Forum Moderation

[maltfield (Michael Altfield)]

Yeah, I don’t think I’m going to be contributing content to the PG Discourse anymore after that experience

[FranklyFlawless (Frank Lý)]

Okay, see you (possibly) at the NovaCustom Community and Qubes OS Forum then.

[kissu]

Forwarding this here because very relevant to the discussion: The Banality of AI (Hallucination → Bomb School?) - #8 by ph00lt0

[anonymous549]

Just stop circling the wagons everytime someone on staff or the moderation teams screws up. There is very little accountability for staff or moderator actions.

[overdrawn98901]

@maltfield

Yeah, I don’t think I’m going to be contributing content to the PG Discourse anymore after that experience

I personally thought the thread was off topic (can’t read OP so could also be wrong). AI + War isn’t really a privacy topic, and belongs in an off-topic category (or a sanctioned political one). Historically PG closes political threads that don’t have a clear overlap with privacy, as politics are grounds for people yelling at each other, and there is enough FUD in privacy to deal with already. Jonah mentioning ICE arguably does have some overlap with Privacy, given the ICE is surveiling its own citizens and has continued discussions there, but I’d personally argue that connection isn’t there for your topic. Also to be blunt, Jonah lives in the place its happening, so yeah he can do a shoutout.

However, as to why this isn’t in the rules of the forum at this point means the rules should be amended to make this clear. And it circles back to the other point: we as a community can’t learn some of the more implicit rules if threads go hidden. I know this as I’ve been around for a bit, but its not clear for new members.

On double checking, are these the rules in the FAQ? Minor nitpick to rename the Forum Rules or something.

@anonymous549

There is very little accountability for staff or moderator actions.

Threads like this are accountability. I mean, there isn’t like a third party judicial process for this, and its slightly table stakes if I’m honest. Also here for the internet drama

@ThePrivacyDad

That would be a pity for moderators who also want to be users and engage in the debates on PG as users, (and there is no other forum but PG) but having this separation between what it means to be a moderator and a forum member could lead to an improved environment for discussion, and mitigate some of the concerns raised in this topic.

I don’t think its a huge deal for mods to be a part of the discussion. It shows they aren’t pure sentinels and care about being a part of the community. No disrespect for those who focus on maintenance, but I enjoy the participation.

However, being a mod means being in a position of authority, and that comes with more expectations. Paid, volunteer, etc, the root of it is that there are expectations of how mods conduct themselves apart from regular members. i.e., if a regular user gets heated and lashes out in a convo, not as big of a deal, but Mods do not get to lash out at regular users no matter how hair-pulling frustrated they are. If mods break the rules they enforce, it doubles down on mistrust. While users don’t have to exactly apologize for breaking rules occasionally, I expect Mods will publicly or personally reach out. In this case, I don’t really see mods doing eye-brow raising reactions, but I will say the reply from the team in the AI unlisted channel isn’t what I would consider good moderation.

We are all human though, and I also occasionally misconstrue text or maybe reply in an inflammatory way, but I’m first to apologize on reflection if the intent/impact don’t align (I’ve done so a few times here). Mods don’t have to be perfect, and there will be friction, but that’s fine, most active users here are pretty nice. But its nice to hear a “sorry about that” apology as well.

@kissu

• people do not like the moderators
• people do not want to volunteer or help anyone
• bonus : people might divergent and just want to mess around with the team
• people join/stick around less because the place is not as cozy , hence not injecting any positive behavior into the loop
• moderators become more sour by the day (hence back step 1.)

This is a bit of a slippery slope argument.

Mods can’t satisfy everyone, that is also part of their job. How they do their job guides the community, and it either turns away people from that vision or the people that stay are fine with it. I’m happy this isn’t a free-for-all fist-fighting and sucker-punching like discussion place. In this regard, I don’t think the mods are doing a bad job, I just think the vision of the mods is misaligned with the vision of the community, and it just needs some clarification.

But mods don’t get to be sour. Not to say we should all leave, but if we all leave, there is nothing to moderate. So if the community has a problem, its kind of a requirement to find some path of remediation. Staff getting upset about problems being raised (even if they are non-issues) is not putting additional trust.

But also consider the counter-hypothesis: more people aligned to the PG have stayed because moderators are filtering out the noise of bad discussion. I think this also happens too, but its not publicly acknowledged as its not quite happy announcement material (yay we banned foobar everyone!), but I think the disagreement on is the transparency of it.

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With this, I do believe mods unlist threads as this forum is geared towards high quality discussion that is highly targetted towards privacy, and the staff have a vision that this is a meaningful searchable place externally to improve privacy for those stumbling into the forum from outside - a reasonable goal to accomplish imo. If this is true, would be great to make this clear in the FAQ, but I’ll assume this is true:

Below are some immediate actionable suggestions.

On unlisted threads

1. Lock threads, keep it public, state a reason, and allow community members to understand why things get locked. We all learn, we all can ask questions as needed.
2. If a mod would normally unlist a thread in a scenario, have an automation that unlists threads in a specific tag/category (i.e. an unlisted special tag) after X days. This gives active members a chance to review, but also prevents search indexing. Unlist threads that are actively harmful or illegal of course.

On transparency

1. Update the FAQ with clear guideliness, and consider stickying a post in about it, so it is more easily discoverable for new members (I had to hunt for it). New members will absolutely not read the FAQ unless its in plain site. I know I didn’t. Also say non-privacy related political discussions will be locked and unlisted or something.
2. A meta discussion thread like this is pretty useful, but its often seems to become a dogpile, indicating members don’t vent want to vent their frustrations in public (until its already public and silently upset). Then also not replying to users is also not good. A dumb idea is a monthly survey for users with some rank or however Discourse determines it, that way you get feedback in a batch rather than a mega-thread or several direct messages, and can iteratively steer the course of things. Even something like an e-mail address to take feedback and then review it once a month is something.
3. The hand-wave rule is required to be flexible in enforcement. However, just as we developers preferring static typing over dynamic typing, elevating common hand-wave enforcement to clear-cut rules prevents issues down the road.

On teaching

@phnx

There is nothing shadowy about the fact that, frankly, this forum has been a much less chill and respectful place recently, which is absolutely regrettable, but it’s outside of my power to change that.

Soft disagree. For black and white cases, sure lock the thread. But for grey-area cases, its a great guiding opportunity to reach out in kindness. I try to do the same in active conversation, but I also am not as active nor am a mod in a position to really do that as directly.

@Valynor

The post in question had an expletive in it. The moderation told you to remove it.
You chose to replace it by asterisk-ing most of the letters out but it was still rather obvious what you meant at which point another member of the moderation removed the post AGAIN because this is a clear violation of the PG CoC.

Asterisks and bleeping is live television rules fine for kids. But if the expectation is no swearing or cursing, even in *****ing asterisk form (I promise I said fudging ), append the FAQ and make it a teaching opportunity. If the rules change, productionize them once a month and make a quick announcement of changes.

@lyricism

The best explanation I got was that I “Consumed disproportionate amounts of staff time”. However, I was even more confused when a decent number of the posts I had flagged were removed for being off topic. So, wouldn’t the person who consumed the disproportionate amount of staff time be the ones who had been posting off topic replies? Further, in the same breath I was told “You are NOT supposed to fight it out in the thread yourselves, notify the moderation and let us deal with it.”, which was exactly what I was doing that apparently got me muted. I mostly tried not replying to the off topic posts except to point out they were off topic (I expected those replies to get removed alongside the off topic posts if moderators took the action I expected).

Learning opportunity. I also didn’t know this. Update the FAQ, post a pinned thread stating report a topic or a message once, and mods will review surrounding context. Multiple reports should be avoided.

[Blackbird]

What, now comments are being deleted right away??!

[anon54537205]

Yes, it was indeed quite strange. Anyway:

That’s why I put a . I don’t know the reasons, but I’d love to hear their side of it — I’m all ears.

[ph00lt0]

Disclosing anonymized users who left the forum is not allowed and this will be enforced.

[Blackbird]

It’s definitely not weird. That tells you more about the issue than a thousand words.

[ph00lt0]

I don’t think we need to invent a new rule for every creative way of bypassing general rules on good faith, and in this case also laws on personal data. I must hope you don’t expect us to invent a new rule for every way some user tries to do something obviously concerning.

In fact if you want these rules, maybe sum up all the criticism here and make rules to prohibit those behaviors. I think they are a good sum up of things I do not like to see here.

[parkerchandler1979]

Rules for common sense is not something that should be made explicit. If one is reasonably educated and literate, it should be pretty obvious.

Do you also want PG to make a rule for “Thou shall not kill?”

[jonah (Jonah Aragon)]

I feel as the feedback here has been clear, and we have started down a path of people repeating themselves and their points, rather than adding anything new.

This is really hindering our ability to take in this feedback and discuss it amongst ourselves, so I’m going to close this thread. Thanks everyone, but going forward we are going to try to take this feedback into account, and hopefully have more to share soon, and in the meantime I hope you all can give us some time to do this without restarting this topic or relitigating past moderation decisions in other threads