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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 describ

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.
  - friendlybus 6y ago
    Is there any other tool you can use? A warning that it will be banned then lean into it a week later? Mark individual words automatically inside posts with a symbolic warning? That's what I'm getting at, I should probably do research on my own time. Thanks for doing the good & dirty work of moderating a subreddit.
    - carapace 6y ago
      Yeah! Shoosh already! Don't drag the debate in here! You might as well wave a red flag in front of a bull! Or pour gasoline on a tire fire! (Meant humorously with no disrespect.)
      - friendlybus 6y ago
        Just interested in ideas. I'm not going to tell you were I got that old quote from, it has an incendiary speaker! :P
  - thejynxed 6y ago
    Portland (and Seattle) have had such a terrible homeless (and drug addict) problem for decades that it's been reported on in various PBS shows such as Frontline several times over the years. It even spawned an entire music subgenre in rock that gave birth to the likes of Nirvana, Hole, Mudhoney, etc.
    - jethro_tell 6y ago
      Heh, the dressing like a homeless logger/fisherman trend wasn't a show or a fashion statement. In my area, people complain that there are homeless people 'now', when I was a kid, fishermem would come home from Alaska with thousands of dollars of cash in their pockets, buy a tent and a sleeping bag and just camp right next to the bar. Lots of couch surfing. People had bars on their windows. These PNW cities have always had a lot of drugs and poverty and depression. Cities built on logging, fishing, lumber mills, paper plants, shipping ports and airplane factory work. The tech hub vibe and the people who moved to here from the suburbs see this as new. And in a way, it's been exacerbated by skyrocketing rent, but part of what we're seeing is a lack of places where these people could hide in plane sight. They've always been here. This is a subculture that has always existed.
- Goronmon 6y ago
  The 'criddler' word seems humorous. Is there any particular need to ban it outright? From my experience in the past, moderating doesn't scale at all. So you basically have to pre-empt issues that tend to lead towards requiring mod actions. An example of this would be the auto-mod stuff on Reddit (though I don't have any experience with the specifics here, just assumptions). Another approach is to root out the "trigger" words that tend to escalate arguments quickly, and are generally a sign that a discussion has just become a battle of insults instead of a useful discussion. Again, because its not just one situation between users, it's potentially dozens of arguments across a site between dozens of users. You can't wait until after things get out of control, because there isn't enough time in the day to clean stuff up in that manner. And people want clear rules for what they can and can't say and rules like "Don't be disrespectful" aren't usually super helpful, especially against people who are more malicious in their interactions. So, calling out specific words that are banned allows for a simple, straightforward rule that can be pointed to without leaving lots of wiggle room for arguments (which again, you don't have time to have with every user who complains).
  - bredren 6y ago
    Excellent points. You also get at a key issue around volume of moderation tasks.
  - pas 6y ago
    Usually the problem is, that you don't want to ban the user, but the behavior. And - reddit being mostly a textual thing - it is represented by words. Banning the user is unfair, plus they can just create a new account anyway. So you try to be alert for people who use certain phrases. Racism, xenophobia, conspiracy theories, paranoia, extreme pettiness, severely abrasive attitude, choosing beggars, and so on. And flame wars, and people jumping on others. And of course if there is a group of people showing such unwanted behavior it takes no time for the powder keg to go off. I think having sort of simple but a big ambiguous rules are okay if there are very broad but exact rules too. (Eg. Rule1: don't be a dick, Rule2: no harrassment, no xenophobia, no posting of personal information, etc.) Moderators and the community should be proactive. (I find that the best tool is reports, because that signals what people find problematic. Sometimes they are just annoyed that some newcomer posted that again. That's okay, but most of the time users report spammers, crazy serious racists with too much time, and the occasional lost redditors' posts.)
SlowRobotAhead 6y ago
This is almost off topic... but can you explain criddler? I think I’ve spent enough time around people on meth and bicycles to probably understand it - but I just don’t get it yet.
- mundo 6y ago
  It's an insulting term for scruffy looking people who are presumed to be homeless or drug-using. The reason it's contentious is that one person uses it, someone else objects to it, people take sides along left-vs-right lines, and the thread devolves in to a shouting match.
  - SlowRobotAhead 6y ago
    I guess I meant the etymology of the word. It seems it’s pretty well established though, from 2010: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=criddler https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=criddler
jerrysievert 6y ago
r/portland is one of the worst cesspool subreddits I've seen, and has had a history of really bad moderators over many years. I likely haven't read anything in r/portland since you became a mod, so I can't comment on how it is at the moment, but something about a liberal city draws out the worst in people on that subreddit. but, "criddler" is much older on the sub than "last year", it's been a mainstay for at least 10 years. and Portland doesn't have a police department, they have a police bureau (sorry, that one's a pet peeve).
- deleted 6y ago
  [deleted]
- bredren 6y ago
  Jerry, I'd welcome you to come back and see how things are now. I understand there was some moderation in the past that was difficult but that a change went through some time ago. The group of mods running the show now seem to me good people and having seen how they operate I'd be impressed if other city subs of this size are doing a far better job. I realized after writing the above that it was likely an older word than that, but it hadn't really been a growing memey word in the sub before last year that I had noticed. Maybe the year before? Time flies. And thanks for the note on the Portland Police Bureau. Too late to update my post, but I'll try to remember that one.
  - jerrysievert 6y ago
    just went and looked, many of the most popular posts are still a cesspool once you dig in, and the moderator list looks little changed from 10 years ago. I'm glad you're enjoying yourself, and have drunk the koolaid, but this just reminded me why even r/politics is a nicer place to visit.
- NoodleIncident 6y ago
  Subreddits for any location go completely against the grain of reddit. The point of a subreddit is to group people with a similar interest, but the people who live in a city don't have that shared interest, they're just in the same place. Even on the bigger side, you end up with this cross section of the entire site, shrunk down and fragmented so that it's too big to ignore the inevitable arguments between the different factions, but also too small for the moderation to be any good. Since the concept of a city subreddit is so obviously pointless, the only people who stay are the ones who like the conflict, exacerbating the problem; or in worse cases like the Canada subreddit, there is a hostile takeover by one side. If you want to talk to people who happen to live nearby, I think you should do so on a different website; reddit doesn't work at all for that usecase.
naasking 6y ago
> 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 [to ban everyone's use] was a good one Note how your conclusion doesn't actually follow: just because something isn't healthy for you, doesn't make it unhealthy for everyone else. Trying to police too much is likely why moderators get such a backlash when they employ heavy-handed tactics like outright bans. Moderators also very likely operate in a like-minded bubble: the sort of people who would volunteer to be moderators are far more likely to have more in common with each other, than with the average community member. As such, mods will likely always get backlash. For instance, I'd bet it's far more likely that your fellow mods debate to what extent language should be policed, and there are probably almost no mods questioning whether language should be policed at all. Some kind of moderation system with strictly limited mod terms and random promotions to mod status would likely improve relations, but achieving the right balance would be challenging.
- dillonmckay 6y ago
  Like moderator jury duty?
  - naasking 6y ago
    Yes, there are many possible options here for random mod status, limited terms, etc. I review a couple here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23263181 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23263181
- fzeroracer 6y ago
  > Trying to police too much is likely why moderators get such a backlash when they employ heavy-handed tactics like outright bans. This logic doesn't follow. If you don't police enough, then users have an expectation that anything goes. When you do decide to moderate behavior, you experience a backlash because you've changed stances. If you moderate too much, then you get accused of being heavy-handed, fascistic or trampling over their free speech rights. When you're a moderator, there's often very little that you can do that won't generate backlash unless the user in question is so toxic that the community as a whole agrees they need to go. Your idea of random promotions to mod status w/ limited mod terms is an incredibly bad idea as well, because the moment a bad faith actor gets promoted to mod your entire community will quickly go up in flames. Trust me, there are people that will pretend to be in good faith for months, years until it gets them a position of power just so they can burn it all down.
deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
DataWorker 6y ago
Also politicians. They too are trying to fight the good fight and help their community. Pretty much any position of authority attracts a certain mindset yes, but also changes the person who assumes that authority.

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.
- friendlybus 6y ago
  Is there any other tool you can use? A warning that it will be banned then lean into it a week later? Mark individual words automatically inside posts with a symbolic warning? That's what I'm getting at, I should probably do research on my own time. Thanks for doing the good & dirty work of moderating a subreddit.
  - carapace 6y ago
    Yeah! Shoosh already! Don't drag the debate in here! You might as well wave a red flag in front of a bull! Or pour gasoline on a tire fire! (Meant humorously with no disrespect.)
    - friendlybus 6y ago
      Just interested in ideas. I'm not going to tell you were I got that old quote from, it has an incendiary speaker! :P
- thejynxed 6y ago
  Portland (and Seattle) have had such a terrible homeless (and drug addict) problem for decades that it's been reported on in various PBS shows such as Frontline several times over the years. It even spawned an entire music subgenre in rock that gave birth to the likes of Nirvana, Hole, Mudhoney, etc.
  - jethro_tell 6y ago
    Heh, the dressing like a homeless logger/fisherman trend wasn't a show or a fashion statement. In my area, people complain that there are homeless people 'now', when I was a kid, fishermem would come home from Alaska with thousands of dollars of cash in their pockets, buy a tent and a sleeping bag and just camp right next to the bar. Lots of couch surfing. People had bars on their windows. These PNW cities have always had a lot of drugs and poverty and depression. Cities built on logging, fishing, lumber mills, paper plants, shipping ports and airplane factory work. The tech hub vibe and the people who moved to here from the suburbs see this as new. And in a way, it's been exacerbated by skyrocketing rent, but part of what we're seeing is a lack of places where these people could hide in plane sight. They've always been here. This is a subculture that has always existed.
Goronmon 6y ago
The 'criddler' word seems humorous. Is there any particular need to ban it outright? From my experience in the past, moderating doesn't scale at all. So you basically have to pre-empt issues that tend to lead towards requiring mod actions. An example of this would be the auto-mod stuff on Reddit (though I don't have any experience with the specifics here, just assumptions). Another approach is to root out the "trigger" words that tend to escalate arguments quickly, and are generally a sign that a discussion has just become a battle of insults instead of a useful discussion. Again, because its not just one situation between users, it's potentially dozens of arguments across a site between dozens of users. You can't wait until after things get out of control, because there isn't enough time in the day to clean stuff up in that manner. And people want clear rules for what they can and can't say and rules like "Don't be disrespectful" aren't usually super helpful, especially against people who are more malicious in their interactions. So, calling out specific words that are banned allows for a simple, straightforward rule that can be pointed to without leaving lots of wiggle room for arguments (which again, you don't have time to have with every user who complains).
- bredren 6y ago
  Excellent points. You also get at a key issue around volume of moderation tasks.
- pas 6y ago
  Usually the problem is, that you don't want to ban the user, but the behavior. And - reddit being mostly a textual thing - it is represented by words. Banning the user is unfair, plus they can just create a new account anyway. So you try to be alert for people who use certain phrases. Racism, xenophobia, conspiracy theories, paranoia, extreme pettiness, severely abrasive attitude, choosing beggars, and so on. And flame wars, and people jumping on others. And of course if there is a group of people showing such unwanted behavior it takes no time for the powder keg to go off. I think having sort of simple but a big ambiguous rules are okay if there are very broad but exact rules too. (Eg. Rule1: don't be a dick, Rule2: no harrassment, no xenophobia, no posting of personal information, etc.) Moderators and the community should be proactive. (I find that the best tool is reports, because that signals what people find problematic. Sometimes they are just annoyed that some newcomer posted that again. That's okay, but most of the time users report spammers, crazy serious racists with too much time, and the occasional lost redditors' posts.)

SlowRobotAhead 6y ago

This is almost off topic... but can you explain criddler? I think I’ve spent enough time around people on meth and bicycles to probably understand it - but I just don’t get it yet.

mundo 6y ago
It's an insulting term for scruffy looking people who are presumed to be homeless or drug-using. The reason it's contentious is that one person uses it, someone else objects to it, people take sides along left-vs-right lines, and the thread devolves in to a shouting match.
- SlowRobotAhead 6y ago
  I guess I meant the etymology of the word. It seems it’s pretty well established though, from 2010: https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=criddler https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=criddler

jerrysievert 6y ago

r/portland is one of the worst cesspool subreddits I've seen, and has had a history of really bad moderators over many years. I likely haven't read anything in r/portland since you became a mod, so I can't comment on how it is at the moment, but something about a liberal city draws out the worst in people on that subreddit. but, "criddler" is much older on the sub than "last year", it's been a mainstay for at least 10 years. and Portland doesn't have a police department, they have a police bureau (sorry, that one's a pet peeve).

deleted 6y ago
[deleted]
bredren 6y ago
Jerry, I'd welcome you to come back and see how things are now. I understand there was some moderation in the past that was difficult but that a change went through some time ago. The group of mods running the show now seem to me good people and having seen how they operate I'd be impressed if other city subs of this size are doing a far better job. I realized after writing the above that it was likely an older word than that, but it hadn't really been a growing memey word in the sub before last year that I had noticed. Maybe the year before? Time flies. And thanks for the note on the Portland Police Bureau. Too late to update my post, but I'll try to remember that one.
- jerrysievert 6y ago
  just went and looked, many of the most popular posts are still a cesspool once you dig in, and the moderator list looks little changed from 10 years ago. I'm glad you're enjoying yourself, and have drunk the koolaid, but this just reminded me why even r/politics is a nicer place to visit.
NoodleIncident 6y ago
Subreddits for any location go completely against the grain of reddit. The point of a subreddit is to group people with a similar interest, but the people who live in a city don't have that shared interest, they're just in the same place. Even on the bigger side, you end up with this cross section of the entire site, shrunk down and fragmented so that it's too big to ignore the inevitable arguments between the different factions, but also too small for the moderation to be any good. Since the concept of a city subreddit is so obviously pointless, the only people who stay are the ones who like the conflict, exacerbating the problem; or in worse cases like the Canada subreddit, there is a hostile takeover by one side. If you want to talk to people who happen to live nearby, I think you should do so on a different website; reddit doesn't work at all for that usecase.

naasking 6y ago

> 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 [to ban everyone's use] was a good one Note how your conclusion doesn't actually follow: just because something isn't healthy for you, doesn't make it unhealthy for everyone else. Trying to police too much is likely why moderators get such a backlash when they employ heavy-handed tactics like outright bans. Moderators also very likely operate in a like-minded bubble: the sort of people who would volunteer to be moderators are far more likely to have more in common with each other, than with the average community member. As such, mods will likely always get backlash. For instance, I'd bet it's far more likely that your fellow mods debate to what extent language should be policed, and there are probably almost no mods questioning whether language should be policed at all. Some kind of moderation system with strictly limited mod terms and random promotions to mod status would likely improve relations, but achieving the right balance would be challenging.

dillonmckay 6y ago
Like moderator jury duty?
- naasking 6y ago
  Yes, there are many possible options here for random mod status, limited terms, etc. I review a couple here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23263181 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23263181
fzeroracer 6y ago
> Trying to police too much is likely why moderators get such a backlash when they employ heavy-handed tactics like outright bans. This logic doesn't follow. If you don't police enough, then users have an expectation that anything goes. When you do decide to moderate behavior, you experience a backlash because you've changed stances. If you moderate too much, then you get accused of being heavy-handed, fascistic or trampling over their free speech rights. When you're a moderator, there's often very little that you can do that won't generate backlash unless the user in question is so toxic that the community as a whole agrees they need to go. Your idea of random promotions to mod status w/ limited mod terms is an incredibly bad idea as well, because the moment a bad faith actor gets promoted to mod your entire community will quickly go up in flames. Trust me, there are people that will pretend to be in good faith for months, years until it gets them a position of power just so they can burn it all down.

deleted 6y ago

[deleted]

DataWorker 6y ago

Also politicians. They too are trying to fight the good fight and help their community. Pretty much any position of authority attracts a certain mindset yes, but also changes the person who assumes that authority.