Unrelated... How does the moderation team prefer us to use the report post feature? Polly brought up that most reports aren't about violations of the rules. I'm a moderator on another site with much higher standards for people speaking respectfully to each other. We like it when members report posts to alert us that something is trending in a problematic direction, or if members blow off steam by ranting in their reports instead of attacking each other. If we only got reports of rules violations, we would feel underinformed. (On the other hand, it's a bigger site so none of the mods read all the posts, and the topic tends to attract some creepers. Plus, like I said, we are stricter about members being respectful.)
I can't speak for the others, of course. But I'm of two minds here. On the one hand, I think that the reporting is currently under-used (we get very few reports, mostly for inter-personal conflicts). And, like you say, reports help me to get a sense of what peoples' concerns are and where they lie, what's working or not, etc. On the other hand, the moderation policies here are so light that most reports have no real effect, and I worry that it seems to reporters like they're sending them off into the void (which itself might generate a feedback loop resulting in less reporting). I have no idea whether that's a legitimate concern, it's just a worry I have.
In what way? I'm curious how you evaluate the health of the fora.
I think we've seen an increase in trolling in extant discussions, and a proliferation of high-visibility racist threads and posts. I think that this has given some members control of the Fora megaphone, and I think that fact is turning people away who might otherwise like to participate. I think we can even see this happening at the level of posts within those threads, where early on there was lots of genuine engagement by many different posters, but as things drag on fewer and fewer people post, the quality of discussion deteriorates, and only a few posters are left in the discussion, which turns into an echo chamber and post-count-upper for a while until a contrary voice pops back in briefly. (And, unfortunately, these posts are not being allowed to die when they reach that point. Posters just pop back in trying to rile up the opposition, which puts the post back at the top of the page for another month or more.)
Honestly, I don't see how the fact that people disagree (even strongly) is inherently unsettling, especially in a pseudonymous forum where there are no "real world" consequences to arguing with someone. There is no doxxing or swatting, and there is virtually never anything like a personal attack. The most that tends to happen is sarcasm, and even that only tends to arise during very heated debate, and occurs on both sides.
It's not the disagreement. As you know, I
like a good internet brawl. It's the nature of the disagreement, the trolling that ensues, and the toxicity of the vitriol that ends up most prominently on display. I, for one, would be more comfortable with it all if it was confined to a single thread, which could peter out over time (or not, as the case may be). But it's not. It's across so many different prominent threads that it makes it look like those are the dominant views here (which they aren't). And understandably that turns newbies off.
It's like what would happen when your local watering hole is taken over by neo-nazis. At first, it's just one guy with a swastika on his jacket. Nobody's very comfortable with that, but it's just one guy, and he's being quiet and minding his own business, so it seems OK. Then, next week, he brings a couple buddies. They keep to themselves, though, so although nobody likes it, they tolerate it. Then the next week, the buddies bring buddies. And pretty soon, your bar is known as the local neo-nazi hangout.
I would be interested in the distinction you would make between "moderation" and "censorship". There's no absolutely clear line, and probably virtually everyone here agrees that some moderation is a good thing.
There's currently virtually
no moderation. If it were up to me, I'd like to see us warning people about trolling and closing threads (temporarily or permanently) when the discussion gets out of hand, or when there's clearly no point to the thread beyond venting racial animus and trolling for a response.
I'd be interested in what counts as '
some moderation' in your books.
I would love to hear their specific complaints. "I am not joining these fora because conservatives and progressives argue on some percentage of its threads"? Bruh, that's called the Internet.
Yes I'm curious too. Can you tell us more without saying anything that would put the spotlight on individual posters?
It's not the existence of disagreements, heated or otherwise. It's the atmosphere created by the particular nature of some of these 'disagreements'. In any case: I've deleted most of the messages in my inbox, unfortunately, so I don't have a good record of them. But here's the last one I got, which I haven't yet pruned (note that there's more to this message, but I'm leaving it out because it singles some people out in a way that I think is not actually germane to this discussion):
I've been reading fairly regularly, but my impression is not good and I think hanging around here may not be great for my fragile mood.
