There are roughly two views on moderators. Moderators think that moderators are the thin green line protecting the ordinary users from a handful of bad actors, letting them live in blissful ignorance of the awful things that are happening. Ordinary users think the that moderators are power-mad bullies who ban and delete as they see fit, with no accountability.

Both of these things can be true at once!

This reminds me a lot of the situation with the police, who are to an extent the moderators of the big room [1]. 90% of a policeman's time is spent dealing with a small number of really nasty people. 90% of a member of the public's interaction with the police is a policeman exceeding their authority, not being interested in helping with a problem, etc [2].

If you spend 90% of your time dealing with really awful people, you will get messed up. You will develop an itchy trigger finger. Most of the time - most of your time - that's appropriate. But when you're dealing with someone who's not awful, you will get it wrong.

[1] http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/B/Big-Room.html

[2] Maybe that's not true of you. Maybe that's not true in general where you live. It is true in general where i live.

> Both of these things can be true at once!

I've been on both sides of this. Last year, /r/portland began using the word 'criddler' to describe people in various states of meth-addiction and bicycle thievery.

The word was beginning to be used very often to disparage many different types of people. The moderators made a decision to ban it, and the community backlash was supreme. I let the mods have it as well.

After a few months, I came to terms with the label of 'criddler' and realized how it would come up in my mind as a form of negative judgement on a person that was not healthy for me. I realized their decision was a good one, and I described this turn around in my nomination thread running for moderator.

Your description of the situation with the police is apt and I have thought similarly many times. Most people have no idea what day-to-day police work is.

If it was possible to see the challenge of dealing with keeping the peace there would likely be more compassion for people when mistakes are made or there's anger about moderator decisions that affect the community.

Someone famous once said (100yrs ago) that when people write to you they want to test their mettle. It is often best not to reply until a week after the letter was sent and to find the fire in the original message has since left the person who sent the letter.

These instantaneous and unpredictable word bans seem to be almost the perfect design for getting the maximum amount burn out of a given burst of new flame. Is the lone moderator too far removed from the pulse of the crowd to give effective feedback?

The word was humorous to me at one point as well.

However, it was being applied in general to homeless people.

Portland, like many cities, has a serious and growing problem with homelessness.

The word was being used to demonize and unfairly group drug addicted folks, people with mental health issues and those who are not those things but still homeless.

I do not know if there was a need to ban it outright, however I think there were reasons to want to.

To some extent, sub-wide decisions like this are taste-profile questions and with taste you will not get agreement.[2]

For example, Craig Newmark had to walk a fine line with adult services on Craigslist.[1] Many craigslist users wanted those forums. Many did not. Ultimately, I think decisions like this give character to the community.

So with /r/portland, banning 'criddler' wasn't just about banning a word, presenting a posture of the sub toward homeless people in general.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Craigslist#Adult_services_cont...

[2] One way to solve this is to allow the sub to elect moderators, which is what /r/portland did. In this case, I did say that I was for the ban on the word and was still elected by the community that was angered by the ban.

In my area, people complain that there are homeless people 'now', when I was a kid, fishermem would come home from Alaska with thousands of dollars of cash in their pockets, buy a tent and a sleeping bag and just camp right next to the bar. Lots of couch surfing. People had bars on their windows.

These PNW cities have always had a lot of drugs and poverty and depression. Cities built on logging, fishing, lumber mills, paper plants, shipping ports and airplane factory work.

The tech hub vibe and the people who moved to here from the suburbs see this as new. And in a way, it's been exacerbated by skyrocketing rent, but part of what we're seeing is a lack of places where these people could hide in plane sight.

They've always been here. This is a subculture that has always existed.

I'm 4th generation Southern Oregon and when I was a kid (20 years ago) I rarely saw homeless people in Medford, they either were much more reclusive or didn't exist. Ashland is it's own case however and we would play the game "Hiker or Homeless."

There's a bike path that runs from Ashland all the way to... Well, at least Central point, or maybe Gold Hill? It's about 25 miles. The Medford sections are now overflowing with tents and homeless camps, enough to make it dangerous for families and children. This was unthinkable twenty years ago.

That's what I'm getting at, I should probably do research on my own time. Thanks for doing the good & dirty work of moderating a subreddit.

Don't drag the debate in here!

You might as well wave a red flag in front of a bull! Or pour gasoline on a tire fire!

(Meant humorously with no disrespect.)

From my experience in the past, moderating doesn't scale at all. So you basically have to pre-empt issues that tend to lead towards requiring mod actions. An example of this would be the auto-mod stuff on Reddit (though I don't have any experience with the specifics here, just assumptions).

Another approach is to root out the "trigger" words that tend to escalate arguments quickly, and are generally a sign that a discussion has just become a battle of insults instead of a useful discussion.

Again, because its not just one situation between users, it's potentially dozens of arguments across a site between dozens of users. You can't wait until after things get out of control, because there isn't enough time in the day to clean stuff up in that manner. And people want clear rules for what they can and can't say and rules like "Don't be disrespectful" aren't usually super helpful, especially against people who are more malicious in their interactions.

So, calling out specific words that are banned allows for a simple, straightforward rule that can be pointed to without leaving lots of wiggle room for arguments (which again, you don't have time to have with every user who complains).

So you try to be alert for people who use certain phrases. Racism, xenophobia, conspiracy theories, paranoia, extreme pettiness, severely abrasive attitude, choosing beggars, and so on.

And flame wars, and people jumping on others. And of course if there is a group of people showing such unwanted behavior it takes no time for the powder keg to go off.

I think having sort of simple but a big ambiguous rules are okay if there are very broad but exact rules too. (Eg. Rule1: don't be a dick, Rule2: no harrassment, no xenophobia, no posting of personal information, etc.)

Moderators and the community should be proactive. (I find that the best tool is reports, because that signals what people find problematic. Sometimes they are just annoyed that some newcomer posted that again. That's okay, but most of the time users report spammers, crazy serious racists with too much time, and the occasional lost redditors' posts.)

I think I’ve spent enough time around people on meth and bicycles to probably understand it - but I just don’t get it yet.

The reason it's contentious is that one person uses it, someone else objects to it, people take sides along left-vs-right lines, and the thread devolves in to a shouting match.

It seems it’s pretty well established though, from 2010:

https://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=criddler

but, "criddler" is much older on the sub than "last year", it's been a mainstay for at least 10 years. and Portland doesn't have a police department, they have a police bureau (sorry, that one's a pet peeve).

The group of mods running the show now seem to me good people and having seen how they operate I'd be impressed if other city subs of this size are doing a far better job.

I realized after writing the above that it was likely an older word than that, but it hadn't really been a growing memey word in the sub before last year that I had noticed. Maybe the year before? Time flies.

And thanks for the note on the Portland Police Bureau. Too late to update my post, but I'll try to remember that one.

Since the concept of a city subreddit is so obviously pointless, the only people who stay are the ones who like the conflict, exacerbating the problem; or in worse cases like the Canada subreddit, there is a hostile takeover by one side. If you want to talk to people who happen to live nearby, I think you should do so on a different website; reddit doesn't work at all for that usecase.

EDIT: just noticed you mentioned "liberal city", so if it's political stances you're referring to then yes a more conservative-leaning person may not feel welcome on r/portland

funnily enough, I'm referring to the sub often times having a more conservative audience, often coming in from the suburbs (Vancouver being a big one there).

Note how your conclusion doesn't actually follow: just because something isn't healthy for you, doesn't make it unhealthy for everyone else.

Trying to police too much is likely why moderators get such a backlash when they employ heavy-handed tactics like outright bans.

Moderators also very likely operate in a like-minded bubble: the sort of people who would volunteer to be moderators are far more likely to have more in common with each other, than with the average community member. As such, mods will likely always get backlash.

For instance, I'd bet it's far more likely that your fellow mods debate to what extent language should be policed, and there are probably almost no mods questioning whether language should be policed at all.

Some kind of moderation system with strictly limited mod terms and random promotions to mod status would likely improve relations, but achieving the right balance would be challenging.

This logic doesn't follow. If you don't police enough, then users have an expectation that anything goes. When you do decide to moderate behavior, you experience a backlash because you've changed stances.

If you moderate too much, then you get accused of being heavy-handed, fascistic or trampling over their free speech rights. When you're a moderator, there's often very little that you can do that won't generate backlash unless the user in question is so toxic that the community as a whole agrees they need to go.

Your idea of random promotions to mod status w/ limited mod terms is an incredibly bad idea as well, because the moment a bad faith actor gets promoted to mod your entire community will quickly go up in flames. Trust me, there are people that will pretend to be in good faith for months, years until it gets them a position of power just so they can burn it all down.

You experience a backlash from some users, sure. If most users consider it a positive change, then no big deal.

> When you're a moderator, there's often very little that you can do that won't generate backlash unless the user in question is so toxic that the community as a whole agrees they need to go.

This seems to be assuming ban-like tactics. They're a poor option and I don't favour them.

> Your idea of random promotions to mod status w/ limited mod terms is an incredibly bad idea as well, because the moment a bad faith actor gets promoted to mod your entire community will quickly go up in flames.

You're making a lot of assumptions:

1. There's an innate equilibrium between the cardinality of the mod set, the probability that it contains a bad actor, and the probability that actor can cause appreciable disruption. The larger the mod set, the less likely a bad actor can do anything meaningful. You can likely make this probability arbitrarily small if that's a likely threat model. Tandom appointments work quite well to increase efficiency in various consensus-driven systems [1].

2. Mods shouldn't have absolute power. There is simply no way that a single mod should be able to destroy a whole community, any more than a bad judge in the legal system, or a single bad politician could destroy a city, county or state.

3. A transparent appeals process is always needed, in which other mods and community members review mod decisions. It took us millennia to develop our robust legal systems. Technology can eliminate some of the bureaucratic inefficiencies of the legal system in this setting, but it still contains robust patterns that should be copied.

4. You're assuming an open signup process which is vulnerable to DoS/brigading tactics. Maybe there's a way to allow open signups too (with reputation systems), but it's not strictly necessary.

5. Various reputation systems can be overlaid on this, and this interacts well with transparent judgments/appeals process, ie. someone with a long record of violating conditions and losing appeals would be less likely to be given mod power (but never 0%).

In general, today's moderation systems are intentionally vulnerable to a number of problems, because sites optimize for growing a user base rather than fostering community, because that's how they raise money.

Consider something akin to stack overflow, which randomly shows you messages to review or triage. Every now and again you get 5 messages or mod decisions to review, and you vote your approval/disapproval. This narrows the gap between traditional mod status and users status, where true mods would be relegated to reviewing illegal content that places the whole community in jeopardy.

Of course, there might also be considerations for avoiding the tyranny of the majority, but my point is only that the space of possible moderation strategies is considerably wider than most seem to think.

[1] https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S037843711...

Have you acted as a moderator before? What are some communities which you believe have the idealized form of moderation? Because even Stack Overflow as you've referenced has issues with high toxicity among users chasing off moderators all the same.

Forum administration already is a limited government, typically authoritarian in current incarnations. Mods are the police, judges and juries. Works fine if you have the resources and mods are fair, and maybe that's typical for minor infractions, but the conflict of interest is clear.

Authoritarian moderation doesn't scale though, and you disenfranchise a lot of people with every a mistake, particularly since a) there's rarely a transparent appeals process, and b) people don't typically like owning their mistakes. Doubly so when "it's my platform, so I can do what I want with it". Maybe that's not something you care about, but given the increasing importance of social media to democratic government, it's a problem that will likely worsen.

> And I would hope that as reality has proven, government is very easily gamed by people seeking power.

Government is a system of rules for governing people's interactions. A moderation system is a system of rules for governing people's interactions on a specific site. You can't speak of these things as if they're that different. Either a system of rules is vulnerable to exploits, or it's not.

> Because even Stack Overflow as you've referenced has issues with high toxicity among users chasing off moderators all the same.

I mentioned stack overflow specifically for the unintrusive and random review process and nothing else. SO doesn't feature any of the other ideas I listed.

Finally, I have no "idealized form of moderation" in mind, I have knowledge of where existing systems fail, and how other systems have already addressed very similar problems. Designing a secure and scalable moderation system is a big task, so if you want to hire me to research and build such a system, then I will be happy to address all of your questions in as much detail as you like.

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23263181

You can also split moderation along another axis, dividing on whether moderators are curators or janitors.

The janitorial view would be that moderators should be generally hands-off, acting only in clear-cut cases of abuse or spam. The community does or should mostly run itself through social norms, and heavy-handed moderation is unnecessarily and unfairly restrictive.

The curation view is that moderators serve an active role in building the community, and they should generally act strongly to define and preserve community norms. The community is the moderators' space first, and a free space second if at all.

It's a job that attracts that sort of person, people who just want things to function smoothly will get fed up with it quickly, the only people who stay at it will be the ones who want to mold the community to their vision (whether it wants to be molded or not).

As a moderator on another forum (not reddit), I disagree. Many of the moderation actions I take are visible to ordinary users, and that's on purpose. For community norms to be maintained, they have to be visibly enforced: enforcement is not just for the particular bad actor, but also for the ordinary users who genuinely want to respect community norms, so they know what the boundaries are (and therefore know how to respect them), and can see that people who violate those boundaries are dealt with (so they have confidence that the norms are meaningful).

> Ordinary users think the that moderators are power-mad bullies who ban and delete as they see fit, with no accountability.

Again, I disagree. If moderation actions are often visible, as above, ordinary users who genuinely want to respect community norms can see what is actually being enforced, and over time, if the moderators are doing a reasonable job, ordinary users will see that the pattern of enforcement reasonably matches the stated norms that are supposed to be enforced. Most ordinary users are reasonable and don't expect perfection, but they do expect consistency and reasonable judgment.

The biggest problem I see facing good moderation is that moderators can't be everywhere at once. One way to address that is to give ordinary users a way to report problematic posts, to bring them to the attention of the moderators. That also gives ordinary users another way to see how moderation is being done, because they can see what is or is not done in response to their reports.

There will always be some people who are never satisfied, and who will find something to complain about no matter what moderators do. But I don't think most ordinary users fall into that category.

Also, about "no accountability": ultimately, as a moderator, I'm accountable to the owner of the site. Similarly, the HN mods are ultimately accountable to the owners of HN. So the corresponding question for reddit would be, who owns reddit?

What complicates matters even more is that the interaction usually involves fear at least on one side. In a peaceful society, a regular citizen doesn't interact with police officers day to day. If you capture the attention of an officer, it usually means either something bad happened to you, or you're suspected of doing something wrong - both of which put you in a "fight or flight" state. I suspect that the most common interaction between a westerner and a police officer involves said citizen breaking traffic rules, which is a pretty antagonistic situation from the start.

I see the logic in your statement, but it's an imperfect model.

Moderators operate purely on the Judge Dredd model.

But then, in reality, the police operate in a 90% classical, 10% Dredd sort of way (for values of 90% and 10% that vary by location). They can mete out small punishments without going to court, oversight is not very effective, etc.

Or, as often happens, they're dead. I don't envy members of a profession that have to get every life-and-death decision right in real time on a daily basis.

It'd be interesting to see real numbers, but I suspect officers on the beat get the short end of that stick.

I try to remember this when interacting with law enforcement. If you have to call the police, you're having a bad day. If you're a police your job is dealing with everyone's bad day.

Anyways, when our main mod got approached on the street and asked if he was /u/nickname on reddit and he replied yes, he got stabbed. That was the day I quit.

It’s not just geo subs that have this problem. A friend of mine who mods a number of comedy subs (of all things) showed me his mod mail that appeared to indicate systematic brigading from far right discord servers.

They post extremist content in a bid to get the sub banned, and if it fails, they escalate harassment campaigns on the moderators

Bad actors can harass a community as a whole (and they do) but it's much harder for them to target specific moderators. The flipside is that moderators have to hold each other accountable for impartial enforcement of the rules.

I totally agree that lack of response to ban-evasion has been a problem. Even Wikipedia does better than Reddit at managing user bans.

The amount of damage that bad actors can do on reddit is disappointing. It also doesn't seem to be getting any better. In the 9 years I have been modding the same problems are still present.

The poweruser situation is also frustrating. The reddit moderation system and the ranking of moderation power by seniority really encourages cabals. It has been tough to resist on some of the subs I moderate for them being taken over by power users. You invite one mod to help with spam or problem users and all of a sudden you have 5 more mods, all of who moderate dozens of subs. Slowly the power users move towards top mod position and they never bring in fresh mods, only other power users. They will also try to remove any existing top mods to entrench their control. The system is killing the democratic nature of reddit by concentrating moderation into a narrow group. Given reddits position that moderators effectively own the community it makes it very difficult to resist this kind of takeover. My advice: never invite anybody who is already modding more than 100K users in other subs to be a mod on your sub.

I'd be interested to know if actual forum moderators think that we could solve the bad actor problem with algorithms...

I only use Hacker News and Reddit. And I always manage to get banned every few months, so I guess I'm a "bad actor".

Usually I start off OK. I can rank up 1000 points on HN or 20k karma on Reddit quickly because some of the discussions are interesting and non-inflammatory and I have interesting things to say.

But then some topics veer into domains that make me angry (hello politics), or I find a comment inappropriate or unfair, or mod behavior hypocritical. And I share that in a post that gets flagged or downvoted, and I get banned.

It is hard to detect because I think anyone has potential to become a bad actor in the eyes of a mod. There is no such thing as an unbiased mod. They will rub some people the wrong way with their comments or actions.

Some personality type's are just not compatible with what mods want to see in their well-tended gardens. I've never stalked or hounded anyone, and I've disagreed with dang's assessment of my posts once or twice, (FYI DanG is a paid mod, not a volunteer, which is probably why he's so calm about it, even though he get's riled too: read the New Yorker article about him) but this appears to be a problem techies cannot solve. Why do I say this? Because it's been going on since the 80's with Usenet. Almost 40 years of trolls, and tech hasn't solved it, but it has created some systems that have worked to keep the weeds out of the gardens. But gardens still need weeding.

Kurt Tucholsky gave great advice on how to write a letter to a government agency that is applicable to all potentially heated discussions:

* write letter.

* put letter in drawer.

* wait three days. don't look at letter in drawer, write a new letter and send that one.

I'm not sure how best to fix that. Some subreddits like /r/scenesfromahat use a timed-release system that only displays vote scores on comments after a fixed period (12 or 24 hours, I forget which). That at least helps reduce the first-comment effect, but it still means that anything after the votes are revealed is basically not going to be seen.

At a certain scale, I think threaded conversations are incredibly difficult to follow without a voting system to sort it out, and once you introduce a voting system you end up with voting system problems as you mentioned.

I honestly think that flat forums are more fit for purpose. Multiple concurrent conversations end up being a bit messy, but there was at least a reasonable chance that someone would reply to any given post, since everybody in the thread was on the same page.

Heck, you can even gamify engagement with a flat forum - one of those that I still frequent allows you to "react" to any given post. It doesn't actually do anything except have a number beside the post tick up, but people still use it.

Isn't that a standard subreddit setting? I don't think that actually affects the problem you were describing. I think it's only meant to help keep the vote tallys from influencing user behavior (e.g. bemoaning how many up/down votes some comment got, being extra motivated to karmawhore).

In my experience, quick-feedback scores seem to have a negative influence on people's behavior and emotional experience. IIRC, HN used to show comments scores, but stopped some years ago. I personally try to disable such "features" as much as possible.

Reddit's default "best" sorting algorithm is designed to mitigate that effect [1]. It does a good job of not biasing old comments in terms of sort order, but it doesn't help the related problem that older comments tend to accumulate the most replies so newer stuff can still get drowned out in terms of quantity of other content.

[1]: https://redditblog.com/2009/10/15/reddits-new-comment-sortin...

Instead of getting warned or banned, a user is placed in a timeout box where all of their posts get a three day lag and remain editable, and when the user logs in, they must re-read their posts before proceeding to the site. Kind of an 'in-your-face' reminder not to be a troll.

It wouldn't stop the insane trolls, but maybe it would give the borderline trolls time to think.

If anyone else is interested, here it is:

https://www.newyorker.com/news/letter-from-silicon-valley/th...

Some interesting stuff in there, though I would love to read more about the behind-the-scenes tools they use to search and keep track of everything.

It's strange to me that especially on a technology forum discussing the negatives or pitfalls of certain mechanisms is being suppressed, censored - just like with politics, as politics is inherently intertwined with everything including non-action.

I'm on another forum that opted for an up/down vote system and showed counts per-post much like news.yc used to. It created so much drama and anxiety that people were openly antagonistic towards each other over what amounted to fake-internet-points.

The solution the admins came up with over there was "keep the counts shown publicly" but also "make public the specific votes that were up/down on any given post" (with an anonymization of all historical downvotes before the policy change, but not afterwards). Within days, the community adapted and it was a huge net benefit, IMO.

For people who think of themselves as good actors, I will reflect on posts that attract downvotes and try to figure out if I should have been more constructive on a given post. (I don't "care" about the score per-se, but I do care about the community that I'm part of and if people are telling me that I'm being an asshole on a given post, I should reflect on that, decide if I agree with them, and if I do, to change next time. (Often, I think my content was fine and someone just disagreed and used a downvote to express that. That's not how I use downvotes, but if they do, so be it...))

I had a funny incident, where I misunderstood a comment, thinking that "all your answers are negative" was very true, because I often disagree and try to be contrarian. SE has a policy that discourages discussion, so if users find it uncomfortable having their views challenged, when they really wanted an easy answer, howbeit simplistic, that may be lawful.

The situation is different when discoussion is the aim of the game. And it's a bit disingenious to say that SE doesn't have "discussion"; rather, they avoid controversy, heated arguments, or open ended debate.

Anyhow, regarding your comment that downvoting is terrible for civil discours, I agree inasmuch as it's often hard to tell what the downvote signalizes, as it might lump up many different opinions into one false agreement. Say, five different opinions compete, but only one takes on all of the answers and will accrue downvotes for the attacks, whereas the others get basicly ignored by competitors for being irrelevant, but yield feedback so that the vote is really one of popularity, as opposed to ...

Really says something about diplomacy. And I hate it so much.

I think a lot of that wouldn't make up such a giant part of the site if there were downvotes on stories.

He would say probably something along these lines: "The chief danger to freedom of thought and speech at this moment is not the direct interference of … any official body. If publishers and editors exert themselves to keep certain topics out of print, it is not because they are frightened of prosecution but because they are frightened of public opinion."

Your "click to read" today is the "buried in page 12 in pt-6 font" of the past. Same train of thought.

* I have accounts not just here, but also at places like Lobsters and Something Awful. In those places, because accounts are rare and can be banned so easily, discourse is constantly trying to stay much more civil than here or Reddit.

* As a former community moderator, I don't respect moderation actions on sites where anonymous signup is allowed. You asked for hoi polloi to wander in off the street and give their opinions; you can't then wonder why discourse is trash. Here, it's even worse; the moderators are paid for their work, which lends a clear bias to every moderation action. Similar happenings on Reddit led directly to user protests and revolts, and it's amazing that the community tolerates paid moderation here.

The idea of the well-tended garden is a potent one. I have had to tolerate obviously toxic but helpful people before and it is always irritating to not ban them, despite knowing that they are good for the garden.

We don't put barriers to signup because we want it to be easy for authors, experts, and people with firsthand knowledge of a situation to step into a thread. Those are some of the best comments HN receives. If you put up barriers to keep out hoi polloi, you end up keeping out the likes of Alan Kay and Peter Norvig too, and plenty of lesser known people who have made first-rate contributions.

Besides that, there are legitimate cases when throwaway accounts are needed in order for a person to post on a topic, often when they have first-hand knowledge of a situation as well. How do you allow that while keeping out trash?

Obviously, if there were a way to allow the above good stuff while keeping out trolls, toxic comments, etc., that'd be grand. But as long as there's a tradeoff, I'd rather have the long tail at both ends—I think the forum would be more mediocre and stale without it.

p.s. I'm puzzled by your comment about paid moderation. It seems to me that unpaid moderation would be more likely to be biased, since people are going to extract compensation for the work in some form or other. If it isn't money, it's probably going to be power or an ideological or personal agenda, or something else that manifests as bias. In any case I'd be curious to hear what sort of bias you think is showing up in mod actions on HN.

I understand where you are coming from here. I struggle with this. I think there is a legit theory for it, usually given in the context of how to reconcile shitty behavior of geniuses (Picasso comes to mind: legendary artist, shitty human.)

Even if toxic people have something good to say once in a while, do the ends justify the means if they stomp all over the roses in the process?

> You asked for hoi polloi to wander in off the street

The garden analogy is potent because where I live there is a huge rose garden that anyone can wander in off the street and visit. Some people come in and do stamp on the roses. And it sucks for everyone else. Which is why I can understand the desire to keep those people out.

However, shouldn't the gardeners KNOW that there are and always will be shitty humans?

I'm truly ambivalent on this one: I want to participate, but I lack impulse control, so I'm excluded. That's not fair. And if I was tending a garden, I'd want to keep the "me"s out.

Yes, it is, because the problem is not the garden, it's you. You want to participate, but you don't have a basic skill (impulse control) that is required for participation. It's like saying you want to be a concert pianist, but you don't know how to play the piano, so you're excluded and that's not fair.

I think your argument mixes up things you can control (skill) with things you cannot control (impulsivity), if the latter could be controlled it wouldn't be impulsive.

And I admit that is a big gray area. There's a continuum of toxicity online, and there are going to be some moderation rules that are subjective.

Unlike a pianist, I see the argument as more akin to web developers choosing not to implement alternate or semantic constructs which in turn excludes blind people. A visitor can't get better at not being blind. Of course, the analogy breaks down because blind people aren't adding noncritical discourse (aka what one mod may consider "flamebait"), but now we are back to subjectivity and affordance as to what is noncritical. We clearly know how to make the web accessible to blind people, but we don't have a universally clear way to make discourse available to people who sometimes suck at it.

However, I can create as many accounts as I want, so I got that going for me.

First, we're not talking about a binary distinction; things aren't either "can control" or "can't control". It's a continuum.

Second, if it's really true that you can't control your impulsive behavior, that still doesn't change the fact that that behavior will make it virtually impossible for other people to deal with you in certain contexts. It's still up to you to recognize the impact that your behavior has on others, and to make choices about what you can realistically do or not do--or about how much work you are willing to do or how much risk you are willing to take to be able to participate in certain activities (for example, if it turned out there was a drug that enabled you to control your impulsive behavior, would you take it in order to enable you to do something you wanted to do?).

> I see the argument as more akin to web developers choosing not to implement alternate or semantic constructs which in turn excludes blind people.

Ok, so what "alternate or semantic constructs" could the programmers of HN, for example, put into their code so it won't exclude people who can't control their impulsive behavior?

> we don't have a universally clear way to make discourse available to people who sometimes suck at it.

It's not that we don't have a "universally clear way" to do this. We don't have a way at all. "Sucking at discourse" is simply not something we know how to accommodate for. The only way we know of to deal with it is for the person who sucks at discourse to learn how to not suck at it.

Perhaps at some point we'll have an AI or something similar that can mediate such discussions so all parties can participate. But we don't have anything now.

> so you are excluded

from what, playing the piano? Do you maybe see a connection here to why somebody might not know "how to play the piano"?

Or in other words: A garden without "you" is not really a garden, except in theory, if the proverbial tree makes a sound when nobody can hear it fall. That's a slippery slope argument.

Many people may lack impulse control, but preemptive judgement can't weed them all out. That's one reason why it's "not fair". It's fair to those that have "impulse control", maybe, but it is perhaps unfair that they get to decide what that is, when a moderator might act out of impulse, or experience, all the same. It is however futile to assume that life were just not fair, because then "you" have already lost.

If entry is taken to afford the gate keeper, it is not an open garden anymore, open to the public. At least not if the submission requirements are arbitrary to an uncertain degree. Maybe it's the wrong approach to take that internet discussion is not important and impulse control therefore let down too easily. But then again, the impulse to post or visit at all might be the problem to begin with, as in this post.

Really, who's aspiring to become a concert pianist in this day and age? That's a weak rhyme, unless you meant to imply that the reddit moderator cabal were playing the readers like an instrument.

I didn't; the person I responded to did, by using the word "I". They were specifically talking about themselves.

> from what, playing the piano?

From being a concert pianist. Read what I actually wrote.

> It's fair to those that have "impulse control", maybe, but it is perhaps unfair that they get to decide what that is, when a moderator might act out of impulse, or experience, all the same.

My statement that impulse control is a basic requirement for participation applies just as much to moderators as to any other participants.

Who gets to decide what the forum rules and norms are is whoever owns the forum. That's as fair as it gets.

There are some forums where lack of impulse control isn't much of a problem, because nobody else on that forum has it either. So strictly speaking, I should have restricted my comments to forums where that is not the case. I don't think that makes much difference in practice for this discussion, since as far as I can tell the forums where lack of impulse control is the norm don't have moderation problems since they don't have moderation at all.

> who's aspiring to become a concert pianist in this day and age?

Googling "how to become a concert pianist" gets plenty of hits, so it looks like plenty of people are trying to help aspiring concert pianists. Perhaps they're all speaking to an audience of zero, but I doubt it.

> unless you meant to imply that the reddit moderator cabal were playing the readers like an instrument

You're going way off into left field here.

There are communities like this; Something Awful is the first which comes to mind. These communities deliberately acknowledge that money is required to fund community spaces, and use the money to improve the space.

There are also extensions to the analogy. A local park has a bulletin board. Postings to this board are generally made by community consent; anything that any community member feels strongly enough about can be removed immediately. This is also how postings on telephone poles work. Sometimes a community will lock up their bulletin board after a wave of abusive listings. This is analogous to primitive message board moderation, as seen here on HN.

Are we here to advertise to each other, like on a bulletin board? Are we here to produce a great knowledge base, like in a garden? What should the shape of conversation be?

Speaking generally, without real-world consequences for violating community TOS on a service there are no teeth in tracking bad actors, banning them, etc.

For a long time, I loathed Facebook's real-name policy. However, to some extent I suspect the amount of identity validation and attribution of comments to actions does have a limiting impact on casual trolling and harassment on that service.

It seems to be trivial for bad actors to hack/farm unused accounts and impersonate people almost at will. Meanwhile nation state-level and/or corporate bad actors have the resources to bypass or subvert the id validation and create fake identities and accounts at industrial scale.

I don't think real ID is a solution. Not even if it's linked to some kind of robust physical key - which is obviously going to have privacy implications anyway.

AI or automated searching for troll-like activity, most likely followed by manual oversight, is more likely to be successful.

But there's the lingering question of whether FB is really interested in pursuing this with any effectiveness or enthusiasm. Given FB's resources and its lack of success to date, the answer seems to be "no."

Just in the last couple of days of me commenting on FB I've been called a "retard" (sorry for the word, but that's what the lady used to describe me) and a "troll" (presumably Russian), this latter description accompanied by said commenter saying how I only write down dumb stuff which shows that I don't think before writing (but not saying where and especially why he thought I was wrong in my statements).

Compared to all that commenting almost anonymously on HN seems like a breeze of fresh air. Of course in the many years I have been commenting in here there have been ups and downs (a couple of very down points for me were the reactions after the Boston marathon and the endless banana references after the Fukushima disaster), but other than that when one is told that he/she is wrong the person saying it usually comes with his/her own reasons which helps move the conversation forward.

There might be some interesting data here supporting real-name policies. I don't say anything on LinkedIn because I'm scared anything I say can and will be used against me when job hunting.

Also: thanks for modding /r/portland. I love PDX. Just wish it was sunnier: it would be the perfect city.

You can still have throwaway accounts for commenting on things and the overall community will be increasingly more civil.

I surfed HN for years before I decided to make an account, and even now I don't really know anyone else using it in my circle. I guess I might have found someone if I asked around, but it would definitely raise the bar.

Let us read our Shirky:

https://web.archive.org/web/20050615082335/http://shirky.com...

A well-tended community is constrained by things like Dunbar's Number and SNR ratios.

Soft forking is a common response - IMO reddit is the closest social platform to "getting it right", although it should do a better job of pushing low-value content (/r/politics, etc) down into the "minor leagues" of subreddits.

> You can still have throwaway accounts

How can both of these things be simultaneously true?

Done. The inviter doesn't know the username of the invitee. It's only visible to the moderation team who invited whom.

If the throwaway account is banned, the original link-giver would lose their good standing. (sorry, I should have highlighted this to the original reply)

We can argue about whether the assertion is actually true, but even the perception that it might be true will make people reluctant to give out an invitation to someone wanting to create a throwaway account.

If I had my own named account in good standing, I suppose I might be willing to use it to create a throwaway account for myself, provided that I was careful to only use that throwaway for... I don't know... "lightly" controversial content that is only likely to be downvoted rather than abusive content that is likely to be banned. (Not that I would ever actually create a throwaway in order to be abusive! Just trying to think like a troll).

Actually, I guess that's what we wanted to encourage anyway, right? Controversial content should be fine; abusive content is not. Maybe this would work after all...

Case 2: Your assertion is incorrect. There is some other reason for making a throwaway (like talking about a former employer, for example) and the system works as intended. The throwaway doesn't get banned and nobody gets their account demoted.

Also these demotions could have a time element to them, where you can't invite someone new for, say, a year.

The upvote/downvote system is designed to reinforce echo chambers and create a chilling effect for your “real” opinion if you know it doesn’t agree with the hive.

That system is already trying to solve the problem and instead creating a different one.

All you can do with an invite system is to make sure the echo chamber is even more structured. That “those people” aren’t even allowed to join. Hello country club.

See regular posts on this very forum about algorithms running amok, banning people without clear reasons, and accounts only becoming reinstated by being famous enough to get enough traction to get a human to review your false positive.

That sense of powerlessness doesn’t mitigate things, it sometimes escalates them.

The shit-peddlers outside the building are constantly convincing pool-goers to join a shit-peddling pyramid scheme so that they bring boxes of shit in to the pool.

And besides that, some people just want to trash the pool for their own enjoyment.

At least as far as websites or individual platforms go, this is exactly what accounts, moderation, and "banning" already attempt to do. We've seen how difficult and expensive this is to scale when your site gets as big as Facebook or Reddit. I can't fathom a sufficiently "benevolent dictator" that I would trust to act as a gatekeeper for the entire Internet at large.

one thing reddit could be doing to help is to stop relying on community moderators for so much. volunteer community moderators shouldn't be dealing with people abusing the reddit platform, that should be the job of reddit's staff. Instead of just building tools, reddit should be actively involved in the enforcement of platform rules to handle these cases, and leave the community moderators to focus on creating and maintaining their communities - ensuring content fits the theme of the subreddit, people are communicating with each other in a tone that fits the intended tone of the subreddit, etc.

Reddit needs people like gallowboob who are willing to do the drudgery of sifting through all the platform abusers, but from an end-user perspective it's easy to see somebody moderating 80% of the big subreddits as a problem, because it's not clear whether a moderator is actually influencing the community or just sifting through obvious abuse.

Free speech is hard. Really hard. Allowing communities to express themselves in person (aka pre-internet) was much easier, because there was a cost to appear in person (time, society's perceptions, etc).

With the internet, truly anonymous speech has flourished, and much of it really is a waste of time or even damaging.

I hope as a society that we will be able to figure out this conundrum without eliminating free speech. I think that just like credit cards accept some bad debts, we have to be able to accept some bad actors in speech - the trick is limiting it without killing free speech.

To me, communities like reddit, HN, FB, twitter, etc are all huge experiments in free speech and how to manage that problem. Hopefully it turns out right - I don't want the future to look like East Germany.

Honestly, this is something Metafilter did pretty well: the five dollar account fee makes a ton of abuse tactics more costly to deploy, while simultaneously funding efforts to combat it.

It would go a long ways I think to at least allow mods to restrict subreddits to read-only for unpaid accounts.

It'd be awesome if we had anonymous reputation scores, like PGP or something, that other people could vouch for. Make bad actors pay to build up good reputation, then burn it down when they misbehave.

I really want a system like that to help filter the deluge of comments anyway. Though there's a danger of forming a filter bubble, I want to see commentary that is vouched for by those I respect. Not just on Twitter, but everywhere. As a protocol or data exchange format.

The whuffie concept relies on strong online identities. Without that, declaring bankruptcy is too easy and allows malicious actors to simultaneously harm others and boost their own scores rep with bots.

Politically motivated reddit people are, or at least can be, scary.

Part of the problem is that online communities rely on the fallacy that, because most people are good, such communities can thrive with some reasonable amount of guidance. But it only takes a relative few people acting in bad faith to cause great damage.

As such, I've long considered that the online world amplifies the sociopaths, bad actors, and worst among us to an untenable level, giving them outsized power and voice. I think it's driving our "real" society and culture in a negative direction to a degree that people vastly underappreciate.

Layer on top of that adversarial nations that actively use our online communities to divide and propagandize, and there's a very real question of whether we're better off without these communities.

More succinctly, many of the largest platforms that enable online communities seem consistently unable or unwilling to rein them in. And when you look at experiences like those you convey, it's little wonder. Attempts to moderate bad actors will invariably add to the problem, as they devolve the discourse further and generally seek to be heard, else burn the place down.

Good moderation can keep out bad actors and promote an adult and civil tone, but it's insanely time-consuming and expensive.

There really needs to be a new legal concept - something like poisoning of free speech. It's one thing to have unpopular and unusual opinions and to argue them, but another to set out to knowingly and deliberately subvert and poison communities with calibrated lies and aggression.

There is no upside to the latter, and the face-to-face equivalent would usually have consequences. Free speech advocates online seem to believe that online communities are somehow magically strong enough to handle these threats automatically - but in reality they can be more fragile than face to face communities. Some formal appreciation of that might not be a bad thing.

one of the few cases where online and offline worlds converge on a common modality to deal with common fundamental inputs. you don't know the valence of a new group member until they choose to reveal it to you, when it most favors their leverage.. This (among other things) tilts the odds of successful group influence in the favor of the new comers. Freedom isn't free and all that.

When reddit goes public, moderators get nothing. The employees of reddit will become defacto IPO millionaires, but moderators who create the success of the site, get nothing. Has anything been discussed along these lines about how unfair this is?

If you create a new subreddit, anyone can show up and participate. Good actor or bad.

Can you imagine if you threw a physical party and let every single stranger in the world literally walk in your front door, wander around their house, and do what they want? You'd be a honeypot for thieves and vandals.

On the Internet, they don't take your physical stuff, but they harm the online equivalent: your information and attention. Every popular online forum is likewise a honeypot for scammers, shady advertisers, griefers, and other malcontents. Why wouldn't it be?

The typical suggested option is massive policing, but that's really hard in a world a bad actor can don a near-perfect disguise (create a new account) in an instant.

I would love to see sites like Reddit and Twitter adopt a model closer to real-world social interactions: something like a web of trust where you need to be invited to participate in a space and where there is some level of vouching for you. But those kinds of businesses don't scale well so we almost never see them.

Another option would be to force something like real identities. The reason a bar can get away with just a couple of bouncers is because a bad actor can't as easily escape the consequences of their actions by shedding their identity. But, of course, requiring real identity gets in the way of good actors who use anonymity for good reasons (generally avoiding other bad actors).

It's a hard problem, but it makes me sad that almost every business just ends up doing "let everyone in and accept that there's going to be shitbags all over the place fucking it up for everyone".

But some mods become really jaded over time and are mean to users by default. I was moderator of a few mid-sized subreddits for a few years and saw that in action. A common thing I saw is a sort of purity mindset, where a moderator feels like the more people they ban, the better the subreddit becomes. It’s really easy to dehumanize people online - users do it to mods, and mods do it to users. But those bad moderators make users hate mods in general, and the cycle continues.

Same platform, but the experience couldn't be more different: we spend almost all our time dealing with "shallow" problems at a high scale. For us that means flamewars, brigading and (usually political) astroturfing, and to a lesser extent commercial spam. We don't even remotely have time to go looking for deeper problems such as ban evasion, because the volume is so high. We know it's probably happening but it's almost impossible to police because it disappears against the everyday noise.

One thing that I think helps us a lot is heavy use of automoderator rules and the spam filter to remove the most obvious problems automatically.

I think smaller and more local communities breed a very different class of problems than big ones -- it's much more personal for the participants, and their retaliation is more personal as well. Also, a single abusive user can do so much more damage in a small community because they don't just blend into the background noise.

One constant though is that we do see some really troubling things as well.

You poor soul. I stopped visiting that sub a few years ago. There was a pervasive negativity about it that was just depressing. I hope it's gotten better.

> [...] the Portland Police Department

BTW, it's Portland Police Bureau (PPB). Calling it PPD will get you labeled a transplant. ;-)

Thus, the system is both evenly-applied (most of the time) and highly scalable.

Thanks for keeping r/Portland such a fun place to hang around in, really enjoy the creative community/people who post there!

A subreddit isn't worth your safety.

There are online places where they use a third-party to verify identity. It may not have the most adoption, but at least you're not putting yourselves at risk.

I mean, if your goal is to "control" conversations, yeah, that's going to be a lot of work. What's the point of that anyway?

There's no benefit to banning the bad folks, since, like your guy, they just create a new account.

    author:
        name: [baddude1, baddude2]
    action: remove
    action_reason: "Troll / Spammer"

@bredren Would you want to lead /Portland District?

As such, this is spam for a vague mailing list.

The senior moderators are faster and better than me, so my actual workload is relatively light.

I believe Reddit will grow in its influence and that tools can and will be developed to improve the situation for community moderators.

"Doxxing" public figures who try to anonymously control public discourse is not.

Not to blame you but this is the kind of BS that makes me uninterested in the Reddit community, and uninterested in Portland in general, rife with cancel culture.

The video I posted was about a Lake Oswego woman going nuts and verbally abusing some local PD who were handling the situation with elegance. My title was something like "this is why I don't trust when people senselessly dog on the police." It was removed because there wasn't anything specific to Portland or surrending area (not true but ok). I told the mod I would just repost with the title "this is why I don't trust when Portlanders senselessly dog on local police" and was told not to post. No rules broken, just intimidation and censorship.

I don't subscribe to the progressive/liberal/left/socialist ideology and I'm genuinely afraid to publicly share that fact in Portland. There are many people in PDX who will violently attack you if they catch wind of that fact. This isn't a secret. It's also not a secret that Oregon outside of PDX and Eugene are generally Red communities.

For instance, look at the protests in Portland last year. The counter-protesters were far more disruptive and violent than the visiting protesters, but the typical Portlander wouldn't see it that way. In my own discussions with them, they see Trump supporters et. al. As being fascist and as causing violence simply by existing, thus justifying their pre-emptive violence.

Getting the actual conversation and actual article you tried to post gives a lot of context into why you believe you were cancelled. I don't want you to out the mods, I want to understand their side of the story.

I've heard your side, and it sounds like the content didn't fit the vibe of the subreddit, as per the mods. They told you that and you threatened to break their rules again. Yes, you were threatening to break their rules.

I'd say they gave you a chance, and given this particular story re: mod harassment, didn't want to engage with an aggressive user.

> No rules broken, just intimidation and censorship.

A moderator of a forum asking you to not do something is not intimidation. It's asking you to adhere to the vibe of the subreddit. The description of the article you tried to post was obviously an attempt at rabble rousing on your part. There are helpful and constructive ways to voice your opinion. If you have consistent trouble doing that, I would consider therapy to try and understand why people see you as aggressive when you try to share your opinion.

There's nothing wrong with asking for help when you're struggling to fit in socially, especially if your opinions diverge from the norm. Being different is HARD.

Thanks for looking into my Reddit post creep, I feel totally weird about you now.

I'm tired of this conversation anyway, just another corrupt person in power bending rules for their own favor, covering up injustice, lying to affirm their position, and creeping on people cross-social media. I would even bet you and your mod pals have put me on some kind of watch list. It's disgusting and shameful really, and I'll be calling out moments like this as long as the law lets me.

My post objectively didn't break any rules on /r/portland.