Well-Kept Gardens Die by Pacifism (2009)
lesswrong.com
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I have been a moderator. I also was a full time parent for a long time. These two things have a lot in common.
It isn't true that your choices are either censorship or just letting some fool ruin everything. You can engage fools, welcome them, be kind, educate them and help them start fitting into the culture.
It helps to assume they are intelligent, but don't know everything. This is a rubric I learned by raising kids. Children aren't stupid, but they have a great deal to learn. A lot of the eye roll worthy stuff they do is just naivete, not intentionally bad behavior.
You can just explain stuff to people without being ugly, angry or condescending. You can just assume they haven't yet learned all the rules, they were distracted, their dog just died.
It helps to give people the benefit of the doubt the first several times and give them time to learn the ropes. People need to be clued that, hey, that doesn't work around here. If you don't tell them this isn't something we welcome here, don't be shocked when they keep doing it, oblivious to the fact that other people aren't cool with it. But you can tell them without being ugly about it.
A healthy community needs some tolerance for friction, mistakes and dust ups. No one should be expected to be perfect and occasionally defending yourself should be acceptable.
At the same time, it needs mechanisms to lubricate the social friction. An expectation of baseline respect is the best lubricant.
Respect is distinct from polite catch phrases and learning all the rules. Some of the most awful people are good at using polite catch phrases and memorizing the rules so they can politely shit all over everyone else. This is toxic behavior.
Yes, it's work to keep a community healthy. But, no, evaporative cooling is not inevitable.
I'm a parent myself and I have infinite patience with my son. But few people have the energy and patience to tolerate and educate other people's children and those that do usually work in education.
I can't stand other people's children running amok in restaurants for example. And I won't try to educate them, after all, I'm there to eat and maybe have a nice conversation with people I care about. I also won't try to educate their parents either. If they left their kids to run amok in that restaurant, then they are probably beyond educating.
What I will do instead is to complain to the waiter. And then leave without leaving a tip if s/he does nothing about it. Because unless you have a big sign on your door that suggests "screaming children are welcome", then having other people's children screaming in my ear and running between the tables while I'm eating is not OK and I couldn't give a damn about the context that made that happen. Not my problem.
And so it is with online communities in general ;-)
If you're the educator type, good for you, I'm very grateful that such people exist. Other people are not and think they have better things to do.
Following the guidelines yourself so as to leave room for other people to do some educating is sufficient. It isn't necessary for every single member to proactively educate newcomers. (In fact, that can go bad places. It can lead to newcomers being obnoxiously swamped with nitpicky "advice" every time they open their mouth, which is the opposite of welcoming and kind.)
I will note that I didn't tolerate my kids. I adored them. I thought they were cute and funny and interesting and cuddly. But, boy, did they have a lot to learn about how life worked. I was happy to talk at them about life, the universe and everything while they soaked it up like little sponges.
My account is almost ten years old and I've seen countless of comments and articles being censored and accounts being banned or soft-banned. And before that the community itself is pretty ruthless in downvoting any dissenting opinion.
It actually gets pretty bad sometimes, because it encourages the hive mind effect, but if the alternative is the aggressiveness of Reddit, then I'm fine with how things are, because I still keep coming to HN, having given up on Reddit.
> I will note that I didn't tolerate my kids. I adored them.
It's pretty bad if you don't tolerate your own children.
Yes, I know what you mean, any sane parent should adore their children, but note that I was talking of behavior when they do mistakes, not feelings. Invoking feelings in this conversation is eliciting an emotional response that detracts from the purpose of the conversation.
The point was that really few people tolerate other people's children. That people don't say anything has to do with politeness, fear of repercussions or simply because they've got children of their own doing the same things. But even so, the sociological effect is pretty clear, it's for example the number one reason for why people that don't have small children stop hanging out with those that do.
This was a good tolerant reply.
The “i adore them” comment reads as a cheap snipe, whether it was actually designed to be or the author was just tone deaf is another matter.
On balance, i find it was a calculated remark. An example of toxic commentary yet entirely within the rules because the problem was not the words but the implication.
And yet the reply didnt antogonise the situation further.
A catalog of examples like this could be a useful reference in moderation.
This is the very definition of tolerate:
allow the existence, occurrence, or practice of (something that one dislikes or disagrees with) without interference
I liked my kids, even though they both had special needs and we're often difficult to deal with. Similarly, I generally enjoy talking with people. I don't want to deal with abusive nastiness, but I also don't expect everything to go perfectly smoothly all the time. Communication is a process.
I like talking about social phenomenon. I enjoy talking about group dynamics and group culture.
I see a lot of harm in just saying "Not my problem. They just need to know how to behave." A lot of people grew up in crappy households where people don't know how to be civil. If we aren't willing to talk to them until they learn to be civil, they have no opportunity to learn to be civil. If everyone is as intolerant as you, then some people are basically headed to jail with no hope of redemption because they grew up poor, were possibly abused and never learned manners.
I think about this a lot: How do we help the most unfortunate in society to have a shot at joining the ranks of the privileged? And I think one baseline thing that works is we talk with them, we engage them in a civil and mutually respectful fashion and we help them learn what that looks like.
There is an excellent detail in the movie Dangerous Minds where a kid goes to the principal's office and the principal throws him out and won't discuss his issue with him because he burst in without knocking. The boy ends up dead.
Some people are in constant crisis. They are ill or being beaten by their spouse or struggling to get enough to eat. Trying to be adequately well mannered to engage in polite society is a real challenge. And many privileged people will cut them out because of it.
You aren't required to be one of the people willing to talk with those who are failing to be polished. But you are free to do that without pissing on the idea that this is how we create a civil culture. I don't understand why you feel compelled to shoot the suggestion down. To my mind, it is an argument that advocates that anyone who wasn't born into privilege is not welcome to try to shoot for a better life by getting online and trying to talk with polished people even though they lack polish themselves.
The internet is the best way for the Haves and Have Nots to mingle. You don't need enough money to dress properly. You don't need enough money to hang out in the right places, like the local country club. You can be dirt poor and still talk to those who know how to get things done.
I would hate to see more of your attitude in the world. When I was homeless, I was treated quite abusively on Metafilter by privileged people who like to brag about what good people they are, making the world a better place. I still am quite angry about that and I hope some of those people burn in hell. It makes me have some sympathy for people who go postal and kill a bunch of people.
The insistence that you aren't welcome unless you are capable of fitting in from the start is an insidious form of classism that is actively harmful to people who have any kind of serious personal problem. I feel that anyone who genuinely wants to see some of the serious problems in the world resolved should eschew such a policy.
Speaking of “censorship” I posted twice for advice on r/diy and twice I was unceremoniously deleted by a moderator with some copypasta message.
Sure, before posting I should have bothered reading the group EULA and realize there’s another “what’s this” sub (god knows what rules they have over there) but boy ain’t I genuinely bitter about the treatment. It alone makes me want to troll them just out of spite... couldn’t they just have been more polite and gasp ask me to move the post to this-and-that sub?! Politeness, assuming goodwill in the counterpart... generally being civil, oh i miss that!
And... no, we do not have time to give personalized individual hand-holding attention to every single person who can't be bothered to read a simple set of rules linked from our sidebar. We use AutoModerator for a lot, and will be using it even more in the future. It's a very impersonal tool, but in any but the smallest subreddits it's simply not possible to scale up personalized moderation like what you're asking for. At some point you have to show some initiative and read subreddit rules or linked wiki pages/guides/FAQs for yourself rather than relying on the goodwill of volunteer moderators to do it for you.
But even then it's an impersonal deletion with a "copypasta message", which is what the parent comment was complaining is unacceptable.
Most of these draconian rules reek of tribal fallout from some earlier - totally unrelated - war.
“And no, we do not have the time to...” then dude, you’re investing waaay more effort than you can afford, you’re burning out, take a step back, chill and let other people shoulder the community. You’re not paid to do it, neither in monetary nor in “gratitude” so chill and keep it best effort
"Just get more moderators" isn't easy in many communities.
Not this:
1 try. No direct images, only Imgur links (first auto-delete)
2 try. No request for advice. (Second delete)
3 try. No what’s this (we have decided that it goes to another sub, there it’s documented in article nn of our faq)
4... (whatever, take your meds, I’ve wasted enough time...)
That's not terribly difficult to follow. But it still ends up taking a lot of words to express, largely because so many people will come in with an attitude of "well my post is special and shouldn't have to be subject to that". Plus, of course, lots of people are just assholes on the internet.
We use AutoModerator to catch what it can catch. We manually remove a lot of other stuff. We use short temporary bans for some categories of rule-breaking, and permanent bans for assholes.
And it mostly chugs along, which is about the best you can hope for most of the time as a moderator. But, again, there's not time to hold the hand of people who think reading a short set of rules is beneath them, or who otherwise have aggressive attitudes to begin with (like you!). And even if there was, it wouldn't be worth the time. If we added a hundred million new moderators overnight just to try to do this, it wouldn't improve things one bit.
For many years those links were not available to mobile users.
This was something I thought a lot about as a moderator. If I don't have time to deal with these small issues, when I am going to find time to deal with the towering inferno that is growing because of me putting out the fire with gasoline?
Sometimes, it isn't what you do per se, it's how you do it.
When I was homeless, I had a question deleted from Metafilter and not hugely long after, someone else asked the exact same question with identical wording but a different explanation for asking and it was allowed to stand. That looks to me like the reason mine got deleted was not because the question was not allowed, but because the mods were classist assholes and actively looking to shit on me. We can't have the homeless woman having any positive experiences here. It might encourage her to stick around and, heaven forbid, even help improve her life and solve her problems, a platform we are actively hostile towards.
I really was okay with my questions sometimes being deleted, but a lot of the details of how this specific incident was handled suggested to me that it was not actually a case of "This question is in violation of the guidelines." And that is often the case. Sexism, racism, classism, homophobia, etc are often reinforced with such tactics because it maintains plausible deniability.
This is intended as food for thought. I am well aware moderating is challenging and that being too nice can serve as an attractive nuisance, causing people to dump on you and expect you to kiss their boo-boo in response to their icky behavior. There are no perfect solutions. I get that. I'm not trying to attack you.
It's really challenging to pin down cause and effect for social phenomenon. It usually isn't as clear cut as "Flicking cigarettes out your car window while driving can start a forest fire." But I wonder a lot about the cause and effect of social events and how to mentally model them.
Much of Georgia is split nearly 50-50 between blacks and whites. Other races represent a tiny fraction of the population. Years ago, I saw a TV show that traced the origins of gang violence in Atlanta to a small number of Hispanic children being treated badly at school by both whites and blacks, which meant almost everyone treated them badly for being the wrong race.
On the show, they interviewed some of the original members of the first gang. One of them said he joined because he was tired of being scared. After he joined, he no longer needed to be scared because now people were scared of him.
Online forums are real social environments. What we say and do on the internet can lead to serious real world consequences. People have married others they met via an online forum. People have been fired from their job for comments made online.
My recollection is the gang violence in Atlanta could be traced to just nine Hispanic kids who simply were treated in a very unwelcoming way and who just could not make positive social connections no matter what they did. You don't need to mistreat all that many people to lead to a metaphorical conflagration.
Our actions have consequences. For good or for ill, those consequences often come back to us.
The other point that the deletionists miss is that sending people elsewhere just doesn't work; it's never worked. All those mods need to keep /r/diy as a dump for everything they don't like, and setup /r/truediy as their pure diy sub.
http://www.plausiblydeniable.com/opinion/gsf.html
(Written in 2003, or about five years prior to the “Pacificm” post.)
But also of course not all ecosystems are gardens; not all ecosystems rely on keepers who are external to the ecosystem. A normal forest is sustained by natural forces and the normal actions of its inhabitants. As much as possible I'd like a community that sustains itself rather than one that is gardened.
Yet once we were successful in eradicating them, to our complete amazement, we found that the eradication of wolves caused the proliferation of all of these negative effects that would have been otherwise kept in check by wolves.
I think the key takeaway is balance. Everything in moderation, even moderation, and especially moderation of the Internet.
In addition, if you give anybody power in an online community, it seems to go to their heads. They develop a hall monitor mentality. It is even worse in the mentioned sites since almost everybody can perform moderational tasks and thus feel like they should hold up the rules.
Rather than "censoring" or "curating" (depending on your viewpoint), I would much prefer a good search function and separate categories. Disk space is cheap and the internet is infinite. Reddit does this pretty well, despite constant moans about the quality. There is an area for almost everybody and every topic, whether you want a clean garden or 4chan or something inbetween.
This was a well-kept garden with no pacifism at all. While SA sure isn't what it was at it's height, it's still going and still retains a fairly high quality to crap ratio.
The only real downside is that by culling users so frequently, the site isn't very profitable and isn't as big as 4chan or reddit. They don't have the userbase needed to make as much advertising money.
http://www.shirky.com/writings/herecomeseverybody/group_enem...
> Imagine a forum / Reddit-style social site that has no owners, no administrators, no entrenched authoritarian moderators. Imagine if the power was shifted back to the individual users, who could hire and fire personal “moderators” (content curators) to best guide discussions in the way that the user found to be valuable.
Personally I still think the StackOverflow notion of moderator elections is the most transparent way of doing it.
It's still not perfect, but I think as far as transparency goes it's the best that I've found.
[0]: https://medium.com/@lopp/moderation-methods-vs-censorship-cl...
I'll also observe that the value many of us cherish is to listen with respect to responsible differing opinions. I don't have to listen with respect to a troll. And yes, it is a judgement which is which, but I'm OK with that.
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/ZQG9cwKbct2LtmL3p/evaporativ...
Everyone ends up with different, overlapping ban lists. Conversations become fragmented when you can't see some of the replies. It turns into a mess, so you leave to seek out a better-kept garden where people still talk to each other.
You already have this power in a moderated community. You can leave and find a new one. This works pretty well for online communities because the switching costs are very low.
And who says that moderators from within an online community, who are unpaid volunteers who want to see the garden remain well-kept, are "large powerful entities"? I think you are confusing the idea of a commumity moderator with institutional censorship, which is an entirely different beast.
http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/09/30/i-can-tolerate-anything...
The idea that censorship and norms are useful isn't novel. In general, American society is well beyond that, with censorship and stigmatization levels reaching a new high, a recent example being the public shaming of political figures associated with the NRA. But more broadly, pro-Trump and anti-Trump people have been very busy finding virtue signals to use to categorize people into one of the camps.
As someone with major objections to both camps, I find the whole process perplexing and frustrating.
But there are valid uses of these mechanisms. I think, when the evidence is there, the recent expulsion of sexual abusers out of positions of power and privilege are generally on the right track.
How do we combine the concerns? How do we expel and exclude people in a healthy way? It seems to me that America, at least, is not very good at this at the moment. Important things like improving the mental healthcare system in the U.S. really hinge on the answers to these questions.
Public shaming is such an archetypal behavior. My contention is that critical thinking is required to examine the content of the belief system that is the implicit subtext of the behavior.
All humans have a “belief system” which helps them function by providing a simplified, more manageable model of reality to conduct themselves in. Having a “belief system” is not some mere crutch, it’s an inherent part of ourselves, essential for our survival.
Challenging an individual’s belief system will provoke an anxiety response, and compensating defense responses.
I “believe” that not all belief systems are “created equal.” Some map reality more closely, some are kinder to the members of the society who create them. Some lead to violent conflict, some are conducive to cooperation.
The “content” of a belief system can be examined with cognitive tools that attempt to transcend one’s own belief system. (This is admittedly very hard, and imperfectly undertaken, at best.) Science is one such tool. Logic is another. An adoption of an empathetic stance towards an individual holding a belief system is another.
However, because belief system have universal characteristics, identifying something as a belief system does not provid much insight into the content of the belief system, and does not provide a basis for evaluating it.
I think that self-identified conservatives, and fellow travelers in the pro NRA crowd, have pulled off quite the disengenous trick, by deliberately exploiting a kind of category confusion: they have managed, at least in their own minds, to equate attacks, or shaming, of individuals based on their belief system, with historical oppression of categories of people, that were a whole different thing.
The worst type of oppression and discrimination in our US history is the racial oppression built into the fabric of our society. This oppression was not based on the “belief system” of black Americans. It was based on amplifying and exploiting a perhaps natural affinity for others like ourselves to systematically exploit, oppress, and persecute a whole category of people, based on an aspect of themselves (race) that a) they had no choice in and b) was irrelevant to the question of whether an individual had rights to live with even a modicum of dignity, health, wealth, and justice.
So we have “conservatives” appropriating the mantle of the oppressed, because they can demonstrate aspects of treatment that resemble what African Americans have had to deal with.
It’s ludicrous. The argument seems to be: historically blacks were treated with extreme deprivation. For example, they were not allowed to participate in the institutions of higher education. Part of this would of course means they would not have been permitted to speak publicly on a college campus, were it not for the efforts of many advocates of racial equality and fairness.
So simply the act of being restricted from speaking on a public campus, because they are (self identified) members of a group, in their minds equals unfair discrimination. It would be comical, if it didn’t serve to confuse and warp the civic discourse around this already difficult subject.
As part of that social rejection, the humans in the groups doing the rejection are likely engaged in some of the same intense, sometimes disturbing, behaviors, like “public shaming” that groups oppressing blacks engaged in. That’s human nature. The fact that two courses of conduct share a common motivation is not enough to evaluate the conduct.
Anecdotally, if you peruse the comment of social media/forum/comment sections of “liberal” and “conservative” sites, you will see the same patterns of smug self righteousness, and certainty that the “other side” are depraved, delusional cretins, who can’t see beyond their own hypocrisy. (If you havent tried this, do, it’s quite surreal...the archetypal patterns of social behavior and biases, of emotional tone, are strikingly similar on Fox News and Huffington Post.) Their are liberal trolls and conservative trolls.
Getting back to the subject of the OP, I suspect that similar category errors are at work when the subject of “censorship” on a website comes up in response to moderation actions. The simple act of suppressing speech in a public forum is not enough to label it “censorship.”
I personally prefer chaos. It’s far more interesting than Groupthink.
So you can give it as an example of a surviving community, but to someone like me it might as well not exist.
Also note that you've just left a comment on Hacker News, one of the most moderated communities on the web.
That, as you said, might depend on the demographic.
But you can certainly find interesting conversations on Reddit.