Dan moved, see pinned toot* Power corrupts, so the moderators of a hobby website should be treated with the same disdain or distrust one would treat a millionaire politician or CEO.
* Moderators only become moderators because they want power over others.
Oof, sad news about Something Awful founder Lowtax.
Something Awful has been going through a messy and painful transformation, a kind of reckoning with its past self, and at some point I was gonna do a case study for this thread.
I've only just heard about Lowtax's suicide so it's probably not a great time to start that analysis, but in the moment this feels like a cautionary tale about deleting your old stuff so you can change.
Community Moderation Thread continued, a case study:
@[email protected] shows us the eventual end state of the hobby degradation dynamic I talked about earlier in this thread.
https://social.bau-ha.us/@aurora/107434889581265192
This starts with admins allowing forums to shift away from normal, everyday conversation about a hobby, and towards threads where people post pictures of the thing they bought today. Further in Aurora's thread are some counterexamples of still-viable groups.
ava vs. the universe ✨ (@[email protected])
trying to sell my old hifi setup and realizing that the stuff i bought for 1-10€ a piece on ebay 15 years ago is now worth over 500€ :blobfoxeyes:
All hobby communities are vulnerable to consumerist takeover, and the effects can spill out into the real world as we've seen here, inflating prices and cutting off new members apart from the very rich, cementing a self-reinforcing mechanism.
There is no saving a hobby community that has entered this downward spiral. Once a hobby becomes involved with financial speculation, it's a rich-getting-richer wasteland until the bubble bursts, which can take years.
Stopping a hobby from becoming taken over by the empty content of the rich is easy, but requires vigilance and community buy-in.
Establish in your CoC that posts amounting to no more than "Look at this thing I bought today" are spam, and will be treated as such. Talk about the hobby degradation phenomenon in your CoC so that people understand why it's a necessary rule; your members will help with enforcement if they're familiar with the alternative.
Moar online community moderation thread!
A browse through reddit's "hobbydrama" forum often yields cautionary tales that can illustrate What Not To Do, and here's a good write-up of Neopets' infiltration by NFT scammers:
https://old.reddit.com/r/HobbyDrama/comments/pzmcy2/pet_site_game_neopets_introduces_nfts_burns/
The bit that caught my eye, the bit that made me think this belongs in the moderation thread rather than web3isgoinggreat or wherever, is the language the scammers use.
In this writeup we see Neopets invaded by NFTrolls who have spent so much time sniffing their own farts that it doesn't occur to them to code-switch; they chuck around 4chan words like "oldf**" thinking this is just how people talk.
Unmoderated, anonymous websites (here I say "anonymous" to mean places where you don't have strong visual differentiation between users) ruin your brain.
(NFTs destroy communities too, but y'all already knew that)
In places where the users are difficult to tell apart, and especially in places that attach numeric scores to socialization, people end up talking the same way. Heck, go browse that subreddit I just linked to, ordered by top; the posts all have the same rhythm, same style, same slang, even though they were written by allegedly different people.
Imagine a party full of people who are so close they talk alike, but aren't friends and don't actually know each other. WEIRD AND SCARY.
This is of course deliberate!
Everyone here knows that spyware companies invest billions into improving their programs to better spy on people and try to predict what people are gonna want to buy. Most people here know that targeted advertising doesn't actually work and it's all just a long con, but the folk who work at spyware companies like google and facebook etc have been - YES! - sniffing their own farts for so long that they're starting to honestly believe their own nonsense!
So when you've chucked billions towards paying some brogrammers to try and predict the behaviour of individual humans and still the best your program can do is show them adverts for a toothbrush they bought last week, if you're particularly sociopathic you might look at the other side of the equation:
Your program might give accurate guesses more often if the people it was spying on were easier to predict.
That's where we're at now: spyware companies have, after decades of trying, finally invented a square-shaped hole, and realised that it'd take many further billions to make that hole sufficiently people-shaped to actually work; now they reason it's cheaper to make a bigger hammer.
Hence facebook's reaction emojis; it's WAY easier to have the product choose from five emotional reactions than to try and parse emotion from a textual comment.
This is why I'll keep circling back to how important it is to allow your users to differentiate themselves visually. Let them upload avatars, change their text colour, choose from different CSS for their profile pages. This fights the homogeneity that spyware companies crave so much, and since so much of people's interactions with computers these days is through spyware, it'll feel to your users like a breath of fresh air.
https://rixx.de/blog/on-running-a-mastodon-instance/
Adding on to my massive long online-community-management thread: Here's a great post from the admin of chaos.social on his experiences running a Mastodon instance along with @leah. There's overlap with running any kind of online community, but federated stuff has its own specific quirks that @rixx highlights nicely in this blog post. A worthwhile read if you're thinking of setting up a Mastodon server or any online space.
Another addition to the online community moderation thread, in which @eldang, a retired Fediverse mod, tells their story:
https://weirder.earth/@eldang/108211095983989977
https://weirder.earth/@eldang/108211095983989977
Eldan Goldenberg (@[email protected])
Content warning: Moderation philosophy, from a retired mod
Meta bit in this thread: Elon Musk just bought twitter, so we may be about to witness what happens when a formerly-badly-moderated site deliberately turns off moderation.
We've seen this before loads of times, and it's predictable - the site fills up with toxic people who scare off first the normies and then each other and it collapses in on itself within months. But I don't believe we've ever seen it happen with a website as big as twitter. This is gonna be fascinating/horrifying to watch.
Here on Fedi we're also gonna get ourselves a big ol' dose of No Fountain, but I see @feditips and others REALLY GOING HARD on the "Write down and broadcast the unwritten social norms for preservation" thing, and I think fedi reminds people of forums and BBSes enough that they're remembering netiquette and dramabombs and site implosions from their own pasts, and taking measures to get the newbies thoroughly doused in Fedi Culture really quickly.
Fedi is very cool in a lot of ways
Big Long Online Community Moderation Thread time? Yes!
Had this conversation again:
Player: "Dan, can you make it so we can block people on Improbable Island?"
Me: "Why, who'd you wanna block?"
Player: "Oh this one jackass, he's been..." *very detailed description of subtly shady behaviour that would've flown right under the radar if they'd just blocked the jackass*
Me: *bans the jackass before they try it on someone else*
Should your website have a Block button? Still probably yeah
But this actually happens quite a lot - behaviour that wouldn't have been documented if a person can just click a button, especially the kind that tends to not stand out until after enough people have been hurt for a whisper network to form. Having the "Yeah it's on the list but it's a technical nightmare because of this ancient codebase, who d'you wanna block anyway" convo opens people up to actually reporting stuff that feels hinky.
Admins, always remember: people generally don't report abuse!
(adding block functionality is legit on the list. It's just ancient bloody rat-wiring code and a very complex game and it's the sort of project that could literally take months - and in the meantime whenever someone brings it up there's an opportunity to catch an under-the-radar abuser that I wouldn't otherwise have had. These dudes are sneaky.)
This article shows such a clear picture of how internet trolls are parasitic:
https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-trump-truth-social/
Trolls can't operate without access to an audience that someone else has built, because they're too unlikeable to build their own. They want to leech off YOUR audience, and understand "free speech" to mean "free web hosting and a free, pre-built audience."
I just saw a twitter screenshot where someone used the slur that rhymes with "maggot," and hoo boy holy shit I knew twitter was bad but this is 101-level stuff they've neglected here.
Even the most amateurish PHPBB forum in 2001 knew that there are slurs that you shouldn't allow to be posted on your website because they can't be used for anything constructive or useful. Seriously twitter this is absolutely rudimentary stuff.
Quote from a toot posted elsewhere, regarding blocklists:
"How is this list to be regulated? By the number of votes? What if 99% of the submissions agree to ban a certain religion, or vegans, or economists who wear yellow shirts on Tuesday?"
This is a type of user you should ban straight away without engaging. Every single time I've seen this sort of post, it's from someone who gets banned from places a lot for being exhausting.
You'll come across people who are generally leery of moderation in general; some of them have genuinely had the experience of being in a community that imploded because of bad mods (always on someone else's website; facebook groups, subreddits, anywhere where you can start a community with a couple of clicks), but 95%+ of the time it's because they, personally, keep getting banned from places.
Nice little post here to add to this thread:
https://thagomizer.com/blog/2017/09/29/we-don-t-do-that-here.html
The "here" part of "we don't do that here" has special Culture Juice in it. You're not trying to change the whole world, that's hard; you're trying to make a nice little space in a website, and people can fit into the culture or they can not and go somewhere else instead. You're just trying to make a nice little bit of positive culture. Yoghurt pot sized like.
Remember earlier in this thread I talked about dramaslurping? Get your straws out and mosquito your way over to this deliciously festering puddle of How The Hell Did We Let This Get So Bad
https://cohost.org/staff/post/124903-community-guidelines
The gist: people were posting drawn child porn on cohost, and rather than banning those people immediately, cohost wrote a very long post about "working to implement a system to allow us to get user input on this area of policy"
Community Guidelines Update
hey folks, we’ve got a couple big trust and safety updates coming today, including some changes to the community guidelines [https://cohost.org/rc/content/community-guidelines]. we wanted to go over everything here for transparency about what we’re doing and why. first off, the community guidelines. we’ve gotten a lot of questions and reports on content that, while we considered to be borderline but permitted, was absolutely in a gray area in the written community guidelines. we had internally developed a set of policies that we were applying to the small number of cases that came up, but had not publicly announced the policies we were applying because of some open questions we still had. this was a bad call, and moving forward we’re going to be more transparent about areas of uncertainty and indecision in our policy. here’s a summary of the changes: * we’ve added clarifications to the section regarding child sexual exploitation material, and how it pertains to non-realistic depictions of minors, in an attempt to provide clarity and consistency for enforcement. * internally, we had been drawing the line at the prevailing legal definition of “realistic depictions,” which includes photographs/videos of actual human minors, or content difficult to distinguish from actual photographs/videos. * policy around non-realistic depictions, such as lolicon/shotacon, has not yet been finalized. we don’t want to implement a policy that the majority of users would feel uncomfortable with. we are currently working to implement a system to allow us to get user input on this area of policy. until such time, please refrain from posting it; up to this point, we have been asking people posting it to remove it pending a final policy decision. * we’ve added a new section clarifying and adding new rules around content warnings. * previously, content warnings were only strongly recommended for posts containing potentially sensitive content. in most cases, this is still true. however, we are now requiring CWs for certain types of content. * this policy change is accompanied by a technical change that prevents these CWs from showing up in unrelated tag pages. these posts will still show up on your dashboard (if you are following the poster), profile pages, and tag searches for any of the terms on the list. * the full list of mandatory content warnings can be found on our support site [https://help.antisoftware.club/support/solutions/articles/62000226150-mandatory-content-warnings]. this page is also linked from the community guidelines. * repeated failure to add mandatory content warnings, as well as attempts to circumvent the filtering system (such as by using numbers or symbols in place of letters), are considered bannable offenses. we don’t want to ban you so please be normal about this. the tag page change is live now. our motivation in this change is not to censor any types of allowed content, but to prevent certain types of sensitive content from showing up in large, more general tags. while we may make changes to this list in the future, all changes will come with a notice, as well as a grace period for users to start adding CWs to their posts. our goal is to provide a robust set of tools that allow everyone to customize their own experience to their level of comfort and safety. to support this, we are actively working on a system with which you will be able to completely hide posts that include CWs you never want to see and skip the clickthrough on CWs you do not need a warning for. these tools are being worked on in addition to general tag filtering tools. above all, we believe that you know your own preferences, limits, and triggers better than anyone else; our intent with these changes is to help you see the posts you want to see and none of what you don’t. we also want to clarify that, thus far, we have not received any reports for content that, under the new rules, would require a mandatory content warning but did not already have one. we really appreciate that people are using the content warning system correctly, even before we had rules in place. the purpose of these rules isn’t to change anyone’s behavior, but to codify behavior we already saw, as well as to make our job moderating easier. we are, as always, open to feedback on these policy and technical changes. this is a tricky, sensitive area to work in, and we’re making sure to act deliberately and with consideration. this is not a sudden decision; we have been thinking over these changes for well over a month now. (related: having weekly hours long conversations with your coworkers about lolicon kind of sucks and we would recommend against being in a position where that’s necessary.) that’s all for now. please let us know if you have any questions or feedback and, as always, thanks for using cohost!
They then solicited comments about whether to allow drawn child porn - and the sort of abusers* who draw child porn - to be on their website (which of course would then turn this website into The Loli Website until it got disabled by its host/registrar), or whether that'd be 😰CENSORSHIP😰
The thread is predictably full of Very Too Much Online people
(* over nearly 15 years and a quarter of a million players, not one person on my game who ever even talked about loli was not a serial abuser)
Look, there's a lot of nuance in online community management. There are very few easy black-or-white decisions. Most of the decisions you make over what to delete/ban will be difficult, agonizing even, and will end up with you getting yelled at.
This isn't one of those. This is forehead-slappingly obvious, and cohost managed somehow to not just dither over whether to be The Nonce Site, but do it *publicly.* That should be a big red flag for anyone thinking of being associated with them.
Comments on cohost and a comment a new fediverse admin in their early 20's left on this thread reminded me that there's a very specific failure state that some Very Online people get into when they're admining a website, and that is to mix up government with website operation.
Websites aren't countries, they're Literally Just Websites. Your users can leave and go to one of the over 300 other websites on the internet, whenever they like.
(if they can't, your website shouldn't exist)
If you're seriously feeling the need to run a website to the same standard as an imagined Ideal Country, then you're gonna have a Really Bad Time, because the two have absolutely nothing in common.
It's not necessary to have convoluted discussions about censorship when the people who want to look at the thing you're about to ban can still look at it by typing in a different web address.
You're not a government. You just run one website, out of many.
(actually I just checked and there are over FOUR hundred websites now)
Like, go read that cohost thread. That's an awful lot of people who are discussing the question of "What is and is not morally right" instead of "What would be good to put on this website vs what should go on a different website somewhere else," and this is an EXTREMELY common mixup!
You'd think it'd be less common on Fedi given the ease of having multiple identities and moving around, but Fedi's also full of people with strong opinions on The Way The World Should Be, and sometimes those folks think installing software is the same as having subjects ;)
Another thing on the Cohost Nonce Implosion: arguments made for "Allow everything, but also allow people to filter out posts they don't want to see."
A really seductive argument that appeals to twentysomething technolibertarians who haven't had to deal with abusers. Loliposters are manipulators and abusers, every time, and it's a mistake to make them feel welcome, a further mistake to let them hide their posts from people who might feel differently about them if they saw.
(if someone who was being friendly towards me was into pictures of little girls, I'd damn well want to know about it, not have that hidden)
(some folk are doubting the "Every time" bit, no really I do mean it. I've been doing this a long time and I've never seen someone with a thing for loli *not* engage in creepy/manipulative/stalky/abusive/boundary-pushing behaviours. It often but doesn't always go the other way (abusers being into loli) but loli fans being serial creeps, 100% every time like clockwork)
Oh no I didn't even know there was an update post to the Cohost Nonce Implosion, this is a real treat, getting me dramaslurping straw out
https://cohost.org/staff/post/125826-hi-there-we-wanted
"we have been refraining from moderating the comments because we don’t want to be seen as censoring discussion," SCHLURRRRRP
Earlier on in this thread I said that watching drama on other websites makes you a better admin but a worse person and right now I am 100% trash goblin schluurp yum yum
cohost dot org on cohost
hi there. we wanted to clarify some things, in light of the community guidelines post [https://cohost.org/staff/post/124903-community-guidelines] yesterday: * it is currently against site policy to post lolisho and it will be removed. * while this was unwritten gray area before yesterday, this has been the case since day 1. * we made technical changes to the site to attempt to ensure that people would have as little accidental contact with this material as possible, even in the instances where it got posted by users in ignorance of site policy. * the inclusion of lolicon/shotacon in the public mandatory content warning list was to provide full transparency around what we are hiding; as we have said many times, we do not want a mysterious algorithm governing what you see. it was not intended to suggest that the final decision about this policy would be to allow it in contradiction of user wishes. * the reaction yesterday has made it obvious to us that a large number of people consider anything short of a total ban to be personally unacceptable to them. * regardless of this, we do not appreciate the tenor of some of the discussion on the original post, and in our e-mails and support tickets. we have been refraining from moderating the comments because we don’t want to be seen as censoring discussion, but the feedback we’ve gotten has caused immense stress to a small team, hence this emergency post. we are currently working on final policy wording. we had wanted to get structured feedback before making any decisions, but the community response has been loud enough that we are fast-tracking the process. jae will be out tomorrow for yom kippur, but we’ll try and have something out by the end of the week. thank you again for your feedback. Aidan, Colin, and Jae EDIT 10/7/22, 8:15am PDT: In an attempt to reduce the amount of unconstructive nastiness and name calling in this comment thread, we are going to be removing comments (both "on our side" and not) that detract from actual conversation. Please note: due to the sheer load, we will not be sending emails to users whose comments were removed. These removals will not be held against you in any future reports. This is a special situation for many reasons. If you have any questions, you can email us at [email protected] [[email protected]]
EPISODE IV: THE FURIOUS BACKPEDAL
When Dan is well: *moderates his own community and keeps it nice*
When Dan is sick: *snotty, hacking drama mosquito*
When Dan is sick: *snotty, hacking drama mosquito*
Adding this on to the EverThread, a discussion from @junebug on how automated moderation tools make things much more unpleasant for human moderators:
https://slime.global/@junebug/109116062565160832
https://slime.global/@junebug/109116062565160832
Juniper Herodias Angel Theory (@[email protected])
One thing that always really grinds me about online is that everyone expects moderation to be free, instant, simple, exactly what they feel, and done by faceless automatons who react without failure my gf worked at a shitty awful job doing moderation on YouTube for years to get through college And what happened is "she got PTSD" every website is moderated by People. Every discord server is moderated by People. Every service is moderated by People.