Markos posted a meta diary earlier today, On tip jars and auto-ban, that also included this swipe at suggestions that new buttons be added to facilitate moderation:
One final note, as I come to you guys for ideas -- if your suggestion is "add a button that does X", your idea will almost immediately be rejected. My goal in refining site functionality will always be to remove buttons. Every single button you add increases complexity and makes the site harder to use, so I'll always do my best to channel my inner Steve Jobs.
So think "simple" and "so easy to use, even a caveman can do it."
I may not be the only person who recently suggested new buttons to address moderation problems here, so I won't take it personally -- but below the gnocchi I will defend the need for changes that include, yes, some new buttons for at least TUs to use.
The problem I'm trying to address is this: what "makes the site harder to use" right now is lousy moderation and what will "make the site harder to use" than that is allowing more aggressive "community moderation" without direction.
I would have made this comments in Markos's diary itself, but I stopped reading the comments after the first 300 or so. I'll take my chances here.
What is the problem with moderation, anyway?
I know what people who think that it should be easier to ban alleged trolls think it is. I know what people (like me) who think that facilitating easier banning risks mob suppression of unpopular viewpoints. What I don't know is what Markos thinks it is. Or, rather, I don't know what he thinks the problem is other than a "pox on both your houses" approach of calling all of the squabbling sides immature, as Bob Johnson recently did.
Do you want to know how we could really solve the problem of pie fighting here? Get rid of threaded comments sections. Make the site harder to use for communication and people will spend less time here arguing. (I hope that it's clear that I don't favor that.)
I get the sense that Markos would like this site to be more mature and erudite, like John Cole's Balloon Juice. Well, Balloon Juice doesn't have threaded comments. It's hard to carry on a vicious and protracted factional war there. It's also small. Markos has to give up an attitude towards the efficacy of self-moderation that could work on if this site were relatively small and homogenous.
It is, gloriously, neither. Wars of opinion take place here, complete with organization from outside the site. Telling us to "act like adults and solve the problem ourselves" is woefully inadequate to the task. We know that greater weapons for troll-rating, with more final outcomes, will just lead to larger wars. Some want that, others don't -- partially depending, as usual, on who thinks they would win.
The disconnect between the ideology of how things are supposed to be (let alone supposed by site Administrators to be) and how they actually are on the ground is almost comical in it's pre-French-Revolution remove. I'll pick on Adam B, a fellow free-speech advocate (further out than me, actually), knowing that he can take it. Here's one exchange from kos's diary:
... The site still represents a wide array of interests, but the civility and breaking of simple, published rules meant to help maintain at least a basic platform for participation seem more often breached and run over with general impunity. If the rules should be relaxed, maybe they need a rewrite.
by wader on Tue Aug 30, 2011 at 02:22:24 PM PDT
It's not that I don't care. Believe me, I do. But what needs to change is the culture, not the rules. Stop giving oxygen to the haters. Just move on.
by Adam B on Tue Aug 30, 2011 at 02:25:01 PM PDT
And it continues on from there. My reaction: stop doing what? Move on where? Change the culture how? Like through technology and rules?
Adam's extended thesis is here:
FWIW ... I don't think the buttons are the problem; the problem is a site culture which has degraded to the point where HRs are used to express strong disagreement rather than "no one else should be allowed to see this post," leading to excessive retaliatory HRs and too many distracting debates over when they're warranted.
But site culture doesn't just "happen." Like democratic values, it must be tended, and there is not a lot of tending going on. I've made that point multiple times over the past year and been told by large numbers of people who disagree with me that this is not what HR's are for -- justifying HRs as responses to "insults" and "Republican talking points" and "conspiracy theory" and all manner of other unexpectedly flexible categories. And where is the site administration is such fights? ABSENT -- except to come back here at times like this to tell us that the problem is that we're not well-behaved like the people at Balloon Juice.
Well, site culture has adapted to the absence of enforcement of the rules. Coming in here and pretending to be shocked at that is as clueless as Marie Antoinette's puzzlement over the peasants not simply eating cake. Thinking that just making the stakes higher and letting the majority rule is as clueless as deciding to leave decisions up to the Committee on Public Safety without expecting it to lead to pitched battles and a Reign of Terror.
The problem with community moderation is that rules aren't clear, rules aren't followed, and those who make the rules aren't paying attention. People on both sides of the great "hater/bot" divide, among others, can work together to moderate the side if we really know how the site is intended to be moderated -- which, among other things, seeing how the Admins would like us to handle actual cases. But the message being conveyed is that the professed principles of the site don't much matter in practice -- in fact, their existence just allow Admins to come in later and express disdain at the proles for not following the rules.
So yes, we need more and better administrative tools
In the diary I presented, I offered one tool that would affect all users: the creation of an "acknowledge" button. The idea is not mine; I first encountered it in this comment from Meteor Blades:
I've always wanted a button ... called "Acknowledged," meaning "I read your comment." That, it seems to me, would be a good substitute for Recommending every comment that comes your way and lets people know you're not ignoring them. But I lost that lobbying effort.
(But, you know, that crazy button-loving guy also favored an unrecommend button, so what does he know about community moderation?)
As I noted, that was not intrinsic to the proposal. The critical changes -- the BUTTONS -- would only be visible to Trusted Users. My revision of the plan in comments is this: have a drop-down menu for TUs labeled "Moderate" that allows TUs to choose an option from each of up to three pairs of choices: "Pro-Hide" vs. "Anti-Hide"; "Pro-Suspend" (and/or "Ban") vs. "Anti-Suspend" (and/or "Ban"); and "Pro-Clarify Rules" vs. "Clarification Not Needed.")
Why add to the complexity (ooh!) of the site?
Because Markos says that he wants Community Moderation -- and these are the sorts of things that Community Moderators have to decide.
Hide Ratings are blunt instruments that carry with them too many implications. They are used, as Adam notes, for disagreement -- but they shouldn't be. They are used for hiding comments that should not be seen (at least outside the site.) And they are used in the Autoban formula to determine whether someone should be banished permanently from the site -- which is largely why people get so exercised about them.
Those trusted users who take on responsibility for site moderation -- my sense is that it is a minority of us -- can handle learning a few new moderation tools. We just figured out DK4 itself, after all.
Or, we can not be given those tools -- which is perfectly valid. But in that case, don't pretend that we can have real community moderation.
Markos can't have it both ways. We're not Balloon Juice, communication is easy and frequent and contentious here, and good moderation won't just come from the Moderation Fairies.
If hoi polloi is to moderate, with the power to hide and the power to ban, then give us more sensitive tools to do so and, for God's sake -- be attentive to calls for clarification of our often self-contradictory site rules. (That last is one thing on which everyone should be able to agree. We're all asserting rules as we'd like them to be, and unenforced edicts that people can twist to suit their own purposes just don't do the trick. I wish that Admins would stop pretending otherwise.)
If you don't want to give us the tools, then hire people to moderate, train them, have them work as an appellate court to figure out both the rules (good luck defining "bigotry," everyone!) and the application of those rules to facts, and let community ratings simply be advisory. If you do that, then you can just have one all-purpose "Hide Rating" because all it really becomes is a message for the paid moderators to come figure out the problem.
But you can't have it both ways and have a working site. That's fooling yourself.
In other news, on the Tip Jars
That ends the main part of the diary, but Markos also asked for ideas on the Tip Jar conundrum. In the spirit of helpfulness and with delight at suggesting what is in effect another new button, here's mine.
What's the actual problem with replies to tip jars? Well, people usually only read so far down the comments section, so a tip jar reply can mean that in practice a disproportionate number of the comments that many people will read will be whatever the person making the reply decided should be the topic of discussion.
Does that mean that we need to cut off all replies to auto-tip-jars? That's what we've done, but I think it doesn't work well. It displaces the problem onto the second comment, for one, and it makes it harder to communicate with the diarist directly -- which is often desirable.
So, what do we do? The problem is usually with replies that are hostile to the diary and to its purpose generating long threads. So: allow one level of replies to the tip jar -- replies, but not replies to replies -- and allow the diarist to affirmatively "unlock" threads stemming from replies that don't seem likely to take over the comments section. That means that, only for all comments branching off the tip jar, the diarist would see an extra option for each comment: "allow replies." I'm sure that the specifics of it could use additional refinement.
This balances the ability of people to "get in one shot" off of the tip jar but would prevent any of those replies from leading to a long, diary-swallowing comments digression unless the diarist affirmatively decided to allow it.
Allow this added power to the diarist and it should be easy to let people go back to rating tip jars again, allowing trolls to be identified -- and allowing community moderation, if that's what we're to have, to work.
12:09 AM PT: Note to Markos: Some dude figured it out. All this work wasted.