It depends on how closely affiliated to the LVMI it is intended to be. Minimum moderation would be ideal.
I hate to continue in this vein, because I really thought we could gather ideas together and back a single, forward-looking alternative forum. Ideas on moderation are only one of many things we could improve. But, has anyone here ever used the comments in youtube? I feel like that alone is enough evidence to rest my case.
I support SkepticalMetal’s insight that people who go to intellectual forums (or intellectual youtube videos) for discussion, tend to be interested in that content. If people want a 4chan experience, they already have 4chan. And for the umpteenth time, this elusive troll is a bogeyman: in 15 years on internet forums, I’ve never encountered someone who just signed up for an account to purely troll. But I have, on more than a few occassions including recently here, encountered mods abusing their power—I will go as far as to say that without exception, all mod activity I’ve ever been aware of was either abusive or, at best, unnecessary.
Moving threads has always an abused mod power. You try to post a thread in the category with the most users, and a mod moves it to some place it will never be seen; you try to post a thread that a mod doesn’t like, they move it to the “graveyard”. With the approach that categories and subcategories are optional, that eliminates at least one classic pillar excuse for moderation. My point is that mod abuse is a much more realistic threat than the troll bogeyman.
hashem,
This forum has had its fair share of troll accounts. TronCat was banned for creating the MissMapleLeaf troll account (who was also probably kylio). There was also mustang19. These are the only two that I can think of off the top of my head (and are quite recent), but I’m sure there have been others here.
But it’s not like it’s going to happen anyway. You’re not going to see that type of poster on an ‘academic’ forum in the first place and if you do they won’t stick around anyway.
I have, but that’s what flaming is for.
Maybe I’m beating a dead horse but I just woke up and am looking to argue something intellectual:
Been here 3 years and never even heard of any of those guys. What were they doing that was considered “trolling”, which was so offensive to our sensibilities and destructive to the reputation of these fine forums that they had to be banned outright? Why were the users here unable to ignore them or build a community character by dealing with them—other than just resigned failure to do anything because they knew that mods would. Again I ask, have you ever used youtube comments (they are unmoderated)? I invoke even the entire philosophy of youtube (at least, what got it off the ground). You could post any video, and youtube didn’t have a philosophy that some content would be considered “trolling” or “offensive” or “damaging to youtube’s reputation”. It’s been from this foundation that one of the greatest sites on the internet has flourished.
I literally haven’t, and yet I agree that an integral part of humand bonding and community building is dealing with problems together. Personally, I’m inclined to ignore trash posts more than to flame. But back to community and bonding, I think people are better served exercising our brain muscle to think of creative solutions to problems than defaulting to force, and again I invoke youtube comments and of course the purpose of this thread: Surely the internet veterans here can use our collective knowledge to fathom improvements which, taken together, eliminate the threat of mods (which is greater than the threat of a bogeyman) while moving in a forward direction. Thus my biggest contribution, the suggestion that categories are optional, which simultaneously is progressive in moving to a unified forum while also eliminating the threat of mods moving threads.
They were trolling. TronCat created at least 1 other and probably 2 accounts for the purpose of trolling. In other words, he had a somewhat productive account and contributed to the discussion on the forum with his TronCat account, and with his MissMapleLeaf (and probably kylio) account he cluttered the forum with posts to flame and disrupt ongoing conversations.
Now, I understand that you think we ought to just ignore those posts. But you know what? As others pointed out, I don’t feel like tolerating people who shout and insult at dinner parties, and I don’t feel like tolerating that type of behavior on this particular forum. You brought up Youtube, well people flame videos all the time. Some musician might put up music, and you’ll get some asshole who will write about how much that person sucks. Okay, often it’s true. But you know what? There are tactful ways to put it, and sometimes you don’t say that at all. On Youtube, you can delete those comments. I support that. If someone puts up a video where they put a lot of work into it, they don’t need to read “You fucking suck monkey balls, bitch. You should quit. You are so fucking bad my grandmother could do that better than you.”
Most people don’t care to read that about themselves or others. Maybe you are different.
I don’t think you can delete comments on youtube.
And I understand a definition of trolling, my question was more specific: “What were they doing…which was so offensive to our sensibilities and destructive to the reputation of these fine forums that they had to be banned outright? Why were the users here unable to ignore them or build a community character by dealing with them—other than just resigned failure to do anything because they knew that mods would.”
I see ridiculous comments all the time on youtube. Everyone does, and everyone deals with it. It doesn’t ruin the community, in fact youtube has grown to be a gigantic community. It doesn’t deter anyone from using youtube or from commenting there, and it certainly hasn’t ruined the reputation of youtube.
Absent moderation, there is evidence that a community character spontaneously arises to deal with the problem. This is the whole point of anarchism, and it works! I don’t come here looking for a dinner party, I come here looking for intellectually stimulating discourse. I don’t go to youtube looking for a dinner party. If I want a dinner party or 4chan, I’ll go to a dinner party or 4chan.
Of course we could just not respond and ignore them. Often that happens. I don’t know why you are being so dense on this. If I am having a party at my home, and some jerk starts giving people a hard time needlessly, then I’m going to kick him out. It’s the same with online forums. If they disagree with us, so be it. But if they are going to be jerks or be dishonest or troll or whatever, then I see nothing wrong with mods throwing them out.
We are all guests here. Kylio, Mustang, and MML were banned because they were running counter to intellectually stimulating discourse through dishonesty and general rudeness. That and MML was a delibrate attempt by TronCat to be a jerk. Sure, sometimes we have threads about pokemon marxists, but so what? Those threads are joke threads. But if a troll is going to go into a serious thread and LIE or INSULT people, then the mods will deal with it.
There is no reason to let those posts remain or let the user continue. I don’t see how this is so difficult to understand.
Yes OK Kylio, Mustang and MML were trolls and they were baned, nice. So in all these years the existence of a whopping 3 trolls justifies having half a dozen moderators? So in some instance having a mod was a good thing. But mods did act in more instances than just this one, so question is was having them a net gain? On the one hand they banned these three trolls, but on the other I recall ERO Ollovietto and wilderness (and there could have been more) leave or be expelled due to issues with mods. I don’t remember the specifics, but I doubt the blame for that lay with the two exclusively since they were quality posters and able to get along for a very long time before their banning/departure. And it’s not like having a mod is a requirement to be able to get ridd of trolls. In fact in some instances having a mod may delay his departure, because a mod may give a troll unwarranted benefit of the doubt and in the mean time protect him from the wrath of users.
Those 3 are only recent trolls that were banned. I have only been posting since April 2011, and I remember there being trolls even back then. I don’t remember specifics, as I have other things I care to remember. The mods barely act even now. I completely disagreed with SD’s month temp ban by Sanchez, and in that sort of situation I agree with you that mods don’t always do the right thing and they misuse their power.
But you need some sort of ability to get rid of trolls. Even wikipedia has taken meaures to stop people from posting whatever they want. It used to be that anyone could edit anything, but you see, trolls like to ruin a good thing. So some articles require special permissions to edit, and there are mods that police wikipedia now.
But you can’t just ignore trolls to make them go away. They thrive on ruining other people’s experiences. They clutter good threads with shit. If you want to voteban somehow, MAYBE that could work. But the problem with that is that people can just create a lot of accounts in order to start vote banning people. No matter what you go with, the system will have some flaw.
Besides, what about the advertising soccer threads? We need to keep those threads? Do we votedelete those threads? Do we voteban the creators? How many votes do we need? Do 50% of the forum users have to vote before we can have spam threads and posts deleted? Or maybe just 50 votes?
Or we can just PM a mod and have them clean it up. Problem solved.
But it’s not like it’s going to happen anyway. You’re not going to see that type of poster on an ‘academic’ forum in the first place and if you do they won’t stick around anyway.
We’ve had a few here. Like Nathan. And some other kooks.
I’m not fully sold on downrating/uprating posts as a means of curtailing “renegade” individuals, as this can sometimes lead to unfair picking on individuals and bullying, and can be as bad as a biased mod. There are positives to this kind of system, of course, in that it gives you an idea as to whether a particular individual has a history of causing trouble, and can constitute a more objective grounds for a mod to assess whether an individual is actually contributing to the forum or poisoning the atmosphere.
As far as I am concerned, the moderators should do no more than keep the forum clean and tidy. I wouldn’t bother making parallels to anarchism. A forum is like a club, and clubs have their bouncers for people who begin causing problems for others. I am opposed to heavy-handed moderation which stiffles the atmosphere, all the same.
YouTube is moderated, to my knowledge, but relies on user-led rating for the most part.
So hang on… You’re saying Youtube can’t work (even though it does) because even though it can (and does) you would kick someone out of a party and therefore it would be a bad idea to try this even though it’s been demonstrated to work on the most well-trafficked, biggest discussion sites of all time including FB, Youtube, and Reddit? This, because the threat of a bogeyman troll is worse than the demonstrated, well known threat of moderators.
There is no reason to not let the posts remain, or let the user continue. I gave some pretty solid examples, you gave an example of a troll and refuse to explain why what he did was a real threat to this community, on par or worse than the real, demonstrated threat of moderators. I don’t see how this is so difficult to understand.
Will you at least acknowledge that the brilliance of spontaneous order is precisely that it does occur without the threat of top-down force? Please address youtube, because your only comment so far was that offensive comments can be deleted and I’m fairly sure that’s not true (not to say you’re a lying troll, just that I’m not aware that you can delete comments).
Holy shit you just went Thoreau on us. I think I pretty much agree with most of your opinions, moderation needs to be a rare occurence.
hashem, you always do this, and I can never figure out why…Instead of LYING about what I’m saying, why don’t you just directly quote me. Nowhere did I claim that Youtube doesn’t “work”, whatever you mean by that.
I already explained the problems with those people and why some of us like to see them get banned. Maybe you could try QUOTING me, that way I know you have actually read what I write.
BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH BLAH
+1
Well put.
I think he’s making some solid points here. I often see material that is not offensive to me at all, get removed by moderators. Whether someone is a troll or not, I think people still get a little too sensitive on forums. I’ve been a mod at another place as well, our policy is to have mods that only remove porn, super weird stuff, and a couple of other things. We normally encourage obnoxious people to post whatever they want, and things have a way of sorting themselves out.
My whole argument is that a forum doesn’t have to be like a club or a dinner party, that in fact, the most well trafficked sites around are not moderated.
As far as commenting goes, which was my point in bringing up youtube, you can post anything and nobody can do anything about it and youtube has thrived like this.
I have a philosophy of anti-censorship, that exposure to the harsh facts of reality build character, and that forceful saviors are barriers to progress. I think sites like FB and Youtube and Reddit and 4chan have proven this. I think an intellectual community can thrive without a lot of spam, and can build character and community by overcoming obstacles instead of expecting someone else to do it for them—and really, power corrupts, the threat of a mod is worse than the threat of a bogeyman troll.
As I said in a previous post on this page, I did not agree with Smiling Dave’s month long temp ban. I think a number of people here were not happy with Danny Sanchez for it. I am not claiming nor have I ever claimed that mods are perfect. But I don’t see a need to clutter a great forum like this one with useless $#!T from people trying to ruin a good experience for the rest of us. It’s one thing for people to create fun threads about what we look like or about marxist pokemon. That’s funny stuff and a lot of us clearly like those threads. But there are other more serious threads where some users have created troll accounts specifically to fill those threads with useless crap.
Not everyone wants to read through useless crap in order to find the good posts in a serious thread. If someone is going out of their way to ruin those threads, then I fully support mods removing those posts and sometimes the users too.
There are I think 2 people on this forum that I no longer respond to. I finally had enough of their shit and said I would never respond to a post of theirs again. Would I like to see them banned? You bet! Have they been banned? No. So I don’t interact with a couple of those people. Okay…but guess what? There are others that are even worse than the people I don’t interact with on this forum anymore. People who really do go out of their way to ruin the experience here.
If you want a forum where people can just post whatever shit they want, go make one and have a good time. In the meantime, Austrian Forum, Liberty HQ, and Voluntaryism Forum are going to remove people who ruin the experience. Fortunately no one has tested Blake, Wheylous, or Autolykos on their forums yet. Hopefully it will never happen.
Spontaneous order, as though it needed defense around here. I can imagine that things would sort out even quicker and more effectively if obnoxious behavior was ignored or not encouraged or even discouraged or, best, if we could come up with some creative solutions. Outright force always seems to be the answer of people who are too intellectually lazy to fathom real solutions.