cross-posted from: https://lemmy.dbzer0.com/post/27346179
When an arrogant presumptuous dick dumps hot-headed uncivil drivel into a relatively apolitical thread about plumbing technology and reduces the quality of the discussion to a Trump vs. $someone style shitshow of threadcrap, the tools given to the moderator are:
- remove the comment (chainsaw)
- ban the user from the community (sledge hammer)
Where are the refined sophisticated tools?
When it comes to nannying children, we don’t give teachers a baseball bat. It’s the wrong tool. We are forced into a dilemma: either let the garbage float, or censor. This encourages moderators to be tyrants and too many choose that route. Moderators often censor civil ideas purely because they want to control the narrative (not the quality).
I want to do quality control, not narrative control. I oppose the tyranny of censorship in all but the most vile cases of bullying or spam. The modlog does not give enough transparency. If I wholly remove that asshole’s comment, then I become an asshole too.
He is on-topic. Just poor quality drivel that contributes nothing of value. Normally voting should solve this. X number of down votes causes the comment to be folded out of view, but not censored. It would rightfully keep the comment accessible to people who want to pick through the garbage and expand the low quality posts.
Why voting fails:
- tiny community means there can never be enough down votes to fold a comment.
- votes have no meaning. Bob votes emotionally and down votes every idea he dislikes, while Alice down votes off-topic or uncivil comments, regardless of agreement.
Solutions:
I’m not trying to strongly prescribe a fix in particular, but have some ideas to brainstorm:
Mods get the option to simply fold a shitty comment when the msg is still on-topic and slightly better quality than spam. This should come with a one-line field (perhaps mandatory) where the mod must rationalise the action (e.g. “folded for uncivil rant with no useful contribution to the technical information sought”).
A warning counter. Mods can send a warning to a user in connection with a comment. This is already possible but requires moderators to have an unhuman memory. A warning should not just be like any DM… it should be tracked and counted. Mods should see a counter next to participants indicating how many warnings they have received and a page to view them all, so as to aid in decisions on whether to ban a user from a community.
Moderator votes should be heavier than user votes. Perhaps an ability to choose how many votes they want to cast on a particular comment to have an effect like folding. Of course this should be transparent so it’s clear that X number of votes were cast by a mod. Rationale:
- mods have better awareness of the purpose and rules of the community
- mods are stakeholders with more investment into the success of a community than users
Moderators could control the weight of other user’s votes. When 6 people upvote an uncivil post and only 2 people down vote it, it renders voting as a tool impotent and in fact harm inducing. Lousy/malicious voters have no consequences for harmful voting and thus no incentive to use voting as an effective tool for good. A curator should be able to adjust voting weight accordingly. E.g. take an action on a particular poll that results in a weight adjustment (positive or negative) on the users who voted a particular direction. The effect would be to cause voters to prioritize civil quality above whether they simply like/dislike an idea, so that votes actually take on a universal meaning. Which of course then makes voting an effective tool for folding poor quality content (as it was originally intended).
(edit) Ability for a moderator to remove a voting option. If a comment is uncivil, allowing upvotes is only detrimental. So a moderator should be able to narrow the ballot to either down vote or neutral. And perhaps the contrary as well (like some beehaw is instance-wide). And perhaps the option to neutralise voting on a specific comment.
Warnings would be useful, folding would be useless, vote manipulation would be bad for mod action transparency
Bizarre that you think that. Bizarre that people are agreeing. Can you elaborate? Why would it be useful to have low-quality content fully expanded by default? Isn’t the status quo with Lemmy to use voting to sink and fold low quality posts?
I personally do not have time to read every single comment when I step into a thread. I want to see the best commentary first and only the less interesting stuff if choose to keep reading, if I have time. The nature of a tree of threads results in some garbage responses to quality comments that rise to the top. If you do not fold anything, you are then forced to see junk before quality, because the 2nd best comment in the tree is still below a low quality reply to the best quality comment.
It would be a waste of mods’ time to decide whether each comment should be folded or not
Folding is not an obligation, so no time is wasted.
There is already some obligation for mods to decide whether each comment should be removed or not (as content can be illegal). But luckily there are mechanisms in place so mods do not have to read every comment. If you are worried that users would use the /alert/ mechanism to ask a mod to fold something, that’s already a risk and a problem. Adding the fold capability does not add to that burden.
I suppose you are right that more mod action options does not necessarily increase mod burden, but i still think that its not something that would be very useful as comment removal already functions as a way for getting rid of annoying comments, its not the chainsaw you portray it as, its merely a slap on the wrist
No downvotes on hexbear. So no, it’s not the status quo here.
You’re getting pushback because we don’t put a lot of value in civility here and the best way to disagree or criticize someone is to post about it.
I said “status quo with Lemmy”, thus talking about the software, not the configuration. Note this is a cross-post. The original post was on Sopuli.
The software is designed to use the down votes to arrange the better quality content on top of the thread (to some extent¹). Of course if you disable the functionality on an instance then that particular instance does not use it, which is orthogonal to a discussion of how to improve the software. It would be bad quality engineering to design the software for a specific configuration of a particular instance.
¹ though not entirely because age is a factor AFAICT.
You can’t disagree when the post is censored. What do you reply to? I don’t think anyone has yet mentioned an alternative way to discourage a moderator from abusing their power to remove msgs they don’t agree with, which is the most rampant problem with moderation in the threadiverse (not just talking about hexbear but wherever Lemmy runs). The hexbear status quo encourages the abuses of power they think they are discouraging by having blunt tools. Which is not to say I’ve seen any such abuses of power on hexbear… not visited it much.
A user with that mindset has decided to put faith that the moderation team will make good decisions on what they should read. Okay, sure, fine. You want your users to have that faith. But now you are turning comments that annoy you into “why was this comment folded?” discussions. If you fold a comment that people agree with, you’re inviting the community to vent about moderation, which I guess you could sensibly handle by just folding those comments too. Problem solved, everyone’s happy.
The whole point seems to be that you’re desperately searching for some compromise where the moderator can dictate the discussion while avoiding accusations of stifling free speech. But if your comment is the one getting folded, you might not see your free speech as being respected. Why is there a barrier to people seeing my thoughts, but no barrier for others? It’s a dream of reducing visibility of opinions you don’t like while still being a heroic free speech warrior.
People on forums understand that moderators exist and there are things they can say that will be censored and removed immediately. So you’re working with everyone knowing speech is not free and we need to trust moderation will not overstep. A modlog for transparency helps with that. Visibly seeing that mods are managing opinions that don’t cross the line is not helpful.