191 karma · joined April 28, 2019
Top-level moderation of any sufficiently cliquey group (i.e. all large groups) devolves into something resembling feudalism. As the king of the land, you're in charge of being just and meting out appropriate punishment/censorship/other enforcement of rules, as well as updating those rules themselves. Your goal at the end of the day is continuing to provide support for your product, administration/upkeep for your gaming community, or whatever else it was that you wanted to do when you created the platform in question. However, the cliques (whether they be friend groups, opinionated but honest users, actual political camps, or any other tribal construct) will always view your actions through a cliquey lens. This will happen no matter how clear or consistent your reasoning is, unless you fully automate moderation (which never works and would probably be accused of bias by design anyways).
The reason why this looks feudal is because you still must curry favor with those cliques, lest the greater userbase eventually buys into their reasoning about favoritism, ideological bias, or whatever else we choose to call it. At the end of the day, the dedicated users have much more time and energy to argue, or propagandize, or skirt rules than any moderation team has to counteract it. If you're moderating users of a commercial product, it hurts your public image (with some nebulous impact on sales/marketing). If you're moderating a community for a game or software project, it hurts the reputation of the community and makes your moderators/developers/donators uneasy.
The only approach I've decided unambiguously works is one that doesn't scale well at all, and that's the veil of secrecy or "council of elders" approach which Yishan discusses. The king stays behind the veil, and makes as few public statements as possible. Reasoning is only given insofar as is needed to explain decisions, only responding directly to criticism as needed to justify actions taken anyways. Trusted elites from the userbase are taken into confidence, and the assumption is that they give a marginally more transparent look into how decisions are made, and that they pacify their cliques.
Above all, the most important fact I've had to keep in mind is that the outspoken users, both those legitimately passionate as well as those simply trying to start shit, are a tiny minority of users. Most people are rational and recognize that platforms/communities exist for a reason, and they're fine with respecting that since it's what they're there for. When moderating, the outspoken group is nearly all you'll ever see. Catering to passionate, involved users is justifiable, but must still be balanced with what the majority wants, or is at least able to tolerate (the "silent majority" which every demagogue claims to represent). That catering must also be done carefully, because "bad actors" who seek action/change/debate for the sake of stoking conflict or their own benefit will do their best to appear legitimate.
For some of this (e.g. spam), you can filter it comfortably as Yishan discusses without interacting with the content. However, more developed bad actor behavior is really quite good at blending in with legitimate discussion. If you as king recognize that there's an inorganic flamewar, or abuse directed at a user, or spam, or complaint about a previous decision, you have no choice but to choose a cudgel (bans, filters, changes to rules, etc) and use it decisively. It is only when the king appears weak or indecisive (or worse, absent) that a platform goes off the rails, and at that point it takes immense effort to recover it (e.g. your C-level being cleared as part of a takeover, or a seemingly universally unpopular crackdown by moderation). As a lazy comparison, Hacker News is about as old as Twitter, and any daily user can see the intensive moderation which keeps it going despite the obvious interest groups at play. This is in spite of the fact that HN has less overhead to make an account and begin posting, and seemingly more ROI on influencing discussion (lots of rich/smart/fancy people post here regularly, let alone read).
Due to the need for privacy, moderation fundamentally cannot be democratic or open. Pretty much anyone contending otherwise is just upset at a recent decision or is trying to cause trouble for administration. Aspirationally, we would like the general direction of the platform to be determined democratically, but the line between these two is frequently blurry at best. To avoid extra drama, I usually aim to do as much discussion with users as possible, but ultimately perform all decisionmaking behind closed doors -- this is more or less the "giant faceless corporation" approach. Nobody knows how much I (or Elon, or Zuck, or the guys running the infinitely many medium-large discord servers) actually take into account user feedback.
I started writing this as a reply to paradite, but decided against that after going far out of scope.
For some people, it's not a matter of taste and it's not a matter of getting over it. Call it weakness if you want, call it mental scarring; either way movies should be entertaining, not traumatic. I can't speak to dogs dying, but flippantly watching "Last Night in Soho" with somebody who really didn't need to see that convinced me to start checking the IMDB parental guide before settling on anything.
The structure of the referenced website (long list of yes/no categories with explanation) seems a bit of a bad fit compared to just enumerating potentially problematic features. I guess it enables categorical searching, but it seems pretty bleak to browse through a filter like this.
For example of the second, there was a thread on /ck/ a few weeks back where some guy (probably a grad student; I'll never know) stumbled on a few $K of food lab equipment. Thread went on with a variety of experiments/projects which ranged from "reasonable" to "why would you even consider this" (some kind of flavored oil distillate from a happy meal, used to make ice cream).
If that was on HN, it would be someone's social-climbing portfolio blog, or I would have to wonder if it's astroturfing by some lab equipment company, or Mcdonalds. I'd question if this really was a curiosity-based endeavor, or if it was just someone trying to signal to potential employers "look at my Relevant Project!" or "look how quirky I am!" to friends.
But none of that was a concern; there is really no way for that individual to profit or benefit from this in any context. It's an anonymous forum, and there's strong social pressure to not subvert that (unless it is simply by virtue of posting similar content). It takes the game theory out of the equation; nobody is trying to sell me something.
It's not for everything or everyone, and there's definitely some effort in filtering out garbage posts. The same goes for HN, except the content to manually filter out is the sea of sometimes-veiled advertisements and self-promotion rather than plain-faced flamebait.
https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefing-room/presidential-action...
Comcast's only innovation in the last few years has been to add data caps to residential fiber service (my 300mb/s "1.2 GBps" is capped at 1.4TB/mo).
This[1] video does an excellent job of explaining the mechanic with visuals and code snippets.
Carmack's public post[2] on the "bug" of strafe-jumping is endearing in light of how much it influenced game design in the following decades.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rTsXO6Zicls
[2] https://www.gamers.org/pub/archives/plans/johnc@idsoftware.c...
I certainly didn't know about the feature.
My point is not that it makes the game bad, but that it's disingenuous to assert that the microtransactions are purely cosmetic or unnecessary. For my case at least, I would prefer if I could just buy the game for $70 and not have to buy more microtransactions if/when some future patch makes them advantageous.
Since 2.4, many of the 3-month content updates (which are always either good content or at least good-faith mistakes) have introduced mechanics which effectively require more microtransaction purchases (see 2.4, 2.5/3.7, 3.1).
Sure, you can technically play through all the content without microtransactions, but have fun organizing the 159 different maps, 104 essences, 42 (ordinary) currencies, endless cards, and all your actual items with the four default 12x12 tabs. Even then, your best bet for listing items for sale without premium tabs is to use a 3rd-party tool to generate a forum thread.
Not to say that PoE isn't one of the better F2P models out there, but GGG shouldn't get away with pretending to be a small indie studio when they have >100 employees and sold a controlling share to Tencent for >100M NZ$. They have (rightfully earned) one of the best reputations among game developers, but their insistence on selling (what should be) standard game features as $15 microtransactions is absurd.
Looking through the store now, what I would consider to be "mandatory" for someone investing significant time into the game comes out to about $70. The free trial is wonderful though!