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.
I haven’t seen that issue here, broadly speaking.
Some of what you suggest is very subtle, and many people wouldn’t notice it being done to other users. It seems like a very direct, but subtle, way for moderators to pick sides and show users they like/don’t like different treatment. With removing comments, it is obvious to everyone a comment was removed and checking to make sure the decision was fair is easy. Collapsing a comment because you don’t think its great is subtle enough for other users not to notice, and is a very subjective ruling.
Giving them subtle tools is what encourages power. Right now, if a mod doesn’t like what I post, they have to justify the removal. They don’t have to justify collapsing because “oh it was just low effort” or something like that. With a removal, the reason needs to be concrete and defensible. Which is good, that’s the role I feel moderators should have. Remove things for clearly defined reasons.
I’ve seen removals without rationale. The software allows it and mods tend to only give a reason in the most justifiable cases (spam). I’ve also seen robotic removals, where nothing appears in the modlog. These are entirely untraceable. It happens when a removal is systemwide and not by a local moderator.
Of course these features can be designed to spec. A msg folding action could (and should) force a rationale, which would then be more transparent than removals (which users have to go to the modlog for – only to potentially find nothing). Burying rationale in the modlog is not good for accountability because that’s less visited than the thread, which is where the folding rationale would appear.
And worse, removals are unnoticeable to the author. Authors see their own removed comments just fine. The status quo is very sneaky. I’ve discovered my comments were quietly removed /months/ after the removal, incidentally, because of the subtle way they are implemented. In one case it was because I was searching for my own comment using a different account than what I authored it with, and that was the only reason I could then realize it was removed. If you generally want to know if you have been censored, you need to periodically search for your own posts in the sitewide modlog. It does not get any more subtle than that.