lori

@lori

customize your hot cakes with syrup

lori @lori5/14/2023, 3:25 AM

I'm still thinking a lot about the moderation posts today. This felt like too much or too weird to dump in a comment.

I've been in communities where people bringing forth concerns in good faith were brushed off as "bad faith" because the moderation took concerns or people being upset as affacks on them personally. I've been in a community that basically ran off anyone who had any concerns with how things were going, which left them with nothing but actual bad actors who were basically yes men to the staff until they realized they could bully them however they wanted with more and more unreasonable requests. They spent the better part of a year trying to fix where the community had gone as a result and ended up implementing a lot of the changes those "bad faith" people were concerned with.

Moderation is tricky. You do in fact get it wrong sometimes. But it's how you handle being wrong that matters, and that's what builds future trust. And I think if someone feels unsafe due to a decision you made, and then you publicly drag them because they said they would leave the site over it (something that is always a positive, you don't want users that don't want to be here as a site manager) and talk about how people need to trust you more...this does the opposite of build trust. If you make a serious moderation error, the absolute worst thing you can do is make it about you instead. I don't know how I'm supposed to trust a team that says "hey we made a mistake, but look at THESE people who didn't like the mistake. Don't they know we're trustworthy? Sure, we're total strangers to you on a relatively new site, but you should trust us. We're leftists! We're your friends!" And honestly it's a big reason I was skeptical about cohost from day one, because when I'd ask "who are the people running it, what do we know about how they will run a large scale site", the only answers I'd get were "well I'm friends with them and trust them!" The problem is I'm not friends with them. I can only go by their actions on the site.

Today's events leave a really rotten taste in my mouth. I've seen this exact thing go wrong over and over. There will always be people who feel strongly about moderation errors and moderation choices, but making angry posts about them tends to just make the moderation look worse and more importantly this kind of thing makes people feel less comfortable about reporting concerns or problems because they think they may be the subject of the next post about "bad faith" posters.

#cohost meta

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in reply to @lori's post:

Renkon @renkotsuban5/14/2023, 2:16 PM

I fully agree. I saw the original posts (which at the time had very few comments other than "wow that sucks") and reported that user. I didn't know it would soon turn into A Whole Thing, and I live in a time zone where most users and the admins are offline so I wasn't around to see it explode. I got a reply from support the next morning saying that I shouldn't join in on mass-reporting, which I thought was a bit unfair since 1) it makes it sound like OP was calling for people to report when she hadn't and 2) how the heck was I supposed to know that's what was going to happen. It makes me hesitate to report stuff in future since it might get a ton of reports and I just don't know it (or in this case, anticipate it). I understand that support at the moment is basically one person and I cannot imagine that's an easy job at all, but just, man.

Plus like... it sucks so bad that someone's traumatic event is being used for Discourse. Like, I know I am contributing to that with this comment, and I feel gross for even saying anything. Just everything about this is super unfortunate.

lori @lori5/14/2023, 2:39 PM

How in the world are you supposed to know who is reporting what?????

Renkon @renkotsuban5/14/2023, 2:51 PM

Yeah 😞 I can only imagine the admin was being inundated with reports and I do feel for it, but still, geez

lori @lori5/14/2023, 2:59 PM

Being a mod sucks! That's the thing, I do fully understand how much it sucks. But I know people who moderate far worse large scale websites that can keep their cool about it. You can't start taking it personally or you're going to burn it to the ground in the end. I think it's a little dangerous that the staff have taken a "we're regular users just like you! We're your friends!" approach because without a clear division between you as a person and your moderation duties you are going to burn out so fast and it'll take a massive toll on your mental health. Some of the staff communication on this site borders on parasocial. And I get it, we're all sick of faceless companies, but you can't run a site full of hundreds of thousands of strangers like you ran the beta where all the users were in your own social circle and knew you. It's not healthy or sustainable. We all want to be in that little community of friends where the admins are your pals but the site has scaled way past that dream. There's a reason no community this size runs that way and it's not just capitalism. You aren't the friend of hundreds of thousands of users. You're the staff running the site they're on. You can still apply a human element but you NEED barriers to stay safe and sane and I don't know if the team here understands that yet.

Renkon @renkotsuban5/14/2023, 3:07 PM

Yeah definitely all of this, was actually super surprised to get a "personal" reply to my report and not a template "thank you for your report, we are looking into it" generic response (which imo is all that's really needed)

lori @lori5/14/2023, 3:16 PM

And as much as people wrinkle their noses at "PR speak", it's actually more alarming to get a personal response from a mod telling you they're not happy with your report.

lori @lori5/14/2023, 2:54 PM

Also for the record I don't love that this has to be tied to someone's specific harassment. But for me it's part of a larger pattern I've seen here of a) posts from staff that discourage criticism or complaint, on the basis that it makes them feel bad and b) the few moderation decisions I've witnessed personally that I thought were handled poorly. And I should probably state most of them were before the current mod was hired, but they were also before the months long mod queue as well. There was more than one instance where I reported a post I thought was blatant harassment, got absolutely no response from the team (not even a "we don't think this is harassment", just no reply), then later found out the person I reported was someone deep in the mod teams social circle. I can't promise that it was bias, maybe they just had reporting so fucked up they never saw it, but when I had this same experience happen more than once, in one case for a comment that was extremely triggering for the person it was directed at, it didn't instill much faith. The whole premise of the mod post is that we're supposed to already trust them to do the right thing based on their prior actions, but most of the stuff I've directly witnessed has been negative. I don't even necessarily think it was all malicious, but it didn't make me trust them either, so I am not too thrilled about them making a mod mistake (which DOES happen, that's not the problem part), then berating the actual person who they wronged to the point where THEY felt they had to apologize for speaking up about it, then saying "you're supposed to trust us!"

Renkon @renkotsuban5/14/2023, 3:04 PM

Oh gross, all of that sucks 🤐 I can only hope that it's site growing pains, but yeah, this was my one and only interaction with staff so far and it left me confused and like I would be bothering them if I speak up about bad actors. I cannot imagine this is what staff really want users to feel!

lori @lori5/14/2023, 3:09 PM

I've been in a few communities where staff make people feel bad for reporting things or accusing them of only doing so in bad faith or whatever and it never ends well. It's too human of a response to think negative feedback is malicious in some way, which I get it we all feel that way sometimes, but you really have to get past that to manage a community, because the absolute last thing you want to do is get people to feel like they can't report problems to you. It's always better to get superfluous reports than not enough.