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El Reg has an interesting read on an OSS developers survey:
Most of the negative behaviour is explained as "rudeness", which has been experienced witnessed by 45 per cent of participants and experienced by 16 per cent. GitHub's summary of the survey says really nasty stuff like "sexual advances, stalking, or doxxing are each encountered by less than five per cent of respondents and experienced by less than two per cent (but cumulatively witnessed by 14%, and experienced by three per cent)." Twenty five per cent of women respondents reported experiencing "language or content that makes them feel unwelcome", compared to 15 per cent of men.
This stuff has consequences: 21 per cent of those who see negative behaviour bail from projects they were working on.
Now I take an entirely different conclusion than El Reg on this. To me this says that two or three percent of respondents have valid reason to bitch about bad behavior but a further eighteen or nineteen percent above that simply are not capable of working with other people. Come on, who here has never held a job where someone on staff was a dickhead/bitch but you kept on working anyway? Me, I've not once held a job where there were zero personality conflicts. In my less than humble opinion, part of being an adult is being able to deal professionally or at least civilly with other human beings who do not cater to your every sensitivity.
Maybe I'm just a relic of the past though. Maybe the future really is a bunch of snowflakes crying to $boss to get you fired if you say or do anything they dislike.
(Score: 4, Touché) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday June 07 2017, @10:48PM (19 children)
Our mod system is "everyone gets mod points". If that makes you unhappy, there are plenty of other venues that are all too happy to make sure yours is the only point of view; seek one of them.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 07 2017, @11:15PM (18 children)
No. YOUR mod system is everyone gets mod points and there is zero accountability for their use.
Nobody voted on it, you just did it and presented it as a fait accompli.
And the only justification? Some hand-waving about unfair moderations which you obstinately refused to back up with even a single metric.
We didn't realize what you were doing at the time so it got a you a bunch of unearned cheers. You've shown your true colors since then.
(Score: 3, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Wednesday June 07 2017, @11:43PM (6 children)
Sorry, incorrect. This was a staff decision after surveying community opinion. I was just the front man on account of I don't give a shit if you talk smack about me.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 08 2017, @12:25AM (3 children)
A staff "decision" where you championed an outcome and nobody felt it worth the effort to challenge you since you were going to do all the work implementing it anyway.
Justifified by a couple of surveys curated to the point of being push-polling.
(Score: 4, Informative) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday June 08 2017, @12:35AM
You seem to think I'm in a position to push whatever I like down the site's throat. Here's a clue: I have three bosses that can shut down any changes I propose at any time without explanation. It was a nice try at playing the victim though.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 2) by Runaway1956 on Thursday June 08 2017, @02:25AM
So go make your own damned site, and you can be who and what you believe the Buzzard to be here. You'll get to make all the decisions, and when you don't like the results, you can change them without asking permission from anyone. Run along, now, little Snowflake, you have a lot of work to do!!
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 08 2017, @02:42PM
cry moar
(Score: 2) by aclarke on Thursday June 08 2017, @01:58AM (1 child)
I rarely agree with you on any philosophical or political matter, but I like the idea of everyone having mod points every day. In my opinion it makes the site better.
(Score: 2) by Grishnakh on Thursday June 08 2017, @03:45PM
I have to agree. There really isn't a perfect moderation system out there; they all have their ups and downs. I see two extremes: Reddit on one end and Slashdot on the other. There's also HN's system. With Reddit, it's basically a free-for-all: you can moderate any post you like up or down. There's no limits to how many moderations you can do, and you can moderate people who reply to you or who you reply to. With Slashdot, it's so locked-down it's basically worthless IMO: you can either moderate or post, but not both, in any given article discussion. You only get 5 points, and only occasionally at that. I'm not going to bite my tongue when I have something to say, so on that site I stopped moderating at all because it was always undone when I then spoke up and made a post. Then they have the idiotic "metamoderation" where they want you to spend time moderating other peoples' moderations. The whole system is ridiculous because I go to sites like that to read news and discuss, not to be unpaid labor to help curate the discussion. Then there's HN which is like Reddit's except you can't upmod people until you reach a certain level of karma (people modding you up), and you can't downmod until you reach a higher level of karma. This system tends to promote a certain amount of groupthink because only people who align with the existing community get enough karma to affect other peoples' karma. There's also a lot of heavy-handed moderation by what appear to be full-time moderators there, with people frequently getting warned, their posts removed, and banned. This site is a hybrid: anyone can mod, but everyone has a limited number of mod points, but they get new ones frequently (every day I think), and they can moderate in any discussion they're in, but there is a small limitation I think about being able to moderate posts in a sub-thread you've posted in. Honestly, I think it's about the best you're ever going to get on a site like this. It helps avoid the group-think you get on HN, but avoids the moderation system being completely useless like on Slashdot.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday June 07 2017, @11:57PM (8 children)
I'm not sure I follow, if there is no accountability than how does that handle unfair moderations? I reviewed the stories about slashcode and moderation changes but they didn't seem to have a good rundown of the system. What is the actual complaint here? No meta modding to punish people who abuse mods?
All I know about it is that TMB made changes and shitposts started rising to the top more easily, and maybe I just never noticed before but I started seeing actual modbombs in real time.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 08 2017, @12:21AM (4 children)
> if there is no accountability than how does that handle unfair moderations?
It does not handle them.
> All I know about it is that TMB made changes and shitposts started rising to the top more easily, and maybe I just never noticed before but I started seeing actual modbombs in real time.
Exactly as intended. Because he embraces the alt-reich's nihlistic version of freedom of expression where anything is allowed, anything should be free. Nothing should be ordered. Those instincts led you to a place of an involuted chaos, of anarchy, where the monster ends up being in charge. They think it’s freedom; it’s preparation for totalitarianism.
(Score: 2, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 08 2017, @02:27AM (2 children)
You, on the other hand, embrace the alt-left's fascist views, where every word a person utters in his life should be punished, unless those words advance the alt-left agenda.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 08 2017, @05:47AM (1 child)
I won't argue the censorship standpoint, I'm not a fan of such moderation. Freedom of speech is important, but it must be balanced by the rule of law. The community moderation system seems to be doing OK, I haven't seen much weird moderation stuff recently but that could just be someone scaling back their botnet. So if it is up to the community then the people who care about this site should be helping create a good atmosphere for discussions. Having a vocal admin spew trollish crap on every story, proclaim he's the smartest person around and just ruin discussions with trolling remarks is a bad way to go about making the site successful.
Oh, you can say whatever you want? You speak your mind? Well, as evidenced by the amount of people vocally speaking up about it your behavior is ruining the site. People don't want to engage when they'll just be crapped on by narrow minded dogma which half the time is just being used to get a rise out of people. Go troll some other site which doesn't try and pride itself on high quality discussions. PS: this comment isn't for just one user.
Oh, and I went and found a slashdot political story, even the disagreements seem to be way more civil over there.
https://politics.slashdot.org/story/17/06/07/2054214/the-public-is-growing-tired-of-trumps-tweets-says-voter-survey [slashdot.org]
https://politics.slashdot.org/story/17/06/07/1635222/edward-snowden-on-trump-administrations-recent-arrest-of-an-alleged-journalistic-source [slashdot.org]
So why stick around here? I like the no censorship ethos, but 100% anarchy isn't working so well. Between the openly racist trolling, the serious conservative brigading, the posting of FB level citations / bad articles, and an admin that prides himself on lack of sympathy and insulting others.... Yeah, SN has problems. I've tried to stick around for the ideologically admirable stance you guys took, but obviously slashdot is not some vastly censored forum and with a larger population they get better discussions overall. The moderation system seems to work for them and I'm not worried about discussions suffering from real censorship, but they will benefit from the removal of racist trolls baiting reactions out of people.
Ya ya good riddance you say, maybe you'll get enough new users to keep things going before it turns into a big echo chamber in here. I've noticed a trend of active users disappearing, with some of the long term accounts petering out as well.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 08 2017, @03:08PM
It sounds like you just don't like hearing certain things, and want people to keep quiet rather than cause some kind of cognitive dissonance in you. Maybe you ought to review your own internal issues.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 09 2017, @04:11AM
Most people thought the site name was a clever pun, but he turned it into a dystopian prediction?
(Score: 2) by The Mighty Buzzard on Thursday June 08 2017, @12:57AM (1 child)
Unfair moderations are the duty of the community to correct rather than a select elite or worse yet me. You yourself can take care of any correction you feel the need to.
I guarantee you're not seeing mod-bombs that don't get reversed though. We have an admin page that looks through the db for anything even approaching one. All admins and senior editors have access to it and I at least check it daily.
Mostly he's just bitching that he doesn't have anyone to bitch about except the very people reading his steaming pile of troll.
My rights don't end where your fear begins.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 08 2017, @01:19AM
There is more than one of us 'trolling' you (lol at the deflection of criticism).
But after this, there is one less. Congrats on winning, your prize is apparently a small pond full of your own piss.
(Score: 2) by Joe Desertrat on Friday June 09 2017, @08:51AM
I may be completely mistaken about this, but it appeared to me that the alt-right posts increased in number and aggressiveness not when TMB modified the moderation system, from which I did not notice an effect, but when the Trump political train got rolling. I always assumed the right just felt more empowered (and the left and moderates more embittered) as a result. It does seem that the level of discourse on this site has declined since then.
(Score: 2) by tangomargarine on Thursday June 08 2017, @02:39PM
Maybe there wasn't a literal vote on it, but the devs have informed us in advance of any major changes they've been thinking about making as far as I remember.
"Is that really true?" "I just spent the last hour telling you to think for yourself! Didn't you hear anything I said?"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday June 08 2017, @03:10PM
We don't have a large enough community, at this point, to sustain metamoderation. Thankfully, abuse doesn't seem at all common enough to actually cause real problems. Everyone having mod points enables people to "correct" abuses (unless you already spent them).
If you have a better idea for the distribution of mod points, then let everyone know.