Hey all,
Moderation philosophy posts started out as an exercise by myself to put down some of my thoughts on running communities that I’d learned over the years. As they continued I started to more heavily involve the other admins in the writing and brainstorming. This most recent post involved a lot of moderator voices as well, which is super exciting! This is a community, and we want the voices at all levels to represent the community and how it’s run.
This is probably the first of several posts on moderation philosophy, how we make decisions, and an exercise to bring additional transparency to how we operate.
I just joined, so I can’t really speak too much about all of this from a point of experience on beehaw itself. It does seem like a lot of though has been put in this document which I do very much appreciate. In fact, it is one of the things that drove me to sign up for beehaw out of many other instances.
I do have plenty of experience moderating on “that other platform people are plenty mad at these days”. And I would like to share a few things for your consideration, if that is alright? To be clear, nothing in my comment below is intended as judgment on your current approach and philosophy. These are mostly (tangibly) related things I wrote down or bookmarked over the years that might be useful or relevant for your consideration.
As far as hate speech goes, there are indeed roughly the two approaches you outlined. Although I do think it often falls in between. I’d like to caution against the most egregious types of hate speech. I very much don’t think you’d leave those up, but I do like to share this story from a bartender [nsfw warning due to Spanish civil war poster with dead child] about this sort of thing.
On Community-Based Moderation I do want to caution for something called the “the fluff principle”
“The Fluff Principle: on a user-voted news site, the links that are easiest to judge will take over unless you take specific measures to prevent it.” Source: Article by Paul Graham
What this means is basically the following, say you have two submissions:
So in the time that it takes person A to read and judge he article person B, C, D, E and F already saw the image and made their judgement. So basically images will rise to the top not because they are more popular, but simply because it takes less time to vote on them so they gather votes faster.
This unfortunately also applies to various types of unsavory/bigoted speech. In fact, I believe I remember reading that beehaw did de-federate from some other instances due to problems coming from them. So it seems you are aware of the principle, if only due to experience.
tl;dr Some waffling about moderation and me generally appreciating that thought is being put into it on this platform :)
Right - most of our communities are not image-based so I’m not too worried about “the fluff principle”.
We definitely have no problem deleting anything that’s clearly bigoted. You can feel free to look at the modlog to see that we delete though sometimes things there can be quite awful so I caution you of that as well.
Do note that this principle doesn’t just apply to purely image based submissions and comments. Maybe I should have picked a different example for what I was attempting to say. But in general, it applies to all sorts of content that is easy to digest and easy to agree with. It is why I mentioned the defederated instances I read about as often people that are actively promoting bigoted views communicate in ways that stands out to other bigots. If you have then a heavy influx of outside users these sort of comments and submissions can easily get boosted into view without your own community being all that actively involved.
Having said that, I think you as a team already have plenty of experience with this and are at the very least aware of it. I still figured I’d mention it.
Trigger warning - please be aware of this before following the link to the first article
I read the first article about the bartender and it shows, with no warning, a historical poster that seemingly has a photo of a dead child on it. I cannot unsee that. I would never seek that sort of thing out.
I thought I was just going to read a story about a bartender. Now I feel extremely distressed on a day when my anxiety was already through the roof and I need to start work.
Please, please put content warnings up for that sort of horrifying imagery.
Oh sorry :( It had been a while since I checked out the page and forgot the poster is part of the entire thing.
If you would be so kind, would you put ‘[NSFW]’ directly to the right of that link please?
Done
Thanks!
Thank you so much for this!
No worries! :) thank you for replying.
Oh hey, you’re the toolbox dev. Thank you for your work! My mod teams over on Reddit got so much use out of that extension.
Same. Thanks for Toolbox @Creesch@beehaw.org !!!