Unhappy with this forum recently

Meta
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Also, if you really care so much about it all, you would have made a much longer posts explaining your points of view in a proper manner with examples and why you think such examples are the types of posts or comments that ought not to exist and how PG can do better.

But practically speaking, what you’re asking is not logistically possible and will curtail open discussion no matter how right or wrong a person is.

Sharing facts all the time is simply not possible and to think this should only be the case is to live in a severely misguided reality.

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I never said opinion has no place, just that the balance has been lost and there has been too much of it recently.

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Hey man.. complaining without proposing a solution is akin to whining.

You can think and feel what you want. It’s still only going remain your opinion.

But my contention is more with how you have said what you have said that does not align with what I think you wanted it to mean.

And this makes it a communication issue/blunder from your end, not mine - since you started this thread.

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This is not untrue. But I don’t think it should be disallowed by the way of…

…an iron fist (even such a framing implies that the participants are hostile towards each other or worse, the mod team is hostile towards the community).

  1. Like with everything else in print or on the interwebs, take most of what you read with a bag of salt.

  2. If you want the absolute truth, you’d have to do your own research; there’s no other substitute (well, other than consulting with folks who do do their own research, but then again, see #1)

The way I see it, PG the website strives for verifiablity (truth or not); while PG the forum strives for free-form discussion.

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This is generally true, which is why the homepage of this forum itself clearly states:

This discussion forum contains community and personal advice, tool suggestions, and proposed changes; none of which have been approved or vetted for accuracy. If you are looking for advice right now, today, visit privacyguides.org.

Not only would approving all posts simply be logistically challenging as @anon36940904 pointed out, but this forum serves an important role to me (and hopefully also to the team and to others) as a place that isn’t the typical echo chambers that other privacy and FOSS forums often are.

I encounter far more criticism of Privacy Guides here than in any other place online, and I prefer that to be the case really:

If I subscribed to the moderation practices of other big communities in our privacy/security space, sure, it would certainly create an appearance of order and help to establish a cult-like following around Privacy Guides the brand. I’m sure newcomers to communities love encountering content that is perfectly tailored to their existing worldview, and I’m sure this is why it’s an incredibly common moderation tactic. However, this wouldn’t be helpful when it comes to helping people (including forum regulars and people on the team) actually learn things.

This idea isn’t just limited to criticism of Privacy Guides itself though, but criticisms of any popularly-held beliefs in the “privacy community” or criticisms of any popular tools we recommend. We should be open to all these topics, really.

Sometimes those criticisms turn out to be wrong and/or stupid, and we do remove those when they are clearly in bad faith, as those comments often are. Us striving to be an open and as-unbiased-as-possible discussion platform is not the same as us being a platform where misinformation can easily spread.

Other times, these discussions and criticisms of other projects become extremely useful resources to cite/reference in other discussions, both here and as links from anywhere else on the internet. People reference the Privacy Guides forum fairly frequently now, and it is only because of long-term users and contributors leaving incredibly insightful comments in response to these discussions, which would be lost if the discussion never took place.

TL;DR: When comments aren’t clearly being made in bad faith, I would lean towards responding to them rather than flagging or removing them.

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Again I would point out that duplicate discussions shouldn’t really be happening, and if you encounter that you should link back to the existing prior discussion or flag it.

If there isn’t an existing prior discussion to link back to, that’s a good sign that it’s something that should be addressed by the community, so that we have that knowledge stored here for future readers. It’s these posts I am mainly referring to with my comments, I wouldn’t want to remove them in place of a discussion actually happening.

I will also say that @anonymous306 in a Meta topic you really need to be replying to my points if you actually want something to change. I don’t really like to play this card in community discussions, but ultimately these meta-conversations about the direction of the overall project is my jurisdiction more than a democratic process, and you are replying to everyone besides my first post here in the thread so far.

My first post above (Unhappy with this forum recently - #17 by jonah) will stand as the answer to this topic unless you would like to debate my points further :slight_smile:

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Well said.

Id like to also add that communities do change over time, and we should find the best ways to embrace that without changing the goal of PG (which I believe it is still going well). I’m sure the forum when it first started is not the forum it is today.

Small communities typically start with the strongest advocates, enthusiasts, and “pioneers”, and over time as it grows, that dynamic changes as more diverse people join the forum. I’ve been on a few forums that went through growing pains at a larger scale than even here, and some even attempted to section of different portions of the user base to solve similar problems, all with varying consequences as a result.

OP may not entirely be wrong, but the conclusion to go back to the way things are is just not as easy as it sounds without drastically disrupting the community. Times arrow marches forwards ever so.

I think it’s important to not change the forum too fast. Even if something is a red alarm, it should try to be solved with the policies already in place. If all of those fail, I’m sure the mod team will start cooking up some new things to assist :cook:

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I was from the before times in the site’s old forum and I was afraid that the community spirit might die but no, it did go on.

My take is, if the user isn’t arguing in bad faith, I’d treat them with kindness and try to be a good steward to the community. The forum is like a growing baby and so far its growing nice. The kid may grow into the political party that you don’t like and its ok: you don’t choke it into submission. You guide it back to what you think is correct, ethical and moral with guidance from facts and data.

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Alot of learning is done through discussion and constructive arguments, this feels really counterproductive to helping people expanding their knowledge of privacy.

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Thank you for speaking out on this. I, for one, 1000% agree with you and think that the team here has let most old school users/lurkers/readers down. With the decision to embrace hyper editorialized and partisan topics instead of focusing on privacy/software/etc the forum has gone downhill, and fast. There used to be multiple high quality privacy related topics being discussed every day, now there are millions of topics serving as whichever user’s mood board at any given moment. There’s a TON of noise and very little signal these days.

On top of all of that, there are users that seem to feel the need to engage in keyboard combat and contribute nothing besides characters in a text box. It’s a very unfortunate state of affairs.

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A possible solution could be making a ‘new user’ corner that trusted users could choose to interact with, and only allow new users to post and comment there until they demonstrate a decent amount of accurate knowledge on privacy. Definitely not perfect, but may be a good starting point?

Also, I can’t be the only one that thinks alot of the complaints about politics/partisanship are made in bad faith, correct? I have only noticed that said complaints are vague or don’t provide concrete examples, and it might be used to stop discussions about topics a user may not like. Please let me know if this is wrong or not.

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It certainly comes across like that.

Yup!

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Hah, the sectioning off users idea has already popped up as I mentioned! I’ll say such a decision is drastic, and leads to further consequences of dividing the user base. I don’t recommend it. It’s better to keep the current culture aligned by having everyone, not just mods, stay vigilant in keeping quality discussion. That also means not being rude, and just reporting bad faith and mean individuals. Those who constantly bring down the forum will get banned.

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I only bring it up because people earlier in the thread complained that inexperienced people were decreasing the overall quality of discussions.

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I would like to add that I think the forum topic comes across recently as more “polarizing” but the problem stems from some of the thread being “US focused” rather than “global”.

I choose not to interact with some of the topics because, frankly I don’t care about US politics, because it is not something I can actually control as a non-US citizen.

It’s going to be weird if I can “control” or even “steer” the discussion because arguably it might fall into “propaganda” because while I will be ultimately affected by US politics, as an outsider, I think its best to let the foreign relations department (or equivalent) of my country to handle such things - its more “clean” in my books.

Its best to let the US folks left in their own internal sovereign affairs. Ill be here with :popcorn: watching.

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I mean, that’s okay for a public discussion. Multiple folks have voiced similar concerns (not just in this thread, but before as well; it seems, we have one such thread once every 2 months). No one should want to put any member/thread unduly on the spot here.

Think for the community in general, the take away should be, some folks are not happy. They have their reasons. Took the pain to convey them because they care. I guess, then, the least we could do, as active participants, is to be mindful from here on out.

I’m not sure what the mods must do, but I’d rather they don’t have to do much at all, as that brings with it its own problems.

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Oh! That reply of mine was answering a particular message about how complaints about “politics and partisanship” are usually vague to the point of meaninglessness. This is because neither are inherently wrong. Politics are unavoidable, in an abstract sense; and not all parties behave in equally harmful manners, so it’s important to be specific about what complaints one may have. But that’s a bit of a tangent, onto your main point:

That’s understandable! In general I’m ok with the status quo (I’d been lurking for a while before joining a couple days ago) but I can see why some would be displeased with it. :slight_smile:

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We need to go back to 1st grade and distinguish fact from opinion. A factual claim may be true or false (a matter of debate and evidence) but it is not merely a point of view. An opinion is a personal value judgement, matter of taste, or a preference.

Whether the NSA monitors phone calls is a factual question. You can’t be wrong and claim its just your opinion.

Your personal level of concern over NSA surveillance is an opinion. You have the right to be unconcerned or very concerned over it and choose your actions accordingly.

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