Tell Me What You Want

[Pensador]

Rules seems to be the theme here.

 

[ben]

I second everything Ben says. Open and no filters is terrible. But no one knowing if their posts will go through or not is also bad and that has happened to me too much. Just list 5 rules (no vulgarity, no sales, no ad hominem attacks, etc) and remove all that violates those rules - and nothing else. But tell us what the rules are. And yes, we all accept and agree that you have the final determination if something violates one of the rules - and that’s fine, we don’t mind, it’s your community - but we just want to know the rules.

Another idea: choose 3 long-standing members whom you trust and give them the ability to remove posts and deep-dive with them on the rules and edge cases. We don’t need a fancy high-tech system - those fail at scale. But we’re a tiiiiiiny community. Choose a few moderate reasonable people and empower them. You choice of whom you select! The system doesn’t need to be perfect but we would love it to be slightly less arbitrary. And even if it isn’t arbitrary to you and if there is reason to everything you do - we don’t see that, so we don’t understand what is happening. I just know a lot of my humor posts never go through!

Much more clear than what I'd written myself. That should be doable, shouldn't it?
And given that presumably you'd be picking people who engage often, should amount to a net reduction of involvement on your part.

BTW, Mysterious admin: thank you for running this community for so many years for us - we appreciate it and you should appear here more often

Morgan

Yes!

 

[TomAtAlki]

Blogging activity is also down significantly. So, it was kind of difficult to get Daily URL section filled with something interesting. Any suggestions?

A member from the past volunteered to keep the Daily URL up to date and she said she was either turned down or ignored. Possibly handing off chores like this to other interested parties would be a way for this popular feature to continue without it being a burden to you.

T/

 

[julian63]

First, thanks for asking.
Re moderation, I 'd favor less rather than more. The basic rules e.g., no personal attacks, advertising, foul language, etc might be supplemented by the easy ability to bring questionable posts to the moderator's attention, i.e., "report this post" attached to the enhancement options appearing above.
Years ago, I recall that the moderator seemed to be an egotistical jerk who removed posts which disagreed with his opinions about anything..

 

[ben]

Years ago, I recall that the moderator seemed to be an egotistical jerk who removed posts which disagreed with his opinions about anything..

I have never seen this personally - then again, I came late to the party - but have seen a lot of people alleging this.

It looks like everyone can agree on what I'd written originally: Make clear the rules, and enforce nothing but those rules.
Add Morgan's suggestion of a few trusted people entrusted with moderating authority, and most people's issues will have been addressed.

 

[MorganF]

Señor Admin,

Any thoughts on this thread, as it’s progressed?

Thank you again for running this community. You are our leader

Morgan

 

[admin]

Years ago, I recall that the moderator seemed to be an egotistical jerk who removed posts which disagreed with his opinions about anything..

Wouldn't that actually mean that every single view presented on this forum got to be absolutely in line with the moderator's own opinion? Including the one that you expressed in the quoted post?

 

[MorganF]

Wouldn't that actually mean that every single view presented on this forum got to be absolutely in line with the moderator's own opinion? Including the one that you expressed in the quoted post?

A few thoughts. First, no moderation system is perfect, and we none of us expect perfection. Secondly, almost everyone on this thread has been making the same one point: we all support your moderation, and we all support you moderating whatever you want. But we all just want to know the rules, so we can abide by them, and know if something we post will be kept or rejected. For everyone on the forum, it just feels too arbitrary. All of us have the experience, all the time, of our posts being silently discarded and never knowing what we did wrong - even the most innocent of posts. The response is not to eliminate all moderation -- no, no, no. That would also be a disaster! We don't want ads for (insert name of a drug to enlarge a certain part of your body, whose name I won't mention here because I fear this post will be moderated out!) (CASE AND POINT!) every second, we don't want that sort of spam, so we like the moderation. But it is so strict, with such the appearance of arbitrariness, that this is a source of frustration for everyone. It's very telling that in this thread, almost every single regular poster who appeared to answer your suggestion as to what we want suggested the more or less the same thing.

Note that this is very different than what you say here, "every single view presented on this forum got to be absolutely in line with the moderator's own opinion". We're only asking for a series of rules, and eliminating only those posts that violate those rules, and nothing else. And we trust your judgment 100% to choose whether a post violates those rules or not. (We just want to know the rules.) For example -- unless you have a rule, "No politics that the admin disagrees with", then people will be free to post any political opinion they want! So there is no connection to you agreeing with it or not.

For example. Lets say, you tell us that there are only five rules: no personal/ad hominem attacks, no selling anything (the classifieds section excluded), no spam, no advocating anything illegal, and no proselytizing. (This is a hypothetical example - you can choose whatever rules you want! - these five rules are listed only as a sample.).

Lets say someone writes a post, "Cristina is evil" -- not censored because it doesn't violate a rule. And then someone else writes a follow-up post, "No, Cristina is not evil, in fact, she is the Messiah incarnate." -- the exact opposite opinion. Both posts can stand, because none violate your rules. And it doesn't matter whether you personally supported Cristina, or not.

Then, lets say someone writes a post saying, "Come to my event where you have to pay $8k to learn all about spirituality and in particular my religion and smoke some psychedelic peruvian drugs." (THIS IS A HYPOTHETICAL EXAMPLE.) Would this be violating the (hypothetical) "no sales", "no spam", "no advocating anything illegal" and "no prosletyzing" rules? Maybe, maybe not -- but you can decide. You can just remove the post, and leave a note (as is often done on Reddit and other forums), in the spot of the deleted post, "This post was deleted because it is considered spam" -- and voila. The writer will learn, as will everyone else, that you can't violate the declared rules, and over time we'll learn what you consider to be a violation and what not to.

And to make this even easier: I suggest that you don't need to spend your time doing it. Look at the 40 most active posters on this site, and choose the 3 of them whose posts strike you as fair and moderate and even-keeled, very consistently. Offer to them to be the moderators, and teach them your five rules - including, they have to continue letting through posts they disagree with so long as they don't violate the rules (else they could lose their moderator privileges.) You won't need to do a thing, other than sit back and watch. And, honestly, of the 40 active posters, I trust at least 38 of them, and I'm sure everyone else on the forum does, too. (Although of course, we will all disagree as to which 38 we trust hahahaha).

TO be clear: we don't expect a perfect moderating system. Just one that *feels less arbitrary*. And again, we know it's not arbitrary; but because we don't have visibility into the rules, that's how it comes off to us. (For me, this is an issue because I love my wacky humor posts here, and my 3 favorite posts ever that I wrote were silently removed - automatically, never posted, so I know it's not personal, I just used some keyword trigger accidentally as part of a joke - so much that a recent one, I whatsapped to my couple of friends I've made from here offline so we could laugh at them together, but alas, the rest of the forum would never see it.)

Thoughts, Mr Mysterious Admin?

morgan

 

[MorganF]

PS -- ignore this unless you're a classics nerd:

Step back. I studied ancient Greek & Latin culture/society/language/history in college ("Classical Studies"), and this issue we're dealing with is an ancient question. The ancient Greeks prided themselves on what today we call the "rule of law": yes, they had Kings (mostly), but even with the kings, they had the rule of law. The king declared laws, everyone knew them, and obeyed them. (But the king still decided when there was a violation of the law.) In fact, it was one of the great "law-givers" of Athens, a leader named "Draco" who had the key insight, for the first time in Western history, to write down the laws -- but he's forgotten for that key insight and instead we only remember him today because his laws were so harsh, that we still call harsh laws "draconian" in English! But Draco is under-rated and did many great reforms, and writing down the laws was key in the creation of liberty, because it let everyone understand the laws so they could operate with realistic expectations. (Even if the king still was the court and jury.)

I like this ancient Greek system, and think we should do something like that on BAExpats. But what's interesting is this: the Greek's mortal enemy was..... the Persians. And what the ancient Greeks criticized the Persians for again and again and again was the same thing: their kings were *arbitrary*. Instead of declaring the rules so the Persians could follow them and know what to expect (that's the Greek way!), the Persian kings (think of the mighty Xerxes! Or the great Darius!) would just arbitrarily say, "I'm punishing this guy because I don't like him" or "That guy there is a bad guy so I'm killing him" etc. And *even when the Persian kings had good judgment*, it felt so deeply arbitrary that Persia became the original Despotic kingdom.

My core argument is: the perfect government doesn't exist, but lets be a little bit more Athenian and a little bit less Persian. Writing down the rules, and only punishing those whom you judge to violate them (or your 3 representatives judge to violate them) will go a long way. (Bonus points for implementing the above suggestion: when you don't post something, post a message as to why it was removed.)

 

[ben]

So... a lot of fresh ideas showing up since the admin last responded.
And... crickets.

Does this sum up the problem as nicely as anything?