The recent threads in the PSF category have become rather heated and intertwined with specific circumstances and some amount of speculation. I wanted to start a separate thread to hopefully focus more concretely on general suggestions people have for moderation, potentially making some moderation policies more explicit, and so on.
@pf_moore’s post on one of the other threads is a great start and, at least judging by the amount of likes it got, seems to have some support. I’ll add to that a couple thoughts of my own:
- It would be good to have guidelines that more explicitly distinguish spam from other kinds of questionable content. In my experience moderating online spaces, there are really two kinds of things to be moderated: one is spam and the other is everything else. Spam is stuff that has no value to any legitimate user, and often has no connection to the purpose of the forum as well; this is stuff like links to porn, bitcoin scams, and so on. That is, to me, qualitatively different from even the most unhinged rant by a genuine user who is talking about something that has at least some tenuous connection to Python.
- Following on the above, it would be good to have clear moderation policies that distinguish what moderation actions might be taken against spam but not against non-spam. For instance, fully deleting a post might be okay if it’s spam, but not if it’s something else. My perception is that moderators are currently taking actions for non-spam that I would expect to be taken only for spam.
- One of the tricky parts of the CoC appears to be the bit about “acknowledging time and effort**”. It would be good to have more clarity about what distinguishes “disparagement” from simple criticism. My own perception is that comments that I considered well within the realm of ordinary criticism have in some cases been flagged as unacceptable disparagement of the hard work of others. (See examples below.)
- Finally I’ll echo @pf_moore’s comment that it’s better if as much moderation as possible happens publicly. It is essential that the community trusts the moderators. One way this happens is if people can see the actions that the moderators took and see that they are reasonable. For instance, if a user is flooding the forum with posts that aren’t spam but are still disruptive, it is better to leave those posts visible (or at least a manageable number of them) so everyone can see what the problem was that needed to be dealt with. Simply removing the posts reduces trust, because it keeps people in the dark about what was going on and how it was handled, and people have no independent evidence that there was ever a problem at all. This issue is especially important when it comes to posts that question the moderation process; it is not a good look if moderators are seen as muzzling criticism, and it’s something that can degrade trust pretty quickly.
I have two examples of a couple of these points. I don’t want to frame these as “the moderators were wrong”. All I’m saying is these were cases where stuff was moderated in a way I wouldn’t have done it if I were the moderator, and (based on the other threads about this) I think I’m not the only one who has concerns about this kind of thing. So what I think would help build a better community is more detailed moderation guidelines that explain how such decisions are made, both in terms of what is considered in need of moderation, and what action is taken (e.g., locking vs. deleting the thread).
One is this post from yesterday in which a user felt they had been “threatened” by mods for making comments about Python being slow. The thread was not only locked but “unlisted”, meaning it can’t be found via the main forum and can only be accessed by a direct link.
The main question I have is what in this post was so objectionable that it has to be unlisted rather than just locked. I also have questions about what in that post and/or the original thread was considered as “disparagement of hard work” and how that is distinguished from simple criticism.
The other example was [this thread] from about a year ago. In this case the user’s post was split off from another thread and given a new title that was in the first person but not something the original author wrote, and which (to me, and to the original poster, and apparently to some others) seemed rather inflammatory. There was then some discussion of the moderation here. At some point the title of the original split-off thread was edited back to something more neutral and then at some other point it was unlisted.
So again my question is, what justifies unlisting such a post, and also what was the thinking behind using that kind of title for the edited post. And, again, this was another case where it seems the issue had to do with a person complaining about Python in some way and that was interpreted as crossing a line. And, also like the example above, dissatisfication with moderation was also in the mix.
Again, although I definitely disagree with these moderation decisions, my goal here is not to say “people need to start moderating the way I want them to”. Maybe some changes to moderation policies could happen down the road, but what I’d hope for in the shorter term is that we can at least get more clarity from the moderators that there actually is a consistent process, a consistent set of criteria, etc. To my eye, there is nothing in any of those threads that seems so vile that unlisting the post makes sense, so I’m trying to figure out what the thinking is there. Similar issues were raised in PSF-category threads about editing posts, etc.