Comment by friendlybus | Hacker News Reader

Comment by friendlybus | Hacker News Reader

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The 'criddler' word seems humorous. Is there any particular need to ban it outright? These kinds of neologism happen all the time in real life and we ask people to 'tone it down' or give some other social signal that the joke has gone too far. The social feedback is immediate with breathing room, nobody is ejected from social areas, but you know they might be eventually. The joke naturally deflates as the last dregs of fun come out of it, and we all move on.

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?

You'll find plenty of debate on this specific subject in the sub's post about it.

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.

Is there any other tool you can use? A warning that it will be banned then lean into it a week later? Mark individual words automatically inside posts with a symbolic warning?

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.

Yeah! Shoosh already!

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.)

Just interested in ideas. I'm not going to tell you were I got that old quote from, it has an incendiary speaker! :P

Portland (and Seattle) have had such a terrible homeless (and drug addict) problem for decades that it's been reported on in various PBS shows such as Frontline several times over the years. It even spawned an entire music subgenre in rock that gave birth to the likes of Nirvana, Hole, Mudhoney, etc.

Heh, the dressing like a homeless logger/fisherman trend wasn't a show or a fashion statement.

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.

You're only partly right, the problem more is exceptionally worse than when you were a kid.

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.

The 'criddler' word seems humorous. Is there any particular need to ban it outright?

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).

Excellent points. You also get at a key issue around volume of moderation tasks.

Usually the problem is, that you don't want to ban the user, but the behavior. And - reddit being mostly a textual thing - it is represented by words. Banning the user is unfair, plus they can just create a new account anyway.

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.)

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