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Official D&D Moderation Feedback Thread! Welcome one and all to the much desired feedback thread. The goal of course is to better serve the community et large in D&D and SA as a whole, and to do so we want you to help us understand what you want D&D to be. Before we get started, ground rules: 2. Please try to include feedback about - Current Rules in D&D, What is bad, what is good? - Moderation Methods - How can we improve moderation - What are key issues that bother you or wish to see more discussion around - If you have examples of what you think is troublesome moderation, cite them and provide feedback If you are forumbanned, it still applies here....until the final day (Next Friday). Next Friday (10/29) is Forumbanned Poster Comment day but they must abide by the above rules. This thread will be reviewed by an admin and discussed, and if possible improvements can be made, we will do so. What this thread is NOT for: "I hate so and so mod/IK, they suck" - This isn't helpful, tell us why they suck. "CSPAM or D&D or SA Sucks" That's nice, but has nothing to do with our moderation? "I hate so and so poster, they also suck" So what? If you post any of the above, you will likely get probed. Just sayin. Please try to be reasonable with your posts and to the point, if you can say it in a couple sentences great, but a novel might be hard to us to parse as feedback, given most of us have jobs, family, and probes to issue. And obviously, we probably won't be able to address each and every post and its claims, but we'll do as best as we can after reviewing with an admin This thread will remain active and pinned for a week, and then allowed to fall off unless there's still valuable feedback coming back. We will keep the thread open overnight as long as it doesn't get bad. CommieGIR posted:At the end of this whole thing, lemme be clear: The community owns D&D. Not the mods. \/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/\/ Cat pictures are encouraged but not required! RULES UPDATE: GreyjoyBastard posted:
GreyjoyBastard posted:
CommieGIR fucked around with this message at 15:31 on Oct 26, 2021 |
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Oct 23, 2021 00:39
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Rules change based on proposal from That Other Thread:
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I've always been interested in D&D and CSPAM by extension and never posted in them much because they're kind of intimidating to someone who isn't familiar and the threads can occasionally seem a little insular, for lack of a better term that isn't so stigmatizing. Like, I don't think it's bad for threads to have regular "crews" but it makes it intimidating to start posting. Maybe some kind of index for ongoing threads and examples of what you can or can't post in them and what topics have already been tread and are thus verboten would be good, and explanations of Why they are verboten, because I've seen people probated for asking questions that look kind of like questions I might ask because they were taken as bad faith rather than genuine ignorance (I know it can be hard to tell when someone's sealioning though). Also please look at my cat, her name is Hubris. 
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Oct 23, 2021 00:55
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Pasting from the thread in QCS:quote:
This is a pointless rule because it is constantly broken and practically never enforced. I have strong doubts anyone actually wants to comply by it. It is probably one of the most common types of responses to threads and posts. Posters of all types, from valued members of this subforum who have stickied threads here to phoneposters in the peanut gallery, do this all the time in their own ways and with their own BBcode eccentricities. The "ample reason to do so" clause isn't really useful, either -- I don't think it's possible to explain how frequently this happens unless we have a community of people who have perfect theory of mind on a platform with a lot of different nationalities and backgrounds. It's not something to infer by whatever subforum you use most; people use different subforums for different kinds of things: information seeking, emotional support, intellectual and emotional validation, venting about their lives and what shapes them, and so on. There is a general program for this particular subforum that is supposed to guide the way people use it, but in practice the forum serves these kinds of needs that can be personal, sensitive, and possibly even incomprehensible among different groups of posters. It sounds like a good rule to have and I understand why it's there, but it seems to go against the state of things as they are and as they always have been. I don't think anyone wants it enforced, but do speak up if you do! EDIT: I am amending my post to request that insinuations (or explicit accusations) of pathology, calling people crazy or insane, etc, as numerous posters below have done, be proscribed as they already are. If you need to say posters you don’t like are crazy, you don’t understand what “crazy” means and you’re punching down on people who actually have mental illness by trivializing it as a slur for your posting enemies. Look after your own mental health and leave others be without medicalizing your disagreements. quote:Do not use slurs, even ironically or towards awful people. Those awful people will probably never read your posts, but members of vulnerable groups on the forums will. This covers words like “moron” and “idiot,” too. People here have, supposedly, read some history and should know better. It’s probably more important to get that under control before coming down on people who write “democrat.” mawarannahr fucked around with this message at 22:55 on Oct 23, 2021 |
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Oct 23, 2021 01:20
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HOT TAKES: -I think the mods are mostly fine. Ralph, Commie, GJB, I think you're all decent. Steve I'm more eh about. Epic High Five I put on ignore for... some reason a while back, and I refuse to take them off ignore out of principle  -I feel like many, if not most of the mods have an aversion to using probes higher than a 6er for most shitposts, and I think that's a mistake. To illustrate this, from literally earlier today, I made a post that I knew was going to get a 6 hour probe in USPOL. And it did! But my thought process was, "Well, it'll get a probe, but only for six hours while I'm at work, so gently caress it, cost of doing business." I imagine that many other posters who get hit with 6 hour probes go through that very same thought process—which is a problem! It may slightly reduce the overall number of bad posts/lovely behavior, but so long as it doesn't actually deter people from making bad posts, it doesn't address the core issue of... people making bad posts. If moderation is supposed to be a deterrent, then the punishments need to be significant enough to actually deter people from making bad posts in the first place. -Much has been made of "The problem with D&D" and the C-SPAM/D&D war, and what changes can be made to moderation to address that. But other than the most obvious and practical solution (permabanning all my forums enemies), I'm going to take the bold stance that these issues really can't be solved by moderation alone. We live in an extremely polarized society, at a time when the stakes of political actions have never been higher. The fate of Democratic governance, in America and elsewhere in the world, is in peril. The effects of climate change will be devastating, We're actively living through a global pandemic. Tensions are going to be high, and that's before we consider that the entire history of leftist discussion (Which, let's be honest, is the majority of what happens in both D&D and CSPAM, for given values of "Leftist") is one of endless argumentation, slapfighting, and denunciations over minor doctrinal differences. No amount of changes to the rules of D&D or forums moderation can solve the core problem that "the world is hosed," and that should be at the forefront of the minds of the mods and admins before considering any major changes to how these forums are run.
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Oct 23, 2021 01:25
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CommieGIR posted:
Feedback - not letting forumbanned individuals give feedback is like taking voting rights away from felons. I am opposed to it.
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Oct 23, 2021 01:33
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Reposting from the previous feedback thread:Freakazoid_ posted:I'm in the camp that wants stricter debate rules, whether that means D&D changes or we get a subforum with stricter rules.
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Oct 23, 2021 01:35
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Tezer posted:Feedback - not letting forumbanned individuals give feedback is like taking voting rights away from felons. Ok, this one I'll act on now: We will open the final day to forumbanned people.
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Oct 23, 2021 01:38
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My feedback is that having a rule that everyone can only make one post, and as such there's no consensus or building off each other's ideas or responding to what other people post, is the deeply stupid. You could not have a clearer sign that this thread is intended as a busy box to quiet the posters down and let the mods carry on with exactly what they were going to do anyway. You know what gently caress it let me include some actual moderation feedback: the ethos that more words equals more good, less words equals less good is the worst way to moderate however you phrase it. All it does is mean there's a core of unbearably tedious windbags who have de facto mod protection because they love writing a dissertation to say something they could express in two sentences and if you don't do the same then you're in line for ramps and forum bans. It makes posting here miserable for normal people basically some plague rats fucked around with this message at 02:19 on Oct 23, 2021 |
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Oct 23, 2021 02:12
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some plague rats posted:My feedback is that having a rule that everyone can only make one post, and as such there's no consensus or building off each other's ideas or responding to what other people post, is the deeply stupid. You could not have a clearer sign that this thread is intended as a busy box to quiet the posters down and let the mods carry on with exactly what they were going to do anyway. We're only allowing one post per a user for now, similar to how Athanatos did with his feedback/mod suggestion thread from last month. Once some time has passed and it seems like everyone who was going to chime in has done so, we'll open the floor up again for anyone that wants to make a follow up post before we close this thread.
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Oct 23, 2021 02:50
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I think the mods need do a lot more regarding people denying atrocities in threads. I don't think probations work anymore, they're too short and can be waited out. I think it should go to forumbans more quickly. There also needs to be cooperation with Cspam mods so people who say they are going to D&D to be threadshitters get banned+probated+forumbanned or something. The D&D Venezuela thread ended up being closed because of deliberate threadshitting by cspam posters, and a bunch came into the china thread recently after a probation to threadshit. I just think a more 'you don't get to post in D&D anymore' stance ought to be used for people deliberately being assholes.
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Oct 23, 2021 02:54
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The excessive moderation has shrunk this forum down to just one or two mega threads. If you want stricter rules, you deserve them.
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Oct 23, 2021 03:05
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Cpt_Obvious posted:The excessive moderation has shrunk this forum down to just one or two mega threads. If you want stricter rules, you deserve them. So provide some actual critique so we can fix that, otherwise what's the point of this post? THREAD'S CLOSED FOR THE EVENING, WILL RESUME IN THE AM. CommieGIR fucked around with this message at 04:24 on Oct 23, 2021 |
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Oct 23, 2021 03:33
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Thread reopened, have at it.
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Oct 23, 2021 15:17
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some plague rats posted:My feedback is that having a rule that everyone can only make one post, and as such there's no consensus or building off each other's ideas or responding to what other people post, is the deeply stupid. You could not have a clearer sign that this thread is intended as a busy box to quiet the posters down and let the mods carry on with exactly what they were going to do anyway.
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Oct 23, 2021 16:28
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This format for a feedback thread reflects poorly on whoever came up with this terrible idea. If you can't trust yourself to moderate debate and discussion of something as low-stakes as forum moderation, then what are you even doing here? If you can't handle a few hours of not being in strict control of the discussion, how do you hope to run the whole forum? Baffling. It's especially silly to ask questions of posters who are expressly forbidden to answer them with replies. Cease to Hope fucked around with this message at 16:57 on Oct 23, 2021 |
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Oct 23, 2021 16:38
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Was there this much wailing and gnashing of teeth over the "One post" rule when Ath did the same thing in their mod thread last month?
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Oct 23, 2021 16:50
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Slow News Day posted:https://twitter.com/TheOnion/status/1450869636208148488?s=20 having to provide context to tweets from obvious satire publications is really, really dumb and should be an exception to the rule; posting links to funny things really shouldn't be an issue PenguinKnight fucked around with this message at 16:58 on Oct 23, 2021 |
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Oct 23, 2021 16:56
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Have stricter punishments for genocide denial and rape apologia. That's all really
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Oct 23, 2021 17:54
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I know this is gauche but I'm going to crosspost myself from the other thread because this is the only salient feedback I have about D&D and I might as well use my Posting Token on it:Pentecoastal Elites posted:I've read and posted in D&D for years and have almost entirely stopped now due to how the forum is being handled. A lot of my frustration (if you put aside the rape denialism and sinophobia) came from my refusal to acknowledge what D&D is now, or at least what the USPOL parts are: chat threads for people who want to pass around news items and make "get a load of this GOP guy" posts. Frankly that's okay. I can't begrudge anyone for wanting to post with their posting pals. That's a big part of what makes this website fun.
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Oct 23, 2021 17:57
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At the end of this whole thing, lemme be clear: The community owns D&D. Not the mods. If the community says something needs to change, so be it. We will go over any recommendations with admins and enact whatever the community says will make D&D better. So please be honest. And I personally do not care what happens to me being a mod or not. I'd like to think I try my best, but I'm human as any other mod is here.
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Oct 23, 2021 17:57
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-Thoughts on Moderation- My current issue with D&D moderation is consistency. From my point of view, there appears to be a huge concern about folks attacking posting enemies. That concern has caused, in my opinion, an increase in retaliation on outlier (left leaning) voices. I witnessed it in the covid thread (luckily that has died down in the new thread) and I continue to see it in the US news thread. In both threads leftist voices were/are called fascists, trump supporters, and privileged for demanding more of the democratic party and liberal community leaders. The posters who dismissed the real concerns of leftist voices as nothing more than annoyances faced zero consequences. On the other hand, folks calling out liberals in a similar manner (example: "Liberals are nothing more than polite conservatives") are probated on sight. My preference is that both parties are not probated. I personally enjoy a free flowing conversation as long as all parties involved have an open mind. However if probations are required to quell slap fights, then I'd like to see probations handed out evenly and consistently. The current 6 to 24 hours probations seems sufficient to me and is enough to calm things down in a thread. Overall I'd prefer less probations and more consistency. Other than that, I don't have any other issues. Keep up the good work mods. One thing EVERYONE should understand is that moderation sucks and, unless one is incredibly skilled and lucky, there are zero forms of moderation that will make everyone happy. -Thoughts on D&D culture- I don't feel the current D&D culture supports or encourages folks to have an open mind. I believe D&D would benefit from understanding that leftist political views are not direct attacks on other D&D posters. A poster who points out the inconsistencies stances of the democratic party and liberals on important issues (#metoo, healthcare, worker's rights, climate change, police/ICE, genocide, capitalism, imperialism, immigration, etc.) is not taking arms in the great posting war. The concern about posting enemies, I feel, extends into the D&D culture. Personally, I believe folks that complain about CSPAM are doing nothing more than thread making GBS threads and folks should treat it as such. I've seen too many derails in threads where an ignore function would have been sufficient. The reverse is also true, but happens far less (Thunderdome thread being the exception). Posters in D&D that complain about other D&D posters is absurd and doesn't add value to the conversation. This subforum, I feel, is a place to discuss political topics that are important enough to us that we spend a good portion of our time on a "dying" forum. We're adults who are old as poo poo. Forum wars and trolling is something all of us should have grown out of by now. -Joke response- I think anyone calling for longer probations and/or more bans should face the consequences they are demanding as punishment to others as a sacrifice for their beliefs before implementation 
virtualboyCOLOR fucked around with this message at 18:07 on Oct 23, 2021 |
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Oct 23, 2021 18:04
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PenguinKnight posted:having to provide context to tweets from obvious satire publications is really, really dumb and should be an exception to the rule; posting links to funny things really shouldn't be an issue I'm generally against tweets. If it's actually informative or important, I'm ok with them. If it just a someones shitpost, attempt at humour or about owning your imaginary enemies, maybe don't post it. Post your own shitposts, people.
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Oct 23, 2021 18:11
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My feeling is it would be nice if there were more IKs/Mods so there could be a more continuous presence of mods in contentious threads, and more mods/iks available to show up in quiet threads that suddenly get contentious when news drops or someone makes a post that suddenly sparks discussion. Additionally mod engagement helps keep people be on their best behaviour, and generally a is a little freer in how they can engage with a problematic poster. In general following from the above, I've noticed that moderation decisions seems to be inconsistent, there doesn't really in practice seem to be a common set of shared principles as to when buttons are used. In my experience different mods tell me different things and then within days or weeks later it feels like what then happens in practice will sometimes wildly differ from what I was told. And when this affects you this sort of environment can feel kafkaesque. One idea I have, that doesn't really relate to the above though, is that I think some people can feel frustrated when making reports and nothing seems to happen and its unclear if the report was seen, or slipped through the cracks or if it was decided not to act on it etc. The lack of transparency about reports and their effectiveness I think can be a part of the problem in how people approach bad posting. I see two possible suggestions for this, (1) the Mods proactively reach out to posters to inform them if they decided not to act on a report, but levels with them the reasons why and tries to better educate them what would be actionable. (2) Or the mods can say once a week do something like go through a selection of reports and then comment on them on why they were or were not actionable and what people can generally do to improve; while stripping out the identifyable information for both the post that was reported or the person who made the report. I also think there should be a greater explicit allowance for devil's advocacy arguments; the poster making them should of course make it clear that they're playing devil's advocate since all discussion should be voluntary; and reframe from being tedious or trolling as a result. However I think a discussion forum is presumably for people who find it interesting to have discussion and sometimes this requires someone like in a debate club, takes the unpopular position in order to insure a spirited debate. Most importantly this serves a useful purpose in making sure popular positions have been properly vetted and any implications or ramifications have been considered. e to add: vvvvvv The post below me is very interesting. What I'd suggest is that maybe we don't need to rebrand, but perhaps the mods can setup specialized Debate threads which are locked when the debate is concluded with a parallel discussion thread for observation and commentary. Posters are selected to engage in a debate; perhaps a mix of volunteer and being randomly assigned; participation is given a reward (free AV? Custom star?) and are on schedule to post their arguments in an organized debate format, and you're encouraged to stick within a word limit in lieu of a time limit. Opening arguments, rebuttals, closing arguments ala standardized formal debate. e2: To build off of my previous suggestion, maybe actually have forum wide ranging stakes for these more formal debates, like the losers of the debate can't bring up the topic again for a month. Raenir Salazar fucked around with this message at 01:31 on Oct 24, 2021 |
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Oct 23, 2021 19:17
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I'd like to put forward a framework for thinking big-picture about this subforum: https://depts.washington.edu/fammed/wp-content/uploads/2018/06/3d-HANDOUT.pdf  I would encourage posters and mods to give the above a glance and think about how D&D works right now: how are posters trying to use the space? How are mod efforts shaping posting? Other posters mentioned in the mod nomination thread and I agreed that D&D has something of a conflicted identity. Is it the serious effort-posting and debate forum? Is it the "venting about current events" forum where people get upset about the news or at each other? Something else? What is it now, and what should it be? To make significant changes the mods and admins need to have a clear vision for what the space should be for, then build rules, moderation guidelines, and thread/forum structures to reach that goal. I mean, look at the current D&D rules: quote:The purpose of D&D is educational. Posters are encouraged to ask questions, share knowledge, learn new things, and speculate, discuss, and argue interpretations and ideas. The hope is that participation here will make posters better informed, develop more refined personal ideologies, be better able to argue their positions in real life, and find ways to put their positions into practice with real world activism. Here's how "debating" in D&D usually plays out right now imo: Both sides argue back and forth. There is often a lot of bullshit and bad-faith which is very time-consuming or impossible to address. Often one or both sides don't actually want to engage in a debate on the facts, what they want is to rile up or gotcha others. The arguing continues until one of two things happens 1) One or both sides gets tired and gives up, stops posting 2) One or both sides gets too angry and posts something lovely, mods step in either by telling people to knock it off or issuing probes This leaves nobody happy, and arguments are very rarely actually resolved. This is also where you get a lot of the accusations of mods shutting down debate or not allowing certain ideologies. You rarely can actually "win" a debate in D&D, everyone goes home angry. Suggestion: rebrand D&D into what it actually is trying to be, which is the current events / politics discussion forum. It's not truly a debate forum. SAL has far more actual debate than occurs here. Instead, refocus on creating a space for good-faith and good-natured discussion of current events and politics. Call it "Current Events" or similar like it originally started out as 20 years ago. I'm not at all advocating for looser rules (except maybe in specific chat threads): a rebranded CE should still be strictly moderated to faciliate quality discussion. Just figure out a vision for what D&D should become and shape rules and moderation approach based on that. I have other thoughts but this is plenty long for now.
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Oct 23, 2021 19:27
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Right now the rules of this thread say that it will be closed around 9:30PM EST and opened again at 8AM EST. However, the vast majority of people reading and posting in this forum live in places that are currently observing Daylight Savings Time and will be until October 31(Europe) or November 7(North America). I think it would make a lot more sense and reduce a lot of confusion if the times this thread was locked/unlocked were shifted to 9:30PM EDT and 8AM EDT.
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Oct 23, 2021 19:29
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My comment is that the word "doomer" has become utterly meaningless around here since while there are legitimate uses of it, someone giving off even the slightest notion that the future isn't all sunshine and roses is frequently called a doomer. I don't think it should be outright illegal to say but it should be legal to make fun of & bully anyone who makes that accusation. My other comment is that the one post per person rule is dumb for this thread since while not every piece of feedback needs elaborating on, some will and sometimes it takes an actual conversation to get to the crux of the feedback in question. Why not just allow that while being extra strict on probating bad/off-topic posts?
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Oct 23, 2021 19:46
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Haschel Cedricson posted:Right now the rules of this thread say that it will be closed around 9:30PM EST and opened again at 8AM EST. However, the vast majority of people reading and posting in this forum live in places that are currently observing Daylight Savings Time and will be until October 31(Europe) or November 7(North America). I think it would make a lot more sense and reduce a lot of confusion if the times this thread was locked/unlocked were shifted to 9:30PM EDT and 8AM EDT. Fair enough, we will keep it open overnight as long as it doesn't get too bad.
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Oct 23, 2021 20:01
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This thread has come too early for me to provide my own complete thoughts on the subject, because this issue is complicated and laughably weird to even want to deal with in the first place. I can still type out a poo poo ton of words about the subject on the spot, so I'll do the best with what I've thought out so far. I really want anyone attempting to reform or stabilize D&D to remember two things above all else — and even if you already totally know these things, it's probably a good idea to keep it up in front in your mind to help with pushing through the decisions that require the most effort or long-term consistency. _ 1. The metadebate about D&D and what to do with it is never going to have a crowdpleaser answer, and you will have incredibly livid detractors even if you are making the best available choices at the time, and 2. Pursuant to (1), your goal is ultimately to displease and drive away the correct people, and their adamant displeasure will be incidental evidence that what you are doing is working. _ There's going to be work in consistently identifying what kinds of "contributions" (and all related pseudoadvocacy invented to insist and/or gloat that you're ruining D&D by not letting their toxicity run rampant) genuinely make the forum a worse terrible super crazier place and ensure continued years of the subforum's deserved infamy. And here I'm not even really talking about the people who are obviously unwell enough like msdos or ymb or caps lock broken that they forced the expansion of stronger ban methodology, ramps, and conclusive exclusion and an effective mitigation of their direct influence on the forums through full forumbans — but in hindsight and with observation of how they responded to their forumbans, you can say it did go a long way towards capping most of the most toxic, most insanely pathological, most pervasively negative elements. And this shouldn't have even been the case; like threadbans, they were, according to the oral lore of the forums, mostly started or initially engaged upon as a tortured stopgap implementation related to a larger issue involving admin noninvolvement or incomplete investment and understanding of the condition here. Anyway, so. The first half of the equation was that it was ultimately important to do that, but the second and much harder question is what you do to keep that from having to be necessary most of the time — what process to use for maintaining the rest of the userbase so that you don't stricture and ossify the forum or create some actually powerfully lame fairweather 'decorum' incentivization What I tend to do just as a regular poster is identify other posters who, whether I disagree with them or not, trend away from obsessive or genuinely toxic presence — and, however they choose to contribute and however often, generally make the place either more interesting and funny, or more informative, or both! Then I guess I tend to track if they're posting more, or posting less, and if they're posting less or they have stopped posting, try to understand why. One particular poster who I ended up using as sort of a bellweather for the current state of the forum for a long time was Deteriorata (sp?) because on whatever subjects he wanted to contribute to, he would be able to consistently participate both in contribution and pushback, and was also entertaining. It's not that I had to be coming from the same political standpoint as him or thinking he's the flawless poster boy of politics posting, it's just that he represents a good example of worthwhile contribution and also being, you know, pithy or not exhausting rather than being a wall-of-words guy, just to explain where I'm coming from with isolating him as a direct example. If Deteriorata and similar posters were posting more, things were looking good. If they were posting less because the forum environment was just too hilariously broken and stupid, I couldn't disagree with that decision, but it spoke to the level of how much a problem the forum was having. And in that analysis you'll have the story about what's making the forum better or worse at any given time. The more the beneficial posters post, the more I'm likely to come away from binging a politics thread with either new actually useful information, or at least something that actively made me laugh or feel better about the state of the world, or have some generally good commiseration about that other people tend to care and have cool new information or takes. Either form of positive contribution is a way to have a politics-based community (which is effectively what this place has to be, even if the phrase 'politics-based community' is hives inducing) not be terrible. Which is hard, because politics is essentially the act of looking at and seeking info about the present global or national condition of dehumanizing neoliberalism, deranged nationalism, factional polarization fueled by the worst possible entities, and related existential threats that have such an impact on people's mental health that most qualified psychological trades still don't know what to even do about it. How are you even supposed to moderate that without wanting to rip your eyes out? Anyway, politics as the central draw or purpose of a forum? It produces an environment prone to doomposting, negative contribution feedback loops, toxic and obsessive contributions by unwell people who have pathological attachments to certain ideological or axiomatic points and positions that will bombard any unregulated environment with unwell tenacity. And then you either have to deal with it or it just gets worse. This is why there have been so many conspicuous missteps, like the "democrat party" thing, or the fanatically unwinnable issue of how to deal with rhetorical flooding of certain points of (even genuine) advocacy, like what has to be done with the subject of accusations of Biden being a rapist, or the general everything that happened with previous mods who flamed out in tremendously embarrassing fashion because they turned out to be really super stupid in one or more unforgivable ways, resulting in genuinely amazing moments like nazi covert D&D mod counterintel drama. But the less spent on these details the better, because I think this is more about what to do going forward. This is why I am leery about calls to improve the forum through incentivizing or mandating "effortposting" or to curtail "drive by" posting because I don't think that necessarily makes a forum about politics better. Relief valve posting can be positive and constrained, and sometimes you just want to shoot the poo poo or just slam down some onion byline observation about current issues. I'm pedantic enough on my own, I don't think the forum needs to emulate me further in that regard. Anyway. Without any particular support or condemnation for the following posters quoted, I want to offer a cross section of parts of the Athanos thread for moderator feedback that I feel are pertinent enough to continued discussion and feedback here, and nominally worthwhile enough in at least analyzing why they were present as assessments or advice, that I want them to be present and be fresh in everyone's minds as we go through another (hopefully more visibly productive) revisitation of feedback that will hopefully Do Something, Possibly Just Anything. Koos Group posted:The reason for enforcing rules of good argumentation here isn't like in a debate club, where they give judges some criteria of finding out who won. The point of D&D is explicitly not to be the winner of a debate. Rather, the rules are in place here to make the discussion more likely to be in good faith, more likely to arrive at the truth, and more interesting to the people reading it. Herstory Begins Now posted:DnD needs admins who regularly read and/or participate in the politics forums far more than it needs new mods (which it also needs) Fritz the Horse posted:There was a really interesting research article published just a week ago I'd like to bring up. It uses data from eight studies from in the US and Denmark to look at political hostility online. The authors started out with the hypothesis that the format and environment of online discussion causes politics to get hostile online. Nope! Instead, ... Sodomy Hussein posted:I would like to see D&D modding dispense with ineffectual things like human word filters and posters getting several years of useless sixers before they are *gasp* threadbanned into harassing yet more threads. Until then, being appointed mod of D&D is more a punishment than anything. Discendo Vox posted:It's going to be really important to go over the rapsheets of everyone in this thread before you trust people about mod nominations, or their descriptions of what's gone wrong. I'm being literal here. Read people's rapsheets and ask yourself if what they're saying now, the face they're trying to present, matches what they've gotten probated or banned for in the past. Users with a bunch of probations for trolling D&D, or various racisms, or straight up thread or forumbans, should not just be taken at face value. Otherwise, you're giving the users with the biggest propensity for abuse the largest amount of leverage. SKULL.GIF posted:[T]he incessant siloing off of actual conversations and discussions is a big problem. Because you're immediately quarantining these conversations the people who actually bother to go participate in the free speech zones develop grudges against each other, and the rest of the community here is increasingly babied and coddled that they're accustomed to whining to a moderator demanding a spinoff when they see opinions that they disagree with. VikingofRock posted:My biggest complaint about D&D at the moment is the level of stressposting and doomposting, which I understand -- we live in a stressful time and the future is bleak, and venting is necessary. But there are a lot of posts whose only purpose seems to be to raise the temperature of the room instead of adding any new information or discussion. The net effect is that some threads don't really seem to discuss problems nor solutions -- they just seem like stress amplification chambers. Unfortunately I don't have a concrete idea of what to do to fix this, since I really do think venting is a psychological necessity, so I don't necessarily think we should ban it. But I wish we could keep the quantity under control a little better. Jarmak posted:there appears to be no effort (or insufficient effort, lately) to stop people who are very obviously posting the most inflammatory take they can think of with the intent of riling up their posting enemies. Pushing back against those takes inevitably spawns a "so basically what you're saying is <not what was said>" or "imagine thinking <not what was said>" Mellow Seas posted:Seriously, admins, please, please, please, just read the forum. ... Fister Roboto posted:-Drop or rethink the "meet effort with effort" rule. Word count doesn't always mean effort, you can write a million words with zero substance, or a short concise sentence that cuts to the heart of the issue. Too often I see people just blast their opponent with logorrhea and it effectively shuts down the discussion. Professor Beetus posted:if you don't know I'm currently IKing in the DND covid thread. My golden rule is don't be an rear end in a top hat to each other, and I have reinstated the pet tax as covid news continues to be depressing as gently caress. I don't have many probes to my name and none since returning to IK that thread, and I hope to keep it that way. Buttons are a last resort or reserved for especially heinous behavior, specific examples being threats of violence or doxxing, but there definitely has to be some flex in there. The point is you're welcome to disagree but I will step in and ask people to behave if you start tearing into each other like animals for no apparent reason. Complaints about tone policing can go in the round file; this is a shared space and if you want to stay here you can try to be less of an rear end in a top hat to the other people in this place. I think it's funny and fine to roast people for wildly lovely viewpoints though, (Hi TDD, always nice to see you pop up in feedback threads). I was obviously trying to have a laugh with the last comment, but honestly there's something to be said for the lack of actually opposing views leading to people getting more and more worked up over minor differences of opinion. Agents are GO! posted:Effortposting doesn't mean you have to write a five-paragraph essay on the subject, one or two well written lines can suffice. I've always liked the calmer, more deliberative discussions which used to be the norm in dnd. It's like dressing up in business attire to go to work, it puts you in a different state of mind, and I think that's something worth preserving or restoring in dnd. Thorn Wishes Talon posted:
Kith posted:In essence, people who do dumb or malicious poo poo are given endless second chances because the appropriate level of punishment is either never meted out or never enforced. James Garfield posted:Adding mods doesn't hurt but I don't think it fixes the underlying problem. Moderation is very inconsistent and there are almost infinite second chances even for users that abuse them. sexpig by night spent the first five months of 2021 being probed more than half the time before finally being forum banned in May. In there is a 6 hour IK probation with no follow up for the second thread ban violation, after the first got a week. Same thing for (forum banned in 2020) Yeowch!!! My Balls. and last but certainly not least: Valor posted:I've been reading D&D for 15 years and at this point have entirely written off the forum because right now the atmosphere is worse than probably any other time in SA, mostly due to how worthless the admin staff is. _ Anyway, thank you for your time. I do hope to see actual measurable change for D&D in the future; this represents probably the last time I will make a conspicuous effort and put myself out there with any reasonable expectation that something could be done about it, if nothing really visibly changes. I'm not saying this with any hostility or derision, but it's just that ... well, at this point, after this length of time, I think that it's only reasonable to have a cutoff moment where you acknowledge, based on further floundering or inaction or even just the opacity of decisionmaking about what to do with the forum, it's just ... not reasonable to expect things are going to turn out. Or, at very least, it's prudent to not take on the visibility or effort and conclude a low probability of productive change. D&D can certainly power by on mere inertia; it's not in any sort of substantively untenable condition, nor is it the subforum getting in the literal irl news because of ultimately very bad, very obvious issues. It can just chug along.
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Oct 23, 2021 21:35
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i'd like to put forward a framework for thinking big-picture about this subforum:
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Oct 23, 2021 22:37
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I have plenty of thoughts but the only one I really care to share is that the climate thread is horribly moderated to such an extent that it has shut down all useful/interesting climate posting (most of which has moved to the CSPAM climate threads). The climate thread was one that I followed religiously for quite some time as it was one of the best resources on the internet for consolidated posting of new/interest climate related news, studies, etc. and actual, realistic discussion of such items. But now the moderation in the thread is essentially climate denialism because you can't post in there unless it's all sunshine and rainbows on the horizon, nuclear is going to save us, etc. Anyone that posts a less optimistic take on the future of our planet is shut down and run out as a "doomer." I get that low-info "everything is hosed" or whatever posts are not interesting or useful. But shutting down good-faith, actually good posts that talk about the reality of how bad the climate is and how little is being done to address it is really dumb and just willful ignorance. It should speak volumes that the D&D climate thread basically died over the last several months compared to what it used to be.
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Oct 23, 2021 23:04
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Posting in D&D (in US-centered topics) is too high stakes right now. There's no leeway for being a novice or learning about things, you're supposed to know not only everything about the topic but also the extensive history of all the discussion participants. Like, at BEST posting anything here will get you called a nazi rape-lover, probably behind your back in another forum, or maybe to your face I guess if you're lucky. And for all that you're not going to change any minds, you're not going to learn anything because you are supposed to be an expert already, and you're definitely, DEFINITELY, not allowed to be having any fun. I realized almost the only time I post here is when another person infuriates me to the point where I want to lash out in response. So now I try not to read D&D at all. Life is hard enough in our year 2021, adding more hostility to my day isn't worth participating here. My dream D&D is a low stakes left-leaning political chat zone where we are not acting like our posts will save the world or really make much a difference to anything except letting a few middle age computer touchers blow off steam, chat about current events and political history, and feel a tiny sense of community for a minute.
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Oct 24, 2021 00:06
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My feedback on D&D is that the mods and admins need to decide what they want the subforum to be, and drop the facade of this being something that is going to somehow magically be resolved by the users. On the one hand, there are posters that want to have debates and discussions. On the other hand, there are posters that want to screech about how evil their posting enemies are and call for them to be destroyed. These two camps are not going to be able to coexist in the same threads, and it's up to the mods and admins to decide which group they want to be happy with D&D. This is also not a CSPAM / D&D division - there are plenty of both on both sides of that. If you want to please the people that want to debate and discuss, you have to start seriously enforcing the basic premise of debate: trying to pick apart positions based on facts and reasoning, and persuade others. Posters should be expected to state their actual positions, give supporting facts when asked, and explain their reasoning. Posters should be expected NOT to make vague accusations about what unspecified groups of other posters think, or call each other mean names. Some facts should be considered objectively true and not debatable, like the existence of concentration camps in both China and America. This route would also require much stronger mod enforcement based on behaviors - just actually ban people who make it difficult for others to debate. I'm not sure the mod team, or any mod team, is capable of moderating based on behavior rather than ideology on such charged topics as rape culture, immigration, or global hegemonic powers. Also, you've really gotta give up on the idea of "good faith," if it's a debate forum you gotta accept any debate that comes your way, whether it's a devil's advocate, troll, or seriouspost. Be good enough at debate to engage with it. If you want to please the other group, the one that read the last paragraph and is now screeching "DECORUM! loving SNOWFLAKE!" in their heads, just stop moderating entirely, I can't even imagine what role moderation could possibly play in that world, except as executioners for the lynch mob. Assign moderators by RNG and rotate them every week, rename the forum "Posting Wars" and just let it disintegrate. Point is, seriously, this has to be a decision made by Jeff / the admins / the mods. If you keep asking us, you will keep getting these two incompatible visions for the forum. If you go down the "self-moderating" route, you will de facto end up in the latter group as only the most hateful and combative posters are able to handle the atmosphere. I get that there's a desire to not "force" the forum to be one thing or another. But no matter what you do, a large number of posters will be unhappy, but twice as many posters are unhappy with the status quo. Just grow a loving spine and make a decision already. Muscle Tracer fucked around with this message at 04:13 on Oct 24, 2021 |
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Oct 24, 2021 00:52
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I th
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Oct 24, 2021 01:04
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Rebrand DnD as a chat zone. Almost no suggestions in this thread or the QCS one are how to bring back debates. It's all let my posting pals post or stop my posting enemies from posting.
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Oct 24, 2021 01:19
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Sedisp posted:Almost no suggestions in this thread or the QCS one are how to bring back debates. It's all let my posting pals post or stop my posting enemies from posting. Yeah I'm increasingly convinced that this is the actual big problem facing D&D. Quite a few posters seem to view probations as an official marker of losing a debate; the larger the punishment, the worse the loss. As such, people try to play the refs, and lure the people they're debating into posting something punishable, then yelling bloody murder about it at the mods (frequently when the infraction is minor at worst). Alternatively, if they can't get that to work, they gather up their posting posse in a discord or whatever and pile into a thread in the hopes that the mods will refrain from punishing their shitposting and cheerleading because they don't want to toss out a dozen probations at once. This isn't specifically a "cspam invaders" issue either, it's an issue with people who have decided that they're only interested in discussions if they can win them, and mod intervention is the most common win condition when there isn't an overwhelming consensus of thread regulars to run them out on a rail. Every new rule just gives people a new angle from which to play this stupid little game. Being wrong isn't a reason for being punished in D&D. Your debate opponent being probated is not an indication that you are correct. Ultimately most debates and discussions aren't going to have a neat, satisfactory ending in this subforum. It's an asynchronous, open medium; a single thread can have a half little mini-debates spanning hours or days, and people run out of time or energy to keep participating. The hope is that a productive dialogue develops, and that even if the poster you're arguing with doesn't come around to your viewpoint, the people reading the debate have come away learning something and refining their own knowledge and worldview. I don't know. I'm tired and feeling poor because of my vaccine booster so my thoughts are a bit jumbled.
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Oct 24, 2021 02:23
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i've let a man stick an entire football into my rear end (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Oct 24, 2021 02:50
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Kavros posted:This thread has come too early for me to provide my own complete thoughts on the subject, because this issue is complicated and laughably weird to even want to deal with in the first place. I can still type out a poo poo ton of words about the subject on the spot, so I'll do the best with what I've thought out so far. I want you to know that I read this. This beautiful cross section of posts.
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Oct 24, 2021 03:12
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Sedisp posted:Rebrand DnD as a chat zone. Almost no suggestions in this thread or the QCS one are how to bring back debates. It's all let my posting pals post or stop my posting enemies from posting. There's not discussion about how to "bring back" debate because outside USPOL debate usually didn't really leave. Maybe it's currently shittier than it needs to be in what I personally perceive as the contradiction between basically USPOL chat crew standards and moderation and the actual debate and discussion but still manages to limp on. If it would keep more people from whining sure let the chat zone keep the forumID and DnD abbreviation but there is still space for a debate and discussion forum. Maybe a very slow one but the MMO HMO discussion has shown that very slow forums aren't considered a problem.
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Oct 24, 2021 03:19
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Itd be cool just to be able to express your own thoughts and opinions and discuss them, but you need to walk on eggshells or get probed asap, so not many bother. Great forum. commiegir needs to step down. He's way too emotional over this
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Oct 24, 2021 03:36
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fool of sound posted:Yeah I'm increasingly convinced that this is the actual big problem facing D&D. Quite a few posters seem to view probations as an official marker of losing a debate; the larger the punishment, the worse the loss. As such, people try to play the refs, and lure the people they're debating into posting something punishable, then yelling bloody murder about it at the mods (frequently when the infraction is minor at worst). Alternatively, if they can't get that to work, they gather up their posting posse in a discord or whatever and pile into a thread in the hopes that the mods will refrain from punishing their shitposting and cheerleading because they don't want to toss out a dozen probations at once. This isn't specifically a "cspam invaders" issue either, it's an issue with people who have decided that they're only interested in discussions if they can win them, and mod intervention is the most common win condition when there isn't an overwhelming consensus of thread regulars to run them out on a rail. This is rather rich, coming from a poster who immediately began weaponizing rap sheets to have their posting enemies removed from D&D as soon as they were made a mod. (USER WAS PUT ON PROBATION FOR THIS POST)
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Oct 24, 2021 03:56
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