wat this post mean???
I would also prefer to see the CoC enforced and offending posts removed or silo’d, ideally with an acknowledgement that the mod intervened. In the case that the post was written in bad faith, getting rid of it is for the best; if the post was well-intentioned but the poster was ignorant of local expectations, it’s probably also for the best if they get a chance to reframe their input rather than starting a flamewar.
The (paraphrased) statement “There are people on this board who engage in misogyny” is accurate; your name has not been mentioned at all in the “How to handle Code of Conduct violations” thread; and the statement in question was not a reply to you, because you haven’t been involved in this thread.
So: no.
Since the pendulum appears have swung back to the topic of the thread, a few more suggestions:
- This is pretty much an exact example of what I was talking about:
This is another one of those vague warnings to no one and everyone. No one knows whether you are talking about them. No one knows what constitutes a “personal attack” by your definition. (There are presumably many people who’d argue I’ve been making them. Hard to point to them because all the context has been deleted, but they exist.) The result is a chilling effect; people are less likely to participate in the discussion for fear of being instantly banned. I include myself in this.
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A lot of the discussion, unsurprisingly, has centered on words, but actions also need to be taken into account. It is possible to be exceedingly, unfailingly polite and nice, while simultaneously (metaphorically) stabbing someone in the face. (Ask any Southerner.) Less facetiously, it’s a known tactic to use politeness as a weapon to intimidate people, monopolize their time (i.e. “sealioning”) or appeal to outsiders.
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Obviously the mod team will have a better handle on this than I would, but I suspect that comparatively few violations involve well-meaning participants in an argument just getting too worked up. (Those are probably the easier ones to deal with.) More of them, I suspect, involve people with no intention of following the Code of Conduct lashing out. Moderation style should be tailored to which of these it is. A nice PM will probably dissuade the former. The latter? More likely to make them escalate. Basically, the principle should be “minimize harm.”
Of course I haven’t been involved. How could I when I feel unsafe? I was also not aware that personal slander is necessary under the rules which are being discussed here. There have been many (in this thread and other recent ones) sweeping accusations against a social and ideological group I feel I belong to. Strawman does not even come close to describe the extent properly. According to the “Code” (which I don’t agree with but which I do respect as far as I’m interacting here), I’m neither allowed to point such instances out, nor defend myself. Fair enough. Though saying from moderator side that you do not feel responsible for such concerns while you do care about others which are qualitatively the same is at the very least a double standard.
So, to not further “pollute” the thread, my question goes directly towards the original intention of the thread: when I feel offended, whom do I turn to? What do I do? Will the infamous Code be actually applied? After all this, I have my doubts.
I’m rhetorically using “thinks women aren’t people” as a proxy/default for any and all extreme harmful views, since misogyny is probably the most prevalent form of bigotry for most people here. I’m not talking about you unless you are a literal nazi or fascist (a brief list of such groups includes the “alt-right”, people chanting “lock her up” at Trump rallies, the BNP, the Front National, the NDP and so on) or maybe a member of some misogyny movement (the “red pill” or whatever). Somehow people can’t even agree that fascism, an ideology that incorporates the abuse of civil discourse to intimidate and demoralize, shouldn’t be allowed here, so I’m using the most blatantly objectionable views as the main example. This isn’t to say everything I think is objectionable falls under the rubric of fascism (“conversion therapy”, which I would strongly object to anyone advocating for anywhere where polite discourse is supposed to happen, is a fascistic idea but many of its proponents are not fascists as such - to pull another example of grossly objectionable views).
Under normal circumstances, we have been deleting posts so rarely that most deleted posts are accompanied by PMs. I’ve been skipping that step this weekend because there are simply too many, between attack posts and out-of-context replies. This situation has taken up most of my weekend and it would have taken up the rest if I reached out to everyone affected.
The CoC simply says “Don’t post anything that a reasonable person would consider offensive, abusive, hate speech, violence, and don’t advocate for any of these things.” We operate as if both we-the-moderators and you-the-forum-participants are reasonable people.
In general:
- Criticize behavior, not people.
- Criticize specific instances of people’s behavior, not people’s behavior as a pattern.
Also, here are a few broad-canvas examples of acceptable and unacceptable. I am going to center my example on racism because that problem hasn’t been front-and-center these last few days.
Acceptable
“We need to do something about the racism on this forum.”
“Person, your game casts Hispanic people in a very negative light.”
(when Person has clearly indicated that they support the Nazi party): “Person is a Nazi.”
(in a report to the mods): “This post is racist. Please do something.”
(in a PM to a mod): “Person keeps doing racist things, like [link], [link], and [link]. Please do something.”
Unacceptable
“Person is a racist.”
“Person keeps doing racist things.”
(when Person does not support the Nazi party): “Person is a Nazi.”
“Person is a trolling shithead.”
As previously established, it is not okay to be a Nazi. The Nazi example is intended to illustrate that there’s a difference between a supportable statement of fact and a slur.
So… what happens when people keep doing racist things (to continue the metaphor)? Are people just forbidden to point them out or object to them, lest that be construed as a “personal attack”? Presumably the racist things would be closer to a “personal attack” than objecting to them. “Person, you are a shithead.” is a personal attack. “Person keeps doing racist things” is a statement about their behavior. (I’d argue “Person is a racist.” is also not a personal attack, but this is significantly more controversial.) These rules only serve to hamstring those who are being attacked; the people attacking or harassing them certainly aren’t going to subject themselves to any such restrictions.
Forcing people to privately message the mods about it is a bad solution because A) as I’ve said multiple times before, forcing, I guess, said racist things (again, continuing the metaphor) to stand unopposed and un-objected to is a tacit acceptance of them; B) multiple people in this thread and elsewhere have said their PMs to the mods have been ignored or deleted; C) it creates more work for the mods to have to go through a bureaucratic process instead of allowing people to point out that people keep doing racist things; and D) I am trying and failing to think of a way to make said “We need to talk about the racism on the forum” topic without pointing out the racist things that people are doing, without making the topic so vague as to be completely useless.
There are perfectly acceptable ways to discuss specific behaviors without phrasing it as “you are a racist”.
“Hey, you know that thing you just did? It was pretty racist. Here’s why.”
“Hey, you know that thing you just did? It was pretty racist. Here’s why. Also, I am really unnerved by this, given that we just had this conversation about the other racist thing you did in this other thread. [LINK to the prior thread].”
(PM) “Hey, moderators? Person has done X, Y, and Z, which are all super racist. Here are links. Please do something.”
As you point out, racist - like bigot, misogynist, homophobe, transphobe, Islamophobe, etc, etc - are actually descriptors of behavior rather than insults per se. But it’s almost impossible to use them as descriptors without the target interpreting them as insults, unless the target would self-describe that way.
What you’re arguing for is essentially the same thing as “Person keeps doing racist things,” except with an extra mandate to explain, patiently to deaf and possibly harassing ears, what racism is. Most people – particularly those who are in violation territory – are either well-aware they are doing racist things, or don’t care whether they are or not. I know this is a hypothetical example, but the same applies to pretty much anything else.
This is also true about personal attacks, or any other form of harassment.
Most people responsible for personal attacks are either well-aware they’re executing them, or don’t care whether they are or not.
You flag the offending post.
You point them out to the mods, in private, especially while clicking the flag button. Then the CoC is enforced and the post goes away; quite possibly the poster involved gets a temporary or permanent ban.
That’s what we want, right?
They won’t stand unopposed when the moderator deletes them. I asked you to clarify your earlier argument on this point but it seems to have slipped through the radar.
The mods have said historically that they take a light hand to moderation. A firmer hand should address this.
If, as you seem to imply, the mods are unable or unwilling to enforce the CoC, hashing it out in public won’t make it any better. The only solution then is to change the mod team or abandon the forum entirely.
This is just not right, but the mods themselves are the best judge of that. When mods delete posts, they can delete just the offending post instead of a long chain of posts afterward discussing the post.
But later you write:
By your own lights, do we need to discuss racism on this forum? Or do we, in fact, just need to delete/ban more racists? (And sexists.)
In my opinion, it’s the latter. Why do you believe that talking to the racists/sexists would actually help?
[On preview, this is crossposting with dfabulich. As I say, I believe there are technical issues with the “just flag it” solution. I ultimately agree with the conclusion that the solution is to ban more racists, or to move to a forum where they don’t have a foothold and won’t be allowed one; but imposing a gag rule and making everything rely on the judgment of the mods means that someone who’s confronted with racism really has no other recourse but to rely on the mods to defend them, and if the mods don’t do that it could be a bad situation. Though perhaps that would be a bad situation anyway.]
Agree with this, with the additional proviso that the forum software (if I remember correctly) doesn’t really support private messaging to the mod. Posts can only be flagged once, correct? So if I want to flag a post and it’s already been flagged, then I’m effectively silenced about that post; can’t flag it and complain to the mods that way, aren’t supposed to reply in public, and though maybe it’s some consolation to know that it’s been flagged I have no idea what the person flagging it actually said.
Agree with this too. Saying “When you feel someone is being racist, explain it to them,” makes it easy for anti-anti-racist people to soak up the time and psychic energy of anti-racist people; just keep posting the same old clueless things and making the anti-racist people come up with new patient explanations about why that’s wrong. And those explanations have to be very carefully formulated in order to avoid violating the CoC, and also to avoid sending the original poster completely off the handle. (As in the anecdote in this post about the woman who, when anti-racism trainers attempted to gently point out that some things she had said had been bad for people of color, got so upset that people thought she might literally die.) Lather, rinse, repeat. This is what has been referred to as sea-lioning.
There certainly have been people posting on this board in bad faith who might deliberately use this strategy in order to harass people (I mean: specific trolls who have been banned). It is at least a theoretical possibility that, even without the sort of bad faith where a poster repeatedly demands explanations with the specific desired effect of making people’s life difficult, they might really just not care about racism, be impatient with anyone talking about any level of racism short of actual Klan activity, and reflexively express impatient dismissal whenever someone tries to bring it up; which has the same effect on people trying to respond to them as the bad-faith posters. And even short of that, there may be people who don’t mean ill but who just keep posting the same cluelessly racist stuff over and over again–and who fly off the handle if you don’t point them out gently enough. Maybe this is what catacalypto meant when she said “I don’t want to feel like basic questions of empathy and understanding toward historically marginalized groups have to be traversed before I can talk about my thoughts on Texture”? And this is just a longer way of what saying what Lucea said about patiently explaining to deaf ears.
Am I way off base here, cvaneseltine? I mean, you’ve been a community developer, you have a lot more direct experience with harassment than I do, I don’t think I should be lecturing you about this, but it seems like what you’re saying leaves open a pretty big exploit.
Also, in relation to Lucea’s D above, I have an example in mind of how this fails to work, but it’s hard to discuss it without pointing it out. It wouldn’t be a personal attack on a current forum member, because the poster in question was banned. And the incident began with a post in which he said in so many words that he was racist.
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.
I’ve flagged matt’s post (apologies for the bit of clutter, mods!). If anyone else can also flag it, that’d be a helpful test, I think.