I don’t see this as “a moderation problem” at all, but could be wrong about that. AFAIK, mods don’t spend their time reading posts at random looking for things to correct, but rather more react to flags raised by the community. The community is central to me; the CoC and the mods are a reflection of the community. That’s why I originally asked, of the community:
Alas, nobody has replied to that part, so I take it the answer is that the community as a whole doesn’t feel it’s s a problem “we’re” responsible for each individually.
In which case it must land on the CoC and the mods and the Discourse policies, and your closing bears repeating:
I’m not up to rewriting the whole OP, but if someone can think up a better title I’d be delighted to change it. Wholly agreed that the title now is so overly broad as to be largely devoid of coherent meaning. I’m drawing a blank Then again … as-is the title has attracted highly relelvant replies, so maybe it’s best left alone. Don’t know.
Is constructive in discussions and his criticisms.
Is not evasive. I.e. answers all questions, not the ones he chooses. Or bothers to explain why he can not / will not answer instead of ignoring (which indicates “you are not important enough”).
And most importantly is NOT abusive, dismissive or talking to me from (unfounded) superior standpoint.
Personally:
I try to treat everyone with the same level of minimum respect, regardless of their status or contributions.
I tolerate everyone who is able to maintain a bare minimum level of respect. If I have seen a person to use at least one of 2 magic words that every honourable person should know, it is a big bonus.
For me to embrace someone, maintaining minimum level of respect is a prerequisite, but it depends on whether I can observe net positive value added (or determination to learn to do that) for the community as a whole.
Done! Thank you for the suggestion. I wonder whether it’s still too specific, though. For example, a newcomer may have problems at first with navigating the maze of social expectations simply because of a disadvantaged (social, economic, emotional, educational, cultural …) upbringing. Related to your mention of a Curb-Cut Effect.
EDIT: But sufficient unto the day are the problems thereof. I don’t have any memory of notable cases of the hypothesized kind. So let’s not let me distract us with them .
As a neurodivergent person, I appreciate seeing this discussion in the open and seeing several constructive ideas and suggestions.
I think this would be an excellent pathway to better support ND folks in our community and newcomers alike.
At PyCon US, a number of us (including Carol here) were interested in establishing a “User Success Working Group” that would cover a broad umbrella of tasks and initiatives to better support Python users, contributors, maintainers, community members, and enthusiasts. We have since worked on an initial charter and submitted it for PSF board approval. We should be looking at starting activities and welcoming folks interested in participating in this WG quite soon.
I am bringing this up because this is precisely one type of initiative I would like to see supported, nurtured, and achieved by this WG in collaboration with the community. I would like to support such an effort as much as I can.
I have been accused of this so many times it’s not even funny (usually not in a technical community though). At the times I was accused of it, I was using a normal (for me) tone and simply explaining my understanding of the topic. I had no idea the person thought I was being condescending. Often, I thought we were having an enthusiastic discussion and only later, someone else explained to me that the other participant was upset. Given that spectrum folks have a tendency to do deep dives on a topic of interest, it can come across to others as ‘relentless’, ‘obsessed’, ‘combative’, ‘dramatic’, ‘aggressive’, ‘abrasive’, ‘superior’, ‘boring’, ‘intimidating’, … (I have had every one of these labels hurled at me in the past, when I thought we were just having an interesting discussion.)
It’s often very difficult to realize that the other person is not receiving my communication in the way I intend, especially when I’m really intensely interested in the topic and focused on that, and even moreso when the other person doesn’t say out loud “hey - you’re coming cross as condescending” or whatever. If they do (occasionally someone will actually do me that favor), I immediately apologize because that’s never my intention.
I’m going to stop now because I could talk/write about this for hours… Other than to say, if I ever do come across as anything other than respectful, please tell me explicitly because I may not realize it and certainly do not intend it.
I’ve had situations like this where someone says something to the effect of “why aren’t you even considering [thing]” when I did, I explained that consideration already, and no new information has changed that, nor has anything been presented to contradict it. In some cases, I’ve even attempted to compromise and find a way to make what the other person presented work, just to find a fatal flaw in that compromise because it’s an attempt to build logical behavior off of already broken premises
The way my brain works, I don’t have a response I can give that’s ever going to be accepted tonally in situation like this, but I’m the one expected to rather than for people jumping into a long discussion to have read and understood the background on a complex topic.
I’ve had people say my knowledge is outright wrong without any evidence to back it up, and with evidence supporting my argument presented, and their messages were allowed to stand.
So, no, I haven’t felt welcome here, and have mostly just churned along because I want better tools to exist despite those kinds of interactions.
As a side note: I don’t think moderators should be removing posts for being false. In my opinion, those messages SHOULD be allowed to stand (unless they’re bad for other reasons). Otherwise, we have the dangerous situation where the moderators are squishing anything they believe to be wrong, in other words, anything they disagree with.
I don’t fully disagree with that, but the entire message I was thinking of adds nothing to the discussion and is someone who jumped into the discussion late making bad faith claims about both the knowledge of other participants and their interactions, saying that they aren’t even considering something that follows directly from logic could have another outcome that is directly contradicted by logic. Both the contradiction and the original logic were presented prior to this message.
I’m not going to re-litigate what happened, but I will say I don’t think it had to be brought to have this discussion or so soon after we all had a rough week (i.e. Łukasz isn’t the only mod who would have liked a break). I understand there wasn’t any malice behind bringing up this example, though.
I can say how I approach working w/ people who may be neurodivergent: be understanding and empathetic, but understand neurodiversity shouldn’t be used as an excuse for bad behaviour (and this is based in having similar discussions as this one multiple times over the years). The way this manifests itself for me is trying to directly explain when some wording is considered bad and try to be a bit more lax in any escalation of enforcement beyond having a word w/ the person. I also make myself available to answer questions, including whether something may come off as mean before it gets posted.
But once you have been warned and you don’t take advantage of the added support available, then you can’t just keep giving someone a pass on moderation.
True, but …
… which does directly pull us into the conversation. Basically the topic had no chance of not pulling in the mods as we indirectly play an outsized role in the tone that gets set here and this topic opened with a paragraph asking about this site’s approach to this topic.
Correct; the volume here is much too big for us to read everything that gets posted.
I checked the moderator messages archive and the latest thing from you was 10 days ago and 2 days later a moderator did reply w/ a canned response. If you’re referring to something else then please message the moderators again as it seems to have disappeared.
Well… If that’s accurate, that changes my perspective on this particular issue, but I won’t really ever be able to confirm that’s accurate. I hope if it is, something happens to ensure this can’t keep happening. (I should be able to trust that things flagged for moderation end up in front of a mod…)
I will do that, there’s something more recent, and discourse won’t let me even do anything else with it saying it’s already something I did with it.
Already explained that as best I could to Łukas: the post was already nearly all written, and i know myself well enough to know that if I waited for some days, I’d revert to complacency and think “oh, why bother? it’s hopeless”. In fact, most things I write (outside of tech responses) are never posted.
I think it was a good decision overall to post it: can’t speak for you, of course, but I think the resulting discussion has been of very high quality. But I’d agree too it will degenerate quickly if it falls into people rehashing specific mod decisions. That was never the intent.
Understood and appreciated. Can only say that I wasn’t addressing “the mods” at all in my OP. The community is central to me. I was addressing them with my:
and
Those barely got any engagement at all.
I didn’t know “no chance” was necessarily so at the time I first posted. I did say, at the end of the OP, that I expected it would require a “minor miracle” for the community to resolve it on its own, through, e.g. widespread introspection and metanoia. So, ya, “no chance” was my guess too. Still, nothing ventured, nothing gained. I accept it now as fact.
Not intending to be intolerable , but it opened with a sentence asking about the PSF. By which I meant the community, although, ya, the PSF, Discourse, working groups, councils, boards … are all secondary in my view.
There’s significant energy evident in the replies by people who feel affected to drive some actual changes. I would prefer that the topic focus on the future of that.
Without getting into the exact followup that occurred, as I don’t think it’s appropriate or necessary to drag that or the underlying moderation topic into the public, it was confirmed that it did end up in front of a mod, and that without this discussion I would have had no feedback about it other than the observation of “post is still there”, the exact situation is more nuanced than that, but without this discussion, I’d have never gotten that feedback. That feedback significantly changes my perception of the situation, because it seemed like it was something the mods saw no issue with from the perspective I had.
I need to publicly apologize and say I personally messed up. There was a second place to look for flags that I forgot to check and everything was there.
I’m actually going to take a step back for a bit when it comes to public comments on moderation as I’m apparently more sleep deprived than I realized and I don’t want others to get the wrong impression that things behind the scenes are as scatter-brained as I currently am.
I’m mostly avoiding posting here, since it’s the kind of topic where I’d need to spend way too much time editing and wording things so that I’m not misunderstood. Guess that’s my coping mechanism.
Several posts here resonated with me. I’m grateful for Discourse’s “heart” reaction: I don’t need to find the correct words for a “simple” thank you.
(I’d be happy to discuss privately. Apparently, an info dump sounds much less disrespectful if it’s answering an explicit question!)
Same here! Please tell me!
And if you don’t want to engage with me, please tell the CoC working group so they can relay the signal. That way I can hope to improve in the future. I’m a very slow learner when it comes to social interactions, but I do try. And you get an apology – unless the WG recommends against it :)
Thank you to the CoC WG for volunteering to moderate social interactions for us.
All good. I wonder whether “escalation of enforcement” can be improved on, or even avoided.
Across the years I was python-dev’s sole active admin, “enforcing tone” wasn’t part of the job description, but I certainly took it as my job to keep spam, wholly off-topic, and purely abusive posts off the list.
Toward that end, on occasion the ability to turn on moderation for specific posters was exactly what was needed. Their posts were held for manual review, and I rejected them with an explanation (not for pure spam, but for real posters). Later unacceptable posts never made it to the list, and so then neither did meta-drama about the moderation make it to the list.
I don’t see that Discourse supports “mandatory pre-publication review”, but really don’t know. This post appears to suggest some plugin makes it possible. If not, maybe some cruder approximation could be devised.
Whatever, spitballing here, perhaps people from Python’s ND community could volunteer to help in relevant situations. If a newcomer who identifies as ND (or “appears to be” ND in mods’ eyes) gets in trouble, don’t just give advice and offer help, then wait for them to get in trouble again. Instead block them from posting until a volunteer of similar neurotype can work with them to create a next post that passes muster.
Why of similar neurotype? Because they’ve “been there, done that”, and everyone responds best to feedback from people they feel have walked in their shoes. I wasn’t surprised just now to see that Google has seen the phrase “neurotypical splaining” before .
If that effort fails, OK, too bad, but it did so behind the scenes. Later unacceptable posts didn’t make it to public view for the duration, and there’s (to my eyes) really no need then for a publicly announced ban either. This isn’t reactive enforcement so much as proactive prevention.
I’m really appreciating the constructive place that this discussion has arrived at! I do want to say that I don’t think we can or should create separate moderation paths for “people we think might be neurodivergent” since 1) that word means a lot of different things to different people and 2) we don’t want to pressure anyone to out themselves, 3) I don’t think we want to add “diagnose neurodivergence” to our moderators to-do list.
Instead, I think we could take the ideas and implement them for everyone, (like the curb cuts idea mentioned upthread.) For instance, if increased clarity, being more specific or providing a suggested way to handle things differently would aid us in making moderation more useful or actionable to neurodivergent people, then maybe those strategies would make things nicer (or at least be no big deal) for everyone who posts here?
Then again … as-is the title has attracted highly relelvant replies, so maybe it’s best left alone. Don’t know.
.