EPTUS Politics Feedback Thread - Page 218
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JimmiC
Canada22817 Posts
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Nebuchad
Switzerland12527 Posts
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IgnE
United States7681 Posts
The fact is, it’s very easy to moderate comment sections. It’s very easy to remove spam, bots, racial slurs, low-effort trolls, and abuse. I do it single-handedly on this blog’s 2000+ weekly comments. r/slatestarcodex’s volunteer team of six moderators did it every day on the CW Thread, and you can scroll through week after week of multiple-thousand-post culture war thread and see how thorough a job they did. But once you remove all those things, you’re left with people honestly and civilly arguing for their opinions. And that’s the scariest thing of all. [...] The thing about an online comment section is that the guy who really likes pedophilia is going to start posting on every thread about sexual minorities “I’m glad those sexual minorities have their rights! Now it’s time to start arguing for pedophile rights!” followed by a ten thousand word manifesto. This person won’t use any racial slurs, won’t be a bot, and can probably reach the same standards of politeness and reasonable-soundingness as anyone else. Any fair moderation policy won’t provide the moderator with any excuse to delete him. But it will be very embarrassing for to New York Times to have anybody who visits their website see pro-pedophilia manifestos a bunch of the time. | ||
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Danglars
United States12133 Posts
On March 05 2019 01:00 IgnE wrote: This post at slatestarcodex has an insightful take on on moderating politics discussions on the internet. The author discusses why he had to shut down a megathread-like subreddit (admittedly w many more participants than on TL) and why he had to shut it down. It also discusses why comments are being shut down on news sites, etc.: That was a long but interesting post. I could’ve sworn it was written about TeamLiquid moderation choices at a couple points. His descriptions of the pressures and the problems shed light on why TL’s old thread(s) worked like it did, and why the new thread changed. I hadn’t fully grasped the brand affiliation factor. It makes the cheap but effective action to bop the lone dissenters instead of the mob reactions a little easier to understand. It’s good to hear the end of the story was sort of a rebirth. I also had a good chuckle at how the sustained right-left balance of the forum prompted mob actions to brand it as a forum of homophobic transphobic alt-right neo-Nazis. Yep, that’s the feedback (sorry, consensus) when moderators do a good job. I’m only being a little tongue in cheek when I say that. One more side note. I like how the blog post treats the challenges even-handedly. I personally have written a lot about moderators making the wrong decisions and the effect it’s had upon the glorious threads created during the Obama presidency. I want to restate for the record that I don’t consider it mostly or entirely out of malice from the mods on right-of-center perspectives. The challenges of bias and civility and unpaid volunteers and gaming-focused outlook are far greater than simple partisanship. | ||
BigFan
TLADT24920 Posts
On March 05 2019 01:00 IgnE wrote: This post at slatestarcodex has an insightful take on on moderating politics discussions on the internet. The author discusses his shutting down of a megathread-like subreddit (admittedly w many more participants than on TL) and why he had to shut it down. It also discusses why comments are being shut down on news sites, etc.: Interesting, thanks for sharing. I like this part haha. More so from the perspective of him finally letting loose after all these years. Understandably why he'd go so far if people were actually trying to lie about him and interfere in his daily life: Third, I would like to offer one final, admittedly from-a-position-of-weakness, f**k you at everyone who contributed to this. I think you’re bad people, and you make me really sad. Not in a joking performative Internet sadness way. In an actual, I-think-you-made-my-life-and-the-world-worse way. I realize I’m mostly talking to the sort of people who delight in others’ distress and so this won’t register. But I’m also a little upset at some of my (otherwise generally excellent) friends in the rationalist community who were quick to jump on the “Oh, yeah, the SSC subreddit is full of gross people and I wish they couldn’t speak” bandwagon (to be clear, I don’t mean the friends who offered me good advice about separating from the CW thread for the sake of my own well-being, I mean people who actively contributed to worsening the whole community’s reputation based on a few bad actors). I understand you were probably honest in your opinion, but I think there was a lot of room to have thought through those opinions more carefully. | ||
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Nebuchad
Switzerland12527 Posts
Without certainty as I was never a part of this thread, it certainly feels like the accusation that it fosters extreme (and in a context like the US, obviously, rightwing) viewpoints is justified. His defense against that accusation is entirely unconvincing in a world where Dave Rubin can call himself a liberal for years (and even if we take the forum users at their word, that's a surprisingly low number for left of liberal people in comparison to right of libertarian people). Obviously that doesn't justify harassing moderators into a nervous breakdown. | ||
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IgnE
United States7681 Posts
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Nebuchad
Switzerland12527 Posts
On March 05 2019 05:34 IgnE wrote: Politics threads are at their best when language itself, the interplay of meaning and figure, can play itself out without having to constantly be curtailed by the demands of and for judgment. This is not a self-evident assertion to me, I'm going to need you to provide some justification. On March 05 2019 05:34 IgnE wrote: Why does it even matter to you whether someone “really means” whatever they are writing? Is the point to describe the purported actors? For them to self-describe and announce themselves? To better get to know who you are talking to as the end in itself? Or is the point to see what comes out of the encounter between different writings? To see what is persuasive and what is not? It matters because of the type of conversations that you're going to have. Let's bring back the example of the user advocating for a better acceptance of pedophilia. Presumably this user is there because he wants to have sex with some kids and he doesn't want society to put him in jail for having done that. But that's not what he's going to say. He's going to talk about freedom, about how age of consent laws change from country to country and are arbitrary, about how people don't suddenly become mature at 18... You can have civil conversations about whichever of these subjects he's bringing up these days, and none of them have a point, because the dude isn't actually interested in freedom, or consistency, or maturity, he just wants to have sex with some kids. What's the best answer a forum can give to that situation? Is it to pretend that this is a thought provoking and interesting debate, or is it to ban the bad actor? My preference is most certainly on the second option. | ||
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IgnE
United States7681 Posts
As to the second you are simply doing precisely what I objected to: judgment about who is speaking and what you presume that who wants. Admittedly, we can judge the writing by its (non)reference to other writing. Is the writing part of the conversation or not? Maybe you are doing that here, presuming a concrete set of circumstances which would justify an assertion about what the who wants, as marked by its apparent (non)engagement. But it’s far from clear that at this level of abstraction anything you’ve said is necessarily true. There are good reasons to problematize pedophilia, like how a consideration of it sheds light on desire, generally: how society channels or blocks desire, what desires are legitimate, the relationship between desire and actualization. That said, most conversation only serves its participants. Conversations are necessarily exclusionary. If there’s an obnoxious person who everyone else agrees is obnoxious, then it’s perfectly reasonable to censor the unilateral imposition of a topic. It’s quite uncivil to be so unyielding, to ignore those whom you are writing with. Only then does the question become precisely a matter of who: who is doing the excluding. | ||
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Nebuchad
Switzerland12527 Posts
As to the second, well yeah, of course I'm presuming that the person I'm talking about is acting in bad faith, it's an imaginery actor that I made up to demonstrate the issue with bad faith actors. I'm answering the question of why I think bad faith matters. If you want to bring up the unrelated question that it's not always clear whether someone is acting in bad faith or not, sure, that's a legitimate point. | ||
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IgnE
United States7681 Posts
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brian
United States9643 Posts
there is no appropriate platform for allowing pro-pedo crap disguised as rational thought. it serves only to attempt to normalize abhorrent behavior. understanding in that even saying so already goes against//refuses really to even consider your position, in ascribing judgement to even hypothetical text. but i guess i don’t believe in allowing for purely equal consideration of all beliefs, and perhaps even further, i think it is explicitly a bad position in some respects, depending on that actor or it’s (his or her?) text. march 5 edit: i feel like there’s a more desirable middle ground to be found here between this and just ‘cataloguing acceptable positions and actors.’ further, in debating a position even when the opposite side is only ‘playing devils advocate,’ so to speak, just generates unhealthy discussion. on one hand you have one person genuinely engaging a topic, and the other simply ‘arguing’ for the sake of it. what good is there in that, wherein one person can concern troll just for the sake of doing so? is discussion really furthered at all? because surely ‘understanding’ is not, insofar as clearly there’s no middle ground to be found or understood when one actor has absolutely no incentive to find it, since they don’t even believe what they’re writing in the first place. and of course for the sake of just putting it out there as to not look like a total hypocrite, i’ve definitely done all these things (well except anything related to abusing minors,) mostly unintentionally. but i do feel like it reflects poorly on both myself and others that partake. or does this just explicitly define me as a hypocrite? either way, clearly an undesirable outcome from my point of view. | ||
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Dangermousecatdog
United Kingdom7084 Posts
______________ Anyways, there is no appropriate platform for allowing white supremacist terrorist slogans disguised as rational thought. It serves only to attempt to normalize abhorrent behavior. | ||
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On_Slaught
United States12190 Posts
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Danglars
United States12133 Posts
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Sermokala
United States14199 Posts
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BigFan
TLADT24920 Posts
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brian
United States9643 Posts
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KadaverBB
Germany25658 Posts
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micronesia
United States24799 Posts
On March 06 2019 11:19 Danglars wrote: That was pretty bullshit. Ambiguous reason, no specific post cited, no warning beforehand. Yes, No, No. I think it's worth sharing with the thread a reminder that, when you have over a page of moderator notes associated with previous warnings, bans, etc., you are on thin ice. Don't expect a warning before any moderator actions. Your history is already full of warnings. If someone with such a history cleans up their act and becomes more of a model poster, over time, the damage they did to their reputation will heal, and moderator evaluation of their posts will be more favorable. Some very good posters got warnings and temp bans years ago that aren't held against them anymore. | ||
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