We’re looking to put together some more detailed rules on what should and should not be submitted to the instance. Things such as, but not exclusively:
- What types of message you would always like to see removed on sight
- Whether there are any types of message which should be left up (borderline, with strong corrections from the community)
- Where the line is drawn on political views (and how gray areas should be treated)
I’ll make no bones: Moderating uk/ukpol has been a learning experience for me.
I’ve learned that there often isn’t much difference between “leaving a comment up because the community has done an excellent job highlighting flaws” and “I should have removed this hours ago, the community shouldn’t have to do this”.
As there isn’t a way to mod-tag a post, inaction on negative posts can reflect badly on the instance as a whole.
Having some clear guidelines/rules will hopefully simplify things.
And more admins should mean that if a report isn’t looked at, someone can review it as an escalation.
I’ve also enabled the slur filters. And we’ll be listening to see if anything needs adding/removing (the template had swearing blocked :| )
So…Answers on a postcard, I guess!
I’m sure we all know which instance (or instances, there’s two that stick to mind) you’re talking about! Their takes are usually crazy and extreme and their behaviour (it’s usually the one of the two that are more problematic) is annoying as fuck.
That said, it sounds like we want to censor people who are arguing in bad faith? I think this might be broad enough, but I worry that people might get banned or content censored when they raise something that is deeply against the commonly held view a the time but later turns out to be correct.
Personally I think we should just downvote people who express these “opinions”, as long as they’re not being offensive. The more rules there are the more work the mods have to do, but they can also open up the possibility of mods banning people they disagree with under the guise of that rule.
In my experience, if bad actors have a specific agenda to push they usually hang around in groups of likeminded people and search for specific discussions, posts, subjects, etc to push their agenda in. This can often results in a toxic / bad faith comment being one of, if not the most highly upvoted comments (due to brigading). Most people that take the middle ground on a topic rarely have the energy to fight against a dog pile of downvotes and bad actors. Automatically assuming that bad actors are single outliers operating by themselves is a bad position that IMHO leads to “too little, too late” moderation reactions after the damage is done and the post has turned toxic.
This is a very complex topic, and not one I believe can be solved by just letting the voting system work it out. I don’t know the right answer, it’s one I’ve been searching for, for years. But the assumption of “good faith, until proven otherwise” in conjunction with “it’s only a few bad actors” is specifically the mentality the bad actors are exploiting. IMHO, YMMV, IANAL, etc…