Quote:
Originally Posted by Mat Sklansky
Mason has looked at this thread and has asked me to think again about intervening.
given years of failure in this area, i don't expect anything productive, but i would like to point to this post by mrwookie: https://forumserver.twoplustwo.com/s...postcount=1323
that's a pretty clear and extreme biased opinion. and it does come from the moderator of the forum. that viewpoint from a mod, by itself, is not problematic for me. it very well might be for mason. but if it means the moderation is biased, that would be a problem for both of us.
The word bias gets used a lot, but it's somewhat vague and I think you have to think carefully about what you think should qualify as a demonstration of bias. To expand a bit on one of my previous comments, I think there are roughly two separate complaints about the politics forum: (1) that Wookie makes actively biased moderation decisions against conservative posters; and (2) that the forum is an echo chamber which is excessively hostile to minority viewpoints, particularly more conservative ones. These two complaints are often connected, but I want to treat them separately.
So, re: (1) -- it's clearly difficult for anyone on either side of the question to make a convincing argument, given the need to either track down a bunch of history or have a perfect memory, but I don't personally believe that Wookie's decisions to ban/exile conservative posters or lock threads show any particularly egregious unfairness. That's not to say that I always agree with him, but I haven't seen anything that I would consider clearly biased. And I think it's significant that when we look at specific moderation decisions they tend to look pretty reasonable, like locking faxanadu's thread, which has a completely substance-less OP.
On the other hand, re: (2), I think the premise of this complaint is clearly true, that this is driven more by the posters than the moderation, but that it contributes substantially to the perception of bias, especially given comments Wookie makes as a poster, like the one you linked.
But I think those perceptions of bias are also driven by differences of opinion about what the forum ought to be, and for whom. If you begin with the assumption that it ought to be a neutral space with moderation aimed at fostering debate or discussion among people of widely differing viewpoints, then you will take the actual state of affairs as evidence of bias not just because of what is moderated, but mostly because of what is not moderated. This is not, however, the view of the overwhelming majority of forum regs, for whom I think the zikzak post (watch us run you out of town, to paraphrase) reflects something closer to the majority view of the forum.
For the majority of regs, the forum is a place to discuss current political events with mostly like-minded people, to vent frustrations, laugh at political memes, share links, etc, and perhaps the occasional argument or at least a little light sport dunking on conservatives. But the single most common reaction to someone arguing against commonly held views in the Trump thread, for example, is to complain about people quoting that someone, and to complain that the mods don't ban them sooner. This is more or less the complaint that Louis Cypher made earlier, but it's worth noting that this reaction is not just aimed at conservative posters, it's not purely about ideology.
Note that I don't think either idea of the forum expressed above is invalid, and my reticence both present and past to do anything to the main forum is because I think the forum works well as a community of mostly like-minded liberals for the overwhelming majority of its regs. But clearly that view of what the forum should be is incompatible with the desires of the folks that complain about (2), and if they interpret the purpose or rules of the forum according to their view they will of course perceive the moderation as biased, when I would say the truth is more that the moderation has mostly just changed over time to accommodate the views of the regs.
On that note, I'd point out that there's a rules sticky that hasn't been updated in nearly 10 years, and it gives a wildly misleading impression of what the moderation of the forum is actually like, mostly because the posted rules reflect something closer to the "neutral forum for debate" view.
This post is predictably too long, but to sum up the above: my view is that if you are happy (or at least tolerant :P) with the forum as a community with its own social norms and culture -- which happens to be on the left as a result of who the regular posters are -- then I don't believe that there's any reason to find wookie's modding problematic, and your original advice ("don't go there, I don't") is the best advice. Although you might consider updates to the forum rules to reflect that reality. If you want a politics forum that's more a neutral forum for debate then the problem is not so much that wookie is biased against conservatives IMO and makes unjustifiable moderating decisions, it's that you don't actually have a large number of posters who share that vision of what the forum should be.