The examples I used were only intended as examples of what is and is not a personal attack. They were absolutely not intended as examples of how to handle racism. Racism is an unacceptable behavior here, and cleaning that up should be on the moderators, just like any other CoC violation. We do not ask or expect people being targeted by racism to walk through why things are racist. That would be exhausting and unfair emotional labor.
Please remember that, in the past, we’ve been operating under a policy of minimal moderation. When we adopted the Code of Conduct, that was the clear preference of large parts of the community.
Times have changed. We’re trying to figure out how we should be handling it now. And we’re open to suggestions.
That last sentence is exactly my stance. If the mods are unable/unwilling to enforce the CoC, trying to rebut racism (and thereby starting a flame war) won’t help, even a little bit, not even as a last resort.
It won’t make the racism go away. It won’t make the racists less racist. (And especially not on other forums.) It won’t even make by-standing readers more sympathetic to the righteous offended party as Lucea described in her earlier “murder” example.
It certainly won’t let us “get back to talking about interactive fiction” as many people on this thread have expressed a wish to do.
I believe IntFic would allow us to start flame wars like that over there, as long as we’re technically civil about it (as long as we’re “nice,” in Sequitur’s terms). Lucea, do you think your life (or anyone’s lives) would be better if somebody were over there raising a unmoderated ruckus?
Certainly I personally have stepped back from fighting extended battles in public, even if I strongly agree with and support one side and not the other. In my experience the knock-on effects of a long flamewar are substantially damaging to the community, without actually correcting the thinking that led to the initial confrontation. On the contrary, in my experience, getting into a big fight typically means that people entrench to defend their positions and become less likely to change behavior in the future; people are hurt in ways that continue to arise literal years later; and it’s not always clear to me that that provides real protection to the person(s) I’m notionally defending.
But a moderation policy that supports that approach is key.
Apologies – I’ve been traveling for the past day, and so much has been deleted in this thread that I’ve lost track of who said what when. So to clarify:
I’m not sure whether the post where I clarified this still exists, but in case it doesn’t: it can sometimes take days for posts to be deleted, and in the meantime, people are likely going to read them and draw conclusions from what’s there. If nobody objects to a post, then it’s a reasonable assumption that readers will think no one had an issue with it. The front page tells people to read the Code of Conduct before reading or posting, but clearly not everyone does, especially readers who are linked directly to topics where (I think) they do not get that message. And “don’t reply to personal attacks” is far from a universal forum rule/norm.
This is particularly the case for time-sensitive or “newsworthy” (this is the wrong term) topics or posts, or posts that are likely to draw attention from people who do not normally read or post here. The incident that prompted this thread involved my postmortem entry. Most people are probably going to go to the forums to read those as soon as possible after the comp is over. They’re not going to wait for moderators. And the comp audience is larger than the active readership of this forum. It’s completely plausible that people might come there from outside.
So while rebutting the post isn’t (usually) going to make it go away, it does send the message to readers that this is not OK nor a universal opinion, and it sends the same message to the person being attacked (or whatever) as well as the message that they are not alone. The opposite way sends the message to readers that the post is both OK and something no one really has any objection to, and it sends the message to the person being attacked that they are alone, and that no one has bothered to defend them.
As far as whether my or anyone else’s life would be better if an unmoderated flame war directed at me were going on: no, of course not. That’s why, in my opinion, the overarching principle of this or any other code of conduct should be to minimize harm.
I hear you all about this, and agree that moderation is critical here. One problem is that the moderators are all volunteers with other things to do, which may make it hard for moderation to happen in a timely fashion. (On preview, cross-posting with Lucea: Lucea points out why this is such a problem.) I don’t have a good solution for this. (Also, can anyone confirm or deny that it’s impossible for two different users to flag a post? Like, if two of you want to try flagging this post, just to see if they both go through, that would be cool.
Here’s a hypothetical question: I’d like to post a postmortem myself, and while I don’t plan to break the CoC or come close to it, what would be the punishment to linking to something that violates the CoC?
It’s been mentioned you’re not responsible for external content, and I appreciate that. But in fringe cases where, say, the poster says “read the first paragraph, the rest is rubbish” and the last paragraph is disturbing etc. how much of this would be on the poster’s shoulders?
Or if a poster links to a blog post, and some other posts in that blog would be moddable in intfiction.org, how would that reflect on the poster? Again, “use best judgment” is a good rule of thumb, but it can be interpreted different ways.
ETA: I got a note saying Matt’s post has already been flagged.
ETAA: Oops, Matt! Should’ve spelt that out. Matt’s “flag me to try this experiment” post.
I just checked; even Discourse doesn’t make flags public. But it does allow flags to auto-hide posts. The default is 3 flags auto-hides the post. That could significantly help with the speed-of-moderation issue.
They tend to be felt as insults because they’re read as accusations of specific behavior that people find abhorrent. Like calling someone a cheater, a traitor, or a pedophile, it provokes a strong reaction because the behavior they believe they’re being accused of, itself, provokes a strong reaction.
That may not be the speaker’s intent. They may mean it as in “everyone’s a little bit racist, let’s remind ourselves to be better people”, not as in “Donald Sterling is banned from basketball and universally despised, serves him right for being a racist”. But considering how often those definitions are conflated, it’s inevitable that someone will take it the wrong way.
Unfortunately, I think that means this…
…won’t help. Yes, it’s focused on behavior, not people, but that’s still the same problem: describing a person’s behavior that way is likely to cause a heated argument if they think your characterization is unfair.
Maybe that’s a fight that needs to happen, but it’ll derail the thread, and it sounds like that’s a common concern.
So, whenever someone feels the need to call out another poster for saying something objectionable, it might be best to start a new thread for the complaint and link to it. Maybe even put those threads in a new subforum, like the Straight Dope Message Board’s BBQ Pit (“for rants about the outside world or quarrels between posters”). That way:
Everyone reading knows you objected, and can click through to see why
The followup discussion can proceed at its own pace, and be as direct as needed/allowed
People who aren’t interested in the followup can continue the thread with minimal distraction
Maybe not today, but I think it’s good to keep it in perspective: this forum has been around for a while, and like various other weird geeky spaces over the years, it has served as a refuge for people and interests that weren’t widely accepted elsewhere.
My point was that this isn’t about a choice between building a space for “people who are used to unthinkingly hanging out” and “people who have to be careful”, because those aren’t separate groups of people. They’re the ways people feel and behave in relation to different environments. People who flee one place for a new one because “it’s just too difficult to be careful when you’re the only one who has to be careful” will eventually find others fleeing from their new place for the same reason.
Yes, this is a problem.
And I agree, Intfic is no better in that respect. I think the meandering, conversational style has worked OK for most threads, given the size of the community, but I have had to split some threads and I expect I’ll have to do more and more of that as time goes on.
If a mechanism for “3 flags to auto-hide” is something that can be implemented, I think that’s a good idea to test out. Slide a controversial message into limbo until a moderator can review it. There are abuses and misfires that I can imagine stemming from this approach, but it might be a tolerable middle ground.
So I have a couple more questions. If we flag something, and there’s no way to show it’s been flagged, can we say “flagged?”
Also, what to do with the following case, where I think we all see through the logical holes and would not be so silly as to post, but hopefully the extreme example helps us get a bit of distance:
Person A: I think Michael Jordan used his popularity and fame to disrespect others at time. He often laughed or snickered at reporters before answering questions, but he was popular enough nobody called him on it in public. But I’ve heard personal accounts that Charles Barkley, who enjoyed playing the heel at times in interviews, could be very gracious with fans and reporters. He even made friends with Herlander Coimbra, the Angolan basketball player he got a technical foul for shoving in the 1992 Olympics.
Person B: I think that comment (is/might be) racist, because Phil Jackson was disrespectful too.
The first statement (About Jordan and Barkley) isn’t racist. But inventing straw men to express disingenuous concern about “what if someone calls something racist that isn’t racist???” is kinda a little racist. Just a scoch racist.
Re: Personal attacks and calling out bigotry,
I’m really concerned about equating saying someone is a racist with personal attacks along the lines of “go fuck yourself, dipshit.” Even if we think it’s not productive to engage people on those terms, that classification seems to implicitly equate the two things.
“Calling someone a racist” and “pointing out they do racist things” seems like a distinction without a difference, too. White fragility doesn’t magically vanish if you phrase it as “you did racist thing” rather than “you a racist,” and this goes for the defensiveness surrounding other forms of bigotry, too. If the idea is that calling someone a racist is to be regarded as a personal attack because some people will react with extreme defensiveness, wouldn’t pointing out a racist action/post also be a personal attack because the same extreme defensiveness will come up anyway? In fact, isn’t saying anything that someone finds disagreeable therefore a “personal attack” if the aggrieved party can demonstrate sufficient defensiveness?
This is why I dislike “personal attack” as a standard. It’s either applied inconsistently (some hurtful remarks are personal attacks, others aren’t) or it boils down to tone policing (it’s never about content but only ever about surface level tone). I prefer to think about this in terms of fighting words or discursive aggression, considering that what is a problem is bigoted speech, gratuitous insult-hurling, accusations meant to discredit someone, and so on, with consideration for both content and intent rather than just tone. If callouts are considered inappropriate (which, believe me, I understand and fully support if that’s the direction you want to go in) that really should be a separate rule, because callouts, simple [legitimate] conflict, and fighting words are three different things that need to be handled independently, otherwise you just muddle the waters.
But, if you are going to ban callouts, you absolutely must be swift and decisive in removing bigotry. “If you react to the bigotry, you’re also a problem and might be warned/have your posts deleted/get banned, but also we are going to take days to delete bigotry and never ban offenders” is really the worst of both worlds.
The topic creator asked for hypotheticals, so i wanted to give one that was, well, clearly hypothetical. Carolyn, I hope I have not been putting words in your mouth, but you gave the example of racism because you feel it has not been a problem. So you and the mod team, what if someone makes a clearly wrong accusation? Or if you feel someone makes a clearly wrong accusation?
It happens on the best of us, if we have bad days, that we can make more of an accusation than we meant to make. What’s the best way to go about that? What sort of punishment does the community feel is effective? And I gave a deliberately conflated example to say, ok, what sort of intellectual disagreement is valuable, and how do we use it?
I’ll accept any answer. If it isn’t to my liking, I’ll just lurk in the beta testing and code-asking areas, and if I’m shunned when I ask a question, that’s okay, too. But I do want to ask these questions, and I hope there are no hidden motives besides, yes, I’d like to stay here and participate because it’s been a place of immense personal growth for me in many ways.
Sequitur: I think aschultz’s (deliberately ridiculous, from what I understood) post wasn’t intended as a comment about disingenuous worry so much as a setup for a discussion about flagging policy.
[EDIT: Or I could have misunderstood entirely, which is probable. Either way, my point continues below.]
As a more abstract and possibly more to-the-point example:
A:
B: I think Y group are a bunch of whiny whatevers.
Presuming for the moment that B’s comment warrants a flagging, is A then allowed to state explicitly “Flagged for whatevership” as part of their reply, even if they don’t otherwise make a response to the post? It would effectively make flagging public, albeit with some effort on the part of a poster (and, as well, linked to the profile of the flagger).
Thanks, Kasran. That is a much better way to express it. Yes, I was wondering about flagging policy. Something you’d take a real life friend aside for and say, hey, I think you’re having a bad day/misunderstood what someone said.
Thank you to everyone who has contributed to this long discussion. It’s obvious that people care deeply about the health of intfiction.org and where we go as a community. You’ve given us a lot to think about.
If you have other thoughts you would like to share, you can always reach us by PM.