- KirbyKhan
- Mar 20, 2009
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Soiled Meat
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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 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.
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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.
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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.
quote: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. quote:DnD needs admins who regularly read and/or participate in the politics forums far more than it needs new mods (which it also needs) quote: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, ...
Online discussion doesn't make people hostile about politics, those people are hostile about politics in real life and deliberately seek to offend others. Non-hostile people disengage from politics discussion. You can see this here on SA where posters who don't hang out in the politics forums often have a "wtf is wrong with D&D and CSPAM lol" attitude.
Since non-hostile people are driven off, the remaining posters are exposed to more and more hostile messages and it's a self-perpetuating outrage/hostility machine. The answer is stronger norms and enforcement. quote:DnD needs admins who regularly read and/or participate in the politics forums far more than it needs new mods (which it also needs) quote: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, ...
Online discussion doesn't make people hostile about politics, those people are hostile about politics in real life and deliberately seek to offend others. Non-hostile people disengage from politics discussion. You can see this here on SA where posters who don't hang out in the politics forums often have a "wtf is wrong with D&D and CSPAM lol" attitude.
Since non-hostile people are driven off, the remaining posters are exposed to more and more hostile messages and it's a self-perpetuating outrage/hostility machine. The answer is stronger norms and enforcement. quote:DnD needs admins who regularly read and/or participate in the politics forums far more than it needs new mods (which it also needs) quote: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, ...
Online discussion doesn't make people hostile about politics, those people are hostile about politics in real life and deliberately seek to offend others. Non-hostile people disengage from politics discussion. You can see this here on SA where posters who don't hang out in the politics forums often have a "wtf is wrong with D&D and CSPAM lol" attitude.
Since non-hostile people are driven off, the remaining posters are exposed to more and more hostile messages and it's a self-perpetuating outrage/hostility machine. The answer is stronger norms and enforcement. quote: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.
I'm almost suspicious of anyone who would want to mod D&D because the only conceivable use of the six-hour probe at this point is to settle arguments. This is the forum of people spending $10 to own each others' accounts, ignore threadbans, re-regging, and so on. No one pauses at a sixer or even a day off. quote: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. quote:[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. quote: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. quote: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>"
I for some reason I can't find the thread but recently there was a DnD 4e thread in QCS where you (Ath) very accurately identified a person who was complaining about getting probed for not liking 4e was actually probed not for the criticism but because they did it in an rear end in a top hat, inflammatory way that was clearly meant to just stir poo poo. This is the same situation here, people complaining about being punished for criticizing democrats are doing the exact same thing. People aren't getting banned/probed for not liking democrats, they're getting banned/probed because they're being toxic assholes who aren't participating in discussions they're just trying to dunk on/ rile up people they disagree with. quote:Seriously, admins, please, please, please, just read the forum. ...
Read the forum! Just read it! Hundreds of posters and likely thousands of lurkers actually enjoy reading D&D so it's weird that the admins insist that the only way to understand what's going on here is through threads like this. Read it! quote:-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. quote: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.
e: Complaints about specific subject matter threads seem particularly bizarre to me because when people says it "kills discussion" it feels like they are tacitly admitting that what they really want is a big built in audience for their rantings and ravings. If you can't get anyone to follow you back to a subject matter thread it's probably because what you have to say isn't all that interesting or you're being too much of an rear end in a top hat. quote: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.
A lot of the posters in this thread can't seem to understand or accept that sometimes topics are banned, not because the mods agree with one side or the other, but because these are contentious issues that absolutely dominate any sort of general thread, that we've all said our piece, and none of us are going to change the others mind, and we're tired of seeing it. It's not personal and please just take it to the dedicated thread.
It seems like theres at least a few posters who are mad that not everyone wants to be as brutally crackpinged as they are. It seems like there are posters who can't stand to let us have a quieter political forum. That they are being SILENCED! because not everyone is as doombrained as they are and doesn't really want to hear it. quote:
Change this to "if D&D mods don't discriminate against leftists, then why do leftist posters constantly get probated and banned?" and you have this dispute in a nutshell. And just like how the above image is actually a hilarious self-own, so are the criticisms of bias leveled at D&D mods: not unfounded, necessarily — after all, nobody can be completely impartial — but also not the actual reason why certain posters (who are actually a small minority of leftist posters, and overwhelmingly belong to a specific clique/faction) keep getting dinged.
The fact of the matter is that, contrary to popular belief, it's actually pretty drat hard to get banned from D&D, or even from a single thread. One has to be a particularly persistent and intentionally aggravating shithead within a relatively short span of time, get ramped repeatedly, have none of the mods miss the fact that they are on ramp, and finally after all that, the mods have to discuss it amongst themselves and agree that a ban is indeed warranted. Before you start to argue that the last step is actually the easiest, please keep in mind that this is more or less the same mod team who agreed to make Majorian an IK after he came back from his self-imposed exile, then defended his calm-hitler style psychopathic "moderation" for months, until he finally slipped and got caught openly welcoming and then acting on probation suggestions from succzone posters (some of whom are now nominating posters like willa, joepinetree and ytlaya, for the same reason: so that they can slip them suggestions behind the scenes). It is also the same mod team that has given posters like 'Yeowch!!! My Balls', VitalSigns and 'sexpig by night' dozens of second chances to improve before finally realizing the futility of it. That is to say, they have been incredibly tolerant to a fault, and that tolerance has been abused to hell and back ...
From my perspective, it is quite okay to disagree with people in D&D. It is not okay, however, to be a disagreeable rear end in a top hat. If you are the latter, and keep getting bad grades probated, well... that's your own drat fault. You should either change your conduct, or stay the gently caress out of this forum.
I agree with the last bit. In order to moderate a space effectively, one has to respect it and the posters in it. Nobody who hates it and looks down upon its residents (such as by mocking them elsewhere) would make a good moderator, and it should be incredibly obvious why. ...
We still have a few effort posters left. Most of them, though, probably feel strongly discouraged from sharing their expertise and knowledge, because there's an "onsite offsite" (i.e. CSPAM) where they get mocked, ridiculed and even targeted. Aggressive anti-intellectualism by a contingent of CSPAM posters, who have radicalized themselves and each other to the point of sheer lunacy, has had a strong dampening effect on level of effort and knowledge-sharing in D&D.
For example, up until a couple of weeks ago the Media Literacy thread, which is one of the few effort threads we've had in a long time and is a fantastic resource, had a mock equivalent in CSPAM (same title and all) where people were blind quoting D&D posters, then coming into the actual thread and making GBS threads on it, then going back to the mock thread to laugh about it, rinse and repeat. That mock thread was allowed to exist for many pages, because who the gently caress knows. Then it finally got gassed (because mocking naturally turned into targeted harassment), but none of its residents got banned or even forum-banned despite a very clear pattern of severe inter-forum abuse. quote: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.
Quite frankly, I don't think D&D needs more moderators or IKs; what it needs is an admin who's capable of directing and supporting the existing moderation team, along with clear and concise guidelines on what is unacceptable behavior and the appropriate actions to take when encountering said behavior. There are enough cooks in the kitchen, now you need a chef - and ideally one who is not part of the existing D&D hierarchy, since D&D on the whole has a very "us vs them" mentality where disagreements frequently make lifelong Posting Enemies™. Honestly, even if it was just someone whose only job is to look over the ModQueue and approve reasonable-looking punishments would probably do wonders for moderator confidence: nothing sucks worse than queuing up a ramped probe for a consistent pattern of lovely behavior and then seeing the initial placeholder sixer expire before the real thing gets approved.
I know it's not the simple "nominate a moderator" answer you were looking for, but unfortunately the issue is too deep for simple answers. quote: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.
I don't know anything about the context, but the newest probation on the leper's colony is Dongicus, who was banned from threads in ADTRW and Games after less than a page worth of posts and ~4 probations in each. Is it really surprising that uspol is toxic when people can spend actual months or years trolling it and still get a random succession of probations between 6 hours and a day?
I don't know why the moderation is the way it is but I don't think adding mods is enough to fix it.
And last but certainly not least
quote: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.
The actual problem is that there is a group of insane brain poisoned dipshits who spend all their time hate reading D&D and screaming about how horrible the posters in D&D are. And if anyone tells them (rightfully) to shut the gently caress up, they proceed to melt down all over QCS about how they've been silenced by evil Democratic cheerleader mods. And for some reason the admins allow this to happen. If your goal as an admin staff is to help create a positive atmosphere or grow the site or whatever the gently caress, maybe do something about the posters screaming about killing other posters or trolling for probations to cry about.
It has nothing to do with politics and everything to do with being an insufferable brain poisoned terminally online idiot who needs to log the gently caress off, but because this is about politics, and not video games, for some reason its tolerated because politics are so important! Its insanely stupid and toxic and if this was any other era of SA it would've been either shut down immediately - either by admins actually issuing punishments, or by other posters being allowed to troll them into oblivion.
Its so loving boring and tedious and it sucks all the air out of the room and leaves no place for any sort of actual conversation. I don't really give two fucks if you think Biden is worse than Trump, but having that opinion and seemingly never being able to shut the gently caress up about it and how everyone is silencing you is the worst poo poo in the world. Just... shut the gently caress up. D&D was once a place where you could come to learn about foreign politics or find interesting perspectives, but, lol, no more.
This thread is actually the perfect example of this. Allowing people who are forumbanned from D&D to give suggestions on how to moderate a forum that rejected them (and who seemingly spend hours a day hatereading D&D and buying hundreds of dollars worth of avatars, which is loving pathetic) is insanely stupid. Stop assuming people are posting with good intentions, especially when you can just read their post histories and see them literally brag about trolling the forum they're deeply concerned about.
(I also want to point out how hilariously ironic it is that despite the key admin lesson of the last two years being "don't listen to extremely online morons who claim how their forum enemies are actually evil racists who silence everyone against them" the admin staff still doesn't seem capable of actually reading D&D and making opinions on the content and moderation and instead relies on second hand evidence. Instead of listening to the people crying about the mean mod who gave them their 150th 6'er, just read USNews for a week and see how moderation works.)
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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.
I want you to know that I read this. This beautiful cross section of posts.
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Oct 23, 2021 16:28
