Comment by tsukikage
3 years ago
The intent of moderation is "don't be horrible to each other and/or the space".
Unfortunately, people who are horrible to other people and/or spaces generally refuse to accept this, and therefore either need more specific examples of what being horrible entails to compare their behaviours against - leading to proliferation of edges, epicycles and rule-gaming - or you have a codicil along the lines of "the decision of what is horrible is up to the moderator and is final", leading to, at best, everyone whining about how unfair, arbitrary and partial the policy is now they can't be horrible to each other any more, all at once.
> leading to, at best, everyone whining about how unfair, arbitrary and partial the policy is now they can't be horrible to each other any more, all at once.
I don’t think that is the only possible outcome. Where moderation is done well lot of people, in fact most people, simply don’t notice it. They just have a pleasant time with other pleasant people. So no, “everyone whining“ is not the best possible outcome. “Most people having a good time, a minority whining” is the best possible outcome. And of course it takes hard work, and maybe even a little bit of luck with the initial conditions.
These communities are lovely when they occur, but they tend to be small and ephemeral; it takes one single persistent troll who is good at gaming community mores and calmly wrapping complaints about any pushback in reasonable-sounding phrases to completely destroy such a space. I've seen this happen entirely too often :(
they tend to be small and ephemeral
I'm part of two such communities that each have tens of thousands of active members, and have both been online for at least 15 years.
Generalizations are rarely accurate.
HN is a good example of where the moderation works to a large extent, but it has trade offs that can be extremely problematic.
For example, politically charged discourse is suppressed. That's going to result in a higher level of civility, but now you have a large community of people with an impaired ability to affect the political process.
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Only if the moderators are idiots. Which most moderators are not: if one person is the bulk of complaints, then that person is the problem not everybody else.
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