6 ms·

This is a really interesting insight, thanks. There are roughly two views on moderators. Moderators think that moderators are the thin green line protecting th

by twic 6y ago

This is a really interesting insight, thanks. There are roughly two views on moderators. Moderators think that moderators are the thin green line protecting the ordinary users from a handful of bad actors, letting them live in blissful ignorance of the awful things that are happening. Ordinary users think the that moderators are power-mad bullies who ban and delete as they see fit, with no accountability. Both of these things can be true at once! This reminds me a lot of the situation with the police, who are to an extent the moderators of the big room [1]. 90% of a policeman's time is spent dealing with a small number of really nasty people. 90% of a member of the public's interaction with the police is a policeman exceeding their authority, not being interested in helping with a problem, etc [2]. If you spend 90% of your time dealing with really awful people, you will get messed up. You will develop an itchy trigger finger. Most of the time - most of your time - that's appropriate. But when you're dealing with someone who's not awful, you will get it wrong. [1] http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/B/Big-Room.html http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/B/Big-Room.html [2] Maybe that's not true of you. Maybe that's not true in general where you live. It is true in general where i live.

bredren 6y ago
You're welcome. > Both of these things can be true at once! I've been on both sides of this. Last year, /r/portland began using the word 'criddler' to describe people in various states of meth-addiction and bicycle thievery. The word was beginning to be used very often to disparage many different types of people. The moderators made a decision to ban it, and the community backlash was supreme. I let the mods have it as well. After a few months, I came to terms with the label of 'criddler' and realized how it would come up in my mind as a form of negative judgement on a person that was not healthy for me. I realized their decision was a good one, and I described this turn around in my nomination thread running for moderator. Your description of the situation with the police is apt and I have thought similarly many times. Most people have no idea what day-to-day police work is. If it was possible to see the challenge of dealing with keeping the peace there would likely be more compassion for people when mistakes are made or there's anger about moderator decisions that affect the community.
- friendlybus 6y ago
  The 'criddler' word seems humorous. Is there any particular need to ban it outright? These kinds of neologism happen all the time in real life and we ask people to 'tone it down' or give some other social signal that the joke has gone too far. The social feedback is immediate with breathing room, nobody is ejected from social areas, but you know they might be eventually. The joke naturally deflates as the last dregs of fun come out of it, and we all move on. Someone famous once said (100yrs ago) that when people write to you they want to test their mettle. It is often best not to reply until a week after the letter was sent and to find the fire in the original message has since left the person who sent the letter. These instantaneous and unpredictable word bans seem to be almost the perfect design for getting the maximum amount burn out of a given burst of new flame. Is the lone moderator too far removed from the pulse of the crowd to give effective feedback?
  - bredren 6y ago
    You'll find plenty of debate on this specific subject in the sub's post about it. The word was humorous to me at one point as well. However, it was being applied in general to homeless people. Portland, like many cities, has a serious and growing problem with homelessness. The word was being used to demonize and unfairly group drug addicted folks, people with mental health issues and those who are not those things but still homeless. I do not know if there was a need to ban it outright, however I think there were reasons to want to. To some extent, sub-wide decisions like this are taste-profile questions and with taste you will not get agreement.[2] For example, Craig Newmark had to walk a fine line with adult services on Craigslist.[1] Many craigslist users wanted those forums. Many did not. Ultimately, I think decisions like this give character to the community. So with /r/portland, banning 'criddler' wasn't just about banning a word, presenting a posture of the sub toward homeless people in general. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craigslist#Adult_services_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craigslist#Adult_services_cont... [2] One way to solve this is to allow the sub to elect moderators, which is what /r/portland did. In this case, I did say that I was for the ban on the word and was still elected by the community that was angered by the ban.
    - 6y ago
Majromax 6y ago
> There are roughly two views on moderators. Moderators think that moderators are the thin green line protecting the ordinary users from a handful of bad actors, letting them live in blissful ignorance of the awful things that are happening. You can also split moderation along another axis, dividing on whether moderators are curators or janitors. The janitorial view would be that moderators should be generally hands-off, acting only in clear-cut cases of abuse or spam. The community does or should mostly run itself through social norms, and heavy-handed moderation is unnecessarily and unfairly restrictive. The curation view is that moderators serve an active role in building the community, and they should generally act strongly to define and preserve community norms. The community is the moderators' space first, and a free space second if at all.
lalaithion 6y ago
The analogy is really insightful, but also makes me slightly uneasy. When a moderator gets it wrong, you can't comment on an internet forum. When a police officer gets it wrong, you're dead.
- ska 6y ago
  The latter is why policing often fails in the absence of serious, dedicated, time intensive protocol development and (more so) training dedicated to countering this effect.
- downerending 6y ago
  > When a police officer gets it wrong, you're dead. Or, as often happens, they're dead. I don't envy members of a profession that have to get every life-and-death decision right in real time on a daily basis.
  - rootusrootus 6y ago
    That's a fair point, although statistically the job of police officer doesn't crack the top 10 in most dangerous careers.
    - downerending 6y ago
      Similarly, a vanishingly small proportion of citizens (as opposed to bad guys) have a life-altering bad experience with the police. It'd be interesting to see real numbers, but I suspect officers on the beat get the short end of that stick.
- twic 6y ago
  Which is why we, in principle, regulate the police much more than moderators. The classical ideal of policing is that the most the police can do is apprehend you and put you in front of a judge and jury. The jury are specifically not people who spend all their time with criminals, so they should be able to act as an effective check on the policeman's instincts. Then we have all sorts of procedures and laws and rules of evidence and oversight and so on, to try and guide the police into doing their job well, and protect people who are caught up by mistake. Moderators operate purely on the Judge Dredd model. But then, in reality, the police operate in a 90% classical, 10% Dredd sort of way (for values of 90% and 10% that vary by location). They can mete out small punishments without going to court, oversight is not very effective, etc.
randrews 6y ago
Having been a moderator of a large, 60k-ish person subreddit for a couple years, I can assure you that that's not the case: removing spam and other obvious rule breaking (sending users death threats, racial slurs, etc) took no more than a few minutes a day. Well over 90% of my fellow moderators' time was spent exceeding their authority: harassing people they just disliked, removing posts for personal biases, and so on. It's a job that attracts that sort of person, people who just want things to function smoothly will get fed up with it quickly, the only people who stay at it will be the ones who want to mold the community to their vision (whether it wants to be molded or not).
oldsklgdfth 6y ago
>If you spend 90% of your time dealing with really awful people, you will get messed up. I try to remember this when interacting with law enforcement. If you have to call the police, you're having a bad day. If you're a police your job is dealing with everyone's bad day.
TeMPOraL 6y ago
> 90% of a member of the public's interaction with the police is a policeman exceeding their authority, not being interested in helping with a problem, etc What complicates matters even more is that the interaction usually involves fear at least on one side. In a peaceful society, a regular citizen doesn't interact with police officers day to day. If you capture the attention of an officer, it usually means either something bad happened to you, or you're suspected of doing something wrong - both of which put you in a "fight or flight" state. I suspect that the most common interaction between a westerner and a police officer involves said citizen breaking traffic rules, which is a pretty antagonistic situation from the start.
pdonis 6y ago
> Moderators think that moderators are the thin green line protecting the ordinary users from a handful of bad actors, letting them live in blissful ignorance of the awful things that are happening. As a moderator on another forum (not reddit), I disagree. Many of the moderation actions I take are visible to ordinary users, and that's on purpose. For community norms to be maintained, they have to be visibly enforced: enforcement is not just for the particular bad actor, but also for the ordinary users who genuinely want to respect community norms, so they know what the boundaries are (and therefore know how to respect them), and can see that people who violate those boundaries are dealt with (so they have confidence that the norms are meaningful). > Ordinary users think the that moderators are power-mad bullies who ban and delete as they see fit, with no accountability. Again, I disagree. If moderation actions are often visible, as above, ordinary users who genuinely want to respect community norms can see what is actually being enforced, and over time, if the moderators are doing a reasonable job, ordinary users will see that the pattern of enforcement reasonably matches the stated norms that are supposed to be enforced. Most ordinary users are reasonable and don't expect perfection, but they do expect consistency and reasonable judgment. The biggest problem I see facing good moderation is that moderators can't be everywhere at once. One way to address that is to give ordinary users a way to report problematic posts, to bring them to the attention of the moderators. That also gives ordinary users another way to see how moderation is being done, because they can see what is or is not done in response to their reports. There will always be some people who are never satisfied, and who will find something to complain about no matter what moderators do. But I don't think most ordinary users fall into that category. Also, about "no accountability": ultimately, as a moderator, I'm accountable to the owner of the site. Similarly, the HN mods are ultimately accountable to the owners of HN. So the corresponding question for reddit would be, who owns reddit?
bsanr2 6y ago
This assumes good faith tested to the point of cynicism, on the part of the police, when it's been shown time and again that police are indoctrinated into a regime of institutional bias from the moment they enter the force. I see the logic in your statement, but it's an imperfect model.

by twic 6y ago

bredren 6y ago

You're welcome. > Both of these things can be true at once! I've been on both sides of this. Last year, /r/portland began using the word 'criddler' to describe people in various states of meth-addiction and bicycle thievery. The word was beginning to be used very often to disparage many different types of people. The moderators made a decision to ban it, and the community backlash was supreme. I let the mods have it as well. After a few months, I came to terms with the label of 'criddler' and realized how it would come up in my mind as a form of negative judgement on a person that was not healthy for me. I realized their decision was a good one, and I described this turn around in my nomination thread running for moderator. Your description of the situation with the police is apt and I have thought similarly many times. Most people have no idea what day-to-day police work is. If it was possible to see the challenge of dealing with keeping the peace there would likely be more compassion for people when mistakes are made or there's anger about moderator decisions that affect the community.

friendlybus 6y ago
The 'criddler' word seems humorous. Is there any particular need to ban it outright? These kinds of neologism happen all the time in real life and we ask people to 'tone it down' or give some other social signal that the joke has gone too far. The social feedback is immediate with breathing room, nobody is ejected from social areas, but you know they might be eventually. The joke naturally deflates as the last dregs of fun come out of it, and we all move on. Someone famous once said (100yrs ago) that when people write to you they want to test their mettle. It is often best not to reply until a week after the letter was sent and to find the fire in the original message has since left the person who sent the letter. These instantaneous and unpredictable word bans seem to be almost the perfect design for getting the maximum amount burn out of a given burst of new flame. Is the lone moderator too far removed from the pulse of the crowd to give effective feedback?
- bredren 6y ago
  You'll find plenty of debate on this specific subject in the sub's post about it. The word was humorous to me at one point as well. However, it was being applied in general to homeless people. Portland, like many cities, has a serious and growing problem with homelessness. The word was being used to demonize and unfairly group drug addicted folks, people with mental health issues and those who are not those things but still homeless. I do not know if there was a need to ban it outright, however I think there were reasons to want to. To some extent, sub-wide decisions like this are taste-profile questions and with taste you will not get agreement.[2] For example, Craig Newmark had to walk a fine line with adult services on Craigslist.[1] Many craigslist users wanted those forums. Many did not. Ultimately, I think decisions like this give character to the community. So with /r/portland, banning 'criddler' wasn't just about banning a word, presenting a posture of the sub toward homeless people in general. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craigslist#Adult_services_controversy https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craigslist#Adult_services_cont... [2] One way to solve this is to allow the sub to elect moderators, which is what /r/portland did. In this case, I did say that I was for the ban on the word and was still elected by the community that was angered by the ban.
  - 6y ago

Majromax 6y ago

> There are roughly two views on moderators. Moderators think that moderators are the thin green line protecting the ordinary users from a handful of bad actors, letting them live in blissful ignorance of the awful things that are happening. You can also split moderation along another axis, dividing on whether moderators are curators or janitors. The janitorial view would be that moderators should be generally hands-off, acting only in clear-cut cases of abuse or spam. The community does or should mostly run itself through social norms, and heavy-handed moderation is unnecessarily and unfairly restrictive. The curation view is that moderators serve an active role in building the community, and they should generally act strongly to define and preserve community norms. The community is the moderators' space first, and a free space second if at all.

lalaithion 6y ago

The analogy is really insightful, but also makes me slightly uneasy. When a moderator gets it wrong, you can't comment on an internet forum. When a police officer gets it wrong, you're dead.

ska 6y ago
The latter is why policing often fails in the absence of serious, dedicated, time intensive protocol development and (more so) training dedicated to countering this effect.
downerending 6y ago
> When a police officer gets it wrong, you're dead. Or, as often happens, they're dead. I don't envy members of a profession that have to get every life-and-death decision right in real time on a daily basis.
- rootusrootus 6y ago
  That's a fair point, although statistically the job of police officer doesn't crack the top 10 in most dangerous careers.
  - downerending 6y ago
    Similarly, a vanishingly small proportion of citizens (as opposed to bad guys) have a life-altering bad experience with the police. It'd be interesting to see real numbers, but I suspect officers on the beat get the short end of that stick.
twic 6y ago
Which is why we, in principle, regulate the police much more than moderators. The classical ideal of policing is that the most the police can do is apprehend you and put you in front of a judge and jury. The jury are specifically not people who spend all their time with criminals, so they should be able to act as an effective check on the policeman's instincts. Then we have all sorts of procedures and laws and rules of evidence and oversight and so on, to try and guide the police into doing their job well, and protect people who are caught up by mistake. Moderators operate purely on the Judge Dredd model. But then, in reality, the police operate in a 90% classical, 10% Dredd sort of way (for values of 90% and 10% that vary by location). They can mete out small punishments without going to court, oversight is not very effective, etc.

randrews 6y ago

Having been a moderator of a large, 60k-ish person subreddit for a couple years, I can assure you that that's not the case: removing spam and other obvious rule breaking (sending users death threats, racial slurs, etc) took no more than a few minutes a day. Well over 90% of my fellow moderators' time was spent exceeding their authority: harassing people they just disliked, removing posts for personal biases, and so on. It's a job that attracts that sort of person, people who just want things to function smoothly will get fed up with it quickly, the only people who stay at it will be the ones who want to mold the community to their vision (whether it wants to be molded or not).

oldsklgdfth 6y ago

>If you spend 90% of your time dealing with really awful people, you will get messed up. I try to remember this when interacting with law enforcement. If you have to call the police, you're having a bad day. If you're a police your job is dealing with everyone's bad day.

TeMPOraL 6y ago

> 90% of a member of the public's interaction with the police is a policeman exceeding their authority, not being interested in helping with a problem, etc What complicates matters even more is that the interaction usually involves fear at least on one side. In a peaceful society, a regular citizen doesn't interact with police officers day to day. If you capture the attention of an officer, it usually means either something bad happened to you, or you're suspected of doing something wrong - both of which put you in a "fight or flight" state. I suspect that the most common interaction between a westerner and a police officer involves said citizen breaking traffic rules, which is a pretty antagonistic situation from the start.

pdonis 6y ago

> Moderators think that moderators are the thin green line protecting the ordinary users from a handful of bad actors, letting them live in blissful ignorance of the awful things that are happening. As a moderator on another forum (not reddit), I disagree. Many of the moderation actions I take are visible to ordinary users, and that's on purpose. For community norms to be maintained, they have to be visibly enforced: enforcement is not just for the particular bad actor, but also for the ordinary users who genuinely want to respect community norms, so they know what the boundaries are (and therefore know how to respect them), and can see that people who violate those boundaries are dealt with (so they have confidence that the norms are meaningful). > Ordinary users think the that moderators are power-mad bullies who ban and delete as they see fit, with no accountability. Again, I disagree. If moderation actions are often visible, as above, ordinary users who genuinely want to respect community norms can see what is actually being enforced, and over time, if the moderators are doing a reasonable job, ordinary users will see that the pattern of enforcement reasonably matches the stated norms that are supposed to be enforced. Most ordinary users are reasonable and don't expect perfection, but they do expect consistency and reasonable judgment. The biggest problem I see facing good moderation is that moderators can't be everywhere at once. One way to address that is to give ordinary users a way to report problematic posts, to bring them to the attention of the moderators. That also gives ordinary users another way to see how moderation is being done, because they can see what is or is not done in response to their reports. There will always be some people who are never satisfied, and who will find something to complain about no matter what moderators do. But I don't think most ordinary users fall into that category. Also, about "no accountability": ultimately, as a moderator, I'm accountable to the owner of the site. Similarly, the HN mods are ultimately accountable to the owners of HN. So the corresponding question for reddit would be, who owns reddit?

bsanr2 6y ago

This assumes good faith tested to the point of cynicism, on the part of the police, when it's been shown time and again that police are indoctrinated into a regime of institutional bias from the moment they enter the force. I see the logic in your statement, but it's an imperfect model.