Hello everyone. I've closed the previous mod thread, and opened this to capture all issues related to moderation policies and actions going forward. I'll kick it off by reposting my intro post from the other thread. Again, I'm happy to be here and look forward to hearing from you.

Browser


Hello everyone.

I'm very pleased to have the opportunity to serve as a moderator in Politics and Society. I asked for this position because I believe we are experiencing a polarization in our politics and society unseen since the 1960s. We may well be at a juncture from which we will either make great progress or suffer great setbacks in regards to our democratic foundations and civil rights over the next few years. So I believe it is important to maintain a forum for discussing these important topics. When the other mods had to step back a bit due to their real life time obligations, I asked to join the mod team to help keep the forum going.

I have not followed this forum in the past, though I have been reading through threads the last few days and made a few posts. This has allowed me to get a sense of the initial impression the forum likely makes on new readers who are deciding if our forum is a place they would like to visit regularly and participate in. While I see some familiar names from the live poker forum, many of you I have not had any interaction with to date. I have no preconceived notions of anyone's posting behavior and will essentially start from a clean slate.

I will shortly post more about my modding approach and give my initial impressions of the forum based on my observations over the last several days. I will be soliciting your input on things you like about the forum that you want to remain, and things you don't like that you would like me to change. Your candid input and feedback is very important to me. Especially, please don't hesitate to let me know if you think a policy or a proposal is a bad idea. I'd rather hear it before it goes into effect than after.

My overall modding principle is simple: Be Nice. Disagreement need not be disrespectful, and everyone must be treated with respect. Calling a poster derogatory names or hurling snarky insults never usefully advances a discussion. It just bogs things down and turns off many would be participants. And it's not nice. Don't do it.

My goal is to have a forum where people with a wide variety of opinions along the political spectrum enjoy expressing and debating their views in a spirited manner, free from insults, bigotry and denigrating comments. If you enjoy discussing these important and often polarizing issues in a passionate, yet respectful manner, I look forward to getting to know you and working with you to create a forum people will enjoy visiting and contributing to. You can be as committed, determined and relentless as you like in advocating for your position. Be persuasive, thought provoking and challenging. But be nice.

I want to thank tame_deuces and King Spew for their support in bringing me onboard and for all the time and effort they have put into making the forum better. While I am taking over most of the day to day modding responsibilities, both are retaining their mod status and superpowers, and will be supporting the forum as their availability permits. And I personally welcome their continued advice and feedback.

Again, I am happy to be here and look forward to getting to know you.

Browser

Welcome, browser2920.

Overall, tame_deuces did a great job, so you have a proverbial "tough act to follow" situation.

Looking forward to more details about your modding philosophy.

In my opinion, if a discussion forum could only have one rule, it would be "Engage the argument, not the arguer."

Thank you for volunteering your time to keep the old ship afloat!

As I am putting together my thoughts as to the direction the forum goes in terms of moderation, I very much would like to hear your thoughts as to what you think are the good things about the forum that I should not tinker with, and those areas you think don't work so well. You can either post your comments in this thread, or you can pm me directly. Please be candid in your assessments.

You can also post your overall feelings about the forum, and whether it provides you with the discussion opportunity and atmosphere you desire. I look forward to reading your input.

PS: In the spirit of starting off on a nice note, please don't target individuals in your comments such as: "if you want to have a better forum, just get rid of (insert name here). Thanks.

tl;dr, can we ban the bigots and garbage posters now?

We will certainly address both of those categories of posters. However, I am not going to go back and retroactively mod previous posts. So posters will be assessed based on the content of posts going forward. Everyone has a chance to be nice from now on. Hopefully most will. Sadly, some just can't help themselves.

Lol @ deleting my post in response to trolly.

Do you have a plan for protecting us from misinformation in regard to covid vaccines and how aggressively do you plan on policing moderate criticism of them?

Can people post links to RFK Jr books now without threats of bans or not?

I'll discuss this type of post in more detail later when I put out the guidelines. But many threads here are completely clogged up with personal bantering or bickering between posters that add nothing to the topic under discussion. Often they even reference other threads, like "you always do this just like you did in the xxx thread". And you end up with a dozen posts of two posters critiquing each others posting style without addressing the thread topic at all.

I know there will be a bit of confusion while the new guidelines are getting rolled out. But in general, off topic posts will be deleted in order to keep the thread easy to follow for other readers. And while there will be some leeway in regular threads, the moderation discussion thread especially needs to be kept clear of off topic posts.

Welcome! I always appreciate anyone willing to put in the work to moderate. If I have a suggestion for new mods who don't come from the community they are moderating: make it less about you and more about the community. It is easy to come in with a grand vision and all sorts of ideas and rules and whatever else, and have that vision be about as effective as a new wave against the breakwater. So my suggestion is to listen to the community more than to speak to it, and probably at least for a good while doing less is more.

For example, the saccharine framing of "be nice" is, well, nice. It would be nice if everyone was nice and everyone respected each other. But politics often isn't "nice". Posters on this forum have a years long habit of not being "nice". I don't know that politics even should be "nice". A lot of the devil is in the details here, so whether choosing this as your central frame for moderating is going to really work out to improve the quality of the dialogue I think is ultimately going to come down to the degree to which you are imposing a view of " be nice" on the forum vs reflecting a latent desire within the community.

Either way, good luck.

This post - and the deletion - makes me more worried than the OP that you are going to tilt in the direction of imposing a set of guidelines of how you wish the forum to be as opposed to responding to the desire of the community you are now in charge of.

I'm quite wary of someone making large plans to be regularly deleting off topic posts. If a long tangent is spawned (which is a good thing!) from an off-topic post it can be split into its own thread or a more appropriate thread (sometimes even low content or containment threads). But part of the benefit of a forum where you build strong relationships - good and bad - with people due to years of posting together in a relatively small community, is that free forming conversations on many topics can be generated. Off topic posts can ebb and flow, but they provide moments of interest and prompts for new directions. If it gets to the point of being disruptive in a specific thread that can be dealt with, but this goes back to my earlier advice: do less than you think you should until you are sure your actions have strong community buy-in.

Those are good questions. As a start point, all rules and guidelines currently listed in either the P&S Guideline Thread or overall site guidelines remain in effect. I am reviewing the policies irt conspiracy theories in general and covid vaccines in particular. If any changes are made to existing policies, I will include them in the revised guidelines.

While I am generally aware of RFK JR's reputation irt vaccines, I am not familiar specifically with his books or what they espouse, so I can't answer that question yet. I believe it is important for us to not be an open conduit for covid vaccine CT so we don't amplify a dangerous message irt public health. So while things like "don't take the vaccine because you become magnetic" or "they include a tracking chip" will not be allowed, an honest discussion of possible side effects and risks can be appropriate. But that's where it will be important to monitor sources of the info being discussed to prevent disinformation or misinformation from being passed off as facts.

I know it would have been easier if I had all the policies prepared for today, as people will have questions. But I wanted to give time for poster input before I published new guidelines, so I wouldn't have to revise them just days after posting them. I appreciate everyones patience during the transition.

Actually, as you can see from my initial posts, I am very much interested in getting everyones input before I publish any new guidance. So I agree with your premise. Unfortunately, there will be a time period where I will take certain actions before the guidance is published. Then when a question is asked, I'm faced with trying to give a quick answer that may not capture the details or nuance of the actual policy.

The post I deleted is an example of that. Of course, some off topic and derails will be permitted at times. But particularly in our mod discussion thread, such posts absolutely overwhelmed the thread and made it almost impossible to follow the discussion of the issue at hand. For comparison, the busiest forum, NVG, has around 2500 posts in its mod discussion thread, and around 2,500,000 posts in the forum. Our mod thread had 4600 posts for a volume of about 250,000 posts. Our mod thread has roughly double the posts of a forum with 10 times as many posts as we have. Clearly, a great deal of those posts are not mod related.

So I hear and share your concerns and appreciate you surfacing them. I am sure after I receive poster input and incorporate it into our guidelines things will be much clearer.

On your other concern, our forum will always maintain the standards and follow the policies set by the owners. Hopefully those guidelines create the type of forum atmosphere our users enjoy. And to the extent possible, user desires will help shape these policies. But should we have a group of users that envision a very different type of political forum, where, for example, insults, snarky comments and trolling are the tools of the trade, (as is common on many forum) then that won't happen here. So it will be a matter of finding common ground when possible without compromising the overall guiding principles.

I actually agree with the sentiment Trolly expresses here.

The difficulty is that both "bigots" and "garbage posters" are highly-subjective categories.

For example, some would see Trolly's post above as an example of a "garbage post".

I think a relatively easy-to-enforce rule would be one I mentioned upthread: "Engage the argument, not the arguer."

Most devolution within threads occurs when two or more parties get into a name-calling match with arguments themselves not being engaged.

Just my three-cents worth. (Adjusted for inflation.)

I agree. It's usually easy to clean up the direct personal insults (Jane, you ignorant slut). But then some turn to passive personal insults dressed up as attacking the argument. Some eg I've seen are "he stupidly asserted" vs "he asserted" or "only an idiot would think that". It's that tone that turns off a lot of people from participating.

Well, I certainly hope this hold true, and more broadly the spirit of building up from the community and not down from your own preconceptions.

I don't think this is persuasive. In this forum, the mod thread was often something of a low content thread, a place for casual connections and amusing banter in the community disconnected a bit from the specifics of a particular topic, and sometimes interesting new tangents sprung out of these and formed their own threads or moved into other threads. So pointing out it is statistically different from the NVG - which has much less of that community sense of a close nit group of regulars who know each other well - doesn't imply it is necessarily problematic. Don't get me wrong, this isn't particularly important to keep around either, it is just a quirk of the particular forum you are inheriting, and so returning to the thesis of not trying to impose your views and instead respond to the community, I think deciding this is a problem that needs fixing from the start and you will be deleting posts to impose it isn't a good approach.

Of course we should (and always have, afaik) be in line with standards from the broader forum, but I think you might find your wheels spinning. "Be nice" is a great anodyne phrase like sure I agree that would be lovely. But the community - rightly or wrongly - has a localized culture of ways it interacts, and so the question you are going to find is whether you think of moderation as trying to come into a community you aren't part of and change that community into something it isn't via imposition of moderator fiat. Personally, I find sort of faux-civility trying to stay just this side of some moderator line a bit off-putting and rather someone just clear says what they think.

As an aside, clever snark can be both hilarious and cutting to strong political points, so don't lump that in with any old insults and trolls thank you very much, and definitely don't delete it!

I don't think your job should be focused on minor tone policing like this. Part of politics, part of political judgement and debate is about framing arguments and not doing a sort of MSM-style fake neutrality. Some assertions are reasonable and some are....well.....stupid, and there is value in being clear about which is which. Presumably why you think it is stupid is going to be explained momentarily. I support you with sort of egregious personal insults, but if your level of tone policing is for infractions as minor as just stupid as an adjective to qualify types of assertions I think you've gone too far.

Itt uke wishes he was mod.

I'm sure he isn't some niceness nazi. And I doubt he plans to sanitize this place to the point of being some dystopian exchange of words. His undertitile is interesting though, so who knows.

This forum has some of the most advanced trolling I've seen. And so no matter the rules, I'm sure you guys can work around them.

He has brought up something I've mentioned several times, which is how this forum is not welcoming or conducive to encouraging new blood. An average person visiting here surely thinks they've stumbled upon some mental hospital's internal chat room

Almost certain you're over 60!

Well said.

I personally think that this forum would compare unfavorably to the psych-ward chat room.

I have literally been a patient in a psych-ward (15 years ago), so I know of what I speak.

I'll try and address some of the concerns surfaced in very general terms in order to try and get some feedback to you quickly.

I appreciate your concerns about someone coming from outside the community and changing things. But OTOH sometimes a fresh set of eyes is exactly what is needed. It's easy to get comfortable with something, like stepping over a hole in the floor, and it takes a new person to say "what's with this hole in the floor?" For example, the mod discussion thread here has, in fact, functioned as a low content thread. But to identify a mod issue and its resolution you have to wade through a bunch of no content, off topic posts. That's not the most efficient use of a mod discussion thread. Most forums (even the mod forum) have a low content thread for just that "shoot the breeze" type posts, or posts about a topic that isnt involved enough to justify a thread of is own. We will soon have a low content thread separate from the mod discussion thread. The mod thread will be for mod issues only. The low content thread is for "other stuff".

This type of structural issue is not one that I need to seek a community consensus on. It is a simple matter that is in line with my (and many others) modding style. This certainly should not be an issue that anyone feels is so important that they fall on their sword over it. If you forget initially, I'll just move the post. In a very short period of time it will seem odd to see an off topic post in the mod thread.

A word on the community and how it appears to newcomers. My first impression was how very small this community is. There seems to be barely 5-6 regular posters, depending on the thread topic. And in those threads, there is a great deal of one on one banter/name calling that often comes across as an argument carried over from another thread entirely. Frankly it makes it very difficult to even follow the thread topic discussion between the number of personal sniping posts. Now I get that it can be similar to the way that old friends tease each other in a good natured way. But it often doesn't come across that way in writing.

As for the niceness factor, that is just a way I used to address the trolls and animosity that existed in the Brick and Mortar forum when I modded there. It was a shitshow of posters attacking each other and the mods. I do not believe that one needs a thick skin in order to take part in a forum discussion, whether debating political issues or truly divisive topics like whether you can move two or three seats before having to post a big blind. IME the insults usually arise after you have run out of actual points to make; can't rebut effectively another posters points; or because frustration builds when you can't get the other guy to surrender to your impeccable logic. So when all else fails, call them stupid, an idiot, etc. And there really is no difference between calling a person stupid and his ideas stupid.

Tone matters in a forum. Adding adjectives like stupid or idiotic doesn't add any additional logic or righteousness to your argument. Everybody deep down feels like their idea is correct and the other side is stupid. If you want to ensure very few new people join our discussions, just call their opinions stupid on their first post. And that's if they post at all, after seeing the name calling that goes on here. We need to grow this forum, and creating a welcoming tone is a key step in that. The old "**** it, it's that politics forum" excuse for incivility is counter to our own interests.

It may seem like this is some major change that will somehow irrevocably change this forum for the worse. But it really isn't. First, it's simply getting in line with our site wide policies. But second, after the adjustment period you will see that the meat of the discussions comes to the fore, and the personal sniping fades into the background. Like a new golf grip, it will feel odd at first. But I can assure you that this forum will not become some sort of sanitized, passion free zone. But *******s and those who treat others disrespectfully will not be welcome here. So if you truly feel like you cannot be yourself without insulting and denigrating people; or if a political discussion just isn't real for you without personally attacking the other players, then you will not enjoy this forum going forward, and should probably look for ones more along your preferences. There are many to choose from.

I'd like to jump right in and get your thoughts on what seems to have been a long standing and contentious issue in the forum. It's the Transgender Issues IV thread. I am aware that there have been earlier versions of this thread that ended up being closed. I'm not sure specifically why they were closed, though it seems due to some inappropriate postings.

I'm particularly interested in your opinions on whether such a thread should exist at all. To a newcomer, it seems odd to have singled out the transgender community for an "issues" thread. Why them, and not other minority groups? Why not an LGBTQ issues thread? Or a cisgender issues thread? It's not clear to me why transgender is different enough to warrant a separate catch all thread. In a way, it seems like a place has been set up for people to drop by and say what they don't like about the transgender community. The first post that starts it off is just a poster saying "this pronoun thing is getting out of hand". Not sure why that is a thread worthy issue when framed like that anyway.

So if you have any thoughts on the development of these transgender threads, and whether you feel that they are appropriate and serve a valid discussion purpose, please post them here. My initial impression is that if a particular discussion topic arises, then a stand alone thread should be started. For example, it someone wanted to discuss the issue of transgender athletes in competitions, then that could be a thread that would likely generate a lot of discussion. And that discussion would be clearer if it wasn't interspersed among posts in the same thread on other possible issues such as pronouns.

Having a thread solely for transgender issues but not other groups strikes me as a thread for people to say what they think is wrong with transgender people rather than a thread where transgender people surface issues they face in daily life. But I admit I don't know the background on this, so please take this opportunity to flesh out the issues involved. Thanks.

I'm also a fairly new participant in this thread, and I agree with what you (browser) have been saying about how the forum needs to be cleaned up as far as the insults and ridiculous tangents. Basically I have the exact opposite opinion of everything that uke_master has been saying you should watch out and not do; I would love to see you do all the things he is afraid of.

Welcome Browser and the best of luck

Couldn't agree more. Democracy is in serious danger. It canot survive too much polarisation ane we are in the red zone.

That was actually the original transgender thread topic. But it evolved and started branching out into other transgender related issues. I believe that each subsequent thread was excised from discussion that arose elsewhere, so the original post was probably made indirect response to something else and not intended to start a thread. I do think it can be a fine thread to have.

Also, I support your general goals and views for this forum.