Please use this thread for alerting admins to moderation issues and for discussion or complaints arising from particular decisions.
The Skeptical Zone
"I beseech you, in the bowels of Christ, think it possible that you may be mistaken."
Please use this thread for alerting admins to moderation issues and for discussion or complaints arising from particular decisions.
I concur.
Same for me. Work got intense and I’m skimming to catch up now. If I wanted to enforce the rules to the letter, I suspect I could Guano 20% of the comments since Thursday night. I submit the fact that the site hasn’t imploded since then in support of my recommendations in The Skeptical Zone is Broken.
Early days. Whether the good drives out the bad or the bad drives out the good is, for me, still an open question. I’m somewhat concerned that, like climate change, the realisation we should have done something arrives too late for effective action.
Alan:
No. We already have evidence that the site does just fine in the absence of guanoing. Remember the experiment during which guanoing was only done at the request of the “injured” party? Even you admitted that the results were positive.
You’ve been crying wolf for a long time. Remember your fretting over a fictitious dropoff in comments that turned out to be merely your misinterpretation of the data?
DiEb’s recent statistics put the lie to your “sky is falling” worries.
Fair point. How do we do A-B testing?
That’s roughly how I look at it.
Patrick,
There’s a prior issue. I’ll PM you and Neil later.
Why is it OK for Richie to attack me with false accusations but not OK for me to respond in kind?
It’s not OK for anyone to break the rules. Though admins are exercising greater discretion currently. We don’t have 24hr surveillance. If you have cause for complaint, rather than respond in kind, report the offending comment to an admin (via PM works best for me). At the moment, all your comments are scrutinized, which is why your rule breakers will get picked up and others get missed.
Admins break the rules, Alan. Richie, acartia, adapa, OMagain all break the rules almost every time they post. The recent comments of mine put into guano are more tame than those of others. All you are doing is proving this site is broken and the mods are hypocrites
Frankie,
Try what I’m suggesting. Also you could try setting a good example rather than joining a race to the bottom.
Frankie,
Do you have an example of such a comment of mine? Do tell.
What race? The posters I mentioned dwell on the bottom
When you respond in kind it does make it look like you’re in a race to the bottom.
IDists here have a bad enough rap as it is. No point in, for example, calling someone else a child abuser who wasn’t even involved in that entire debacle.
Don’t be like Patrick. Don’t be like Adapa. Use the Ignore feature. It really does work.
It is incredibly mean and cold-hearted to ask him for the entailments of the thing he just made up.
LoL! So now I am Jerry Coyne, Charles Darwin and Richard Dawkins- the scientists who said evolution proceeds via blind and mindless processes. Or is Richie just posting ignorant diatribe?
And what are you doing> It looks like you and keiths are in free-fall to the bottom.
I believe any [eta: recent] rule-violating comments I’ve made about keiths have been made in Noyau, where they belong.
Think of it this way. If we up our game then you either get the opponents only going to Guano or you get the tantrums from the opponents showing up in threads where they are doing all the name calling. 🙂
I don’t have to call keiths a whiny dipshit, people can see it for themselves.
You should heed your own advice
I thought you were enjoying yourself. Would you rather I wound moderation back up to eleven in that thread? That might drop the comment count down quite a bit.
It doesn’t have anything to do with that thread, Alan. You are always trying to drag any discussion down to the bottom. But that is only because you really don’t have anything to say nor add. It’s a limbic thing with you
Alan Fox,
I am ignoring most of the posters. So if you want to guano all off-topic comments please have at it. The comment count thing is just to get Richie and his minions to melt down- and it’s working
Hi Richie, I can’t read what you are posting but I am sure that it is substance-free bullshit. That is because of your history- you always post substance-free bullshit.
Frankie,
Aw, Joe. Do you need a safe space? Poor snowflake.
There’s no rule about being off-topic. It’s only a guide-line.
Go to forum
“Ignore most of the posters”
????
Just kick him off, Alan. He has untelligent reasoning.
So I shouldn’t assume that those posters are posting in good faith. That’s good because I know that evolutionists do not post in good faith
That’s a complete non sequitur. There is no rule against posting an off-topic comment. I guess if it ever became a problem we might have to think of one. There is a rule against accusations of bad faith, lying and insulting. As I said, if you’d rather the rules applied strictly in your thread…
Yes, this is another damn meta-discussion about moderation. In this case I hope we can get some action items out of it.
John Harshman writes:
This is exactly the problem I pointed out in The Skeptical Zone is Broken, the ignore function doesn’t block replies to the people being ignored. It also doesn’t remove links from the new comment list, so someone committed to commenting frequently can swamp all other conversation.
As I noted in that other thread, the real solution is to provide people with the technical tools necessary to curate their own experience. The noise doesn’t matter if you can control how much of it you see based on your personal preferences. Unfortunately, those tools are not available in WordPress.
I am a free speech absolutist. I think people should be free to say whatever they like without prior restraint. I also think people have the right to choose what they want to listen to. The current site tools don’t support the latter.
One thing that we could possibly do is restrict particularly disruptive participants to one thread, as is done at AtBC. Anyone who wants to interact with those people is free to do so, but other threads are protected. We might even be able to keep those threads out of the default list of new comments. This approach is not one I suggest lightly, but it may be the only compromise between free speech and freedom to listen that our current tools give us.
I consider the role of the admins here to be caretakers of the site in Lizzie’s absence. If there’s no site left when she gets back, we haven’t done our job. I’m concerned that if the current level of noise persists, she’ll come back to nothing.
Thoughts?
So how bad is the problem? Given the increase in both content-free and flaming comments over the past few days, I have some questions for everyone, including any lurkers out there:
1) Do flare ups of low signal, high noise comments like we’re currently seeing make you less likely to actively participate at TSZ?
2) Do flare ups of low signal, high noise comments like we’re currently seeing make you less likely to read and lurk on TSZ?
3) If you are less likely to participate and read during these periods, does that make you less likely to return in the future?
4) Are there other sites that discuss similar topics that you prefer to TSZ?
5) What, if anything, would you like TSZ to change in order to address the current low signal to noise ratio?
If you’d prefer to PM me with comments and suggestions, please feel free to do so.
Richardthughes,
I would, if it were solely up to me.
I think we have a particular problem with a particular commenter who is not interested in dialogue. I think that commenter has had ample opportunity to demonstrate it and I think we should call a halt, at least temporarily. I suggest a suspension of posting privileges for, say 30 days.
What rules support that action by the admins?
Spam. Unresponsive, repetitive comments and lots of them. Also I think of Lizzie as Hari Seldon. She couldn’t expect to see all eventualities when setting up this Foundation. We have to deal with the Mule.
Bonus points for the Asimov reference. The Mule was more of a sympathetic character than the one we’re dealing with, though.
There is no rule against spam that isn’t caught by the spam filters on the Rules page.
I have a few concerns, despite my suggested solution:
1) The admins making up new rules without Lizzie’s approval is not allowed by the existing rules.
2) Hard cases make bad law. Right now the risk of losing participation at the site seems clear. Taking this kind of step once makes it easier to do in the future in situations that are more hazy. Down that path lies UD.
3) Any action we take is going to be used for victim points, claims of censorship, and association with UD.
I’m don’t like the idea of ghetto threads, but it seems the least onerous of the possibilities.
Once again Patrick’s view of the site is utterly myopic.
My answers though;
No
No
N/A
No
Enforce the rules for all parties equally.
Some things never change.
There’s already a rule against spam. It’s whether a plague of repetitive and unresponsive one-liners can be called spam that is the issue for me. I think yes. You may disagree.
But this would only need to be considered if we were creating a new rule, which I don’t think we are.
Spamming should result in an outright ban. I’m saying a suspension with the opportunity to rejoin subject to an undertaking as to future conduct. It comes back to whether you consider a particular posting pattern as spam.
That would be new territory. But we can do it with existing software. I’d compromise on that.
It’s a fine ideal. We should.
So let’s say we give people their own ghetto [racist] thread. Sure, but do it for everyone. But how will you do this?
We might even be able to keep those threads out of the default list of new comments.
Patrick seems completely oblivious to the fact that people are responding to Frankie and Frankie is responding to them. It’s spam on both sides.
But it does seem to be limited to a single thread, so I can choose to read it for the entertainment value, or I can choose not to. I don’t see the problem here. If John doesn’t want to see Frankie’s comments why is he trolling Frankie’s thread?
I seem to remember Patrick spamming the same thing over and over, which is even worse than what Frankie is doing. He should have proposed this back then when he was the offending party. Or perhaps it’s not really about what is being done but who is doing it.
I honestly have no problem with the admins making new rules. Lizzie has entrusted them with the welfare of the site. I hope that Alan and Neil act as moderating influences on Patrick’s over-the-top tendencies.
That said, what would the creation of “ghetto” threads be, if not the making up of new rules?
bullshit. and. so. what.
I don’t necessarily disagree. I need to ponder it.
Neil, what do you think about the scope of the problem and possible solutions?
Even Patrick’s caught the spam virus. Can we give him his own ‘ghetto” thread?
Or is it ok when Patrick does it?
My view is similar to Alan’s.
Start Here
Spam?
My suggestion would be:
1) acknowledge that Lizzie made a mistake in unbanning Frankie/Joe; and
2) reban him.
It isn’t unfair at all. The rule about bannable offenses still applies to everyone equally. Frankie violated it.
‘Ghetto’ threads are unnecessary.
When the entire problem is being created by one commenter who by all rights, and in complete fairness, should have remained banned for violating a rule that applies equally to everyone here at TSZ; then the cleanest solution is simply to reban him. It’s clean and it’s absolutely fair.
We don’t need a ghetto thread cluttering up the site, and we certainly don’t need endless meta-discussions about what constitutes spam, along with dickheads like Mung and phoodoo running around pointing at people and screaming “Spam!”
It’s perverse to mess up the site like that on account of one commenter who in all fairness should already be banned.
So Frankie is ignoring most posters and declares victory because no one can refute his assertions.Nice.
See. Even keiths and I can agree sometimes. 🙂