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 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 :)
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.
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?
Not meaning disrespect, but how on earth could you sit through history lessons in school? Plenty of themes involved imagary of that kind. Like the running and screaming kid just hit by napalm or agent orange.
We never saw anything like that in school (I’m in the UK), or were shown dead bodies/people dying/anything like that. The closest we came was travelling to places like the Somme and a lot about the world war.
TW, unpleasant content
spoiler
I remember watching a video at a concentration camp that showed people reduced to near-skeletons because of the horrors they were subjected to, starvation and so forth. I even educated myself in my own time on the horrors of nuclear war as a teen, the horrific injuries and deaths experienced by the victims of the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki etc etc, but it still had a huge negative impact on my ability to function (see below) even though I was looking voluntarily.
And honestly? I **didn’t ** cope well. I have autism, ADHD and OCD (the former two I’ve only been diagnosed with in my 30s), which makes it very hard to filter out, compartmentalise or be ‘thick skinned’ about anything, despite working most of my life on it. I had a really, really hard time. It made my OCD go through the roof, I lived in constant fear and anxiety, and suffered with intrusive thoughts and images of the things I’d seen.
Unfortunately, not everyone is able to process that kind of imagery or story without it having a massive detrimental impact on their life.
In this case, I thought I was going to read a story about a bartender dealing with a patron he didn’t want in the bar, on an instance that I thought was safe from shocking content like that. Having a picture like that slapped in my face was, as I said, incredibly upsetting, and I had to spend time processing and dealing with the emotions it brought up (see disabilities above).
All I’m asking for it a content warning is all, so people can either choose not to look, or at least mentally prepare themselves. :) I hope that helps answer your question a bit, and I’m sorry if it’s rambly!
Edited to add: I didn’t mention it in my original reply because I didn’t want to be speaking on behalf of others, but there are probably a lot of people out there for whom stumbling across that sort of image would be way more traumatic for a variety of reasons. So my concern wasn’t just for me, if that makes sense?
You do make perfect sense.