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.
All you're asking for is to replace clear cut censorship with more subtle, manipulative, petty ego tripping censorship.
And calling it “quality control”, lmao
To say /subtle/ is to overlook the expressed transparency of mod votes being distinguished from user votes. Anything you understood to undermine transparency is a misunderstanding. Transparency is important. None of the mechanisms mentioned are necessarily opaque if competently designed.
A brainstorm is not meant as a deeply detailed specification. You have to be able to imagine how transparency can be built into the designs.
To say “petty ego tripping” is to misunderstand the purpose of voting. Voting is a means to an ends, not the ends. I doubt anyone gives a shit what the total is (except of course ego trippers). Voting has a utilitarian purpose: to influence a quality score that sinks poor quality content and/or folds it, while raising high quality posts to the top. To have contempt for accurate scoring is to have contempt for quality control and curation.
To worry about voting losing its role of displaying an integer discrete vote count is actually to promote ego tripping. Using the votes for utilitarian purpose diminishes the use case as an ego tripper’s status symbol. So if you oppose ego tripping, you’re actually on the wrong side of this.
Votes could in fact remain as integers, 1 per vote, if you want to preserve the ego tripping function. While the quality score could be a separate number with a composition and calculation that need not be hidden from view.
(update) Consider how SpamAssassin works. It computes a score then it also gives detail on how the score was calculated:
X-Spam-Flag: YES X-Spam-Score: 7.2 X-Spam-Level: ****** X-Spam-Status: Yes, score=7.2 required=5.0 tests=HTML_MESSAGE, RCVD_IN_DNSWL_NONE,SPF_HELO_NONE,SPF_NONE,URIBL_BLOCKED autolearn=unavailable autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4Rough example but a post quality score could be more or less similarly refined using smarter criteria than just equal weighted votes per account, particularly if people get multiple categories to vote on.
That's a lot of words to say "I should have more ways to ego trip while moderating."
What about the post you linked is uncivil?
Are you a person of land?