagree is that it needs to be backed up with a threat. I think most people who would yield to a ban warning would also yield to a friendly etiquette reminder.
I'm talking from about 10 years experience admining forums. I have at this point a pretty good sample size of a couple hundred cases for both approaches. (One of the forums I used to admin had pretty strict moderator policies, because of the advertisers' content requirements.) When you issue a ban the typical response is that the member who got banned will PM the site admin. I'd say for about 80% of admin actions (excluding spam bots etc.) I get a complaint afterwards. Often the complaint will contain links to some other posts that the mods chose not to delete that the victim of the deletion/ban thinks were even worse than what he posted. And to be honest he'll often be right. It's impossible to apply such a standard consistently, there will always be posts that slip through that are worse than ones that got deleted. Mods will also always have a biased towards their friends or major contributors to the site, those will tend to get a pass on things that a new member or somebody the mod personally doesn't like gets banned over.
So after the complaint I usually look at the posts in question, talk to the mod in question and make a judgement on whether to reverse the decision. If I don't reverse the decision, the member will usually feel bad about it. Everybody deals with that differently. Most people will just stew for a while and then get over it. Some people will start a debate and a very small percentage will try to take revenge somehow.
In about half the cases I end up reversing the decision. The main reason is bias, even the best moderators will play favors all the time, whether they realize it or not. And I include myself in that statement. The only reliable way I've found to limit this type of arbitrariness is to minimize the amount of subjectivity in your rules.
Alliteration wrote:As for when a team member is involved, perhaps an additional policy stating that only a different team member can take action?
We do that all the time to be honest. Dark and I used to do that very effectively. We would always refer decisions to each other when one of us felt too close to the issue. Other Team members who stood out by doing that very well are jp, zenlover and mrfire.
It helps, but it also adds additional effort and obviously the benefit from deleting a personal attack is greatly diminished if it takes 24 hours until the internal discussion on what to do has reached a conclusion.
Alliteration wrote:If someone wants to challenge authority or make a point, it's quite possible to do so without resorting to personal attacks. Freedom of speech is not about how you're allowed to say things, but about what you're allowed to say.
I'd disagree with that. To me freedom of speech very much is both, because if you put restrictions on the how then people who want to censor the what can just pretend they take offense to the how. As I said, don't underestimate how subjective and fuzzy the line is between a personal attack and an argument in the middle of a heated debate.
Alliteration wrote:This is correct, but I don't think they've changed in the way you seem to think. When a site first opens up, and for quite awhile afterwards, the main goal is to get lots of users and start building a solid community. Here, however, this has already been achieved. We're a pretty solid group of friends; but lately, a few people have been feeling "iffy" about what's going on...mostly because one of our group has had his feelings hurt so bad that he has decided to leave. When something like this happens, it affects the entire group of friends, not just that one person. The rules, nowadays, should be aimed not at building a community, but keeping it stable. Stricter guidelines regarding personal attacks would accomplish just that.
That's not true. Because we took over the archive from OD.com, a lot of people switched over, so we had plenty of users early on. For about two years, there was a pretty tightly knit community around dark, zenlover, alpahde, cactusman, nomeuno, camipco and myself. (Sorry to anyone I forgot.) So we never cared about finding new users. We never ran an ad, I did a few link exchanges, which were pretty much worthless and didn't do anything. But the site spread through word of mouth and still does.
To say that it's grown up now and hence we should switch to protecting established users is just silly. Old users will keep leaving, new users will keep arriving. Thats the nature of an online community. My goal has always been to make sure new users feel welcome. Existing users are welcome as long as they don't expect special privileges.
Alliteration wrote:This doesn't seem like much of a problem, either. A user who feels that a team member acted inappropriately can easily make a new thread or log into chat to ask that team member about his rationale for taking action in one case but not the other; or, the team member could simply make a post in the thread explaining his/her actions.
Yes and this is related to your earlier point. My experience is that this works, but there are some practical costs to be aware of. First off, this costs time, both in terms of that Team members have to take time to post in these discussion threads and in terms of that it takes a while to reach a decision that way. Second, these discussion sometimes seem quite pointless and infinite. When you're trying to decide what should be removed you have to take into account things like how well the people involved know each other, which insult is worse, whether graphic language is worse or subtle psychological tactics. It's complicated and you get people having different opinions with pretty much equal justification.
The phrase "You're such an asshole" might be harmless banter between to friends while the same phrase is a pretty strong attack between two strangers. I actually sometimes got complaints against moderator action from the supposed
victim of the personal attack, because they didn't think it was so bad, while the moderator thought it needed to be removed.
Alliteration wrote:I don't think rules must be this way. A good example is the chat rule against unsolicited PMs; normally I always follow this rule, but I'm pretty sure most people would agree that it's ok (and I think you would as well) to break it if there's some situation where a PM must go through as fast as possible, for example, if someone logs into chat and says "I'm going to kill myself now". I think there's a good real-life analogy with laws against trespassing; I would break such a law if I saw someone about to be mugged behind a no trespassing sign. What matters isn't the letter of the law, but the spirit of the law.
I completely agree. This is precisely why I advocate informal enforcement in some cases. When a rule is fuzzy by its very nature, sometimes it does more harm than good. The rule we're discussing in particular just tends to lead to a lot of bad blood, because so many people who get hit by it feel that it is arbitrary and unfair. And they're not wrong about that. Yes, by investing a lot of time, moderators can try to eliminate the bias, establish more detailed criteria and discuss every case, but that gets tedious and you're dealing with volunteers, so eventually these procedures erode a little bit and you go back to a more practical, but rather arbitrary regime again.
The alternative of informal enforcement by comparison is dynamic by its nature. It may not deal with every case perfectly, but well enough and it tends to create a lot less friction and animosity in the process. Trolls have an easy time getting mad at an individual moderator for using the ban hammer against them. But if a whole community ignores or criticizes them, but without resorting to force, they have a much harder time maintaining a moral high ground.
Alliteration wrote:I do think that any idea should be allowed to be expressed on this forum; however, I also think that those ideas should not be allowed to be expressed with rudeness. And if someone is just after attention...well, if the post is not deleted, some people will almost certainly respond. The members page says there are nearly 18,000 users; while not all of them are active, relying on every single person here to do the right thing and not respond just doesn't seem very realistic.
Absolutely true. It depends very much on the community I guess. But the enforcement really doesn't have to be perfect to get the message across.
