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.
Does not check out, anyway. This is most definitely a “sanitized space”. Just for liberals, not leftists. Reddit 2.0. https://beehaw.org/comment/606420
This comment doesn’t seem to be in good faith. Can you elaborate?
It’s in good faith. Follow the link. Check that community’s modlog if the big tree of removed comments isn’t sufficient.
TL;DR - OC shit on people who don’t vote for Democrats. I replied saying the current state of affairs is thanks to people like them who vote for mainstream parties, with the same kind of snark they used against the implied target of anyone who doesn’t vote or votes third-party. The mod removal based on “needlessly antagonistic” started with me—the leftist—and left alone the reactionary liberal who blamed leftists and working-class voters for the state of U.S. politics. Removing whole conversation trees for the sake of people who want to defend the honor of Democrats looks an awful lot like a liberal “sanitized space”, I’d say.
From a meta point of view, sounds like you started the antagonistic comment tree; was it needed, or could you have addressed the issuse while trying to deescalate? Correct me if I’m wrong, but I think some of the moderation philosophy docs address favoring deescalation and disengagement, as opposed to escalation, even when it is "in kind’.
Wrong. The original comment was antagonistic toward any and all users (as well as the broader population) who didn’t vote the way the liberal wanted them to. I guess it’s okay to be antagonistic toward a whole segment of a community, but being “antagonistic” back to a single user who’s doing that…that is a no-no.
I’ll quote @Gaywallet, Beehaw admin and OP of this thread (and, probably, the linked document) here:
Whatever “realistic” means here, I guess. But it sounds a great deal like responding “in kind”, as you put it, isn’t fundamentally something that’s expected to be moderated against. Allegedly, at least.
The original comment was yours… it seemed to include an attack onto everyone who doesn’t think like you, with nothing constructive to offer. At least the response included an explanation of their point of view, but then you kept derailing the discussion towards antagonism and personal attacks.
If I understand the rules correctly (any admin/mod feel free to chime in if I’m wrong), the right way to continue that conversation would’ve been to acknowledge the other person’s point of view, excuse yourself, and either try to work towards a constructive consensus, or just leave it be.
You can also edit your previous comments to add context or correct any mistakes to avoid misunderstandings.
Wrong. Here is the bit of the original comment—still unremoved and not mine, but the one I replied to—which shits on anyone who doesn’t vote for Democrats, and anyone who knows enough about other political philosophies to know the two liberal mainstream U.S. political brands are basically identical in all but rhetoric (so yeah, that user “included an attack onto everyone who doesn’t thing like [them]” as you so helpfully put it).
Does that help clarify things for you? I hope so, because you’d honestly have to be willfully misreading things if not.
Your original comment was this one: https://beehaw.org/comment/604794
Its contents are still in the modlog, no need to copy either content in here, it was not a nice comment. You hit someone’s nerve, which made them reply “in kind”. I personally disagree with your interpretation of their comment, even if I agree with your premise, but neither of that is relevant here. What matters is you shouldn’t also escalate “in kind”. Such escalation, along the other escalating comments, appears to have been correctly seen as “needlessly antagonistic”. There was no need for any of it.
And since I have your attention… let me tell you an anecdote: a long time ago, I used to have a blog, which allowed people to comment. Not all comments were nice, and for some time it was fun to moderate them by editing and replacing the not nice parts with “[slur]”, “[ad hominem]”, “[straw man]”, and similar, to the point where some comments ended up 100% edited. This place doesn’t do that, but I would find it fun to find a place that did (…and wonder if some AI could help with the process).
i’d just pop in to note that it’s kind of bizarre we’re even seriously debating whether this is a “liberal sanitized space” when:
if this is a “liberal sanitized space” then we’re not doing a good job of enforcing that, lol
In addition to what jarfil said about this comment let alone the other removed comments, even now your behaviour is very confrontational and not conducive to intelligent, meaningful discussion even if we don’t agree on political beliefs.
You are free to state your opinion, but instead of opening with “Wrong.”, I suggest you express yourself in a way that invites discussion with anyone willing to discuss similarly, be it a liberal, conservative, anarchist, socialist, monarchist, libertarian, or what have you.
I’ll go first. I agree with you that Beehaw is a sanitized space, kept clean to encourage friendly, respectful conversation. Where I disagree with you is where you say only certain political opinions are permitted. The focus of “sanitization” is for inflammatory, inappropriately judgmental, ragebait and flamebait, antagonistic and off-topic comments and posts. It is possible to detach an opinion from its inflammatory delivery, you know. I recommend you give it a try.
This is pretty much the position we took when clearing that comment thread — I didn’t scrutinize between ideologies, I removed a variety of comments just for not being nice or for being potentially inciting/inflammatory. I had to remove several comments in that thread by liberals as well for being unproductive or even toxic.
Only nit I have about your comment is that “sanitized space” is a term we came up with for the mod philosophy. We explicitly meant it in the context of removing “not nice” comments. It expresses the fact that we can’t perfectly clear the space of anything which an individual user might find offensive or harmful. The standards for gauging safety/harm in a space vary from user to user; our moderation has to consider our users collectively rather than just one of them. This is part of why Beehaw is not a sanitized space and aims, rather, to be what one might describe as a safe space, a brave space, an accountable space, or other similar term.
Really just putting this out there for the benefit of others, as it seems some are mistaken about the word “sanitized” and what we really meant by it.
Then the original comment I replied to should have been removed. Fuck that original commenter, fuck the mod, and by extension fuck your for blaming the working class’s conditions on anyone not willing to vote for Democrats. That creates a toxic and unwelcoming community, and you should be ashamed of yourself.
Oops. Guess I didn’t knuckle under to your demand for civility; also liberal as hell.