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Laissez-faire moderating
December 10, 2016 - 2:37am
As some of you may have noticed, my style of moderating has changed over the years - less confrontational, more laissez faire. So what do you think of the various moderating styles over the years? Your memory may go as far back as Audra, or I might be the only thing resembling a moderator you've ever seen on the site. Regardless, please let me know what you think.
I would characterize your current moderating style as "death from above, but only when necessary". That might be a little too pithy ;-).
I'm only familiar with moderation from Michelle to current date, but I think your current style works well and is an improvement over some previous moderators.
I can deal with laissez faire, and my default is more open discussion.
The only things that piss me off are personal attacks rather than talking about issues, ignoring evidence and just going on ideology and not arguing in good faith. But that isn't all stuff that requires moderation.
And I think I posted my own rant about that not too long ago, so I don't need to repeat it.
That contrary to policy we are actually fighting some things at a 101 level? Well it's the internet, so we aren't going to avoid it. For me the bottom line is that if there is some actual productive discussion happening I think free discussion has to take precedence over the rules
Really though, I recognize your style is a response to what we asked for in a backhanded way when people freaked out over these rules being applied, and people being suspended. So when people complain about bad moderation and how things have deteriorated, I don't think they realize how we have all contributed to where things are now. And I think you have to also have to factor in peoples' own intolerance.
(though of course not all the problems we now face are because of that alone)
I know I have sent you three notices over the past month. Not something I usually do. Only in one case - the thread about Peterson - do I see it as a problem of a real impasse, and some pretty clear breaches of policy. And as I said I am not asking for closure, and I am not asking for anyone to be suspended , but my concern in that case is that since participants are clearly not interested in what the law is it runs the risk of being a magnet for people who really believe protection of rights is "leftist authoritarianism" and trans people are all just narcissists and abusers. Conversations seem to be spinning that way everywhere else Peterson's name pops up.
Come to think of it, I asked in the thread some weeks back that it should be for public view, rather than in reactions. In hindsight I think I was wrong to suggest that; I don't think we need a bunch of people inspired by Peterson signing on to babble so they can weigh in against the social justice warriors.
And I don't want to make your thread all about that one issue (so no, I don't want to argue those points here), I bring it up as an example of why I don't envy your job, and of a problem where there is no clear solution that doesn't go against some principle.
To be clear, when I have written you it hasn't been expecting that you swoop in and act, but they have all been cases where I think something has happened that you probably want to know about. And yes, to express frustration.
Your style is definitely an improvement. And you have far more patience than I do when it comes to dealing with people's verbal abuse.
I have never been suspended or so threatened, but one of the few times (might be the only time, actually) I was told to shut up by a moderator it was because I dared to point out that one can be a good worker and union member and also a slumlord.
So yes, things have changed.
I guess if there is one thing I'd suggest it is more calling out of actions which are not in good faith, and obstructionist. I used to let that pass because I didn't see it as my role since I am not a mod. In the past year I have started to just call it for what it is, because after a couple of years now clearly it is not going to stop.
It is difficult, just as moderating is a very difficult job. In general I think Meg does a splendid job, though I'd be loathe to compare her to Audra, Michelle and others. What I find very difficult here is the presence of a tag team. I apologise for calling them trolls, as I have no proof of that, but there is a group vehiculing a particular line and insulting a wide range of posters who disagree with them. Such situations have destroyed internet forums and other groups.
Laissez faire works well and if you attain the Old Goat gold standard of pithiness that would be great.
I don't think that 6079 and Magoo are trolling or working in consort although they do often appear to be tag teaming.
BTW, Oldgoat will be moderating over the holidays and for two weeks in January. Please be kind to him, being an Oldgoat an' all.
We promise not to mention the composition of our famous moussaka...
Hope you have fun on your break!
Yes, we''ll make sure to not interfere, and leave it to him to ban himself.
I think you do great. Meg. Thanks for taking on a thankless task!
Are you on your own now, without a second mod?
I'm going to suggest something that was suggested to Audra back in the distant mists of time, which she agreed to do - which is to make it very clear that you are speaking as moderator when you're doing so. Not everyone can always tell, since one risk of laisser-faire moderating is that not everyone here knows you are a mod when you post. Audra posted, I think, [mod hat on] and [mod hat off] to make it clear when she was moderating and when she was expressing her own opinion or gently poking babblers.
I also think there's a collective responsibility. When someone is making personal attacks on other babblers, we all need to flag it, rather than expecting you to magically know about it.
Have a great holiday, we'll try not to break oldgoat wile you're gone!
I think the current moderating style strikes the right balance. I'm particularly pleased that bannings have gone way down and only happen in extreme situations. We all freak out from time to time, but it takes a lot of energy to keep up that level of self-importance. Ultimately the pot simmers down and the underlying common interest resurfaces. We are allies. And I think Meg's laissez-faire style helps us to stay that way.
Good point.
Babble has far fewer participants now. Maybe that is what is most important to remember. Babble is really quite tiny, and I think we would all wish that it were not so small.
OTOH, there were so many at one time that we, effectively, self-moderated, which probably made the mod's job easier. Yet we still had brutal disagreements, ending in the formation of new disc boards, etc. So size, diversity, and self-moderation were no guarantee of collegiality.
I'd really like it if babble had a kind of minimum anti-imperialism. Of course, what I think is anti-imperialist is viewed by some others as simple apologetic, etc. But a recent comment by the Syrian President, that he was surprised by the foreign influence and dominance over so many Syrians, makes me realize that we have the same problem here in Canada and babble, in spades. It is very, very difficult, unless you are an active participant with internationalist struggles (or were) , to be faithful to this perspective.
Long ago, as a young student, I read a book by a far off politician, over the mountains and across the prairies, from a country that I never knew existed, about their struggle to throw off the yolk of domination. It changed my perspective on everything and, from then on, it was the easiest thing in the world to come back to this understanding, and not be misled by imperial arguments,even ones very close to home. At least I like to think so. The politician was one Rene Levesque and the book was An Option for Quebec. It seems genuinely strange to me that more Canadians have not had this experience.
I won't make any apologies for criticizing and mocking what I think to be disdain for anti-imperialism. But I know I could go about it in a better way.
I expect that it also strikes the right balance between fantasy (24/7 moderation in real time, instant chat window for grievances, etc.) and reality (I'm guessing probably about 6 hours per week of paid mod time, a mod with a life apart from modding, etc.)
I'm fine with the babble moderation being relatively sparse. I seem to recall a thread a while back where MegB and Catchfire said they were each only being paid for 2 hours per week to moderate babble. I'll make an educated guess that Meg's paid moderating hours per week are still only 2.
That said, here's a couple of things I'd like to see with respect to the moderation:
I am fine with laissez-faire moderating not with laissez-faire economics.
Yeah, I guess I'll never live down that banning myself bit. Looking forward to doing schoolyard duty here for a few weeks. and to kropotkinn, yeth, I shall maintain the highetht thtandard of pithiness.
I think the larger problems on the board aren't moderating issues per se. The amount of fake news and links to clear propaganda sites is pretty disturbing, imo, but that's a policy issue that I wish TPTB at rabble would have a think about and perhaps adjust in the board guidelines.
I wouldn't mind a little heavier hand on the moderating, either, although I know that your time is limited and so there is only so much you can do.
News Flash! "Heavy-handed babble moderator closes discussion board."
Silent Night, Holy Night!
..i'm content with the moderating and for the most part, have been all along. moderating has grown and changed..that's all that i ask.
rabble has lots of policies, which babblers seem not to respect. Problem is, having a policy of being explicitly feminist does not actually make clear who moderators should silence when abolitionists and sex workers disagree. The policy works fine if someone comes by to tell us all about "women's place" or whatever, but for other real-life things it's just not as cut-and-dried as some might think it should be.
I know that with only one mod, and almost no paid mod time, it might not be realistic to apply a clear framework to moderator activities, but that's about the only suggestion I'd make. Could babble have a transparent progressive discipline model? Something that ties behaviour to consequences, and would apply to everyone? Because it sometimes seems like some babblers have been turfed or suspended without any kind of warning, while others are simply warned repeatedly, even as it becomes clear that they're not going to change their behaviour. I wouldn't mind seeing something more consistent, e.g. two warnings, then a suspension, then a ban (if it comes to it).
Anyone remember a former babbler named after a Cuban statesman? How many times was he warned, and how many times was he suspended? At a certain point, it's like reading about some drunk driver who's on his seventh licence suspension but keeps driving drunk anyway.
I remember.
But I also think any attempt at setting hard rules is ultimately going to run into hard reality, and get broken. And more than likely cause a big headache for the moderator and everyone else. We have done this a couple of times.
Really, the most important, and the simplest rule to my mind is don't be a fucking jerk. Everyone pretty much understands it even when they pretend that they don't, or are too caught up in themselves to recognize it.
Someone is being honest and not railroading, attacking or trolling? I don't care too much if they happen to stray over the line of policy. And really, it seems to have been applied that way.
By contrast (and speaking generally), the thing about a good professional troll is that they know just how far they can go to play the rules, and butter wouldn't melt in their mouth. So just sticking to the rules doesn't always work, and sometimes you have to cut through it.
So I don't see hard rules alone working. That's why we don't have robots doing this job.
Speaking of which, why am I getting the sneaking feeling this thread is a nastly little time bomb set to go off as a present for Old Goat? Or maybe it's a test to see how naughty and nice we are.
Magoo, ikosmos got asked by Meg in one of the Ukraine threads (I think) if he needed a break fro babble because of the number of complaints she'd received about him. This when ikosmos is one of the few posters on babble who have taken a clear anti-imperialist line on Russia/Ukraine. I see many posters on babble who simply parrot the U.S./Nato line on Russia, which I believe is every bit as much fabrication and lies as was the Bush administration's justifications for the Iraq war.
This doesn't mean that I'm any fan of Vladmir Putin, only that I don't think he's an imperialist warmonger.
There are also many who don't support either side, particularly given the rightwing, authoritarian nature of both the states involved. And Russia is no longer a Soviet state, a workers' state, or a socialist state. It is simply a capitalist state. Idem Ukraine.
Some times neither "side" warrants the support of anti-imperialists, and the best thing to work for is antimilitarism and defusing conflicts. And supporting progressive forces in both those countries.
What do you figure is going to be the hard reality that will break this?
I know that in the past there've been babblers who've been suspended for 72 hours, followed by an intense period of mourning for our best and brightest, who just can't seem to not insult others or the mods. But why can't those mourners just be allowed to cry themselves out? Or gently reminded that insults don't magically become not-insults when they're "telling it like it is" or "spittin' truth"? That's what it seemed to always come down to: a babbler whose abrasive and defiant posting style makes them a hero to the downtrodden, or whatever.
Then in my ideal model, Meg would need to count not the number of complaints, but the number of transgressions of policy.
So? Can't one take this clear position while staying within policy? What's the problem here?
Personally, I think babble needs a fairly coarse net for content or ideology -- one that will let the smaller fish swim through, while catching the "who needs unions in 2017?" or "women are biological nurturers who should stay home and raise their children" fish -- and then a much finer net for behaviour, to catch the "you're a piece of shit!" fish and the "glad to see you support Hitler" fish. But this is just my $0.02 worth.
I agree with this. Canada is complicit in the current escalations around the globe including the spending of my tax dollars to influence poltics in the region. I think that there are people on this board who seem to cheer on these NATO incursions on the Russian border and to me that is not defusing the situation either in the Ukraine or on this board.
I can think of a couple of times when there was an immediate campaign to rescind the suspension or banning, ranging from an attack on the rules to an attack on the moderator. And another occasion when the way back was a bit more roundabout. And a couple of times when everyone pretty much realized it was the last straw.
Ultimately it is Rabble's board of course, but a forum like this can't function except by some form of consensus. This just happens to be one with members whose buttons get pushed by shows of authority, and who, with the exception of blind spots, favour open discussion even to the point of suffering rudeness . So I think that would be another strike against hard rules. Just my opinion.
(edit)
Also, it is really unfair to expect a moderator to enforce rules in our interests, or for us to complain about things being unwelcome here, yet when moderators act, have them and their authority be undermined and attacked (and some criticism definitely went into that territory). Another reason I am not into solutions that are supposedly cut and dried, but really aren't when it falls on a mod to enforce them and bear the brunt of that sometimes personal attack.
Of course anti-imperialism aside it seems these days that a significant percentage of the threads are started to trumpet the benefits of the oil and gas industry. I too worry about fake news sites and many of these threads are started with articles from US media known to have often published major lies in news stories.
OK. Not to be argumentative here, but I remember those too, and I'm not sure why babble should bend its moderation policies to accomodate that. The more transparent and equitable the policies are, the less gravitas anyone has when they complain that their folk hero has been silenced by the authorities.
I remember much weeping and gnashing of teeth over the brief suspensions of several babblers, but it remains unclear to me why those babblers couldn't espouse their anti-(imperialism, racism, U.S., NATO, pornography, Capitalism, etc.) views without falling afoul of babble's policies. Certainly, babble's policies don't prohibit anti-imperialism, anti-racism, anti-U.S., anti-NATO, anti-pornography or anti-Capitalist viewpoints... so it must have been something else, and something quite unrelated.
Cross posted in my last post. But we should probably leave it at that or people might forget that we're a tag team.