We're (r/relationship_advice) rarely transparent with removal reasons. Our templatized removal reasons generally look something like this:
> u/[user], please message the mods:
> 1. to find out why this post was removed, and
> 2. prior to posting any updates.
> Thanks.
or
> User was banned for this [submission/comment].
The reason is because we have a high population of people who:
1. post too much information and expose themselves to doxxing risks, and
2. post fantasies that never happened.
So in order to protect the people who inadvertently post too much information, we tend to remove these posts using the same generic removal template. However, if people know that the post was pulled for one of these two reasons, the submitter may still end up on the receiving end of harassment as a result, meaning we have to fuzz the possibility of the removal being for one of these two reasons by much more broadly withholding removal reasons.
This is specific to r/relationship_advice. Other subreddits have other procedures.
It is worth keeping in mind that mods on any non trivial sized boards have to be transparent to their peers. Appeals do come in and latest at that point others look what one has done.
What one does not want is drama on the board and discussions of disciplinary actions in the open will lead to exactly that. Moderation decision may lead to the loss of a board member but drama will drive away many more.
Well, as long as you don't replace removal reasons with unwarranted insults when withholding removal reasons, then you're already a step ahead of 90% of reddit mods.
Indeed, I’ve been muted for daring to ask why a comment of mine was removed, then subsequently banned for replying “yes, and here’s why,” including a link to this very article when asked “Do you think you’re entitled to a reason?”
I’ve also been banned from a sub simply for posting in a completely different sub.
Few years back Jeff Atwood on coding horror (which I can't find now) had a "guide" that partially match this data. The poster, and everyone else, must know see the original post and the reason it was moderated so the rule is clearer for everyone.
I think in Reddit, like other communities, the problem still is that most users still don't see moderated content because only upvoted/popular content is seen.
Maybe that could be future analysis comparing communities where moderated content is regularly visible by the overall community vs small set of the community vs only the poster.
I had this debate with other mods on r/cscareerquestions a few years back. My preference was for SomethingAwful-style modding transparency, where your bad post (usually) stays up with a note that says "USER WAS BANNED FOR THIS POST", and in fact there's a global listing of all the recent bans, including the user and posts in question.
The other mods largely preferred invisible modding, that "stays out of the way", that doesn't draw attention away from productive discussion.
I'm not sure either is obviously a better methodology, honestly.
As I'd have expected, it seems providing an explanation does indeed reduce the likelihood the user will break the rules in future, and make them more likely to contribute in future.
Surprised there wasn't much difference between a human provided reason and a bot provided one though (and in fact, the latter performed slightly better). Wonder what the reason behind this could be?
> s.Our results show that controlling for other factors,explanations provided by automated tools or bots are associated with higher odds of moderatedusers posting in the future
Either way, I always make sure to provide an explanation why a piece of content was removed on any site I manage, with the sole exception of obvious bot submissions (since the latter are literally incapable of understanding feedback).
The emotional rejection experienced by the moderated user might be less when they associate that experience with an automated tool/bot rejecting their posting versus a human.
It's possible that a moderated user might feel less dejected when they know it's not a human personally reviewing their content and rejecting it.
Certainly I myself would feel less inclined to try posting again if a human moderator rejected my content (because I feel that I have little chance of changing their mind, and I'd feel judged) whereas I'd be inclined to try again if a bot rejected my content because it's impersonal. This is, of course, entirely irrational since automated tools can't really be persuaded in the same way a human can.
Sometimes, you don't want them to contribute anymore.
A large number of the people who get banned on the subs I moderate are just belligerent assholes that we're better off without. Someone posting blatantly racist or misogynistic comments isn't someone we want around.
I’m talking about their message board contributions, obviously.
That someone might have a normal life outside of screaming at women and minorities online doesn’t have a ton of relevance on the forum where they’re doing the screaming.
My point is that reducing even someone's comments to a simple label is a dangerous mindset,particularly negative labels. Once you've applied that label, there is no redemption. What would this person have to do to remove a negative label you've associated with them?
I think it's more dangerous to allow them to stick around because of a misguided sense of charity.
> What would this person have to do to remove a negative label you've associated with them?
First, let's stop right here. You're using weasely language to try to make it sound like noticing someone has said bigoted things, and kicking them from the community for it, is some kind of mistake, as if the bigotry was the fault of the moderator, rather than the bigot.
Place blame where it belongs: if someone says something sexist, someone noticing that they appear to be sexist is fully the responsibility of the person who said the sexist things.
Let's reword what you said in a way that makes sense:
> What would the bigoted poster have to do to convince you they're no longer a bigot? (at least as far as internet posting goes)
There, much better.
Depends on what they said, of course. If they said something racist, I would expect an earnest acknowledgement of that, that racism is bad, etc. As well as evidence from posting elsewhere on Reddit that they've reformed.
> You're using weasely language to try to make it sound like noticing someone has said bigoted things, and kicking them from the community for it, is some kind of mistake, as if the bigotry was the fault of the moderator, rather than the bigot.
And you're trying to deflect from the problems by once again reducing a person's behaviour to simple labels that justify any actions to stop "bad people". Every mod has certainly banned people who are not bad actors, as but one example. Maybe the mod had a bad day, maybe the poster had a bad day.
> Place blame where it belongs: if someone says something sexist, someone noticing that they appear to be sexist is fully the responsibility of the person who said the sexist things.
The use of blame is not the problem, the problems are the standards used to assign blame, the processes by which correctness of blame assignment is judged, the consequences to the accused should blame be found justified, the path to redemption for the accused, and the transparency of the whole process to the accused and the community so that everyone can see that justice is being done and mod power is not being abused.
You know, the sort of thinking that took millennia to evolve into our modern legal systems. Show me a modern nation where exile is a legitimate outcome for a legal infraction. As flawed as modern justice is, at least we've evolved past the tribal thinking inherent to punishments like exile.
If this laundry list may seem impossible to satisfy given current sites, maybe it is. Maybe that also shouldn't be an excuse to not do it. I've written about this briefly before with some ideas why the problem exists, and how some of the issues might be mitigated [1,2].
> What would the bigoted poster have to do to convince you they're no longer a bigot? (at least as far as internet posting goes)
I'm sure that rephrasing is much more comforting to you. In reality, the situation is:
> What would a poster whose comment I and a few others have interpreted to be bigoted have to do to convince you they're not a bigot?
Regardless of the fact that no amount of circumstantial evidence would amount to proof, you've basically just doubled down on your assertion that people you consider bigots don't belong in your community, even if they're polite. That's exactly the problem.
> Depends on what they said, of course. If they said something racist, I would expect an earnest acknowledgement of that, that racism is bad, etc. As well as evidence from posting elsewhere on Reddit that they've reformed.
Few if any mods are going to do such detective work (due to time, patience, whatever), nor would many even entertain a conversation with a person that was banned for such reasons.
And as the set of mods changes over time, and the interpretation of policies changes over time, and with no transparency of community checking of mod power, they end up banning people for ever more specific infractions, with no real appeals process, thus creating the perfect echo chambers.
Every mod and mod system starts out with good intentions, but particularly with communities covering divisive issues, this is where naive moderation inevitably ends up. I don't think examples of unjust moderation are in short supply.
> And you're trying to deflect from the problems by once again reducing a person's behaviour to simple labels that justify any actions to stop "bad people".
The surface area someone has with a random internet message board is usually very limited. They post shit, and thus others there think of them as shitty. Pretty simple.
That they have some deeper inner life is irrelevant in the context. We're not their parents. We're not their therapist. We're not their social worker. If they can't behave themselves, then they shouldn't be allowed to ruin the space for others who can behave.
> so that everyone can see that justice is being done and mod power is not being abused.
Please, we're talking about volunteers on internet message boards here, not judges passing judgment over someone's right to basic freedom. The only power I have is to stop someone from posting in a subreddit -- and even that's not really accurate, since creating a new account is fairly trivial.
I can make further posting in a particular subreddit less convenient for them. That's it.
> What would a poster whose comment I and a few others have interpreted to be bigoted have to do to convince you they're not a bigot?
All labels, all words are subjective somewhere, somehow. To belabor this point is mere pedantry. Of course our judgments and rules are subjective, that's true for all judgments and all rules throughout all history, so why bring it up?
> Few if any mods are going to do such detective work (due to time, patience, whatever), nor would many even entertain a conversation with a person that was banned for such reasons.
It's never come up for people banned for bigotry; they're usually unceasingly hostile. We have unbanned a few people who were more general assholes (e.g. flaming) and came back later, based on exactly what I suggested. They apologized for being aggressive and insulting previously, we checked their post history, they seemed to be productive posters, so we unbanned them.
This doesn't involve very much work, actually, partially because it doesn't come up very often, and partially because skimming through someone's post history to see whether they're generally earnest/helpful doesn't take very long.
> And as the set of mods changes over time, and the interpretation of policies changes over time, and with no transparency of community checking of mod power, they end up banning people for ever more specific infractions, with no real appeals process, thus creating the perfect echo chambers.
> Every mod and mod system starts out with good intentions, but particularly with communities covering divisive issues, this is where naive moderation inevitably ends up. I don't think examples of unjust moderation are in short supply.
I agree that issues of mod transparency and power abuse are an issue. Certainly you can find plenty examples of terrible mods around.
Nevertheless, we're almost invariably talking about volunteers here. Holding them to a standard comparable to real life legal procedures is ridiculous. Ain't nobody got time for that.
For at least more popular subs, which applies to one of the ones I mod, I've come to the conclusion that truly fixing the situation is essentially infeasible. The total amount of content and activity outstrips what a volunteer team can handle in a good, consistent way; the best you can aim for is "passable, most of the time", imo. (And just increasing the number of moderators linearly causes too many coordination problems)
Sounds like you are high on power, forcing your own subjective morals on others, thinking you can change their morals and the way they think just like that with silly threats of bans. This is not how people work. They can't get much out of it, except form their own opinion of you, the moderator. You think of them as sexist assholes, they will think of you as an SJW asshole.
All morals are subjective. I'm not going to let bigots run rampant in a space that I have responsibility for just because some people feel like it's their sovereign right to be an asshole anywhere they please.
Up/downvotes has categories. For upvotes there are interesting, insightful, informative and funny. For downvotes there are troll, flamebait, redundant, offtopic. There are also the general categories overrated and underrated. You can also flag posts for things like spam.
It is not a full review but it is better than nothing. Also, users can give out weights per category. For example if you don't want to see jokes, you can lower the value of "funny".
Agreed. I think these types of systems work better than the standard upvote/downvote one, and I wish more sites would use them. I know Facebook reactions are a bit like this, as is a popular XenForo plugin with similar features.
Yes, but I think implementing a requirement to post a reply (or at least upvote some other person's direct reply) before a downvote would be much simpler. The categories do not take away certain subjectivity of the up/down votes.
It is easy to understand silent upvote as "I am in agreement and I think more people should read this". With silent downvote, the intent is clearly "less people should read this" but the reason as to why is not given.
It also nicely solves the meta-moderation problem. If the reason for downvote is given, it can be validated whether the explanation is meaningful or not.
I'm a reddit moderator for one of the 50 most active subreddits. My experience as a reddit moderator has been that users break down into 4 groups:
1. Normal people that mostly follow the rules. This is BY FAR the largest group, and they're usually great. Transparency benefits them most: once they know what they did wrong, usually they won't do it again. Some even admit they deserved penalties or short bans -- although a few will defend their actions.
2. Jerks: people who contribute constructively sometimes but also cause a lot of drama. If moderators don't show clearly where they broke a rule, usually they're going to protest that they did nothing wrong. Providing transparency saves moderator effort because it avoids some of this back-and-forth. Sometimes. These are almost inevitably the people that claim mods were "abusing their powers" when they get banned for obvious things (swearing at people, posting self-promotional content, etc).
3. Dedicated trolls who go out of their way to break rules and cause trouble. They are relatively rare but as a moderator really the only thing you can do is ban them. Transparency won't make a difference one way or another, but it can be hard to tell a jerk from a dedicated troll at times so you're better off citing specific violations.
4. Spammers & obvious bots. With the right defenses (automoderator rules, spam filter, etc) most of these can be handled with minimum human effort. Without these defenses, spammers/bots can flood you pretty quickly. Transparency is irrelevant here.
FWIW I always provide a reason when issuing a ban (citing the rule broken and where they did it).
I wonder whether there's a membership size threshold where, after crossing that tipping point, the community implicitly looses some degree of transparency whatever the moderation rules are. At some point the increasing impact each decisions have will skew the potential motivations of members and moderators. Intent become very difficult to judge meaning the degree of transparency decreases.
I've seen so many comments from people about the changing nature of some online communities as they grow. Perhaps capping memberships could curb the increasing politicisation of user behaviour and the weight of any individual action would be limited as a result.
I wonder whether it’s even limited to online communities. I’ve had similar experiences with a small office and in a small student organization that grew rather large.
If the rules are solid, 'gaming the system' means they're rule-abiding members. If there's a problem with that, then improve the rules and don't blame the users. Reducing transparency because you're relying on tricks is a great way for users to begin hating your mods.
Hating mods is not necessarily a problem. If you boot a user, you don't care about their opinion of you. Mods select the community, and their goal is a comfortable place for that community.
Booting easy cases should be easy. There will also be edge cases, and almost by definition there's no easy way to make the rules crystal clear for edge cases. You can't be consistent because consistency doesn't exist. The best you can hope for is to encourage users to avoid getting close to edge cases. For those who are uncomfortable with that, there are many unmoderated forums elsewhere.
It's all a question of the the site owner's goals. Maximum traffic and maximum content are not everyone's goals. Often they are seeking a community to deal with that community's concerns, and to shut out the overall problems of the world that attract the most attention.
Unfortunately, rules for humans don't work that way. It may be helpful to read up on "work to rule" strikes - they provide good context on what kinds of problems happen when people start trying to act up while staying within the letter of the rules.
It's odd, I usually see that consequence ("rules lawyering") given as a reason why they avoid being specific about the rules to begin with. It is often followed up with almost everything moderators called on saying that the comment was "on the bubble" or that the commentator failed to "read the room" or some other such nebulousness.
Keep in mind that while the focus is often on individual posts the moderator may well look also at other posts and other moderation decisions related to that in the past. A post by a new member is treated differently from a post by a member with a good record and that is treated differently from a post of a member who has been warned repeatedly.
The opposite is true with bots, spammers, paid trolls, and other attempts to subvert the platform itself.
It's the same reason why open source projects try to fix security vulnerabilities privately before they disclose them publicly: they don't want bad actors to be able to take advantage of the information. Except with social platforms, they can't ever truly "fix" the problem, just mitigate it by trying to detect and remove offenders.
If you provide transparency into how bad actors are removed, they'll just adapt to hide better.
So let’s remove the game. Why should it be a challenge for two people to work around censorship automation before they can communicate?. It feels like we have normalized caring for the well-being of ads over the well-being of actual humans.
I've posted this elsewhere on hackernews (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23259595), but I'll repost it here since it's relevant:
---
We're (r/relationship_advice) rarely transparent with removal reasons. Our templatized removal reasons generally look something like this:
> u/[user], please message the mods:
> 1. to find out why this post was removed, and
> 2. prior to posting any updates.
> Thanks.
or
> User was banned for this [submission/comment].
The reason is because we have a high population of people who:
1. post too much information and expose themselves to doxxing risks, and
2. post fantasies that never happened.
So in order to protect the people who inadvertently post too much information, we tend to remove these posts using the same generic removal template. However, if people know that the post was pulled for one of these two reasons, the submitter may still end up on the receiving end of harassment as a result, meaning we have to fuzz the possibility of the removal being for one of these two reasons by much more broadly withholding removal reasons.
This is specific to r/relationship_advice. Other subreddits have other procedures.