State of this forum, better moderation

Meta
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I think what most of us want is a high-quality forum where news, discussions, and answers to questions about privacy are relevant.

In my view, this forum has taken a bit of a nosedive in recent months. I am not quite sure why, but I hypothesize it has to do with changes to make this forum much more visible to search engines, thus drawing more users from the general populace.

A few examples of conversations that have disappointed me:

-An very noticable uptick in people treating forum responses like a chat with very short answers that aren’t really informative or helpful

-forums devolving into bickering and arguing, or going completely offtopic.

-a major increase in people arguing for Russian or Chinese developed software. Like… What in the world? There is a reason why security experts don’t trust these sources. Even if the software itself is safe and good (which is a major assumption), there is no reason it can’t be compromised or poisoned by their respective governments, which does happen. Other governments have their problems, but they usually don’t directly pressure developers to do this sort of thing.

-linked to the previous point, increased claims of Russophobia or sinophobia in this forum, and that this forum is too eurocentric. Again, just, no. Privacy is a worldwide issue, and some countries have a better record with it than others. Maintaining a healthy skepticism of Russian/Chinese/NK interference in software is important for privacy and security. It has been the standard view of cyber security for decades. To this end, I worry about PG being pressured to cater to these sorts of criticisms, thus detracting from the quality of PG’s work.

-increased level of extremely basic posts/questions that could be answered with the briefest of glances at the PG website. Examples: “is this random browser fork safe,” " pls approve browser fork because it looks pretty," “is this random google android phone good for privacy,” and “are apple phones a great option for privacy.”

-Finally, an increase in FUD posts and comments. This is a forum to provide high quality discussion, with good sources and using a solutions oriented approach. This isn’t a tinfoil site.

To this end, I guess I am asking for better moderation, maybe a megathread for basic questions? Maybe start implementing suspensions or bans, because these sorts of things often have repeat offenders. Maybe there are other solutions, and I think this is a discussion we should have. To be clear, I am not criticizing the PG team, I am just suggesting we could be upping the quality of this forum, that’s all.

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Just wanted to post this

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Have noticed that and it’s very annoying.

Have noticed that too.

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Maybe we should have a “low effort” category for posts.

This is generally not something we’re interested in. If a product strong E2EE which has actually been audited, then we might take interest.

The fact is though the products that generally come from that sphere do not. People need to just accept that’s life there and move on.

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This is more about responses, and there isn’t really a way to categorize those, right?

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Agreed. Not a long time member of the forum, but I have seen people using the PG forum for validation of the tools they use a lot, instead of treating PG recommendations as what they are: Recommendations.

So annoying I swear. Just stop talking about intel ME my god. Fossbro culture to blame, FSF has set back mass adoption of privacy and security by decades. So has the advent of state backed misinformation campaigns feeding conspiracies in the minds of people.

For the rest of the points, won’t respond with repetition of my points in the previous thread, which this is clearly a criticism of. I apologise if me asking for a balanced and global discussion forum is a big ask :slight_smile: Had a long ass paragraph about Global South and inclusion, but won’t waste that here on the obviously superior civilizations that NEVER force developers to compromise users. Seeing these attacks, being called a russian bot, being told I am ruining the forum, one after the other on such a simple topic has convinced me about the vocal minority ruining privacy for the masses by discouraging and disparaging their participation.

Non-europeans are not second class citizens in the privacy world. Will move to a solution that works for my part of the world if PG is not for us (with even mods liking this post lmao). Lol, keep your precious forum.

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Although I’m new, I couldn’t agree more.

But also, I noticed this is the state of many forums elsewhere. I’m not sure what changed. To me, PG is the best places I tried, although I agree with everything that you said.

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My main observation on this situation is if we want civil discourse, everyone ought to be very careful when discussing governments. Propaganda is unfortunately everywhere, and people who have received a lot of it strongly believe whatever they have been “taught”. Be focused and well supported in your arguments. False equivalencies are fallacious, and blanket dismissals of regions and jurisdictions run the risk of being discriminatory and indiscriminate.

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Am I the only one thinking it would be very useful if PG forum has a chatbot trained by PG website contents to try answering people’s question, where they have to mark the “answer” unsatisfactory before creating a new thread?

its good to see people to seek advise here, and its bad to see people asking without research or accusing without valid reasons.

Moderation is labour intensive and always controversial, I hope the precious human resources and be diverted to content cobtribution and polishing, rather than tedious and energy draining admin task.

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I think this might be helped with more categories? Our categories are as follows:

  • Announcement [12]
  • Privacy [778]
  • Site Development [184]
  • Meta [61]
  • Off Topic [181]

The category of Privacy is kind of… broad. Its a privacy forum, so yeah anything “on-topic” is about privacy. But there are definitely breakdowns of this, which could be explored. Not saying the below are better breakdowns, but considerations:

  • Recent Events and News
  • Threat Models
  • Privacy Applications and Services
  • Operating Systems and Hardware

If we create the categories, we can have sensible rules and focus per category, and some general rules to gear towards higher quality initial posts and discussion. From what I am seeing, we don’t have this, and only a general conduct. However we can create all the rules we like, its up to staff if they believe this is a better way to delineate and enforce discussion.

Most forums I’ve been on, maintained, and browsed separate their niche focus into distinct categories to help maintain discussion. For example, see Ultimate Guitar Forum - a very focused topic of instruments and music, but with major groupings for each category, which there are plenty.

Just an idea.

An aside is that I don’t like the Discourse UI actually. If you visit the linked forum, that is my preference in style (maybe I’m old fashioned). I can hone in on topics I care about, and I don’t care about the feed like view. Each category has a pinned rules thread that you should read before posting. But pros and cons, feed view works really well for smaller communities like this.

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I agree, but I also think that the staff need maintain a high quality response even in these situations. For example, this reply on the 4get engine is snarky. Doesn’t explain why its not being considered. Its a funny quip, sure, but these kind of replies set the tone for the rest of the community. I haven’t done enough research to say this is the norm, but something staff should be aware of. The linked example isn’t horrible, but if that becomes a pattern, well the community will also incorporate that.

I also agree. As someone whose bickered at other members twice, and haven’t gotten reported or talked to, I’m somewhat surprised. While it can feel draconian if mods stop every little bicker, I think its important to stop long-running banter and completely off-topic derailments.

This recent thread somehow became an argument about Apple. While I typically don’t like “I’m quitting and I’m making a thread about it” topics, it was a chance for the community to try to help understand why the user was having difficulty integrating privacy. What was shown was exactly what that OP described: arguing with people with elitist mentality. That isn’t a hard metric that the forum has gone to waste, but elitist mentality will be an issue for Privacy. Same issue can be applied to technical experts too on this forum.

Don’t known a solution to this either, just thoughts. Something to consider.

There is no barrier of entry to join. Even one with 0 privacy knowledge can post. The solutions oriented approach without tinfoil, derailment, bitterness, and banter, are up to the community and staff to shape. The staff can definitely can remind us to stay on this course. The community can also govern itself if that is how they feel. It’s a hard problem to solve, and requires gentle and considerate course correction.

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Just my opinion: I know it is different than others that have commented so far. This is not meant to discount previous opinions.
I like PG just like it is. When a simple question is asked, I learn from a small detail I hadn’t thought of. I realize how annoying it is when you know something already and keep hearing that (simple to you) question come up, time and time again, but for others it is a first time.
There is a counter-intuitive danger in over-categorizing. Just too many layers/levels and information tucked away.
So, in brief, I greatly appreciate PG and allowing those of us with varying levels of Privacy experience to see and hear others without having to jump to different sub-groups. (yes, I ask very basic questions…)

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I agree. I think kindness and politeness in simply linking to duplicated threads and asking “is there anything else you need clarification on?” before closing can go a long way.

As for over-categorization, that can definitely happen. Categories should be made only when the current ones are no longer serving their purpose for the community. I would argue today that “Privacy” is just way too general, and having even a more basic breakdown into a few more may help filter for relevant discussion and rules on them. Even with that, the UI just molds all categories into a single feed, so categories can mostly be ignored (which I personally don’t like). I don’t even look at tags, haven’t seemed useful to me at all for finding relevant topics at all.

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I never look and use tags, to me this forum is already very specific, and the amount of new posts is not too much for just a quick look.

If I want to know a specific topic such as certain service or event, i would just go to search.

Of course tag could be improved, however, looking at current state, the bottleneck seems somewhere else and should he prioritised, unless tag system improvements are quick and easy to deploy.

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Mhm. A suggestion for the staff members: Professionalism should be adhered to, along with diplomacy, courtesy, and patience. Additionally, sharp disagreements should be de-escalated, rather than intensified and turned into a heated debate.

Yeah, it’s not helpful and unnecessarily wastes time. Instead, responses should be akin to this: “We have not known of this search engine’s existence,” or “We did not add this search engine for x reason.”

The “Company x is based in Russia, so it shouldn’t be used!” is just completely wrong. We should not just be skeptical and cautious about products from Russia, China, Iran, and others, but all products in general, like Google for example.

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I am very happy and satisfied the way it is. There really isn’t a tangible way to categorize response styles. Some prefer short answers like chats while some like paragraphs. Attempting to categorize them is only going to increase layers of categorizations as another user pointed out and will nosedive the forum even more.

Welcome to 2024, I think it’s perfectly fine that we adapt to the hybrid mode of communication where most of the convos resemble chats.

Cheers.

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This is the precise reason we started the forum (reddit behaving like reddit merely provided the opportunity).

We need to discourage/actively moderated against this. Our goal with this forum is to encourage quality discussion on matters of privacy that you wouldn’t find elsewhere.

This is how we judge software: by our own criteria, not by anything else. And simply meeting our criteria does not guarantee listing (we try to learn from our mistakes).

We no longer whang on about ‘five eyes’ and we care more about the product than its origin. This doesn’t mean that we’re going to instantly start adding software funded by the states you mention in order to be inclusive. But it also doesn’t mean that we’ll disregard something because one of the developers is from, say, China. Moreover, everyone makes their own choices as to what software they use. If your threat model is such that a single Chinese employee is enough to write off a product then fine - but that doesn’t apply to everyone.

This pisses me off too. As mentioned above, we have criteria. Instead of posting on our forum and asking someone else to do the work for you - why not check if said browser (or whatever) meets it? Firefork forks in particular are irritating - a new one seems to crop up every week. Because they usually lack funding they are likely to go unmaintained. And the few that actually have funding are rarely very private.

Sadly this happens in every privacy community I’ve been in. As ever, flagging posts/comments like this always helps.

And thank you for your post. Transparency is very important to us, and we are nothing without our community.

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Low effort posts are still going to be removed for low effort without much more justification.

There simply isn’t time to have a debate with every person we remove a post from. It doesn’t happen a whole lot but it does happen.

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I have learned one thing over past few years. You can never fix the issue of elitist mentality anywhere you go on this planet be it online on some forum or offline in some community. It can be reduced but never be removed.

You can have the best forum moderation but still after all moderators are humans and humans make mistakes, when there’s a chance of mistake, mistake will happen!

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I just wanted to let you know that I understand how you’re feeling.
I’m really sorry you’re experiencing this discomfort.
It’s disheartening and discouraging when you feel like even when you open up and share your thoughts and emotions, they’re being dismissed or ignored.

I think you made the right call in talking it through, just want to reiterate that it’s much more effective to do this with a professional who knows how to listen.

From my own experience - anything anyone says to you, even if it’s just a comment, should be treated as a reflection of themselves, not you. It’s often a sign of an ego that’s out of proportion to reality.

There is another way, but it might take a bit more effort on your part, but I think it’s time for you to relax.

Your health is your most valuable asset, and it’s something you should take care of.
Don’t waste it, and remember that there’s nothing more recharging than a walk in the fresh air, even alone.

You know what they say: you want a friend? Get a dog.

I did that once, and it was a real turning point for me.